When All Else Falters, Airbrush
The woman onstage is a poofball of black, all silky long legs and fur trim. Her hair is bobbed in a spray of Easter chick yellow. When she talks to the hungry crowd at the Century Club, you can still hear her breathy bedroom voice. She is, as her press release would have it, a “sex kitten on the prowl again.”
“I’m Joey, I’m a girl and I’m on the cover of Playboy,” she coos, before promoting her pictorial with an encore of “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
If Joey Heatherton is still a girl, then it would seem she’s playing the part again and again until she gets it right. In fact, there’s little visible evidence that the long-ago Rat Pack mascot has reached the lofty age of 52. Just open the current issue of Playboy, where her pink pouty lips and other more intimate trademarks seem almost cryogenically preserved. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine her rising from the ashes of her fast life to sprawl on a TV bed selling Serta mattresses once again.
Heatherton is the latest in a lengthening line of women over 40 who are taking it all off to become objects of readers’ desire--and curiosity. They’re making mincemeat out of the truism that women “of a certain age” are over the hill. When presidential daughter Patti Davis posed at 41 nearly three years ago, she told Playboy she was irked by “the nasty little press reports that call me middle-aged. . . . I thought, ‘You know what? [Expletive] you. This is what middle-aged looks like.’ ”
Of course, in the Playboy universe, middle-aged looks like, oh, 24, give or take. Heatherton says she trained more than 30 hours a week for a month for her shoot. Davis lifted weights for seven years and God only knows what 50-year-old covermate Farrah Fawcett had been doing to stop the clock at 19--and an awesomely fit 19 at that.
“It’s like a P.T. Barnum thing: Come see this 60-year-old woman who looks like she’s 20,” says Susie Bright, author of the recently published “Sexual State of the Union” (Simon & Schuster). “Making up someone to be beautiful is like making up Boris Karloff to be Frankenstein.”
As aging baby boomers inherit the Earth, they’re declaring themselves the silver standard for beauty. Older women who were not long ago considered nearly invisible and certainly not sexual are being eroticized from one cultural extreme--the porn industry--to the other--the more rarefied pages of magazines such as Vanity Fair and Mirabella.
“This is not a fad,” says Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of “The Anatomy of Love” (Columbine, 1992). “This is a real trend in human evolution and human culture. We’ll see more and more middle-aged women looking powerful and sexy.”
Penthouse has run pictorials of over-40 newsmakers Gennifer Flowers and Lauren Hutton. “We have nothing against age,” says Editor in Chief Bob Guccione. “It’s just a question of finding them.”
Hustler ran its first and only 50-year-old centerfold in 1975. “We were exploring a lot of new territory,” Publisher Larry Flynt says, “and at the same time we ran a girl who was eight months’ pregnant and a girl who weighed 300 pounds. But the readers were apparently titillated by the older centerfold. Why? I have no idea.”
But Playboy didn’t just stick its toe in the water when it published whatever-happened-to layouts of former centerfolds in the late-’70s. Since 1981 when it published its first senior celebrity layout--the then 51-year-old Vikki LaMotta, wife of raging bull boxer Jake--the magazine has run almost a dozen such pictorials. So far, its oldest model has been Terry Moore, onetime amour of Howard Hughes and 55 when she posed for Playboy.
“Reaching 30 used to be a big deal,” says photography director Gary Cole. “Reaching 40 used to be a midlife crisis. Now people don’t have them until they reach 50, and as we get older, we don’t want to be thought of as older.
“Does Playboy redefine or reflect? It does both. Playboy is not a cutting-edge magazine. We’re in the wave, but we’re not in the front of the wave because you can’t be and sell so many magazines.”
And famous older women in the buff do sell magazines. Davis’ cover boosted newsstand sales 22% above the average for that period. Nancy Sinatra sold 53% more issues on the stands at age 54 two years ago, and Fawcett, whose pin-up appeal hasn’t dimmed with age, sold a whopping 2.5 times the average for her December ’95 cover.
Playboy spokesman Bill Farley credits the winning combination of celebrity and longevity. “The better known a celebrity is, the more likely you are to get that bump up,” he says. “[MTV’s new ‘Singled Out’ host] Carmen Elektra was on the cover two years ago, but at the time her only claim to fame was that she had gone out with Prince. If a celebrity has been around longer, chances are she has a bigger audience.”
*
Such numbers don’t surprise Susan Faludi, feminist social critic and author of “Backlash” (Crown, 1991). “Not to be predictably cynical, but one assumes that Playboy and the other marketers of beauty are doing this not because they’ve suddenly realized how unjustly they’ve sidelined older women, but because they sense a potential market as the baby boom population ages,” she says. (Playboy says its readership is aging, and the median age is now 32.5.)
“This seems like a great epiphany to the executives in Hollywood and in the entertainment and media industries because a lot of them are aging men who compete with each other by seeing who can get the most youthful trophy teeny-boppers,” Faludi says.
Nonetheless, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner attributes the magazine’s friendliness toward middle-aged beauties to his own sentimentality.
“Playboy from the beginning is a reflection of my personality, which is essentially romantic, and nostalgia and memory are a key part of what romance is about. Retro is very hot now, everything old is new again, and there’s a fascination with things past now as probably never before. It’s probably that we’re coming to the end of the century, and as one looks back, certain things in the past look better.”
The person on Playboy’s front line, the one scouting out West Coast centerfold talent, is--surprise--an older woman.
“I think it’s good to have women editors because I don’t know if men would have necessarily been the precursors of this movement,” says Marilyn Grabowski, a longtime Playboy photography editor and Heatherton’s contemporary. “They have to be taught this equation. In Europe, youth and beauty don’t even begin to equate. Catherine Deneuve, Simone Signoret and Jeanne Moreau--these are the women men venerate and find very sexy.”
Even in the halls of Playboy Studio West, Grabowski has noticed that 20-year-old women may take flack for taking off their clothes, but 50-year-old playmates are more often told, “More power to you. Go for it.”
“There are some women who reach a certain age and they give up, and they say, ‘It’s beyond me and I’ll be a grandmother’ and that’s fine for them,” she says. “But there are other women who never stop exploring the limits and what’s there for me now. They’re the adventurers, and the adventurous ones can take their clothes off at that age.”
But images of clock-stopping perfection send a double-edged message to women: Middle-aged women are fabulous . . . as long as they spend hours working out, that is, and maybe have a little work done.
“The idea of it being OK not to be nubile is one of the appealing things about old age,” Faludi says. “I don’t want to be on the StairMaster at 70.”
*
Cultural critic Camille Paglia, on the other hand, considers middle-aged pictorials the logical extension of first-wave feminism.
“I love it, naturally,” she says. “It’s the new feminist generation of the ‘60s hitting menopause. It’s fabulous that certain gifted women can retain their sexual allure.
“We have a naive youth cult in this country, that older women are expendable. And it doesn’t help that there’s a vogue for plastic surgery. I like plastic surgery if it does enhance a person’s appearance, but when you have older women going for the Barbie doll pop-eyed look, it’s a disaster.”
Sinatra also considered her Playboy debut to be politically correct--’90s-style. “One of my daughters said, ‘Mom, you’re a feminist. How can you think about it?’ I said, ‘Because I’m a feminist, I can feel totally secure about doing it and not have it clash with my principles because the whole idea is choice.’ ”
Although Playboy says the magazine works its pictorial magic with lighting, makeup and great photographers, Sinatra says--gratefully--that her layout was airbrushed. “They had to, sure,” she says, noting that Playboy touched up areas body makeup couldn’t cover, such as knees and elbows, as well as evidence of her surgical procedures--a caesarean and breast reduction.
“I remember [New York radio shock jock] Don Imus said I’d been airbrushed in a wind tunnel, which was not the case. I retaliated with, ‘We know why he’s on the radio and not television.’ ”
Like Sinatra, several of Playboy’s deshabille middle-agers are celebrity daughters--mobster Sam Giancana’s daughter Antoinette among them. And while Davis never discussed her magazine tryst with dad Ronald Reagan, Sinatra pere’s reaction was less predictable.
“Every time I said the promotion would be invaluable, he nodded. And when I told him what the money was, he said, ‘No.’
“He said, ‘Double it.’ ”
Sinatra posed to resurrect her rebel image and boot up her eclipsed career. And thanks to the magazine’s $200,000-plus promotions budget, her moment in the sun was blazing. She was all over the airwaves, and her performance at the House of Blues was maxed out with fans, many of them drag queens wearing Sinatra-like boots made for walking.
But after the party was over, Sinatra pretty much disappeared whence she came, which she says fits in comfortably with her priority endeavor--momhood to two daughters.
As for the body-building Davis, she says she looks much better in middle-age than she did at the typical Playboy age. “I’d come from drug addiction and anorexia,” she says. “Playboy wouldn’t have wanted me at 21. They would have said, ‘Go eat and then come back.’ ”
In fact, confidence is one of the sexually alluring perks of later years. And with the high divorce rate, more people are looking for mates in middle age, anthropologist Fisher says.
“A lot of men who are in their 50s do not want a 24-year-old girl,” she says. “They want a woman who might look younger, but they want someone who will reasonably go into old age with them and be a comfortable companion. Margaret Mead said the first relationship is for sex, the second is for children and the third for companionship.”
Playboy men’s columnist Asa Baber says older men are not the only audience for the sexually experienced older woman. She’s a universal male fantasy, he says.
“The marketing and advertising people have finally caught up with an eternal truth, which is that men of all ages, let us say from 12 on, find women of many different ages attractive,” he says. “The male appreciation of female beauty is wide and deep.”
Wide enough to create a market for “wrinkle movies,” a hard-core porn genre featuring older women that’s sprung up in the past few years. Mickey Bee, producer of the San Clemente-based porn video company Shooting Star, reports brisk sales of more than 50 such movie titles.
Bee, who says his stars bring him chicken soup on shoots, says his market is “men of all ages. Guys are animals, but for the most part it’s baby boomers who are our biggest audience. They want to fantasize about 18-year-olds, but in reality, a lot of guys have a hard time identifying with superstar models.”
*
In her Beverly Hills studio apartment, Heatherton is a constant blur of movement on a white couch. She’s a symphony in black, from her platform suede “Mammy Okum boots” to a demure turtleneck. She periodically retrieves a comb from her jacket pocket and idly grooms her long blond hair.
Heatherton is also hoping Playboy will reignite her singing career, which had sunk into a black hole. She was arrested a few times in the late ‘80s on charges of assaulting a boyfriend and possession of cocaine. But none of the charges stuck, and she says now of that period, “I’ve had some life, and it got pretty accelerated, really quite exciting but very dangerous.”
She says she never would have considered posing for Playboy in her sex kitten youth. “I was a St. Agnes Academy girl, you know,” she says.
She says she overcame her troubles with the help of good friends and introspection. On the way, Heatherton met spiritual writer Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. “She said, ‘We go through the tumbler and we either come out crushed or polished.’ And, not to sound hokey, I feel polished inside.”
