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ENTERTAINMI \ | www.playboy.com e MARCH 2013 
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HUNTER S. THOMPSON 


THE WINTERING OF 
THE ARAB SPRING 


EASTBOUND AND 
DOWN: THE BIRTH 
OF REDNECK CINEMA 


JIMMY KIMMEL 
THE INTERVIEW 


MOTORCYCLE PREVIEW 
THE PERFECT HAIRCUT 


CHRIS HARDWICK 
TALKS NERD 


BELONGS IN E 
THE FOREGROUND. | 


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o man is immune to the adrenaline 
М spike that accompanies spring's 

thaw. A short skirt on a beauty with 
a twinkle in her eye, the roar of a roadster's 
engine pulling out of the garage on fresh 
tires—it's that time of year. To celebrate, 
we offer a new issue dripping with thrills 
and sex and challenging ideas. Let's start 
with a writer who personifies all those 
things: Hunter S. Thompson. Continuing 
our celebration of the 50th anniversary 
of the Playboy Interview, we bring you 
an excerpt from Thompson's 1974 clas- 
sic. Expect drug-induced madness and 
Nixon bashing. Thank Contributing Edi- 
tor James Franco for inviting Hollywood 
siren Mila Kunis to the party. In Franco- 
file, you'll find Kunis—whose film Oz: The 
Great and Powerful hits this month—in all 
her glory. Speaking of Tinseltown, we look 
back on the wonderful life and times of 
film director Hal Needham in The Birth 
of Redneck Cinema. Needham launched 
a genre of testosterone-fueled films with 
crashing cars and girls in bikinis—see The 
Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Ban- ШД 
dit, for example. The Academy 
of Motion Picture Arts and Sci- 
ences honored him in December, 
Now we are honoring him in our 
pages. Moving from big screen to 
small, in this month's interview 
Jimmy Kimmel explains why 
the behind-the-scenes world of 
late-night TV can be as funny as 
what you see on the show. We 
are also pleased to publish a 
portfolio by Parisian photogra- 
pher David Bellemere, whose 
pictures of model Karolina 
Szymczak sans clothing will 
leave you breathless. “One of 
the sexiest bodies 1 have ever 
discovered,” Bellemere says. 
Coming from him, that's saying 
something. Wes Siler certainly 
loves this time of year—the start of motor- 
cycling season. In Thunder Road, the man 
behind hellforleathermagazine.com hits the 
road on this year's hottest bikes. What goes 
with motorcycles better than hot girls in 
lingerie? Nothing! Turn to The Language 
of Lingerie, our guide to buying the right 
look for your partner in crime. The story 
was photographed by lensmaster Michael 
Bernard. From bikes and babes we go to 
Russian literature, naturally. Ludmilla 
Petrushevskaya is one of Russia's great- 
est contemporary writers. The Goddess 
Parka, selected from her new book There 
Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sis- 
ter's Husband, is a tale of stark romance 
that questions the mythology of love. 
Finally, we spotlight “the Nerdist" Chris 
Hardwick in 200. Find out why Hardwick 
has become the comedian and TV person- 
ality of choice for a generation of geeks. 
See, we told you this issue would drip with 
adrenaline and sex and challenging ideas. 
And we haven't even gotten to Miss March 
yet. She's waiting for you inside. Now turn _ 
the page and let's get rolling. Petrushevskaya 


Michael Bernard 


David Bellemere 


_ _ 


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VOL. 60, NO. 2 一 MARCH 2013 


PLAYBOY 


(exo N T ENIT S 


THE COLD ARAB 
SPRING 

After the upheavals 

in the Middle East, 
NICOLAS PELHAM 
expected to discover new 
sexual freedoms. What 
he found was something 
entirely different. 


THE BIRTH OF 
REDNECK CINEMA 
How a beat-up 
ex-stuntman and a 
Pontiac Trans Am made 
cinematic history: the 
behind-the-scenes story 
of Smokey and the Bandit. 
By STEPHEN REBELLO 


THE GODDESS 
PARKA 

The story of a school- 
teacher, a shrewd 
matchmaker and the love 
she finds for him in her 
family. By LUDMILLA 
PETRUSHEVSKAYA 


CHRIS HARDWICK 
It'strue: The nerds have 
inherited the earth. ERIC 
SPITZNAGEL talks with 
comedy's geek king about 
Comic-Con sex and playing 
Dungeons & Dragons with 
Hollywood's funniest. 


THUNDER ROAD 
Whether you prefer to 
hug mountain curves 

or roar down Route 66, 
WES SILER's guide to the 
year's best motorcycles 
will have you craving 
pavement. 


PLAYBOY CLASSIC: 
HUNTER S. 
THOMPSON 

In 1974 CRAIG VETTER 
sat down with the father 
of gonzo journalism to 
discuss Thompson's 
favorite drugs, butting 
heads with Nixon and 
rolling with the Hells 
Angels. 


DEATH AND 
MADNESS AT 
DIAMOND 
MOUNTAIN 

Ian Thorson went 
to Arizona to gain 
enlightenment. He 
ended up dead. 

By SCOTT CARNEY 


JIMMY KIMMEL 

The late-night talk show 
host bares all to BILL 
ZEHME about classing 
up his act post-The Man 
Show, his true feelings 
about Jay Leno and his 
new life at 11:35 p.m. 


Any gentleman knows the 
importance of foreplay. 

Our Rabbitis no exception, 
cavortingthigh-high with our 
irresistible lingerie model. 


Photography by MICHAEL BERNARD 


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PLAYMATE: Ashley Doris 


E-SEARCHES AND 
E-SEIZURES 

When investigators can 
read your e-mail at will, 
where do your Fourth 
Amendment rights lie? 


THE MAN'S BEST 
FRIEND 
Drug-detection dogs 
aren't the unerring pups 
we think they are. By 


TALKING WITH 

MILA KUNIS 

What's it like being the 

world's sexiest woman? 
asks his 

close friend. 


WHO’S SORRY 
NOW? 

Men are unable to apolo- 
gize. Thankfully, 


isamanofchange. 


BOSOM BUDDIES 


debunks the platonic 
opposite-sex friendship. 


PORN POLICE 
Can you force actors to 
wear condoms? 

explores the 
new lay of the land. 


GOLD IN DISDAIN 
We suffer, Goldman Sachs 
profits. But as 

explains, the gov- 
ernment is catching on. 


FADE IN 

The fade is a haircut that 
proves classic style never 
dies. Here's how to make 
it work for you. 


VOL. 60, NO. 2—MARCH 2013 


PLAYBOY 


CONTENTS 


THE MUSE 
Karolina Szymezak is 
a Polish goddess whose 
body is a work of art. 
Prepare to be inspired. 


PLAYMATE: 
ASHLEY DORIS 
Flowers are the key 
to Miss March's 
heart, andinher 
garden, temptation is 
always in season. 


THE LANGUAGE 
OF LINGERIE 
Don't wait for an 
anniversary to 
unwrap the most 
seductive lingerie 
onthe planet. We did 
it for you. 


WORLD OF 
PLAYBOY 

Hot girls, cool art: We 
party at Miami's Art 
Basel; Cooper rings in 


2013 at our London club. 


NEW BEGINNINGS 
Wedding bells chime as 
Hefand Crystal walk the 


200: Chris Hardwick 


aisle; New Year's Eve at 
the Mansion, where there's 
always a kiss at midnight. 


PLAYBILL 
DEAR PLAYBOY 
AFTER HOURS 


PLAYMATE NEWS REVIEWS 
Brande Roderick suits up for MANTRACK 
All-Star Celebrity Appren- PLAYBOY 
tice; Amanda Cerny shreds ADVISOR 


PARTY JOKES 


with her own skateboard. 


PLAYBOY ON PLAYBOY ON PLAYBOY ON 
FACEBOOK TWITTER INSTAGRAM 


Keep up with all things Playboy at 
facebook.com/playboy, twitter.com/playboy 
and instagram.com/playboy. 


GENERAL OFFICES: PLAYBOY, 9346 CIVIC CENTER DRIVE, BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA 
90210. PLAYBOY ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY TO RETURN UNSOLICITED EDITORIAL OR 
GRAPHIC OR OTHER MATERIAL. ALL RIGHTS IN LETTERS AND UNSOLICITED EDITORIAL 
AND GRAPHIC MATERIAL WILL BE TREATED AS UNCONDITIONALLY ASSIGNED FOR PUB- 
LICATION AND COPYRIGHT PURPOSES, AND MATERIAL WILL BE SUBJECT TO PLAYBOY'S 
UNRESTRICTED RIGHT TO EDIT AND TO COMMENT EDITORIALLY. CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 
02013 BY PLAYBOY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PLAYBOY, PLAYMATE AND RABBIT HEAD SYM- 
BOL ARE MARKS OF PLAYBOY, REGISTERED U.S. TRADEMARK OFFICE. NO PART OF THIS 
BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED, STORED IN A RETRIEVAL SYSTEM OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY 
FORM BY ANY ELECTRONIC, MECHANICAL, PHOTOCOPYING OR RECORDING MEANS OR 
OTHERWISE WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. ANY SIMILARITY 
BETWEEN THE PEOPLE AND PLACES IN THE FICTION AND SEMI-FICTION IN THIS MAGA- 
ZINE AND ANY REAL PEOPLE AND PLACES IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL. FOR CREDITS SEE 
PAGE 140. DANBURY MINT, DIRECTV AND DIRECT WINES ONSERTS IN DOMESTIC SUB- 
SCRIPTION POLYWRAPPED COPIES. CERTIFICADO DE LICITUD DE TÍTULO NO. 7570 DE 
FECHA 29 DE JULIO DE 1993, Y CERTIFICADO DE LICITUD DE CONTENIDO NO. 5108 DE 
FECHA 29 DE JULIO DE 1993 EXPEDIDOS POR LA COMISION CALIFICADORA DE PUBLICA- 
CIONES Y REVISTAS ILUSTRADAS DEPENDIENTE DE LA SECRETARÍA DE GOBERNACIÓN, 
MÉXICO. RESERVA DE DERECHOS 04-2000-071710332800-102 


PRINTED IN U.S.A. 


FROM THE WRITERS OF 
‘THE HANGOVER’ 


21 


&OVER 


FINALLY. 


` BLAC 20] | 
ылы MARCH 2013 


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LIGHTERS А5 CLASSIC 
AS THE LINE 
“1 READ THE ARTICLES.” 


Zippo 


Playful new designs just released, 
hit zippo.com to choose yours. 


@ 2012 Playboy. PLAYBOY and ісопіс Playboy 
PLAYBOY Y Rabbit Head Design are marks of Playboy and used 
under license by Zippo Manufacturing Company. 


HUGH M. HEFNER 


editor-in-chief 


JIMMY JELLINEK 
editorial director 
STEPHEN RANDALL deputy editor 
MAC LEWIS art director 
LEOPOLD FROEHLICH managing editor 
A.J. BAIME executive editor 
REBECCA H. BLACK photo editor 
HUGH GARVEY articles editor 


EDITORIAL 
FEATURES: JASON BUHRMESTER senior editor FASHION: JENNIFER RYAN JONES editor 
STAFF: JARED EVANS assistant managing editor; GILBERT MACIAS editorial coordinator; 
CHERIE BRADLEY executive assistant; TYLER TRYKOWSKI editorial assistant 
CARTOONS: AMANDA WARREN associate cartoon editor 
COPY: WINIFRED ORMOND copy chief; BRADLEY LINCOLN senior copy editor; CAT AUER copy editor 
RESEARCH: NORA O'DONNELL senior research editor; SHANE MICHAEL SINGH research editor 
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: BRANTLEY BARDIN, MARK BOAL, ROBERT B. DE SALVO, 
GRETCHEN EDGREN, JAMES FRANCO, PAULA FROELICH, KARL TARO GREENFELD, KEN GROSS, GEORGE GURLEY, 
DAVID HOCHMAN, ARTHUR KRETCHMER (automotive), LISA LAMPANELLI (special correspondent), 
SEAN MCCUSKER, CHRISTIAN PARENTI, JAMES R. PETERSEN, ROCKY RAKOVIC, STEPHEN REBELLO, DAVID RENSIN, 
CHIP ROWE, TIMOTHY SCHULTZ, WILL SELF, DAVID SHEFF, ROB MAGNUSON SMITH, JOEL STEIN, DAVID STEVENS, 


ROB TANNENBAUM, CHRISTOPHER TENNANT, ALICE K. TURNER 


ART 
JUSTIN PAGE senior art director; ROBERT HARKNESS assistant art director; MATT STEIGBIGEL photo researcher; 


AARON LUCAS art coordinator; LISA TCHAKMAKIAN senior art administrator 


PHOTOGRAPHY 
STEPHANIE MORRIS west coast editor; BARBARA LEIGH assistant editor; PATTY BEAUDET-FRANCES contributing 
photography editor; ARNY FREYTAG, STEPHEN WAYDA senior contributing photographers; SASHA EISENMAN, 
RICHARD IZUI, ZACHARY JAMES JOHNSTON, TONY KELLY, MIZUNO, BYRON NEWMAN, GEN NISHINO, 
JARMO POHJANIEMI, DAVID RAMS contributing photographers; ANDREW J. BROZ casting; 
KEVIN MURPHY manager, photo library; CHRISTIE HARTMANN archivist, photo library; 
KARLA GOTCHER, CARMEN ORDOÑEZ assistants, photo library; CRAIG SCHRIBER Manager, prepress and imaging; 


AMY KASTNER-DROWN digital imaging specialist; OSCAR RODRIGUEZ prepress operator 


PUBLIC RELATIONS 


THERESA М. HENNESSEY vice president; TERI THOMERSON director 


PRODUCTION 
LESLEY K. JOHNSON production director; HELEN YEOMAN production services manager 


INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING 
MARKUS GRINDEL Managing director 


PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES INTERNATIONAL, INC. 


SCOTT FLANDERS Chief executive officer 


PLAYBOY INTEGRATED SALES 
JOHN LUMPKIN senior vice president, publisher; MARIE FIRNENO vice president, advertising director; 


AMANDA CIVITELLO senior marketing director 


PLAYBOY PRINT OPERATIONS 
DAVID G. ISRAEL executive vice president, general manager of playboy media; 
TOM FLORES business manager 


ADVERTISING AND MARKETING: AMERICAN MEDIA INC. 

DAVID PECKER chairman and chief executive officer; KEVIN HYSON chief marketing officer; 
HELEN BIANCULLI executive director, direct-response advertising; BRIAN HOAR national spirits director 
NEW YORK: BRIAN VRABEL entertainment and gaming director; MIKE BOYKA automotive, 
consumer electronics and consumer products director; ANTHONY GIANNOCCORA fashion and 
grooming manager; KEVIN FALATKO senior marketing manager; 

ZOHRAY BRENNAN marketing manager; JOHN KITSES art director 


LOS ANGELES: LORI KESSLER west coast director; VALERIE TOVAR digital sales planner 


THE WORLD 
OF PLAYBOY 


HEF SIGHTINGS 
MANSION FROLICS 
AND NIGHTLIFE NOTES 


Cooper Hefner flew across the pond 
to ring in 2013 eight hours ahead of 
the Mansion. Hef's youngest son 
hosted the United Kingdom's 
hottest New Year's Eve party at 
Playboy Club London. Decked 

out in swinging retro style 

for the Mad Men-themed Y 
soiree, revelers descended on 

Old Park Lane for an evening 

with Hefner, British Bunnies and 
champagne towers galore. 


During Miami's Art Basel—the in-crowd 


exposition 一 Playboy launched a chic leather 
bralette at a party with the Hole gallery 
at the Delano. The bralette was created 


by Cushnie et Ochs, the design team of 
Michelle Ochs and Carly Cushnie (right 


middle), and shown off by Miss February 


1999 Stacy Fuson and Miss November 
2005 Raquel Gibson (right 
top). Also dazzling the 
throng were ASAP 
Rocky and the 
ASAP Mob. 


Sugarplums and fairies have nothing 
on gingerbread and the girls of the 
Mansion. Leading up to Christmas, 
Kimberly Phillips, Melissa Dawn 
Taylor, Trisha Frick, Crystal and Caya 
Hefner made gingerbread houses. 
Fun in the Sun guests decorated 
gingerbread men and then sank their 
teeth into them. 


5 


iPLAYB OY Playmates, celebrities and articles 


EVERY PLAYBOY EVER 
FROM ISSUE #1 TO NOW 


ON YOUR IPAD, MAC OR WINDOWS PC. 


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PLAYBOY INTERVIEWS 


УУУУ 


Since 1962, Playboy has published 
the greatest interviews in history. 
Now you can buy 50 of the most 

(in)famous exclusively at Amazon.com— 
99 cents each. Read them today on your 
Kindle App, Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch. 


TE 5. Thompson on C 
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NEW 
BEGINNINGS 


Let us introduce Mr. 

and Mrs. Hefner. Hugh 

М. Hefner wed Crystal 
Harris on New Year's Eve 
at the Playboy Mansion. 
In an intimate affair, 

the couple's family and 
close friends witnessed 
the validation of Hef 

and Crystal's love. 

The bride's stepfather 
gave her away under a 
bower of pink, purple 
and white flowers that 
complemented her 
blush Romona Keveza 
mermaid gown. The 
legendary aquatic 
creatures were a 
wedding theme inspired 
by Crystal's favorite 
movie, The Little 
Mermaid, as shown 

on the wedding cake, 
which was adorned with 
a mermaid bride and 
merman groom. Hef, 
best man Keith Hefner 
and Charlie (the couple's 
dog) wore tuxedos and 
received congratulations 
from guests arriving 

for the Playboy New 
Year's Eve party, which 
doubled as a 
wedding reception. 


The Hefners hosted a posh 
New Year's Eve party where 
couples Joe Don Rooney and 
PMOY 2005 Tiffany Fallon, 
and Evan Longoria and Miss 
January 2010 Jaime Faith 
Edmondson kissed as the bal- 
loons and confetti dropped. 


DANGEROUS GAMES 
You left out an important aspect of the 
Cuban Missile Crisis in your introduc- 
tion to the classic January 1967 Playboy 
Interview with Fidel Castro (November). 
The U.S. had set up nuclear missiles in 
Turkey before Castro allowed the Sovi- 
ets to place theirs in Cuba. President 
Kennedy made a secret deal with Nikita 
Khrushchev іп 1962 to dismantle the mis- 
siles aimed at Moscow if the Soviets would 
remove theirs from Cuba. So who should 
be considered the aggressor in this crisis 
that nearly annihilated the planet? 
Frank Gubasta 
Fort Myers, Florida 


REASONABLE POINTS 
I am appalled by many of the 

responses in November to the Playboy 
Interview with the noted atheist and evo- 
lutionary biologist Richard Dawkins 
(September). Dawkins may come off 
as arrogant, but he's certainly not 
as arrogant as people who believe a 
supernatural entity cares what they do. 
Religion is about control, plain and sim- 
ple. If people need to believe a fairy 
tale—and act honestly only because 
they fear eternal damnation—I consider 
them very much beneath me. 

Phil Drifter 

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 


A reader in November advances the 
nonsensical argument that because 
Dawkins feels “privileged” to be alive, 
an omnipotent consciousness must have 
instilled the ability to acknowledge that 
experience. Evolution wholly accounts 
for man's ability to perceive, understand, 
calculate and emote. No one “granted” 
Dawkins the right to feel a sense of privi- 
lege, just as no one made grass green or 
instructed bees to form hives. All life is a 
product of an ongoing process that began 
some 10 billion years ago. 

Thomas Ferrugia 
Forest Hills, New York 


BLUES BATTLES 
As a onetime guitarist for the band 
Blue Cheer and a professional player for 
more than 50 years, І am taken aback 
by Rob Tannenbaum’s assertion in his 
review of Gary Clark Jr.'s new album 
that “Cray was better than Vaughan” 
(After Hours, December). Robert Cray has 
never played an original lick in his life, 
while Stevie Ray Vaughan is on a level 
with Les Paul, Chet Atkins, B.B. King, 
Dick Dale and Jimi Hendrix. 
Troy Spence Jr. 
Brookings-Harbor, Oregon 


WINNING DRIVE 

As a teacher and father, І appreciate 
people with strong character. Jon Gruden 
(Inside the Head of Football's Greatest Nerd, 
December) may seem eccentric, but we 
would all benefit if we had his fervor. 
Rather than return to coaching, 1 hope 


DEAR PLAYBOY 


One Degree of Lee 

In After Atwater (November), J.C. 
Gabel says Lee Atwater remains 
unique as a political strategist, 
which is true. But more than 20 
years after his death, members of 
“Atwater’s army” still wield consid- 
erable influence. His legions include 
Haley Barbour, Roger Stone, Mary 
Matalin, Roger Ailes, Ben Ginsberg, 
Andy Card, George W. Bush (whom 
Atwater called “Dubya”), Karl Rove 
(Atwater ran his campaign to become 
chairman of the College Republican 
National Committee), Charlie Black, 
Jim Pinkerton (whom colleagues 
called “Atwater's brain”), Ed Rogers, 
Ed Rollins and on and on. Political 
campaigns have long been nasty, but 
Atwater took them to new lows. He 
died a terrible death, sending letters 
of apology and asking for forgive- 
ness, but the bell had been rung. You 
can hardly turn anywhere in politics 


he travels the country to push his work 

ethic on the youth of our nation. They 

need a spark, and he has a fire to share. 
Christopher Barnes 
Germansville, Pennsylvania 


POLE POSITION 
Every month I find plenty of remind- 
ers why Tve subscribed to PLAYBOY since 


[ 
1 

#1, 

I 4 = d : Е 
Amanda Streich is a Polish delight. 


І was a teenager, but learning that 
Playmate Amanda Streich is a native of 
Poland was the cherry on top of 2012 
(Girl on Film, December). Coming from 
strong Polish roots, І am proud to see 
her represent my favorite month of the 
year. Га be happy to be her date on a 
visit to the motherland. Dziekuje bardzo, 
PLAYBOY, and na zdrowie! 

Chad White 

Columbus, Ohio 


4 Же 


today without finding him опе or two 
degrees away. 
John Brady 
Newburyport, Massachusetts 
Brady is author of Bad Boy: The Life and 
Politics of Lee Atwater. 


FREEDOM LOVER 
Do you believe in Jungian synchron- 
icity? When the November issue arrived 
with your send-up of the Uncle Sam 
recruiting poster on its cover, I had 
Just finished two weeks of intense work 
on a music video for an antiwar song 
called “If I Was You” that features 
Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, George 
W. Bush, Dick Cheney and former Salt 
Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson on 
the same poster. I won’t bore you with 
a statement about my politics, but I will 
tell you I decided to vote for Shera. 
Dave Elder 
Vestal, New York 


As a soldier recently returned from 
Afghanistan, I am put off that you used 
a Canadian model to portray Uncle Sam, 
a symbol of American patriotism. 

Ben Taylor 
Anchorage, Alaska 
She's North American—close enough. 


FOUND WISDOM 
Richard Warren Lewis's classic 1972 

Playboy Interview with Jack Nicholson 
(December) is fascinating and surpris- 
ingly fresh. For someone who claims to 
be a nonintellectual, Nicholson comes 
across as the best kind of psychedelic 
and spiritual guy without being pre- 
tentious. Jack was a strange and honest 
34-year-old—my age. His take on 35 
being “probably the last time you can 
consider abandoning what you've started 
and getting into something totally new” 
is inspiring to read. 

Michael Kline 

Memphis, Tennessee 


17 


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TALKING TOO FAST 
I am a registered Republican, but I 

have moved toward the political cen- 
ter because of conservatives’ ideas about 
women’s reproductive rights, among 
other issues. However, your article 
Screwed (November) upset me. Nancy L. 
Cohen is contributing to the problem in 
American politics today. When given a 
soapbox, those in the media paint their 
opponents into a small corner. Don’t 
muddy your great institution with par- 
tisan rhetoric. 

Darren Drake 

Sacramento, California 


LOVES OF HIS LIFE 
Your November issue showcases the 
incredible array of women Hugh Hefner 
has dated during his lifetime (Hef's 
Girlfriends). I would be interested to 
know who is not included on this list— 
for example, the models and movie stars 
he’s had flings with. 
Thomas Pistone 
Lake Norman, North Carolina 
Got a minute? 


LASTING IMPRESSION 
I have finally been able to pinpoint 
what it is about Marilyn Monroe that 
makes her images so enduring (The Nude 
Marilyn, December). She reminds me— 
and I'm sure many other men—of a time 
in my life when I was coming of age and 
first driven mad by love, lust and longing 
for a young woman. 
Roger Cloud 
Madison, Alabama 


Thank you for the outstanding tribute 
to Marilyn Monroe. Seeing a black-and- 
white photo of her on the cover evokes 
memories of your first issue. 

Gordon King 
Laconia, New Hampshire 


If Marilyn had lived, “I believe she 
would have become a sweet little old 
lady,” says Roger Ebert (A Sense of Con- 
trol). “I don’t think she would be such a 
big deal,” says Hef. She would be a “dis- 
comfiting reminder of how we all age,” 
writes John Updike (A Broken Venus). But 
I think George Carlin had it right when 
he wrote, “If Marilyn Monroe were alive 
today...there would still be guys lining up 
for a chance to fuck her.” 

Earl Flaherty 
Whitneyville, Maine 


Marilyn, why did you have to go? 
Thank you, PLAYBOY, for a wonderful trib- 
ute to the ultimate American blonde. 

Juan Perez 
La Pryor, Texas 


LAWYERS IN A STRANGE LAND 

Blowing past the margaritas and the 
mule in the bar, Adam Reposa is what 
a criminal defense attorney should 
be, especially in a state that regularly 


executes people, some of them inno- 
cent (Law and Disorder, December). The 
prosecutors and judges involved in these 
railroad jobs are “sorry” only later, after 
they have been exposed. Instead of tar- 
geting corrupt prosecutors and judges, 
the state bar devotes itself to hound- 
ing attorneys like Reposa, who uses his 
brain against the collective brawn and 
has the audacity to win. You need to be 
crazy to buck a system that excoriates 
defense lawyers for doing their jobs, usu- 
ally on behalf of the poor. Wish me luck 
in my own disbarment proceedings as І 
walk through the same fires Reposa has 

endured, and for the same reasons. 
Theresa Caballero 

El Paso, Texas 
Caballero and her co-counsel Stuart Leeds 
face disbarment following their unusual con- 
victions last year for criminal contempt. The 
attorneys had been characteristically aggres- 
sive while defending a judge accused of 
accepting bribes (she was acquitied). After the 
trial, the judge who oversaw the proceedings 


Adam Reposa: seeking the advice of counsel. 


filed a complaint, accusing the lawyers of 
being disruptive—even though, Leeds noted, 
“Our client isn't complaining.” Among the 
charges: Caballero told prospective jurors 
that the judge and prosecutor were “on the 
same team” and ignored instructions from 
the bench to “move on” during her question- 
ing of witnesses. 


MISSING SCENE 
As a movie buff I look forward each 
year to Sex in Cinema (December) to see 
which films I missed that feature hot 
female actors baring it all. I don’t mind 
when you include the occasional non- 
nude shot, such as the one of Eva Green 
massaging Johnny Depp with her foot 
in Dark Shadows. But how could you use 
a photo of male strippers from Magic 
Mike instead of a shot of a topless Olivia 
Munn initiating a threesome? 
Kevin Espie 
Wolfeboro, New Hampshire 
We need to watch that movie again. 


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BECOMING 
ATTRACTION 


“YOUR SENSES 
are heightened; 
you find that ani- 
mal inside you—it's 
all about being in 
tune with yourself.” 
It's no surprise 
Canadian actress 
Kristen Hager 
describes play- 
ing TV's sexiest 
werewolf in such 
seductive terms. 
As Nora on Syfy's 
Being Human, 
Kristen makes 
those body-ripping 
transformations 
look downright 
appealing. Is there 
a downside to 
being a werewolf? 
“Well, you're 
waking up naked 
in the woods 
somewhere all the 
time.” Where do 
we sign up? 


21 


TALK | WHAT MATTERS NOW 


ж "cem 
NE N 


BALL 


HANDLING 


AFULL-COURT PRESS 


TO CONVINCE MEN 
TO GET THE SNIP 


* Vasectomy Madness, 
we're glad to report, 
isn't a horrifying 
mental condition—it's 
actually a promotional 
deal offered by Virginia 
Urology. Despite what 
that Seinfeld episode 
says, men don't exactly 
line up to have vasec- 
tomies, no matter how 
often urologists point 
out that it's the most 
cost-effective and 
safest form of birth 
control. As such, it's 
an excellent candidate 
for this type of pitch: 
Get snipped in March, 
and afterward you can 
lounge on the couch 
for two days watching 
March Madness bas- 
ketball uninterrupted 
by your spouse. Some 
clinics even throw in a 
free pizza. Now these 
March Madness vasec- 
tomy deals are popping 
up all over the nation. 
“It's difficult to 
promote us, in many 
ways, because of the 
sensitivity of what we 
do,” says Terry Coffey, 
chiefexecutive of Vir- 
ginia Urology. “But 
we thought we could 
have some fun with 
it.” One ofthe promo- 
tion's strengths is that 
it provides a way for 
couples to raise the 
issue. “A guy wouldn't 


call up a urologist and 
say, ‘I’m ready to get a 
vasectomy, " says Evan 
Cohen, administrator 
at Urology Associates of 
Cape Cod, which runs a 
similar program. Cohen 
says the promotion has 
tripled the number of 
vasectomies his clinic 
performs in March. 
Other reports suggest 

a natural increase 

in vasectomies that 
month, thanks to the 
NCAA tournament's 
therapeutic qualities. 


Perhaps that's why 
these promotions 
portray a cartoonish 
image of men as couch 
potatoes who want 
to watch sports and 
eat pizza: because it 
appeals to both men 
and women for all 
the right reasons. It 
provides women a way 
to raise a sensitive 
issue and offers men an 
upside where there was 
none before, especially 
when faced with giving 


up their virility. 

Itis these concerns 
about masculinity 
that hamper the pro- 
cedure's popularity. 
The New York Times 
reported in 2008 that 
each year only about 
500,000 men have the 
procedure done in the 
U.S., compared with 
New Zealand, where 
nearly half of all men 
do so by the age of 
50. “Men have some 
fears about vasecto- 
mies,” says Coffey, 
“unfounded fears, 


Reports suggest a 


natural increase in vasec- 

tomies in March, thanks 
tothe NCAA tournament's 
therapeutic qualities. 


because it's a simple 
procedure.” Your vasa 
deferentia, the tubes 
that supply your semen 
with sperm, are easily 
accessible and can be 
sealed without a scal- 
pel. You're out of the 
clinic that day. Then 
you go home and nurse 
your manhood— both 
figurative and literal— 
back to health with 
some hoops and pizza 
for two days. “If you're 
good at it," says Coffey, 
*you can stretch it to 
three."— Willy Staley 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY SATOSHI 


SEX AND THE 
SUPERHERO 


Superpowers do not 
ensure a super sex life. 


of his sex life. “He's not 
prepared for the world 


“SUPERHERO 


Just witness Clark he must now live in,” 

Kent, Peter Parker and says Casey. “He's so COMICS HA VE ALWA YS 
legions of other caped repressed, based on 

crusaders fumbling everything he locked BRUSHED AGAINST A VERY 


around the opposite sex. 
“Superhero comics have 
always brushed against 
avery adolescent view 
of sexuality, and more 


down inside himself 
when he was a super- 
hero. He’s going to be 
dancing on that razor's 
edge of what's out there.” 


often than not they're Although Casey has 
the most embarrassing written for Uncanny 
examples ofsexincom- X-Men, Adventures of 


ics," says Joe Casey, a 
veteran comic writer 
and partner in Man of 
Action Studios. These 


Superman and other 
comics, he is best known 
as one ofthe creators of 
Ben 10, the multibillion- 


prepubescent portray- dollar—and decidedly 
als led Casey to create unsexy—kids' franchise. 
SEX, his newest comic “Tm a grown man, 

from the Man of Action somewhat mature, and 


imprint at Image Com- 


this is the type of subject 


ADOLESCENT VIEW OF 
SEXUALITY.” 


— JOE CASEY 


USTRATION BY TODD DETWILER 


ILL 


matter I'm interested 
in exploring," he says. 
“Maybe it's my way of 
finding some weird cre- 
ative balance in my life." 


ics. Launching this 
month, the story follows 
Simon Cooke, a retired 
superhero forced to 
confront the failings 


edge of space. You have a window seat 


* Civilian space travel isn't rocket 
AIR APPARENT science, a not anymore. For to the universe,” says Zero2infinity CEO 
THE NEXT FRONTIER $145,000 Barcelona-based company José Mariano López-Urdiales of the 
OF SPACE TRAVEL Zero2infinity will send you 22 miles eight-hour journey. What if we want to 
above the Earth in a high-tech pod have sex up there? "In fact, we encour- 
PRICE: $145,000 for MOVES CLOSER TO attached to a proprietary helium bal- age sex," he says. Here's what travelers 
an eight-hour trip. LIFTOFF loon. “The Bloon takes you to the very are in for in 2014.—Harold Goldberg 


STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP 


01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 


— Your party 2 Liftoff! The > A two-hour Dinner and > Sail detach- 3 Enjoy 25 => Pilots guide —Ə Shock ab- 
boards the 13- balloon begins cruise above drinks with a es. Parafoil seconds of pod to landing sorbers inflate 
foot pod. its ascent. Earth. view of dawn. deploys. zero gravity. site. for landing. 


TRAVEL 


MODERN MUMBAIIS 


NIRVANA TO THE 


ENLIGHTENED TRAVELER 


* While Mumbai tops 
the bucket list of spiri- 
tualpilgrims, we sug- 
gest ап itinerary that's 
more eat, play, love. Yes, 
the city is an intoxicat- 
ing blend of saturated 
colors, street food siz- 
zling on outdoor grills 
and about 13 million 
inhabitants, but it's also 
a modern metropolis 
that celebrates the good 
life with thumping 
dance clubs, upscale 
restaurants and some 
ofthe most gorgeous 
and stylish women on 


CLUB PLAN 

Hop a flight to Goa to 
check out the first in a 
series of Playboy Clubs 
opening in India. 


the planet. Time your trally situated Four Check off tourist tikka masala, it’s at India’s indie fashion 
trip for late March Seasons (2), which must-sees such as the Ziya at the Oberoi, and a quirky stash of 
and catch the citywide has a dramatic rooftop crowds ofChowpatty Nariman Point. It’s gadgets. A five-minute 
street party that is the bar, or the Taj Mahal Beach, bustling Fashion approximately 100 times walk and a few flights 
Holi festival (1). Palace hotel in the Street (3) for sartorial more flavorfulthanany of rickety stairs later, 
If you're blessed Colaba business dis- finds and the field of version ofthe takeout find Bungalow Eight's 
enough to be іп town trict, which can serve amateur cricketers at staple available in the three floors of clothing, 
on an expense account, asa posh yet practical Oval Maidan. Then let States and 100 percent accessories and house- 
check in to the cen- HQ for your stay. your stomach be your less neon color. wares that are made 
— guide. Tuck into a plate Bypass the tacky using mostly traditional 
[z т » of fried giant prawns stalls (and pickpock- techniques and materi- 
h - andafrostyKingfisher ets) along the crowded als but styled for the 
beer at Trishna in Colaba Causeway in here and now. 
Fort for areminder favor of concept shops When the sun sets, 
of the city's fishing- where souvenirs deserv- head to Bollywood 
- g village roots. (Later, ing of suitcase real stomping ground 
visit nearby Everyday estate await. Just off Bandra and dance the 
Project (4) for mod the main drag, behind a night away to a DJ set 
stationery.) Andifyou’re heritage buildingfacade, at Blue Frog to see 
wondering where to find Bombay Electric why Mumbai’s the 
arefined take on chicken houses the best of word.— Crystal Meers 
EET 01 02 03 04 
THE anaes — — o = 
STREET LIKE IT HOT SNACK WELL SIT DOWN DRINK UP 
> friec > going > Don’t wan > Overdo it 


24 


tick to fried > Befo 


A 


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next door. 


EN 


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FOOD 


USE YOUR 
NOODLE 


STANLEY TUCCT’S RULES 
FOR PERFECT PASTA 


* Inthis era of gustatory one- 
upmanship, if you can't cook an 
expertly sauced bowl of al dente 
pasta from scratch, you can't call 
yourself a real man. Which is why ` 
we enlisted Stanley Tucci,the actor 
who plays Julia Child's husband 

in Julie & Julia and co-directed, 
co-wrote and stars in the foodie 
cult hit movie Big Night, to help 

us out with date night. Imported 
Italian canned tuna is the secret 

to his can't-fail sauce. “People go, 
‘Really? ” says Tucci. “But then 
they try it and it's so sweet and just 
so fucking delicious.” 


RECIPE 


Spaghetti con Pomodoro e Tonno 


3 This recipe was adapted from The Tucci Cook- 
book, a new collection of family recipes. Proceeds 
benefit the Food Bank for New York City. 


tomato sauce. Cover 
and simmer to heat 
through. Remove from 
heat and set aside. 


1. Warm quarter cup of 
olive oil in a saucepan 
over medium-high heat. 
Add onion and cook 
until soft, about three 
minutes. Add toma- 
toes, crushing them 


2. Meanwhile, bring 
a large pot of salted 


well with the back of a 
slotted spoon. Season 
with salt and pepper 
and stir in basil. Sim- 
mer over medium-low 
heat until slightly thick- 


ened, about 25 minutes. 


Drain half the olive oil 
from canned tuna and 
pour the other half into 


water to boil. Add pasta 
and cook until al dente. 
Drain, then toss pasta 
with remaining two 
tablespoons of olive 

oil. Add about three 
ladles of sauce and 
continue tossing. Dis- 
tribute evenly among 
four dinner plates. Ladle 


sauce. Flake tuna into remaining sauce on top. 


Tucc's Ө Ө 
TIPS | WHET THE APPETITE : POUR PINOT NOIR 

5 y^ "The fig is so "Because the 
vaginal. | suppose if sauce has tuna in it, 
you had figs and a you shouldn't serve 
phallus of salami that anything heavy. And 
would be the perfect, tomato wants to be 
extremely suggestive paired with some- 
appetizer." thing red." 


Photography by KANG KIM 


us 2 tbsp. 


PLAY ARMSTRONG 
> “| like jazz, par- 
ticularly from the 
1950s. You can't go 
wrong with Louis 
Armstrong. He spans 
such a long time and 
diversity of music.” 


ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH C. RUTHERFORD 


A 


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GO GLOBAL THIS 
EVIL TWIN 
ST. PADDY'S DAY AÚN MÁS A JESÚS 
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this St. Patrick's day: 
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The strong dark beer GUINNESS 
made from roasted Despite its dark color 
malt or barley first and tosty ei 
= Guinness is deceptively 
be nn light in body and has 
A . just 125 calories per 
working-class river 12 ounces. 
and street porters in 
the 1700s (hence its 


old moniker “stout 
porter"). Today 


wildly different 
styles are produced 
everywhere from 
Denmark to Japan— Y 
lighter English and < А. LE COG IMPERIAL 
Irish stouts, sweet № This Russian-style 
oatmeal and milk da double stout, brewed in 
stouts, strong Rus- u England, has notes of 
sian imperial stouts Vu vintage port, dark cherry, 
and even oyster e » espresso and spice. 
stout, brewed with 
the bivalve to give 
extra body and pro- 
teinto the beer. As 
for possible amorous 
side effects, that's 
just опе more reason y A 
uw i OBSIDIAN STOUT 
1 An American stout 
with strong espresso 
and dark chocolate 
flavors and molasses 


sweetness. 


& 


THE 
SIPPING 


Guinness master 
brewer Fergal 
Murray advises 
drinkers to raise 
their elbow high 
to “drink under 
the head” and 
taste the rich 
brown liquid 
beneath. 


28 
Photography by MISHA GRAVENOR 


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Lighten Up 


The soft sides of these 
bags make them light, 
while the leather details 
make them tough. 


BEYOND THE 
BRIEFCASE 


THE BEST MODERN BRIEFCASES HAVE 
GONE BUSINESS CASUAL 


* Gone are the days of the clasp-lock, hard-sided 
briefcases of Mad Men and salarymen the world 
over. Today's dressed-down business environment 
means you have more bag choices than ever before 
that are practical, tactical and handsome as hell. 


01 


CARRY ОМ 


— Made of waxed 
sienna canvas 

with a tough black 
leather bottom, this 
small and sturdy 
bag is sized just 
right to fit a 17-inch 
laptop and other 
tools of your trade. 
Billykirk No. 165 
medium carryall, 
$325 


02 


BACK IT UP 


— The durable 
ballistic nylon and 
double-stitched 
seams make this 
American-made 
bag tough enough 
for the trails. The 
leather accents 
make it stylish 


enough for the office. 


Altadena Works 801 
Teardrop, $245 


03 


SQUARE ONE 


— This handsome 
canvas bag can 
bring a regimental 
air to the board- 
room proceedings: 
The olive drab color 
is military cool, and 
the lines are crisp, 
sharp and classic. 
Jack Spade Field 
Canvas briefcase, 
$325 


Photography by SATOSHI 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY TODD DETWILER 


LEAVE YOUR 
IMPRINT 


Cell phone, 
wallet and key- 
chain imprints 
are battle scars 
of the profes- 
sional class. 


SEE RED 


Red or orange 
stitching on the 
fabric around 
the inseam is 
an indicator 
of top-quality 
denim. 


Raw 8: Order 


See the jeans above? 
They're four years old. See 
the jeans below? That's 
how the jeans above 
looked when they were 
brand-new. Spiff up new 
raw denim with a dress 
shirt and blazer. 


1 Indigo 
: Rocker jeans, $260, 
* worldjeanshop.com 


Photography by SATOSHI 


DENIM IS IN 
THE DETAILS 


A perfectly aged 
pair of selvage 
denim tells a 
unique story 
about its wearer. 


PUSH THE 
CONTRAST 


The best denim is 
dyed deeply with 
indigo, which 
makes creasing 
and wear pat- 
terns stand out. 


PATCH 
PROUDLY 


Patch up holes so 
your jeans don't 
go all shreddy 
Van Halen. 


CARPE DENIM 


SIT OUT THE BLUE JEAN TREND RACE AND 
INVEST IN STYLISH AND STURDY SELVAGE DENIM 


* Before jeans came in a diz- 
zying array of fits, colors 
and styles, there was selvage 
denim-—the hardy fabric of 
cowboys and motorcycle 
rebels who wore their jeans 
notuntil they went out of 
fashion but until they wore 
out. (“Selvage,” or “self edge, 
refers to the finished, woven 
seam that is the hallmark of 
high-quality denim.) 

Today denim for jeans is 
rarely made the way it was 
inthe early 20th century: on 
shuttle looms that produce 
athicker fabric that holds 
indigo better and lasts lon- 
ger. While fashion followers 
have prized selvage denim 


» 


for the past decade or so, in 
recent years more compa- 
nies (we love Raleigh Denim, 
Nudie Jeans and Levi's 
Made & Crafted) have been 
selling selvage. The $200 
price tag on some styles 
may seem steep, but keep 

in mind they can last for up 
to sixyears. The best way 

to buy them is raw, which 
means they weren't washed 
after being dyed. “When you 
put on a pair ofraw selvage 
denim, you can feel the 
difference," says Eric Gold- 
stein, owner of Jean Shop, 
the New York temple of 
denim. “It molds around you 
and becomes your own." 


WASH THIS WAY 


HOW DENIM OBSESSIVES 
CLEAN THEIR JEANS 


1. GO DRY 

— Machine washing fades 
jeans fast. Raw denim can 
stand up to the dry cleaner; 
the indigo color will stay dark. 


2. GO COLD 

— Putting off the first wash 
for six months allows detail to 
develop—but odors too. De- 
stink jeans by freezing them. 


3. GO DARK 

— When your jeans have de- 
veloped character, wash them 
inside out by hand in cold 
water with Woolite Darks. 


4. GO SWIMMING 

— Hard-core denim-heads do 
as denim pioneer APC sug- 
gests: They swim in the ocean 
while wearing their jeans. 


31 


MOVIE OF THE MONTH 


A GOOD DAY TO 


DIE HARD 


By Stephen Rebello 


* John McClane (Bruce 
Willis) gets caught up 
in a deadly underworld 
heist of Russian nukes 
in this fifth installment 
ofthe long-running 
action series. This time 


cus: Vengeance and in for Bruce to break out 

Jack Reacher. “I play a amassive automatic 

McClane, so I knew Га weapon and tear the 

gettoripplentyofwise- place apart while we 

cracks and do alot of crawl along the floor 

running, jumping and dodging bullets. That's 
McClane gets an assist flying out ofthe backs when it hit me: I’m 
from his apparently of cars,” says Courtney. actually in a Die Hard 
wild and wayward “We were filming a movie. This install- 
estranged son, played big safe-house scene ment has anew flavor, 
by Jai Courtney (above in adecrepit building but it’s definitely a Die 
right), the fast-rising in Budapest, and sud- Hard that won't disap- 
Aussie seen on Sparta- denly the action calls point the fans.” 


2 BLU-RAY + OVD LIT) 
Ж, fat 


ROMAN A 
CLEF? 


Roman Coppola, co-writer 
of Moonrise Kingdom, 
switches to the director’s 
chair for the quirky com- 
edy A Glimpse Inside the 
Mind of Charles Swan Ill. 


Q: Charlie Sheen plays a 
glib, high-living, woman- 
izing graphic designer 

in a tailspin over his ex- 
girlfriend in A Glimpse 
Inside the Mind of Charles 
Swan Ill. 15 it based on 
someone you know? 


A: | was interested in a 
character who is really 
out there, outrageous, 
childlike, exasperating. 
Charlie Sheen and | have 
been friends since | was 
12. | was determined to 
have him in this even 
though he had trepida- 
tions, but | wouldn’t take 
no for an answer. 


Q: The movie is set 

in the 1970s and fea- 
tures Bill Murray, Jason 
Schwartzman, Patricia 
Arquette and lots of 
trippy sequences. 


A: | wanted it to be 
playful and fantastical 
but about adult, men- 
women issues. Charlie’s 
fantasies, especially a 
sexy one with the all- 
female Indian tribe 
called the Secret Soci- 
ety of Ball Busters, are 
very much like а PLAYBOY 
cartoon—humor blended 
with eroticism. 


Q: This film sometimes 
feels very stoner and 
made for fun by a pack 
of cool friends. 

A: Jason is a relative, 
and working with him, 
riffing off each other, is 
just a blast. Certain audi- 
ences are really going 

to dig this movie. | just 


TEASE FRAME 


want them to have a 
chance to see it. 


BATTLESTAR š te 
GALACTICA: iz 
BLOOD & і s 
CHROME 


UNRATED 


Ifyoure seeking an old-school space opera ripe with 
chaotic cross fire, relentless Cylons and unisex showers, 
then the 10 episodes ofthis web series prequel will satiate 
your sci-fi craving. A young, cocky, battle-hungry Will 
Adama (Luke Pasqualino) joins the Galactica crew during 
the first Cylon War and soon embarks on a covert mission 
that could be a game changer if he doesn't get frakking 
smoked along the way (to use the show's favorite curse 
word). The fireworks this time are more visceral than 
political, but the drama is sensational. This all-new spin- 
off co-starring Ben Cotton, Jill Teed and Tricia Helfer 
comes to disc after its internet run and recent premiere on du 
the Syfy cable channel. (BD) Best extras: Deleted scenes 
and a look behind Blood & Chrome’s visual effects. ҰҰҸ 


Emmy Rossum plays the eldest 
daughter of William H. Macy on 
Showtime's Shameless (above), 
and she has no shame about tak- 
ing off her clothes—nor should 
she. See her next in the supernat- 
ural romance Beautiful Creatures. 


32 


BIOSHOCK INFINITE 


Fans have bemoanedthe decision to relocate 
the beloved BioShock series from the failed 
underwater utopia of the first two games. Not 
to worry. Set in 1912, before the previous games, 
BioShock Infinite (360, PC, PS3) carries the 
steampunk-inspired aesthetics to Columbia, a 
government-created flying city gone rogue. For- 
mer detective Booker DeWitt, sent to retrieve a 
young girl, finds himself in a civil war and must 
fight his way out of the city using fun powers 
(throw fire!) and zooming around on a roller- 
coaster-like rail. Remarkable. YY YY 


MUST-WATCH TV 


SPIES, CAPERS AND 
MIDSEASON DRAMA 


By Josef Adalian 


* Homeland junkies 
suffering from adrena- 
line withdrawal will 
find plenty of thrills in 
apair of new dramas 
now hitting the small 
screen. The better of 
the two is FX’s The 
Americans, alate- 
Cold War period piece 
that imagines Keri 
Russell (left) and Mat- 
thew Rhys as married 
Soviet sleeper spies 
who have been embed- 
ded in suburban Wash- 
ington, D.C. for nearly 
two decades. The 
Jenningses are a per- 
fect all-American cou- 
ple with two perfectly 
ordinary kids; they just 
happen to be deeply 
committed Commu- 
nists willing to kill for 
their country. Set just 
after Ronald Reagan's 
first inauguration, 
with a new adminis- 


tration determined 

to defeat the Reds for 
good, The Americans 
masterfully captures 
the overheated para- 
noia ofthe time. It 
also humanizes the 
bad guys: These Sovi- 
ets love their children, 
and the balancing act 
between parenthood 
and serving the USSR 
sets the show apart 
from standard spy 
fare. No such subtlety 
burdens Zero Hour, 
an ABC caper in which 
Anthony Edwards 
finds himselftrying 
to solve ancient mys- 
teries in order to, you 
know, save the world. 
The first episode has 
Nazis, albinos, devil 
babies—and a final, 
jaw-dropping twist 
that may make you 
forget all the preced- 
ing silliness. 


ta 


ALBUM OF THE MONTH 


PUSH THE SKY AWAY 


By Rob Tannenbaum 


* Nick Cave's music is almost always 
described as poetic and dark. It's 
also hilarious: “She was a catch / We 
were a match / І was the match that 
would fire up her snatch,” he sings 
heatedly on Push the Sky Away, 
his new album (the limited deluxe 
release comes with abook, CD and 
DVD). Ifthat’s poetry, it's notthe 
kind most ofus learned in school. 
With a stately baritone shaped 


mostly by cigarettes and a love of 
Johnny Cash, Cave narrates tales of 
fleshly temptation as his longtime 
band the Bad Seeds, formed in 1983, 
play hushed, barbed prairie bal- 
lads. Yeah, the music is dark. But in 
the middle of a song about plague, 
oppression, murder and Lucifer, 
Cave spies tween queen Miley 
Cyrus, who seems to be enjoying 
herself. As is Cave. ¥¥¥¥ 


33 


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MEET THE ASTON MARTIN 
VANQUISH, THE NEW BOSS 
OFBRITISH SPORTS CARS 


* The British have an instinctive 
talent for looking stylish, even 
when it comes to flexing some 
muscle. Think Daniel Craig as 
James Bond in Casino Royale, 
taking on villains while decked 
out in his best tuxedo. Nobody 
dresses up raw power better than 
the U.K.s storied luxury-auto 
brands: Aston Martin, Bentley, 
Rolls-Royce, Jaguar. What you 
see here: Aston's 2013 Vanquish. 
It's not every day the venera- 

ble sports-car purveyor unveils 
anew flagship, so we traveled 
across the pond to hammer this 
thing. On winding roads near the 
company's factory in Newport 
Pagnell, north of London, the 
sleek coupe slalomed and juked, 
briskly accelerating out of bends 
with a turbine-like rush of power. 
The 565-horsepower, six-liter 
V12rumbles rather than screams, 
its sonic bursts somehow polite 
and understated compared with 
the roar of Italian sports cars. 
Although you can buy far more 
speed for far less money, the 
four-second sprints to 60 and 

the 183 mph top speed will turn 
your knuckles bridal-gown white. 
The interior is Savile Row sweet 
thanks to hand-stitched leather, 
and it's replete with technology, 
as you'd expect in a $280,000 Brit- 
ish automobile. That's the price of 
making muscle look this good. 


e 


LUXE LIFE HIGH DESIGN 
Dig the hand- With sweep- 
stitched leather ing curves and 
seats, touch- razor edges, 
screen controls Aston's flagship 
and Bang & is aggressive yet 
Olufsen stereo. elegant. 

POWER PLAY BODYWORKS 
The six-liter V12 The carbon- 
delivers 565 horse- fiber body panels 
power and tops reduce weight 
out at a bloody while maintain- 
fast 183 mph. ing strength. 


POETRY IN 
MOTION 


The mind behind some 


of the great cars of our 


time, from Aston Martin to 
Jaguar (for which he is cur- 
rently director of design), 
talks about his life in cars. 


Q: What are you 
thinking when you 
begin a design? 

Cars need to have 
presence on the 
street because there's 
so much visual com- 
petition. My cars 
have to compete with 
Porsches and BMWs. 
In the U.S. they com- 
pete visually with 
Ford F-150 pickups. 
There needs to be an 
overt confidence. 


Q: Did you have 
a eureka moment 
as a kid when you 
fell in love with 
automobiles? 


At the age of four 
in my small town 
in Scotland, | saw а 
Porsche 356—a silver 
coupe. | can still see 
it in my mind. It was 
1958 or 1959. | knew | 
wanted to be part of 
the world that made 
motorcars happen. 


Q: Do you have an 
all-time favorite? 


The 250 GT Short 
Wheelbase Ferrari. 
| discovered it as a 
teenager. | loved the 
beauty, but it was also 
powerful. If | could 
have one car, one 
road and one gallon 
of fuel, it would be the 
250 SWB on roads in 
northwest Scotland, 
the most beautiful 
roads in the world. 


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* The GTI, the first pint-size power- 
house, has been tearing up streets 
E since 1983. The original had less 
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hp out of a two-liter four-cylinder 
turbo, for $24,000 and up. Watch 
for an all new GTI later this year. 


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42 


Talking With 
Mila Kunis 


by James Franco 


Mila Kunis first made a name for herself 
as Jackie, the delightful airhead on That 
“705 Show, but unlike most sitcom stars, 
she has been able to move successfully to 
the big screen. Her latest movie, Oz: The 
Great and Powerful, puts her in the role of 
an evil witch —not what you'd expect from 
Esquire's (and Maxim's and GQ's) Sexiest 
Woman Alive. She recently spent a day with 
her Oz co-star and PLAYBOY Contributing 
Editor James Franco to chat about paparazzi, 
Pilates and getting old. 


FRANCO: Let's talk about Oz first. Was 
it hard to play such an ugly-looking 
creature? 

KUNIS: That was the easy part. I'd 
never done a role that existed before, 
and it's probably the scariest one 
I've ever played. It's not like I'd ever 
play Theodora better than Margaret 
Hamilton. The only thing I could do 
was reinterpret it. I hope people appre- 
ciate it for what it is and don't compare 
it to what it was—because you can't. 
FRANCO: I think they're two very dif- 
ferent movies. You're fine. 

KUNIS: I hope that's how people see it. 
I did have fun making it. Can I tell you 
I love Detroit? I could walk around. I 
had food outside. I don't remember the 
last time I ate outside. We went to the 
zoo. It was fantastic. 

FRANCO: You can't go to the zoo in 
Los Angeles? 

KUNIS: Dude, I can't leave my house 
in Los Angeles. 

FRANCO: Because you'd be followed? 
KUNIS: Yeah, there's no privacy. Every 
sweet, mundane moment you have 
in life is photographed. І always get 


ILLUSTRATION BY RAUL ALLEN 


photographed in the morning, when 
I'm running errands or going to the 
gym, so in all the photos you see of me 
I'm in sweatpants because it's seven 
A.M. and I’m going to Pilates. I’ve now 
resorted to going to Pilates at six A.M. to 
see if I can beat the paparazzi. 
FRANCO: They're just going where the 
money is, right? The magazines want 
to see you. 

KUNIS: But you know me. Come on, І 
am the least exciting person to photo- 
graph daily. 

FRANCO: You look good in some of them. 
KUNIS: Fuck you! What do you mean 
“in some of them"? 

FRANCO: You're not always in sweat- 
pants is what I'm saying. Tell me this: 
How do you see things playing out in 
terms of your future and your career? 
What do you think you want to be? 
KUNIS: I don't know. James, seriously, 
do you feel you could be an actor forever? 
FRANCO: Yeah. Although, do you think 
it will get weird when you're older? 
KUNIS: I think for a woman it does. 
There's a documentary you should see 
called Searching for Debra Winger, about 
how this industry affects women in their 
30s. Realistically speaking, it's hard. 
FRANCO: What happens, they age and 
people don't want them? 

KUNIS: No, I think you have to choose. 
Do you want to have a life, or do you 
want to have a career? Sometimes you 
can find a happy medium, but in this 
industry it's rare. 

FRANCO: What are the conflicts? 
Traveling so much? Is it hard to have 
a family? 

KUNIS: All of the above. Everything. 
You have to choose: privacy or career. 
FRANCO: Why is that particular to 
women? 

KUNIS: Its not necessarily particular 
to women, but in this documentary it 
is. І also think in this industry, age is 


particular to women versus men. Why? 
Because that’s just how it is. 
FRANGO: You don’t see yourself like 
Meryl Streep, working into your 60s? 
KUNIS: Listen, I’d love to, but I 
wouldn’t presume or assume to be that. 
If I'm lucky enough to have a career 
remotely close to hers, great. If I’m not, 
I’m not going with the expectation of 
having one, because that will ultimately 
slow me down. It’s one in a million; it’s 
not the reality. 

FRANCO: But look at your career. Why 
would you think that? What would you 
do if you couldn’t act? 

KUNIS: I think a lot of it is luck. Don’t 
get me wrong, I work my ass off. But 
so do a lot of people. It all depends 
on whether people care to see me in 
five years or not, and you can’t predict 
that. It’s weird that at the age of 29 
I'm talking about aging in this indus- 
try, but the truth is I don't think I can 
do this for the rest of my life. I want 
to be a producer. That’s really what 
I want, because I love this work in a 
weird, sick way. But I also want a life. 
I want a family—just, like, one day, 
not tomorrow. 

FRANCO: And that means you'll stop 
acting as much? 

KUNIS: As much, for sure. I want to 
be a present mom. When I was grow- 
ing up both my mom and dad worked 
full-time. I guess the only thing I can 
say about that is they worked full-time 
іп one location. I'm never in the same 
place for more than two months. How 
am I ever going to have a family like 
that? You have to make compromises. 
If that means I do one movie a year, if 
people still want to see me and hire me 
and I don’t suck by that point, great. 
But my only source of happiness can’t 
be dependent on something so fickle. 
And I find this industry to be incred- 
ibly fickle. п 


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ШІЛ!!! 
3 


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ne of my greatest skills is apolo- 
gizing. 1 do it not only well but 
constantly. When people bump 
into me оп the street, I say, 
"I'm sorry.” Right after “Take 
it” and “Good girl,” my third- 
most-used sex-talk phrase 
is “Sorry about that.” When 
housekeeping opens my hotel- 
room door, instead of just saying, “Can 
you come back later?” I go with “Sorry!” 
and then immediately follow it with “For 
being a privileged white male.” I am the 
anti-Dominique Strauss-Kahn. 

But most guys suck at saying sorry. 
Women are brilliant apologizers. That's 
because they're comfortable being submis- 
sive. Often, as soon as they realize they're 
wrong, they'll cry, throw in sex or, in cases 
when they've done something particularly 
awful, both. The performances are so im- 
pressive that we often root for women to 
screw up just to see them apologize. І have 
no doubt there are disturbing Japanese 
and German porn sites devoted to women 
saying they're sorry. 

Part of the reason men are so bad at 
apologizing is that we never actually feel 
bad. In fact, we never apologize because 
we've done something wrong; we apolo- 
gize because we got caught. Our brains 
justify all the ethical lapses we get away 
with: 1 have a right to lose money on 
poker since she spends it on clothes; a lap 
dance is to men what a massage is to wom- 
en; Conan just wasn't getting the ratings. 

Because we don't actually feel guilty 
and have no training in being subor- 
dinate, we apologize poorly. We make 
speeches that are 10 percent apology 
and 90 percent explanations for why we 


44 weren't really wrong. Any apology with 


ED 25 TL 


e 


WHO'S SORRY NOW? 


the word but or because in itis not an apol- 
ogy. Also, any apology delivered while 
you picture having sex with the woman 
you got caught having sex with is not 
an apology. You cannot feel truly sorry 
when you are shoring up the spank bank. 

Men used to give great, deeply felt 
apologies, the kind samurais made with 
swords. That's because there's no simple 
“my bad” in an honor culture. Ifyou were 
sorry for something, you could keep your 
honor, but you relinquished your power: 
no more running an army, no more com- 
plicated facial hair, just one wife. An apol- 
ору was something taken so seriously that 
Fonzie—who lived in his own personal 
honor culture so intense he physically 
defended even his friends’ friends, some 
of whom were Ralph Malph—could only 
stammer the first phoneme of the word 
sorry. Countries still operate this way. It 
took decades for the United States to 
apologize to Native Americans and to in- 
terned Japanese Americans. We probably 
won't apologize until 2050 for our 1970s 
decision to try the metric system. 

But we now live in an honor-free cul- 
ture, and in our softness, men have low- 
ered the value of our freely given sorries, 
thereby greatly increasing the demand. 
The price of apologies drastically plum- 
meted when the public apology became 
popular. Other than high treason, there 
is no offense for which a man should 
make a public apology. Apple CEO Tim 
Cook apologized so quickly for the Maps 
app fiasco in the new iPhone, all anyone 
could think was, That guy got beat up 
a lot as a kid. Justin Timberlake wrote 
a letter on his website apologizing for 
an offensive gag video about homeless 
people a friend of his had made for his 


Wees =. 


BY JOEL STEIN 


wedding, even though it wasn't actually 
shown at Timberlake's wedding and he 
never saw it. After my wedding, all I did 
was write e-mail apologies to my friends 
for not inviting more slutty single chicks. 

All this sorrifying has fed into people's 
eagerness to play the role of morally su- 
perior scold, horrified that other people 
are not as pure as they are. This is why 
Tiger Woods stood at a podium and tear- 
fully apologized to me when all he had 
done was entertain me with awesome 
sex stories. The only public apology 1 
ever felt I actually deserved was from 
Anthony Weiner, since a man should al- 
ways apologize for forcing another man 
to see his junk. 

The word sorry has been devalued to 
bummer. Every time I tell a story in which 
something bad happens, someone in- 
terrupts with “Sorry.” When І tell you 
someone died decades ago and you re- 
flexively say “Sorry,” what you're really 
saying is “I'm the omnipotent, omnipres- 
ent being who makes decisions on life 
and death, and І may have blown the one 
about your grandpa.” In which case, you 
need to up your sorry to include some 
lightning, thunder and one of those 
Tupac-style holograms. 

We have to cut down on the apologies 
and withstand the confrontation when 
we're not really sorry for what we did. 
Otherwise we're going to devalue the 
sorry to the point where it has no effect 
at all. And if there's any group that does 
such horrible things it needs to retain the 
power of the sorry, it's men. So let's save 
it for genocide, forgetting birthdays and 
not clearing our browser before our girl- 
friend sees our history. It's the only way 
we'll get anything done. 


—VISIM 


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PLAYBOY 


46 


Us an age-old question, a 
query pondered by mere 
mortals long before Harry 
met Sally: Can men and 
women be friends? 

To that I respond with 
a resounding “Does Bear 
Grylls shit in the woods? Of 
course!” In fact, I have lots 
of male friends. They love 
to go shopping, they give me valu- 
able fashion tips, and they always have 
great stories about getting sodomized 
by a famous closeted actor in a trendy 
nightclub bathroom. That's right—my 
male friends are gay. Gay, gay, gay, 
gay, gay! And that's why these friend- 
ships work, because there's no sexual 
tension whatsoever. In fact, the only 
time there's stress is when we show up 
somewhere wearing the same dress. 

Now, am I friends with straight guys? 
Not anymore. Like all of you, my loyal 
readers, Tve tried to take the “friends” 
route. Tve attempted to be buddy- 
buddy with someone of the opposite 
sex for whom I had the proverbial 
hots. How did that work out? Well, 
let's just say, after about 10 minutes 
I wanted to jump on my “friend” like 
Kristen Stewart on an A-list director. 
So after taking stab after stab at be- 
ing pals with guys who made me sweat 
like Ricky Martin at a Chick-fil-A, I've 
come to the conclusion that straight 
men and friendship are like Amanda 
Bynes and automobiles. Individually 
they're great, but put them together 
and there's going to be trouble. 

Most of the time, being friends with 
someone of the opposite sex is a per- 
fectly good waste of genitalia. Are there 
exceptions? Sure. Say a guy is com- 
pletely repulsive, like the Elephant 
Man, Rocky Dennis from Mask or, even 
worse, the Situation. I could be friends 
with that. And it's the same for you 
men. No guy in history ever wanted to 
be friends with Halle Berry. That being 
said, some men still try to do it. 

I don't blame them. Women make 
great friends. The problem is, most of the 
time the last thing you want to be with 
a woman is friends. In fact, friendships 
between men and women usually don't 
start out as friendships at all. They start 
out as you trying to get into her pant- 
ies, and somewhere along the way, the 
botched sexual relationship turns into a 
friendship. This disastrous turn of events 


BENJAMIN MARRA | 


BOSOM BUDDIES 


is commonly known as entering the 
“friend zone,” and we've all been there. 

Now, as shallow and simple as men 
are, we women are even more devious 
and selfish. If we sense that you like us, 
we'll string you along, getting what we 
want without giving up the goods. I will 
admit that over the years І have been 
“friends” with guys because they took 
me to dinners, concerts, vacations and 
the occasional cockfight. Get in a situa- 
tion like this and you'll be broker than 
Greece and the only female you'll get 
blown by is Hurricane Sandy. 

If you insist on having an opposite- 
gender friend, here's my advice: Use 
the relationship to 
your advantage. Use 
your “friend” to meet 
other women. It’s a 
proven fact that one of the best ways 
to get a girlfriend is to hang out with 
girls. If a woman sees other women 
are comfortable around you, she’ll be 
more likely to want to get to know you. 
Before long, you'll have a binder full 
of women, like Mitt Romney. In fact, 
a good reference from a female friend 
will get a woman's bra off quicker than 
a lobster dinner and three appletinis. 

Plus, sometimes girls are just more 
pleasant than the guys you pal around 
with. Be honest—other than your best 
friends, you'd totally rather hang out 
with chicks because they don't start 
fights or smell like stale farts and onions 


By Lisa Lampanelli 


or eat all the wings while you're taking 
a piss. Who would you rather spend a 
day at the beach with? The guys? No! 
After throwing the football around for 
10 minutes, you'd rather be rubbing 
lotion on the girls while praying for a 
bikini nip slip. Just don't confuse a girl 
who's a friend for a girlfriend. Because 
believe me, she won't. 

Generally speaking, however, most 
men can't be friends with a woman 
they're attracted to because, like it or 
not, we are all sexual beings. Spend- 
ing too much time with someone of the 
opposite sex is like watching A-Rod in 
the playoffs—nerve-racking and frus- 
trating. Its like putting 
food addicts in a room 
with an all-you-can-eat 
buffet. Even if they're 
not hungry at that moment, it's just a 
matter of time before they're facedown 
in a tray of Swedish meatballs. 

So, guys, if you can, stick to being 
friends with guys. Just like a woman 
needs a friend with whom she can share 
her dreams, her feelings and the name 
of her favorite vibrator, a guy needs a 
guy friend who will keep the ugly chick 
occupied while he hits on the good- 
looking one. Either that, or become 
friends with Chaz Bono. That's the best 
of both worlds. He can give you inside 
advice on women and tell you which is 
the best razor for heavy beards. Now 
that's what I call friendship! E 


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Go to amazon.com to order, 


人 neighbor is letting me fuck 
his girlfriend. One night when 
the three of us were drinking, 
he told me she wanted to sleep 
with me and he was okay with 
it. I guess I'm weak, because I 
did. He works and she doesn't, 
and I think I fuck her more 
than he does. Should I be both- 
ered by this? If it matters, I'm 
46 and they're both 22.—J.L., 
Boston, Massachusetts 

You're mistaken about which 
neighbor is letting you fuck her. You 
may feel a twinge of uncertainty 
about the arrangement because it's 
unusual, but from what you tell us, 
everyone is being honest. They have 
their relationship and you have your 
fun while it lasts. One possibility, of 
course, is that she decides she prefers 
you as a boyfriend. Would you be 
okay with her fucking the neighbor? 
You might have to be. 


І want to buy a leather sofa, but 
every store has its own name 
for the best grade, just like 
mattresses. How can I be sure 
I'm getting quality leather?— 
R.G., Austin, Texas 

It's difficult because there is no 
industry standard, so one manu- 
facturer's C may be another's 2. 
Regardless of how salespeople 
describe leathers (e.g., “grade A” 
or “grade 1,000”), the key is their 
ability to explain the differences. 
There are a few terms you should 
be familiar with. “Top grain” or 
“full grade” indicates the leather 
comes from the outermost layer of 
hide, meaning it is the most durable 
and natural looking. “Split” leath- 
ers come from beneath the hide and 
are less expensive but also less flex- 
ible and more likely to eventually 
crack. “Aniline” leather has not 
been treated with color, so it looks 
and feels great but is the least resis- 
tant to stains and fading. "Semi- 
aniline" means the leather has been 
dyed but not enough to hide its nat- 
ural characteristics. "Pigmented" 
leather has a color coat that may 
be stamped to give it texture. "Cor- 
rected” means the leather has been 
sanded or buffed. "Full grain" is 
sometimes used as a synonym for 
"top grain” or to indicate top grain 
that hasn't been corrected. If you correct 
full-grain leather on only one side, you get 
nubuck. If you correct split leather, you get 
suede. If you correct a person who is wearing 
leather, you get kink. 


M, husband is an avid pot smoker. 
His smoking doesn't interfere with our 
daily lives, but I don't think he should 
be stoned all the time. In fact, he has 
to smoke а bat before we have sex. I'm 
offended that he needs something extra 


PLAYBOY 


| fantasize about being dominated like a pony. My 
boyfriend doesn't quite get the fantasy, but he's game. 
Where do 1 start?—J.W., Las Vegas, Nevada 

On all fours, we suppose (though human ponies can also 
stand). “Pony play” is a relatively common interest a 
BDSM crowd, so it's not difficult to find a herd. Check out 
thehumanponyregistry.org, or pick up the essential guide The 
Human Pony: A Handbook for Owners, Trainers and Admir- 
ers, by Rebecca Wilcox. As your trainer, your boyfriend will need 
tack (including bit, bridle, saddle, harness and reins) and a lead 
line. He can also make use of a whip, restraints, spurs, blinkers, 
a grooming brush and possibly a chastity belt “to prevent other 
animals from molesting the pony,” as Wilcox puts it. A tail can be 
strapped on or attached to a butt plug. Shoes can be slipped into 
fake hooves for an authentic clop-clop sound. If you are a cart 
pony, you will need a cart. Once you have agreed on a safe word 
that will put a stop to the game if you become uncomfortable, sow 
your wild oats—and maybe eat some, if you're good. 


to make love to me, but he says I'm 
being too sensitive. Am І wrong to ask 
that he smoke only on weekends?—T.D., 
Morristown, New Jersey 

We don't think so, but good luck. A guy 
who is perpetually stoned on any drug has a 
problem; by one estimate about 10 percent of 
marijuana smokers are seriously hooked. If 
your husband's habit affects your sex life, tt 
affects your daily life, so don't kid yourself. 
It’s ironic that he tokes before sex, because the 
latest research suggests weed. crimps sexual 


response in men. А team of scientists 
in Canada and Egypt reports that 
cannabis receptors may be located 
not only in the brain but also in 
the penis. This means every joint is 
passed from a guy to his dick, and 
if there's one thing you don't want 
junior to be during sex, it's baked. 
Presented with this finding, your 
husband may understand why you 
are reluctant and perhaps decline 
to have sex when he's high. For the 
record, experienced swingers rarely 
drink or toke before an orgy. You 
can smoke a joint anytime, but how 
many chances do you get to have 
your joint smoked? 


M; husband and I have 
been married for 12 years. 
If we go more than two days 
without having sex, he starts 
what I call “the countdown," 
announcing how many days it 
has been. I enjoy sex but not 
every day or even every other 
day. He is also an octopus—he 
won't keep his hands off me, 
even when I'm asleep. After 
he wakes me up, he acts as 
though he doesn't know why 
I'm angry. He also talks dirty 
to me all the time. I appreci- 
ate that he wants me, but it's 
getting on my nerves. Do you 
have any advice?—A. P., Gasto- 
nia, North Carolina 

You can change this situation in 
10 minutes a day. When your hus- 
band begins the countdown, fondles 
you, talks dirty, feels you up in bed 
or makes amy indication he is fan- 
tasizing about you, give him a hand 
job. No excuses, no exceptions. This 
the will quiet him down. Consider his 
plight: He feels horny (for you— 
that's not a situation to "appreci- 
ate" but to celebrate), but nine times 
out of 10 he is frustrated. He can 
masturbate, but that's almost like 
torture, given that he's living with 
a siren. All he can do is pursue 
the prize, even if his technique is 
clumsy. It will take five minutes 
(less if you enjoy yourself and/or 
talk dirty to him and lift your shirt), 
maybe twice a day, and it can take 
place anywhere in the house or 
elsewhere, depending on your taste 
for adventure. Also, when you feel 
horny and want a quickie or extended atten- 
tion in return, he'll have no excuses. (We can 
already hear the objections from some readers 
that we're asking you to "service" your hus- 
band. Well, yes. Waiting until you're both in 
the mood isn't working. And if he's going to 
be serviced, who else would you prefer do it? 
This recommendation also applies when the 
woman has the higher sex drive.) 


ln November the word deserve appears 
twice, once when a reader asks, “How 


49 


PLAYBOY 


50 


do I get the blow jobs I deserve?” and 
again when the Advisor writes in a 
response to a different question, “You 
certainly deserve a better sex life.” But 
do we, as individuals, deserve sex? I 
once complained to a female friend that 
because my internet connection was 
down, І couldn't look at naked women. 
I was half joking, but she replied, “You 
say that like you deserve to look at naked 
women. You don't deserve to look at 
naked women. You don't deserve shit.” 
Since then, especially when it comes to 
sex, I question the difference between 
desire, need and deserve. Let's say І 
deserve a blow job 一 then what? Does 
that mean somebody deserves to give it 
to me?—D.G., Houston, Texas 
“Deserve” is defined as having qualities 
worthy of reward. When tt comes to sex, being 
human is that quality. Every person deserves 
a great sex life, which includes a right to com- 
prehensive sex education and equal gender 
rights. That doesn't mean you deserve a blow 
job or to see naked women online in the sense 
that you “earned” it—just that you shouldn't 
be denied the opportunity to be sexual by a 
friend, religious leader or anyone else who 
insists it's “wrong” or “dirty.” They can 
decide that for themselves but not for you. 


| have a few scarves but am not sure 
how to tie one correctly. Also, І see some 
men wearing them outside their coats, 
while others keep them inside. Is there 
casual or formal scarf etiquette? —T.R., 
Novi, Michigan 

A scarf serves the same function as a tie or 
a pocket square by adding color and personal- 
ity to an otherwise straightforward overcoat 
or jacket—except that, unlike a tie or pocket 
square, it keeps your nipples warm. Wrap the 
scarf as tightly as the weather requires, tuck it 
into your jacket or coat and be on your way. 


Is it possible for two brown-eyed people 
to have a blue-eyed child?—L.R., 
Omaha, Nebraska 

Yes. It’s not evidence of cheating, though 
two blue-eyed people who have a brown-eyed 
child would be suspicious. (We qualify that 
because the genetics behind eye color is not 
fully understood, and many newborns have 
blue eyes that later darken.) We inherit an 
eye-color gene from each parent. Brown is 
dominant, so if you happen to get a brown 
gene from Dad and a blue gene from Mom, 
you will have brown eyes. If you and your 
partner both have a brown-blue combo, your 
child could inherit the recessive blue gene 
from both of you and have blue eyes. A third 
gene accounts for green, and others play a 
role in hazel, gray and black. 


Му girlfriend would like to hire a gig- 
olo. She will be traveling to Las Vegas 
for business. Are there any services 
there?» We would also like to locate an 
arrangement closer to home.—S.S., 
Cleveland, Ohio 

Brothels in Nevada have experimented with 
adding studs to their menus, but none of them 


lasted more than a few months due to lack 
of clients. However, agencies such as Cow- 
boys 4 Angels (cowboys4angels.com) provide 
dates in Vegas, as well as Los Angeles, San 
Francisco, New York, Dallas, Orlando and 
south Florida. They walk the same fine legal 
line as female escorts—you don't pay for sex, 
only "companionship" that may include sex. 
Capisce? Prices start at $300 per hour. Find- 
ing a pro in Cleveland will be more of a chal- 
lenge. You can search online, but the listings 
seem dicey. ("Available to eat pussy and flip 
hoes—no disrespect.") If you're both turned 
on by your girlfriend being with another guy, 
it might be more productive and less pricey 
to visit a swing club such as Escape or Club 
Eros, or search by location at sites such as 
adultfriendfinder.com and socialsex.com. 


Ате we all getting dumber? The 
December column makes me think so. 
A man wonders what type of penis a 
woman is attracted to. Ask the woman! 
An online relationship with a woman in 
Mexico? Have her visit as a tourist. If 
you don't like her, send her back. Not 
your issue! How old is the kid who can- 
not figure out how to prepare his car 
for a cross-country trip? Left out of a 
threesome? Do a better job making the 
women happy! The woman you love is 
married to your best friend? Grow some 
balls and tell her! No wonder Obama 
was reelected. Nobody can think on his 
own.—C.W., Cedar Rapids, Iowa 

You're overlooking an important fact: No 
one asked for your advice. 


| have a fetish: I am turned on by 
watching a couple fuck when both peo- 
ple are enjoying themselves and show- 
ing tenderness and affection. This is 
the antithesis of everything I can find 
online. All the hard-core porn is male- 
centric; the guy thrusts rapid-fire as 
soon as he enters the woman, and her 
moans are fake and unrelated to any- 
thing actually happening in her body. 
Where is the porn featuring real cou- 
ples in love with each other or, if not 
in love, at least having fun and doing 
what most folks do when they fuck in 
real life? I've never had sex that came 
close to resembling what I've seen in 
porn.—M.K., Cincinnati, Ohio 

Of course not. Porn is fantasy —typically 
that of the (male) director. The ubiquitous 
nature of hard-core online, especially when 
seen by young people who have little or no 
experience with a partner, is causing many 
people to question its effect on our collective 
sexual health. Porn films have been around 
for decades, of course, but only now have 
they become so readily available that they are 
filling the vacuum created by our aversion to 
sex education. Former advertising executive 
Cindy Gallop raised an alarm in 2009 after 
she noticed a number of the younger men she'd 
slept with seemed to have learned their moves 
from porn, including asking to come on her 
face—an almost universal tableau in hard- 
core and the type of request that leads mamy 


women to wonder if they're starring in an 
adult movie running in their partner's head. 
Gallop launched a site, makelovenotporn 
.com, to argue her case. In 2011 she followed 
up with an e-book, Make Love, Not Porn: 
Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human 
Behavior. Most recently, she created the 
website makelovenotporn.to, which will host 
videos made by couples as they have distinctly 
warm, sensual, connected sex. Gallop insists 
she isn't antiporn; she watches it, but like 
you, she has a hard time finding anything she 
likes. In the meantime she is happily “теһа- 
bilitating and reeducating” the pornified men 
she sleeps with, which reminds us why we love 
predigital women. 


While dining at a steakhouse, I was 
faced with the dilemma of what to do 
with a piece of gristle. I was taught as 
a child that you should discreetly wipe 
your mouth and deposit the offend- 
ing piece into your napkin. But when I 
returned from the restroom, the waiter 
was refolding my napkin. I was embar- 
rassed to think he discovered the bite. 
What is the best way to handle this?” — 
D.K., Atlanta, Georgia 

Remove the gristle discreetly with your fork 
or napkin, or by cupping your hand over your 
mouth, and place it on your plate. It's not 
wrong to leave it in the napkin—a steakhouse 
server has seen it before—but it puts your 
napkin out of commission. 


In October a reader wrote that he mas- 
turbated into a glass with a lipstick print 
on it. І have а somewhat similar situa- 
tion. І am 25 but have spent only six 
months out of prison since І was 13, so 
my life experience is limited. Several of 
my female pen pals have, at my request, 
put lipstick on their labia and sent 
me a pussy print. (Most prisons don't 
allow inmates to receive nude images, 
so this feels like the best Гіп going to 
get.) After I get the print, I masturbate 
to it. The turn-on is knowing that if I 
were free the woman would fuck me. 
I've even placed my tongue against the 
prints because the lipstick had been on 
her pussy. Is this too extreme?—M.R., 
Miami, Florida 

It’s certainly kinky and, given your circum- 
stances, almost romantic (or commercial; we 
envision a line of holiday cards). We hope you 
can turn things around and someday enjoy a 
pussy print on your face. 


All reasonable questions—from fashion, 
food and drink, stereos and sports cars to 
dating dilemmas, taste and etiquette—will 
be personally answered if the writer in- 
cludes a self-addressed, stamped envelope. 
The most interesting, pertinent questions 
will be presented in these pages. Write the 
Playboy Advisor, 9346 Civic Center Drive, 
Beverly Hills, California 90210, or e-mail 
advisor @playboy.com. For updates, follow 
@playboyadvisor on Twitter. 


Millions of people collect the American 
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And right now, many of those same people 
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currency issues and privately issued licensed collectibles and is not affiliated with the United States government. Facts and figures deemed accurate as of November 2012 


©2013 New York Mint, LIC 


E FORUM 


E-mail privacy Drug dogs Condom law Goldman Sachs 


E-SEARCHES 
AND E-SEIZURES 


The government has been increasing its control 
over social media and the internet. It's time to do 


something about it 


oes the Fourth Amend- 

ment protect us from 

warrantless government 

searches? It's supposed 

to, but in some cases it 
doesn't. One of the most amazing de- 
tails to come out of last year's l'affaire 
Petraeus—when the di- 
rector of the Central 
Intelligence Agency was 
forced to resign after his 
extramarital affair was 
revealed through e-mails 
obtained by an overzeal- 
ous FBI agent—is the 
ease with which law en- 
forcement agencies can 
access anybody's private 
online information. It's 
surprising how quickly 
Google and other inter- 
net service providers will 
give up information to 


investigators. But that's not the fault of 


Google or the ISPs—that's just how the 
law works. 

If the feds want to search your base- 
ment, read your mail or tap your 
phones, they have to go through a 
process designed to protect your con- 


Your e-mails, 
texts, Face- 
book messages 
and Dropbox 


files can easily 


be accessed by 


investigators. 


stitutional rights. But in the realm of 
electronic communications, investi- 
gators needn't consider those rights. 
They are not required to establish 
probable cause or appear before a 


judge in order to obtain a search 


warrant. That means your e-mails, 
texts, Facebook messages 
and Dropbox files can all 
easily be accessed by a 
nosy investigator. 

E-mail providers such 
as Google and Yahoo 
may turn over messages 
older than six months 
if authorities obtain a 
subpoena, which doesn't 
require a judge's sig- 
nature, rather than a 
search warrant, which 
does need court ap- 
proval. The government 
isn't even required to let 
you know if it has obtained your e-mail 
with a search warrant. 

This is partly because electronic pri- 
vacy law—which essentially remains 
defined by 1986's Electronic Com- 
munications Privacy Act—hasn't kept 
pace with technology. Back in the 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY JUSTIN PAGE 


READER 
RESPONSE 


FREE MARKET RULES 


'The commentary by Jackson 
Lears on the economic theo- 
ries of John Maynard Keynes 
(*We're All Animals," Novem- 
ber) perpetuates the myth that 
the housing collapse was a fail- 
ure of the free market. President 
Clinton embarked on a policy 
that promoted home ownership 
for anyone with a pulse, and his 
attorney general, Janet Reno, 
enforced it with threats of sta- 
tistical discrimination against 
recalcitrant lenders. Yet even 
that couldn't coerce enough 
lenders to make no-income, 


ПРО 


ope 


има | | 


no-job (NINJA) loans, because 
holding the loans would destroy 
the institution and no inves- 

tor was big, dumb and rich 
enough to buy them. A free mar- 
ket would have shut down this 
absurd scheme. Enter the nanny 
state in the form of Fannie Mae 
and Freddie Mac to circum- 
vent market discipline and give 
the imprimatur of legitimacy to 
mountains of NINJA loans, all 


53 


54 


funded by the American tax- 
payer. In 2003 Representative 
Barney Frank was vigorously 
defending this scheme, and 
Senator Chris Dodd assured us 
that Fannie and Freddie would 
always be sound. I'm confident 
the nanny state will manage our 
health care and energy programs 
with the same wisdom. 


Tim Stein 
Punta Gorda, Florida 


So you bastards are Keynesians. 
I don't know what economy—or 
world—you live in, but no one 

in the U.S. is arguing that "only 
austerity can save us now." Our 


deficit and debt have grown by 


leaps and bounds, and welfare 
and warfare are skyrocketing, yet 
PLAYBOY seems to believe we're 
cutting back. You also seem to 
think more government spending 
will end the recession. But FDR's 
First and Second New Deals and 
even World War II did jack-shit 
to end the Great Depression, 
which lasted for 20 years. 

Evan Rogers 

Dublin, Ohio 


Your pale homage to Keynes 
rings false to anyone with a 
modicum of macroeconomic 
understanding. Keynesianism 
got us into this mess. I've heard 
all the insinuations about how 
the Great Depression followed 
that 1920s, Republican-wrought 


1980s, most people didn't keep elec- 
tronic communications for long, so six 
months seemed a reasonable protec- 
tion. Now, of course, such information 
lives forever in the cloud. 


In 2010 the Sixth Circuit Court of 


Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that users 
would have the same reasonable expec- 
tation of privacy in their stored e-mails 
that they do with their mail or phone 
calls and that the government must 
obtain a search warrant before seizing 
e-mails. Which means, essentially, that 
the ECPA is unconstitutional. 

Last November, the Senate Judiciary 
Committee approved a measure that 
would require investigators to obtain 
a search warrant before they could 
review any e-mails. And the proposed 
amendment to the ECPA would ob- 


Y overnmen 
18 around the 

users 0 ine i 
nations and the number of rec 


received from each durin 


BRAZIL 1,566: 


ligate officials to notify you within 10 
days of obtaining a warrant, unless a 
special dispensation had been granted 
by the court. 

Investigators don't like this amend- 
ment, naturally. They contend that 
such protection—it takes longer to get 
a search warrant than it does to get a 
subpoena—would hinder their ability 
to go after criminals. But the amend- 
ment would leave intact the counterter- 
rorism provisions of the Patriot Act. 

With a little luck the measure will 
make it through the Senate sometime 
this year. Maybe it will even become the 
law of the land. Until then, be careful 
what you write. 


% Gi Ogle cor plia 


THE ^ 
MAN'S. 
BEST ` 
FRIEND 


Drug-sniffing dogs onem 
make mistakes 


BY TYLER TRYKOWSKI 


n June 24, 2006, 
Deputy Sheriff 
William Wheetley 
pulled over Clay- 
ton Harris in 
Liberty County, Florida for hav- 
ing expired tags on his truck. ` 
Harris was shaky and agitated; an 
open beer in his cup holder didn't 
aid his case. Wheetley deployed 
his drug-detection dog, Aldo, 
for an open-air sniff around the 
vehicle. The dog "alerted," which 
was enough cause for a search. 
'The officer found 200 pseudo- 
ephedrine pills, 8,000 matches 
and other ingredients for cook- 
ing meth under Harris's seats. 
The case would have been 
open-and-shut if Aldo were trained to 
detect the scent of matches and Sudafed, 
but he wasn't. Aldo may have alerted to 
residual odors, but dogs can't be cross- 
examined, and no illegal drugs were found 
on Harris's person. The state of Florida's 
appeal of the suppression of evidence 
based on this fact has made it all the way 
to the Supreme Court, where oral argu- 
ments in Florida v. Harris 
were heard in October. 
Historically, courts have 
upheld the right of police 
to use drug dogs, but there 
are no national regulations 
for their training or reli- 
ability. Although dogs are 
required to be "trained" 
and "certified," those terms 
vary widely. For example, 
U.S. Customs uses a rig- 
orous 12-week training 
course that requires dogs 
to demonstrate 100 per- 
cent accuracy to pass and 
graduates only half its canine candidates; 
the United States Police Canine Associ- 
ation requires 70 percent accuracy, and 
the National Police Canine Association 
requires only that dogs find three of four 
"hides" to pass certification. Other pro- 
grams provide no certification standards, 


Dogs may have 
been trained 
to operate as 


“trick ponies,” 


providing 


false alerts via 


handler cues. 


simply graduating dogs that “pass.” 

Research shows that even with training 
drug dogs can be remarkably inaccu- 
rate: Studies from the Chicago Tribune, 
the University of California, Davis and 
the Australian government have found 
that currently operating canines have 
false alert rates of 56 percent, 85.5 per- 
cent and 79.8 percent, respectively. These 
results were consistent over 
time and mirror situations 
encountered by police 
departments daily. 

Then there are dogs 
that aren't trained to detect 
drugs at all: Nevada state 
troopers filed a lawsuit 
last June alleging their 
dogs were being trained to 
operate as “trick ponies,” 
providing false alerts via 
handler cues to facilitate Ше- 
gal searches and seizures of 
property (including money). 

During oral arguments 
in the Harris case, Supreme Court Jus- 
tice Antonin Scalia asked, “What are the 
incentives here? Why would a police 
department want to use an incompetent 
dog?” It would seem so-called incom- 
petent dogs provide all the incentive 
potentially corrupt police need. a 


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period of prosperity and social 
progress and must therefore be 
a consequence of it. But it would 
have remained an ordinary 
recession had FDR, his New Deal 
and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff not 
gotten hold ofit. 


Berry Muhl 
Houston, Texas 


ONE DRINK, TWO STRAWS 


Human liberty, as defined by 
Melba Newsome (“Hands Off My 
Big Gulp,” October), is the free- 
dom to purchase the precisely 
calibrated quantity of salt, sugar 
and fat that corporations have cal- 
culated will render their products 
most addictive to consumers while 
incidentally killing them. She 
defends this freedom of lab rats 
to demand their preferred brand 
of doped sugar water with the 


enthusiasm of someone refighting 
the Battle of Lexington and Con- 
cord. Thanks, libertarians! If only 
Newsome had been around when 
Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. 
She could have fought to preserve 
our choice to eat tubercular beef 
and rat droppings. Damn those 
nannies at the FDA who took away 
our freedom. 


Andrew Christie 
Cambria, California 


It is interesting to see all the let- 
ters calling for gun control in 
response to the June feature 


55 


56 


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Armed amd Dangerous? adjacent 
to a commentary decrying a 
government attempt to regu- 
late the size of sodas. Newsome 
argues that when “government 
starts to ban things it deems bad 
for us, it is protecting us from 
our choices.” That's exactly my 
argument against gun control. 

I can make my own decisions 
about Big Gulps and firearms. 
It is foolhardy to relinquish our 
personal liberties in the name of 


the “public good.” 


Ronald Delgado 
Tampa, Florida 


ENTANGLED IN WEED 


The November Raw Data cites 
a statistic claiming $2.4 billion 
to $6.2 billion in tax revenue 
would be generated if mari- 
juana were legalized. Has 


103 | 


3) 


i6 

: 

3 

© YEARS’ 
о 

т) 


$2.4 - $8.2 
2,700% BILLION 2 


400 |= 


MILLION 


anyone done an estimate of the 
costs in human misery, ruined 
lives and other “benefits” of 
legalization as untold mil- 
lions of the legal pot smokers 
advance to harder drugs? 


Carl McGlothlin 
Pollock Pines, California 


Prohibitionists have long made this 
“gateway” argument, but given the 
millions of people who have smoked 
weed and not become addicted to 
heroin, it seems spurious. That said, 
a new study by researchers at Yale 
University finds that the use of alco- 
hol, cigarettes and marijuana by 


图 


| 


a 
0 


PORN 
POLICE 


How do you force actors to 
wear condoms? 


BY NORA O’DONNELL 


ast November Los Ange- 
les County voters passed 
Measure B, which requires 
condom use on the sets of 
porn films. Wearing a con- 
dom, advocates argued, is common 
sense. But how will the measure be 
enforced? Public health officials don’t 
have a rule book for strong-arming 
penises into prophylactics, and they’re 
unwilling to comment until they’ve 
had more time to figure out how to 


approach the issue. Will government 
workers drop by sets for surprise in- 
spections? Or will they seize early cuts 
of Missionary Position Impossible: Ghost 
Protocol and view them for violations? 
Activists behind the law say that’s a pos- 
sibility. “This is no different than su- 
pervising restaurants or nail salons or 
barbershops,” Michael Weinstein, co- 
founder ofthe AIDS Healthcare Foun- 
dation, told the Associated Press. “You 
fill out forms, you are granted a per- 
mit, and periodically somebody goes 
out and does spot inspections.” Will 
these spot inspections include penis 
checks? Porn stars have their doubts, 
but if it comes to that, they could pack 
their bags and head to a more welcom- 
ing county or state. Or the industry 
could stay and new government jobs 
(paid for by the cost of health permits) 
would be created. It’s possible some 
women—and men—might enjoy work 
as professional penis inspectors. m 


AMMO NATION 


Does the Second 
Amendment protect 
bullets? 


ore than a century of legal decisions 
has created a delicate balance—or a 
stalemate, depending on your level 


of cynicism—between gun rights and gun con- 
trols. But what about ammunition? Do bullets 
qualify as arms? They're harmless in isolation, 

while an empty gun is at least useful as a bluff 

or a bludgeon. 

Gun-control advocates have been chasing bul- 
lets for decades, calling them "the actual agent of 
harm." The cause found its champion 20 years 
ago in Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New 
York, who liked to tweak the National Rifle 
Association with the mantra "Guns don't kill 
people, bullets kill people." Although there was 
a precedent for restricting the most destructive 
bullets (the Law Enforcement Officers Protec- 
tion Act of 1985 banned armor-piercing ammo), 
Moynihan instead proposed taxing handgun 
bullets into scarcity, framing the issue as a 
public-health policy akin to taxing cigarettes. 

Moynihan's 1995 proposal would have raised 
the tax on the wholesale price of most hand- 
gun bullets from 11 percent to 50 percent. (He 
excluded ammo designed for hunting and tar- 
get practice.) For example, the tax on a box 
of 50 high-grade .38-caliber cartridges would 
have risen from $1.20 to $5.90, a significant but 
relatively modest increase. However, .50-caliber ammo 
and "hyper-bullets" would be nailed with a 10,000 per- 
cent tax increase. As a result, the cost of a box of 20 
Winchester nine-millimeter hollow-point Black Talons 


= ы 


would jump overnight from $15 to $1,515. 

The comedian Chris Rock worked the idea back 
into the conversation in 1999 with a routine in which 
he noted, "If a bullet cost $5,000, there'd be no more 
innocent bystanders." Last year Toni Preckwinkle, board 
president of Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, 

proposed a more modest increase of a nickel per bul- 
let in an effort to raise an estimated $400,000 in 
annual revenue and potentially reduce urban vio- 

lence. The NRA threatened to sue. She couldn't 
get enough board support and dropped the idea. 
At least two courts—in different centuries— 
have not dodged bullets when considering 
the Second Amendment. In 1871 the Tennes- 
see Supreme Court agreed with three men who 
argued that a state ban on concealed handguns 
violated the Constitution. The right to bear 
arms, the court noted, "necessarily" includes 
the right to "purchase and provide ammunition 
suitable for such arms." In 2010 the D.C. Court 
of Appeals said the same thing, throwing out 
the conviction of a man charged with posses- 
Sion of handgun bullets in his home, which the 
district had banned. It concluded that a 2008 
Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia 
v. Heller, which affirmed a homeowner's con- 
stitutional right to defend himself with a gun, 
implies that the gun is loaded. 

Bullets are taking fire lately from another 
direction. Last year a coalition of environ- 
mental groups organized by the Center for 
Biological Diversity asked the Environmental 

Protection Agency to ban lead ammunition, 
claiming that 85,000 tons of shot left on the ground 
each year by hunters and target shooters poison as many 
as 20 million birds. The Fish and Wildlife Service long ago 
banned lead shot for hunting waterfowl.—Chip Rowe 


Our 
Corporate 
Masters 


GOLD IN 
DISDAIN 


Corporations often profit 
immensely from the 
misfortune of others 


BY BRIAN COOK 


s Hurricane Sandy pounded 
lower Manhattan last 
October—flooding its streets 
and leaving most residents 
without electricity—a photo 
made the rounds on Twitter. Taken about 
the same time the emer- 
gency generators were 
failing at NYU Langone 
Medical Center, the image 
shows a blacked-out city 
with one building, the 
headquarters of Gold- 
man Sachs, remaining 
incongruously bright. 
In context the building 
appears like a defiantly 
shining middle finger, 
untroubled by forces that 
left so many around it (lit- 
erally) powerless. 
Goldman Sachs has 
made a habit of remain- 
ing untroubled as others 
around it are battered. During the most 
frenzied period of the housing-market 
bubble, the investment bank persuaded 
hedge funds, municipalities and pen- 
sion funds to invest in complex financial 
instruments based on mortgages (many 


Goldman 
Sachs has 
made a habit 
of remaining 
untroubled 
as others 


around it are 
battered. 


of them subprime) it considered worth- 
less. Goldman then turned around and 
bet against its own instruments, largely 
through the insurance giant AIG. When 
the feds were forced to bail out AIG with 
an initial $85 billion, about 15 percent 
of that money went to settling the com- 
pany's losing bets with Goldman Sachs. 
AIG was far from the only entity Gold- 
man played. A partial list of government 
groups, pension funds and private com- 
panies that either are suing or have 
settled lawsuits against the bank for sell- 
ing toxic crap includes the Securities and 
Exchange Commission (which received 
a $550 million settlement in 2010); the 
pension funds for Mississippi public 
employees and Arkansas teachers; the 
West Virginia Investment Management 
Board; the city of Reno, Nevada; and 
German lenders Bayerische Landesbank, 
DZ Bank and IKB Deutsche Industrie- 
bank. The list goes on. 

With all that bitterness and wealth 
destruction in its wake, 
it's perhaps no surprise 
Goldman has seen its 
profits more than halved 
since reaching record 
highs during the two-year 
period of 2009 to 2010. 
Last year the company 
had to let 1,600 employees 
go (about five percent of 
its workforce). 

But don't cry for Gold- 
man Sachs. The firm's 
chairman, Lloyd Blank- 
fein, went on TV to call for 
cuts in Medicaid and Social 
Security, while advocating 
for tax breaks so his com- 
pany wouldn't have to pay U.S. income 
tax on its foreign earnings. Blankfein's 
firm, which turned a cool $1.5 billion 
profit in last year's third quarter, would 
have gone out of business if not for a $10 
billion federal handout back in 2008. W 


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men ages 18 to 25 is associated with 
an increased likelihood that they will 
abuse prescription drugs. We could 
easily solve that problem, of course, 
by banning alcohol and cigarettes. 


Despite the best efforts of the 
federal government and the 
morality police, marijuana has 
been part of the American expe- 
rience for generations (“Legalize 
ІШ,” November). Consumers 
have voted with their dollars. 
Legalize weed and add a sales 
tax. The revenue will more than 
cover the costs of abuse, help 
balance budgets, reduce debt 
and pay for essential services. 


Penner 
Great Neck, New York 


E-mail letters@playboy.com. 
Or write 9346 Civic Center Drive, 


Beverly Hills, California 90210. 


57 


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AZUNIA REMINDS YOU TO DRINK RESPONSIBLY. 


Aura 


QUILA 


sis JIMMY KIMMEL 


A candid conversation with the affable talk show host about the new late- 
night wars, having nerves of steel and the enduring humor of Matt Damon 


When Jimmy Kimmel Live debuted on Janu- 
ary 26, 2003—on the heels of Super Bowl 
XXXVII and prefaced by a joking warning 
to viewers from anchor eminence Ted Koppel 
to expect "no special post-Super Bowl edition 
of Nightline tonight so that ABC can bring 
you the following piece of garbage"—not 
many people thought the show would survive 
a year. "Welcome to Enjoy It While It Lasts, 
my new talk show," said Jimmy Kimmel that 
first broadcast. The young midnight upstart, 
who followed Nightline on ABC until Night- 
line was relegated to following him earlier 
this year, is now fully engaged in a head-on 
battle at 11:35 P.M. with his late-night elders, 
NBC's Jay Leno and CBS's David Letterman. 
JKL’s dependably okay ratings—which, in 
fact, have spiked in recent years—have less to 
do with the seismic move than with the show’s 
lure of advertiser-treasured 18- to 49-year- 
olds, exceeding even that of the other, younger 
Jimmy (Fallon) on NBC. 

At 45 and 20 pounds slimmer than in 
2003, the Brooklyn-born, Las Vegas—raised 
Kimmel has slowly reshaped his longtime low- 
brow image—a residual effect of four years of 
co-presiding over Comedy Central’s The Man 
Show (itself a culmination of his earlier radio 
shock-jockeying)—into a talent worthy of play- 
ing in the majors. His rise has been slow but 


steady, based on his willingness to take chances 
and exploit social media. The JKL online vi- 
ral music-video sensations “I’m Fucking Matt 
Damon” (perpetrated by Kimmel’s then inamo- 
rata Sarah Silverman) and the tit-for-tat “I’m 
Fucking Ben Affleck” begat A-list intrigue 
that has resulted in the show’s steady stream 
of elaborately produced comic videos featur- 
ing the likes of Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, 
Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey 
and even first lady Michelle Obama. Last 
year alone he hosted both the White House 
Correspondents’ Dinner and the Emmys; he 
also became engaged to JKL co-head writer 
Molly McNearney (he has two grown children 
from his first marriage), and in the realm of 
dreams-come-true, he finally welcomed onto 
his show has lifelong idol David Letterman. 
PLAYBOY dispatched journalist Bill Zehme— 
an expert on the world of late-night talk shows 
who has spent time with and written about 
Letterman, Leno and Johnny Carson, and 
who profiled Kimmel for PLAYBOY in 2007— 
to the hosts Hollywood Hills home to make 
him sit and think about what he's done. Zehme 
reports: “Jimmy Kimmel embodies more of, 
well, everything than anyone I’ve known—the 
expansive generosity, the reflexive candor, the 
profound. thoughtfulness, plus he cooks like 
a four-star chef. He gave up the bulk of his 


birthday weekend for our many hours of ses- 
sions, even whipping up an incomparably fine 
frittata during the process. Once, as we sat by 
his pool, he spied a few giant hawks majestical- 
ly gliding above our heads and briefly recoiled 
before magnanimously giving them their due: 
‘Look at those motherfuckers,’ he said, squirm- 
ing. But they re awesome too—because they 
eat fuckin’ rats, so I have to love em.” 


PLAYBOY: Let's begin by mentioning your 
nightly trademark Jimmy Kimmel Live 
sign-off, when you apologize to Matt 
Damon for bumping him due to time 
constraints. This interview, it turns out, 
had to be bumped one issue because 
Matt Damon was locked into doing it last 
issue. Can you accept our apologies? 
KIMMEL: Well, isn't that beautifully ironic? 
But the good news is Matt Damon won't 
ever know about this because he doesn't 
read PLAYBOY for the articles; he reads it 
purely to masturbate. So I actually feel 
okay with it. 

PLAYBOY: Where did that sign-off come 
from? 

KIMMEL: Out of sheer desperation—just 
self-deprecating sarcasm that was the 
result of having mostly C- and D-level 
guests on the show. The night I first 


"People believed I was some kind of cross 
between Andrew Dice Clay and one of those 
windup penises that hop across desktops. That 
was never me. That was The Man Show. I think 
the perception of me is more accurate now." 


“I don't have the qualities you need to be phony, 
which is a huge drawback in show business. I 
never had any option other than to be myself. 
I'm a guy who's not particularly handsome or 
well-spoken; I’m just kind of a funny guy.” 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID ROSE 


“I would never date someone I’m convinced 
wouldn’t have dated me when I was in high 
school. Гт not that kind of guy. I want to 
be loved for who I am, not for what I do for 
a living.” 


59 


PLAYBOY 


60 


said it was toward the end of our third 
year. 1 wish I could remember who 
the guests were, but they weren't just 
C-level guests; they were particularly 
low-rent, so unremarkable that I was 
feeling ashamed of myself by the end 
of the hour. As a joke І said, “Apologies 
to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.” 
He happened to be the first A-plus-list 
guest that popped into my head. Our 
co-executive producer Jason Schrift 
immediately doubled over laughing, 
which made me much happier than Га 
been. So I just kept doing it to amuse 
Schrifty, really. I never imagined any- 
one was actually still watching us at the 
end of the show, much less that Matt 
Damon would get wind of it and it 
would become this big thing. What's 
even weirder is that the studio audi- 
ence still laughs at it every single night. 
I don’t know if there’s ever been a joke 
told practically verbatim so many times 
on television that keeps getting laughs. 
It's taken on a life of its own. 

PLAYBOY: Do you remember the first re- 
action you got from Damon? 

KIMMEL: His publicist told us he thought 
it was funny and that people were con- 
stantly mentioning it to him on the 
street. As a result, we can’t just have him 
on as a normal guest. It now has to be 
something spectacular, like his video 
with Sarah, “Pm Fucking Matt Damon.” 
He has appeared probably five or six 
times but always in the context of a bit 
that grudgingly relates to not having 
time for him. 

PLAYBOY: How much of you is the same 
guy who started this show 10 years ago? 
KIMMEL: One hundred percent. 

PLAYBOY: Really? You do know that the 
perception of who you are has changed 
considerably. 

KIMMEL: Well, I think the perception of 
me is more accurate now. Back then, 
people believed I was some kind of cross 
between Andrew Dice Clay and one of 
those windup penises that hop across 
desktops. That was never me. That was 
the conceit of The Man Show—which was 
designed as a satire of irresponsible male 
stupidity and instead became a magnet 
for a huge segment of dopey guys who 
didn't understand we were making fun 
of them. But when we started that show, 
I was a crazed, overly responsible guy 
who had already been married for 11 
years, with two children. People are still 
shocked to learn I have kids. 

PLAYBOY: Who are, in fact, the oldest off- 
spring among all the late-night hosts. 
KIMMEL: Yes, my kids are now in their 
40s. Actually, both my son and daughter 
are in college, but when they were little 
kids they, along with my ex-wife, would 
occasionally appear on The Man Show. 
People thought they were actors. 
PLAYBOY: Your first Playboy Interview— 
just prior to the debut of Jimmy Kimmel 
Live—did dwell a bit along the lines of 
bowel movements and masturbation tips. 


KIMMEL: At that point I had nothing to 
lose. I could say whatever I wanted. I was 
a sniper back then. 

PLAYBOY: Let's talk about what has 
changed. For instance, you estimated 
here 10 years ago that you'd received 
only 20 blow jobs in your life. Where does 
the tote board stand these days? 

KIMMEL: Oh, the count is way higher now. 
It's in the hundreds, easily. Well, maybe 
not easily—listen, if I were able to give 
myself a blow job I'm sure the number 
would be much, much higher. But I 
wasn't blessed with that kind of flexibility. 
PLAYBOY: See, right there we've further 
broadened your public perception. 
KIMMEL: Along the way, though, I've dis- 
covered people do have a hard time be- 
lieving things that are true. I'm always 
being asked about my lunatic family 
members who appear on the show: “18 
that your real Cousin Sal? Is that your 
real Aunt Chippy and Uncle Frank?" 
Of course they're my real cousin, aunt 
and uncle—I mean, who could invent 
crazy characters like them? But I guess 
people are used to seeing fake relation- 
ships on TV. 


I was scared to stand in 
front of the audience and 
deliver jokes. I was a radio 

guy and thought I would 
always be a radio guy. I’m 
not a stand-up. 


PLAYBOY: What about you? Are we seeing 
the same Jimmy we'd see offstage? 
KIMMEL: I don't have the qualities you 
need to be phony, which is a huge draw- 
back in show business. I never had any 
option other than to be myself. I doubt 
Га be able to keep it up. I'm a guy 
who's not particularly handsome or 
well-spoken; I'm just kind of a funny 
guy. Starting back in my radio years, I 
decided to just go with that. 

PLAYBOY: "Just be yourself" was Johnny 
Carson's first rule for late-night hosts. 
And by the way, you're much better 
looking than you think you are. 

KIMMEL: Thank you. I see another blow 
job in my future. 

PLAYBOY: During the first 14 months of 
JKL you worked with a parade of weekly 
co-hosts, one of whom was presidential 
fellatio specialist Monica Lewinsky. How 
were her performance skills? 

KIMMEL: She was one of the worst co- 
hosts we had. Her one condition was 
that she wouldn't talk at all about Presi- 
dent Clinton, which left only the hand- 
bags she was selling as a conversation 
topic. She seemed to be fragile in gener- 
al, so everyone was nervous to bring up 


his name around her. And by the way, 
after meeting her, the Clinton situation 
fascinates me all the more, because five 
minutes with that woman would tell you 
that this is probably not someone you'd 
get involved with if you wanted to keep 
it a secret. 

PLAYBOY: Doesn't that whole co-host pe- 
riod seem like a bad idea? 

KIMMEL: Yes, considering that most of 
our co-hosts were such bizarre charac- 
ters. We had some very good and very 
bad co-hosts. The good ones were the 
people with whom I was most com- 
fortable, so they returned regularly— 
Adam Carolla, Sarah Silverman, Kathy 
Griffin, David Alan Grier, Anthony 
Anderson. I remember having to really 
sell ABC on Zach Galifianakis, which is 
funny now that he's a big star, and hap- 
pily, after his first night, they realized 
he was great. As for the bad ones, Deion 
Sanders was terrible. And the psychic 
John Edward—awful. He didn't want to 
do any psychic stuff. We had Jim Belushi 
as our guest and of course thought it 
would be fun if we tried to contact John 
Belushi. To my amazement Jim was all 
for it, but John Edward didn't want to 
do it. Pm convinced all psychics are 
completely full of shit. 

PLAYBOY: Viewers also probably forget 
that up until August 9, 2004, you opened 
the show by immediately sliding behind 
your desk instead of taking center stage 
to do a monologue. Was this a renegade 
act of hosting hubris? 

KIMMEL: No, no, it wasn't that. I was 
scared to stand in front of the audience 
and deliver jokes. The craziest thing 
is, even though I had some material 
planned each night, I was mainly wing- 
ing it for that first year and a half or so. 
Plus my experience onstage was limited. 
I was used to sitting behind a radio mi- 
crophone until I started my TV work on 
Comedy Central's Win Ben Stein's Money, 
where I was really just a wisecracker 
who read the questions. Then came The 
Man Show, where I was onstage—for a 
hundred episodes—but partnered with 
Adam Carolla, who is a pretty great 
crutch if you're looking for one. So when 
this show started, I think I made a good 
decision to just come out and follow the 
Regis Philbin model—sitting down and 
chatting with the co-hosts. It felt more 
comfortable. But imagine a comedian 
who has been onstage only a hundred 
times being asked to host a talk show. 
PLAYBOY: Then again, are you technically 
a broadcaster first and a comedian sec- 
ond? That was David Letterman's path. 
KIMMEL: Dave did radio, local television 
and then a lot of stand-up comedy when 
he moved to L.A. I hadn't done anything 
like that. I was a radio guy and thought 
I would always be a radio guy. That was 
my only goal. People mistakenly think 
I'd been planning to host a late-night 
talk show since I was a kid. I wish that 
was the case because it's a better story— 


and I did deeply worship Letterman, no 
question. But I'm not a stand-up, and 
furthermore, it never dawned on me asa 
kid that there could be other talk shows 
besides Dave's and Johnny's. I looked 
with disdain on anybody who tried to 
start a new one. It was off-putting to me 
that Pat Sajak or Rick Dees would dare 
go up against Johnny Carson. I resented 
them for trying. Frankly, those shows 
never worked anyway. 

PLAYBOY: Is it true you're never nervous 
before show time? 

KIMMEL: Yeah, very rarely. It's just the 
rhythm you have to get into. You have 
no choice but to do it, so you just do it. 
In fact, I can't remember the last time 
I was nervous. Do you think any of the 
hosts аге? I mean, at a certain point, how 
could you be? Your metabolism will ac- 
climate. Maybe it's like being a homicide 
detective. You're horrified by the first 50 
dead bodies you see splayed all over the 
sidewalk, but eventually you're prop- 
ping one up to take your Christmas-card 
photograph with a decapitated head. 
PLAYBOY: АВС brought you aboard to 
draw male viewers, basically your Man 
Show fan base. Ironically, soon after that 
the network's prime-time demographics 
became hugely female. Were adjustments 
made to become more women-friendly? 
KIMMEL: On some level, yes. For me it was 
not a matter of the things I did; it was 
the things I chose not to do that made 
an impact. Our show had a lot of staff 
from The Man Show, and the sensibility 
hadn't changed much. But there came 
a certain point when 1 knew change had 
arrived. It was when Steve-O, the Jackass 
stunt maniac, came on and wanted me 
to do a bit in which Га throw darts into 
his ass. And І said, “You know what? Not 
only do I not want to do that, I wouldn't 
even want to see that.” I don't know 
anyone who would want to see that. I’m 
sure certain people out there might, but 
I didn't think it was right for our show. 
PLAYBOY: Was that your turning point? 
KIMMEL: It really was. That's the moment 
I grew up: when I declined Steve-O's 
invitation to throw darts into his ass. 
PLAYBOY: You demonstrated another big 
stride in TV maturity when you finally 
consented to wearing ties. You'd held 
out on that one for almost three years. 
KIMMEL: I finally put on a tie, yeah. Be- 
fore that Pd sometimes wear one as 
part of a costume, and whenever I did 
everybody at ABC would be thrilled: 
"Oh! You look so great in that tie!" Even 
Disney-ABC chairman Michael Eisner 
would try to convince me to wear the 
tie. The reason I didn't is because I felt 
it was a "give" that I could rely on later— 
like a chit. I held back until they became 
insistent, and then I gave in, which kept 
them happy for at least a year. The tie 
made them feel like I was listening to 
them. And of course it was the right de- 
cision. We have this idea that television 
executives don't know anything and we 


know everything. The truth is they know 
just as much stuff as we do, and as much 
as you don't want to say it, sometimes 
they're right. 

PLAYBOY: Only Craig Ferguson has dared 
to keep his tie loosened. 

KIMMEL: Yeah, it's to reflect how casual 
and off-the-cuff he is. His tie is askew. 
You don't plan that—it just happens. 
PLAYBOY: You've thrown some notorious 
star-studded parties in your home, wel- 
coming everyone from Howard Stern to 
Don Rickles. What's your secret to great 
party giving? 

KIMMEL: I don't know. I'm not a great 
partygoer. When I go to a party all I 
want to do is go home. I like having par- 
ties because I don't have to go home. I 
already am home. 

PLAYBOY: But doesn't the host have the 
least fun? 

KIMMEL: Theoretically yes, the party host 
has the least fun. But it's worth it to not 
feel uncomfortable in other people's 
houses. I do know you need to have 
cocktails and something to eat. If you 
put a little extra effort into these things, 
it surprises and impresses people. 


I'm not a great partygoer. 
When I go to a party all 
I want to do is go home. I 
like having parties because 
I don't have to go home. I 
already am home. 


PLAYBOY: What did it take to successfully 
entertain Rickles? 

KIMMEL: I guess a mixture of pride— 
which I always take in preparing a meal 
for people—and also fear, knowing the 
insults would never end if anything was 
even slightly out of place. I know it went 
well, though, because all Don criticized 
was the stairs he had to walk up. To hear 
him explain it, it was like scaling the side 
of Rapunzel's castle. But the reality is 
there are six steps leading up to my front 
door, and he came in the back way. He 
just didn't like the idea of stairs in general. 
PLAYBOY: Historically, what's the one 
surefire dish you serve that people love? 
KIMMEL: Pizza. Chris Bianco, the world- 
famous pizza chef from Phoenix, taught 
me as much as I can learn without the 
benefit of his 30 years of experience. I 
can get to about 84 percent in terms of 
replicating his pizzas, which is pretty 
great. I’ve got a brick pizza oven іп the 
backyard. No one has ever been disap- 
pointed. And you can tell when people 
really like something; they go through 
an emotional process, like ^Oh my God! 
Wow, this is good!" But please let me 
point out that 95 percent of the events 


at my home do not involve celebrities of 
any kind. 

PLAYBOY: That wasn't the case with your 
weekly multiscreen Football Sunday 
game-viewing parties—which stopped 
a couple of years ago. Guests on your 
show would openly beg for invites. 
KIMMEL: That was mostly the result of 
Adam Carolla and Bill Simmons of 
ESPN talking about it on their podcasts 
and radio shows and websites. Celebrity- 
wise, there'd be occasional drop-ins like 
Tom Arnold, Kathy Griffin, Jon Hamm 
pre-Mad Men—but mainly it was a lot 
of Man Show staff guys and friends who, 
after my marriage ended, I began hav- 
ing over to watch football every Sunday. 
It finally got overwhelming. Га spend 
almost all of Saturday shopping and 
cooking, and then Sunday preparing ev- 
erything while watching the games with 
them. Then they started asking if they 
could bring other friends, and Га say 
okay, and those friends of friends would 
come every week and become part of the 
group, and then eventually the friends 
of friends brought along more friends, 
who also became regulars. It just got so 
big that I was too busy to barely even 
glance up at any of the games. 

PLAYBOY: Proving once again that party 
hosts do have the least fun. 

KIMMEL: More like proving the sad fact 
that I never have the heart to tell any- 
one no. 

PLAYBOY: But then Tom Cruise asked 
you about it on the air one night, which 
led to probably the strangest Football 
Sunday in history. 

KIMMEL: True. І invited him, and Tom 
Cruise came over—with his mom. Now, 
there are a lot of fictitious versions of 
what happened that day, most of them 
perpetrated by Adam Carolla, who was 
so drunk at the time he remembers no 
actual facts. And also our pal Jeffrey Ross 
the comic filled a whole chapter in his 
book with an incorrect version. 

The definitive version—to make it as 
concise as possible—starts, as do all idiotic 
stories, with Cousin Sal, who instigates evil 
for pleasure. In this case his victim was 
Jeff Ross, who months earlier had been 
on Dancing With the Stars and was elimi- 
nated in the first week of competition. 
And because we have the eliminated stars 
as guests immediately afterward on those 
same nights, you should know that we find 
out who got the lowest votes a little bit be- 
fore the general public does. It's a network 
courtesy, just to help us prepare questions. 
Anyway, on the afternoon of that season's 
first elimination night, we had no idea 
yet whether Jeff had been voted off, but 
we did know that on the previous night 
he scored a 12—the lowest score of the 
night. So Sal, who has constantly screwed 
with Jeff for 10 years minimum, decided 
to send him a text that said, “You're 
safe.” We figured Jeff would at least be 
suspicious. He texted back, “Really?” Sal 
texted, “Yes. Don't tell anyone.” 


61 


PLAYBOY 


62 


Jeff of course instantly told his dance 
partner, “We're safe!"—Aand then on the 
live broadcast later pretended to be ner- 
vous when they found themselves, natu- 
rally, as one of the two couples with the 
least votes. And then, surprising only 
him, he was eliminated. If you watch the 
tape you can see him mouth the words 
“We lost? We lost?” He looked as if he'd 
been hit by a train. He was so angry 
about this prank he wouldn't speak to 
Sal for months. And they were pretty 
close—in fact, it's a sore point that still 
lingers. Ross even avoided Football Sun- 
days for a while but decided to show 
up the same day Tom Cruise decided 
to come—which I hadn't told anyone. 
Tom arrived as promised, along with his 
mom, who's a very lovely woman. 
PLAYBOY: Little did they know what 
awaited them. 

KIMMEL: Right. Tragically, Sal and Jeff 
had resumed sniping at each other 
that afternoon. After the games ended, 
someone—probably Sal—decided that 
the best way to settle this dispute would 
be to lay the case out for Tom and his 
mother. Suddenly, a courtroom scenar- 
io was set up in the living room—this 
was at my previous house 一 with Sarah 
acting as Jeffs attorney and me acting 
as Sal's. Sarah and I were still together 
then. We carefully presented all the in- 
sane details of the case to Tom and his 
mom, who graciously agreed—after 
already being at my house for seven 
hours—to spend another two hours lis- 
tening to this nonsense, with Tom ear- 
nestly questioning both defendants. In 
the end, Tom deferred to his mother 
because he ultimately didn't know what 
to make of such lunacy. And his mother 
said, "I think you're both acting like 
little boys." Which pretty much shut it 
down, appropriately. So no resolution 
ever came, but it was fun to purge and 
play it out, which kind of healed that ri- 
diculous situation. 

PLAYBOY: Then there was the Carolla ver- 
sion to straighten out. 

KIMMEL: Yes. Carolla told a separate story 
about that day in his book, which I point- 
ed out to him was untrue and which he 
then realized was untrue. He'd forgotten 
how smashed he'd been. But Adam long 
ago invented a victory dance where he 
makes it look like he's shitting a football 
out of his ass while reading a newspa- 
per. It's very funny. He demonstrated it 
to Tom and Tom's mom—not that they 
asked for it; he just did it. And they also 
thought it was very funny. Then Adam 
went home. In Adam's book, however, 
they were so offended that they left in a 
huff. But the truth is they stayed another 
five hours after Adam left. I was especial- 
ly annoyed when I read his story because 
it makes Tom Cruise look like a humor- 
less dick when that wasn't the case at all. 
PLAYBOY: You once lamented, "I wish I 
could enjoy things more in the moment." 
How are you doing with that? 


KIMMEL: Not doing well with that, 
frankly. That situation really hasn't 
changed. [laughs] 

PLAYBOY: Yet on your show you clearly 
thrive in the moment, dependably ask- 
ing fun questions none of your competi- 
tors think to ask and also actually listen- 
ing to guests—which is a great lost art 
among late-night hosts. 

KIMMEL: Hmm? I'm sorry. I wasn't paying 
attention. 

PLAYBOY: Exactly. But you do adhere 
to the Howard Stern school of probing 
guests for answers the public truly wants 
to hear. 

KIMMEL: Nobody does it like Howard. 
By now, if somebody wants to be on his 
show, they're prepared to face the con- 
sequences, whereas we have a merry- 
go-round of publicists and celebrities to 
please. Increasingly, guests also know 
what they're getting into with us and 
aren't surprised if I ask a weird question. 
I just try to put myself in their real-life 
shoes when figuring what I might ask. 
We recently had Daniel Craig on, and 
mainly I was thinking about the fact that 
he's James Bond and how great it must 


I feel bad if I hurt anybody's 
feelings, but I don't believe 
Jay Leno has actual feel- 
ings, and he doesn't seem to 
be that worried about other 


people's feelings. 


be to be James Bond and how pleased 
with myself I would be if I were James 
Bond. I'd probably look at myself in the 
mirror constantly and repeat over and 
over again "Bond. James Bond." That 
would be very enjoyable. 

PLAYBOY: If not in the moment, can you 
enjoy things in retrospect? 

KIMMEL: Overall I enjoy life, but I also 
have too much work to do. Whenever 
I'm relaxing I feel like I'm being lazy— 
that there's something I need to attend 
to. I'm almost always preoccupied, like 
Im nearly drowning at all times when 
it comes to work and returning e-mails 
and revising scripts and on and on. The 
only way to alleviate that anxiety for me 
is to get stuff done. Theoretically if I 
didn't have as much work to do I could 
relax. Who knows what the reality would 
be without the work? What I do know is 
when I go on vacation I'm quite able to 
enjoy myself. If I go away and don't have 
any deadlines looming, then no problem. 
PLAYBOY: So outside of the context of 
everyday life, you're able to relax. Does 
that mean even if you're at home, there's 
no sanctuary for you? 

KIMMEL: Right. Because if I’m here at 


home—well, see those pictures stacked 
over there? [points across the room] They 
still haven't been hung because І haven't 
figured out where I want to put them, 
and this drives me crazy. There are so 
many things I feel need to be done that 
it's impossible not to worry about what I 
should do next. 

PLAYBOY: Your last home was more of a 
bachelor dream playhouse, whereas you 
now have an aesthetically elegant sprawl 
here. Is that on purpose? 

KIMMEL: Yeah, I wanted to have a more 
grown-up house. I’ve been here three 
years, and it’s still in transition. Since 
Molly moved in, though, it’s gotten more 
homey. There are flowers in the house 
now, which is not the sort of thing that 
would’ve occurred to me. It’s a nice look. 
PLAYBOY: Molly McNearney is your co- 
head writer, and you two have a sum- 
mer wedding planned. Do you consider 
yourself a romantic? 

KIMMEL: Not particularly. I'm more a tra- 
ditionalist than a romantic. I am not the 
most communicative person, so any real 
expression of my emotion is greatly ap- 
preciated. I write notes. It's easier for me 
to express love in writing. When I try to 
do it one-on-one it usually turns into a 
joke. I have a tendency to ruin things. 
PLAYBOY: You first got married as a kid— 
or, as you've said, as a fetus, really. 
KIMMEL: I was 20 years old. I did it be- 
cause that was the plan. I didn't make 
the plan, but that seemed to be the 
plan. I was raised, I suppose, to become 
a traditionalist. 

PLAYBOY: Plus you've always maintained 
a pretty rigid code for the women with 
whom you've allowed yourself to become 
involved—all three of them to be precise: 
your ex-wife, Gina; Sarah Silverman; 
and, for the past four years, Molly. 
KIMMEL: Yeah, I would never date some- 
one I'm convinced wouldn't have dated 
me when I was in high school. I'm not 
that kind of guy. I want to be loved for 
who I am, not for what I do for a living. 
PLAYBOY: Historically, though, you claim 
to have always been terrible at knowing 
when women had an interest in you. 
KIMMEL: Yes. Or maybe I was really good 
at it and no women were interested in 
me. It was one of those two things. 
PLAYBOY: Could that partly be why you 
married a few years after high school? 
KIMMEL: Probably that was in the thought 
process: I'd better lock her down, better 
get her contractually obliged before it's 
too late. 

PLAYBOY: Sarah used to say she encour- 
aged you to date other people because 
you had no wild oats. Also because 
you'd ostensibly appreciate her more 
by contrast. 

KIMMEL: [Laughs] It wasn't real encour- 
agement, though. That was pretend en- 
couragement. She knew I wasn't going 
to do it. 

PLAYBOY: Did you know you were going 
to pop the (continued on page 127) 


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THE COLD 


ARAB 
SPRING 


THE REVOLUTION WASN'T 
WHAT WE EXPECTED. 
FREEDOM SOMETIMES COMES 
IN STRANGE FORMS. FROM 
MOROCCO 10 THE GAZA STRIP WE 
LOOK AT HOW LIBERATION 
CHANGED THE MUSLIM WORLD 


BY NICOLAS PELHAM 


MOROCCO 
TUNISIA 


66 


bservers of the first turbu- 
lent days of the Arab awaken- 
ing could have been forgiven 
for predicting the triumph 
of Western values of liberty. 
Scenes of girls fearlessly ' 
marching on the palaces of the 
anciens régimes evoked the 
French Revolution. Women 
led rallies heralding Tripoli’s 
liberation from 42 years of Col- 
onel Muammar el-Qaddafi's 
dictatorship and earned their 
place at the tables of Cairo's 
coffeehouses, long a bastion 
of Egyptian males. The angry 
reaction to soldiers in Cairo 
who chased female protesters 
and subjected them to virgin- 
ity tests showed just how much 
the public mood had changed. 

But two years on, the prom- 
ise of individual as well as 
national liberation still hangs 
in the balance. The secular 
youths who braved the batons 
and bullets seem mere stalking 
horses for the Islamist cavalr 
bent on regulating according 
to God's word not only the 
public life of Arabs but their 
private predilections as well. Among the first victims were 
Alexandria's statues of bare-breasted mermaids, which for 
more than a century had borne a hunky Zeus on a marble plat- 
ter. During the French Revolution, women bared their breasts; 
during Egypt's, iconoclasts covered them up. 

Rather than welcoming the tempests of change blowing the 
idea of liberty from Europe, the Arab world seems to have suc- 
cumbed to the puritanical sandstorms that have since ancient 
times periodically blown in from the Sahara, cleansing like 
pumice stones the epicurean ways of the southern Mediter- 
ranean with rugged monotheism. Clerics railed against the 


INSTEAD OF BRINGING FREEDOM FOR ALL, THE 
REVOLUTION HAS PROPELLED US BACK YEARS, 
BURVING THE PROGRESS | THOUGHT ID ACQUIRED.” 


Western colonial mores that 
earlier Arab revolutions had 
failed to root out. Although 
hundreds of thousands of 
European settlers had been 
swept out in the 1950s and 
1960s, by the eve of the Arab 
Spring 30 million tourists 
were being invited in each 
year. Helped by natives, these 
tourists played out their Ori- 
ental fantasies, bronzing, 
boozing and bonking on 
North Africa’s beaches. 

The desert-born faith is 
threatening to suppress im- 
moral conduct as remorseless- 
ly as the Saharan sands that 
buried the pharaohs’ fertility 
cults and the Romans’ mosa- 
ics of bacchanals. Jolanare, a 
young lecturer in belles lettres 
dressed in cowboy boots and a 
miniskirt, berated the youths 
in Tunisia, once the most 
sexually liberated country in 
the Arab world and the first 
to rise up against its dictator 
in December 2010, for los- 
ing control to the Islamists. 
“Instead of bringing freedom 
for all, the revolution has pro- 
pelled us back years, burying 
the progress I thought Га 
acquired,” Jolanare said. In 
response to the change, her 
blog sports an illustration of a 
woman’s pubic hair shaped as 
an Islamist’s beard. “I never 
thought that one day I would 
have to defend my basic right 
to exist as a sexual person, 
with breasts, lips and an abil- 
ity to think.” 


For a Western pleasure seeker, 
arriving in Morocco—a mere 
eight miles from southern 
Europe—is like diving into 
the shallow end. Cultural 
battles that rage elsewhere in 
the Arab world peter out by 
the time they clamber over 
the western edge of the Atlas Mountains. Islamists swept the 
elections at the height of the Arab Spring, but their influence 
in Morocco is contained by an imperious monarchy whose cur- 
rent ruler had a reputation in his youth as a playboy. As crown 
prince, Mohammed VI wore slick piano ties and had royal 
bouncers escort him from his advisor’s flat to the VIP lounge 
at Amnesia, the most risqué discotheque I know of in North 
Africa. His love of water sports was so widely known that when 
he became king his subjects called him “ma-Jet-Ski.” 

But once he became king he surfed the Islamist wave 
with remarkable dexterity. He was (continued on page 118) 


be my valentine...?” 


“Will you 


arisian photog- 
rapher David 
Bellemere had no 
idea what he was in 
for when Polish model 
Karolina Szymczak 
arrived at his home. 


He knew he would 

be photographing 
her. He did not know 
how much she would 
inspire him as an art- 
ist. The 21-year-old 
model appeared “very 
fresh,” he remembers, 
“no makeup, such a 
beauty.” He began 
shooting her by the 
window so the natural 
light would paint the 
contours of her body, 
just as he was discov- 
ering them himself. 
And then it hap- 
pened. “She brought 
me to the process of 
creation,” he says, 
“where I forget myself 
and just shoot what 

I love, how I love.” 
This is the definition 
of a muse, one who 
reaches into an art- 
ist's soul and touches 
the wellspring of his 
genius. It was like 

“a state of ecstasy,” 
Bellemere says. “It 
doesn't happen often. 
I loved it.” So do we. 


NOUN (myüz] 1. A goddess of inspiration presiding over an art 


\ N 1 


In 1977 a former stuntman named 
Hal Needham and his pals Burt 
Reynolds, Sally Field and 

Jackie Gleason invented 

a new genre of movie. 


Smokey and the 


Bandit may not 
seem earth- 
shattering now, 
but it changed 
Hollywood 
forever 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY 


CAR BY 
CARL STEUER 
OF BLACKHORSE 
MOTORS, LOS ANGELES 


76 


ON OPENIN IGHT 
THERE WERE AISLES.O 
POSH VELVET SEATS; 


MOST OF THEM EMP ЕУ 


his past December， 
during a fancy all- 
duded-up Governors 
Awards ceremony at the 
Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los 
Angeles, Hal Needham, 
the legendary stuntman 
and director of Smokey and 
the Bandit and The Can- 
nonball Run, stepped up 
to the podium to claim his 
honorary Oscar. The dare- 
devil, square-jawed vet- 
eran of hair-raising stunts 


in more than 300 feature films—in 
which he broke 56 bones, twice broke 
his back, fractured a collarbone, punc- 
tured a lung and lost several teeth— 
Needham, 81, has earned the slight 
hitch in his giddyup that now dents 
his famed swagger. Besides, he prob- 


ably never expected the film indus- 
try to salute him for his life's work— 
particularly if he flashed back to May 
19, 1977, the Thursday night his debut 
movie turned America's grandest, most 
popular movie showplace, New York 
City's 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall, 
into an outsize art deco ghost town. 

On that white-knuckle night, not 
even the allure of 100 leggy Rockettes 
high-kicking in slinky military precision 
managed to draw flies to the world pre- 
miere of Needham's directing debut, 


Smokey and the Bandit. For the uniniti- 
ated or those who may need a reminder, 
the twangy barnstormer is 96 minutes 
of pedal-to-the-metal, Southern-fried, 
grinning-ear-to-ear car chases and bad- 
assery featuring a runaway bride, a 
scene-stealing hound and the even big- 
ger scene-stealing Jackie Gleason as a 
short-fused, potty-mouthed sheriff—not 
to mention the plot: To win an $80,000 
bet, ultracool outlaw Burt Reynolds, 
driving a black Pontiac Firebird Trans 
Am, and ace trucker Jerry Reed, behind 
the wheel of a souped-up semi, have 
to haul 400 cases of contraband Coors 
1,800 miles in under 28 hours. 

But back in 1977, Manhattan wasn't 
cottoning to Needham's raucous, 
randy good-old-boy salute to hot cars, 
18-wheelers, open throttles and two- 
lane blacktops. The release of Smokey 
and the Bandit wasn't trumpeted in 
high-profile Burt Reynolds interviews, 
there was no red-carpet opening, and 
Needham hadn't been flown out to 
publicize the flick. Not surprisingly, 
the New York film critics were short 
on Northern hospitality. The New York 
Times deemed the movie fit only for 
"audiences capable of slavering all over 
a Pontiac Trans Am, 18-wheel tractor- 
trailer rigs and dismembered police 
cruisers and motorcycles." Other re- 
viewers found it "thoroughly unimagi- 
native" and an "unfortunate waste of 
talent." Nobody involved in the mak- 
ing of Smokey was naive enough to 
think they had (continued on page 130) 


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КУ ILLUSTRATION BY YUTA ONODA 


A., a schoolteacher in a provincial town, 

decided to spend his summer holiday 

near a lake and woods, not far from where 

he lived. He rented a screened porch in a 

cabin (he couldn't afford a whole house) 

and began to live there very quietly. He 

@ left in the morning with a backpack and 

returned late at night. He never asked for 

anything and refused offers of dinner leftovers, to the chagrin 

of his landlady, who had planned to charge him for food or, at 
least, for the use of a hot plate. 

A.A.'s search for privacy and independence didn't take into 
account a certain Aunt Alevtina, a resident of Moscow and 
his landlady's distant relative. Alevtina visited the cabin every 
summer. She'd stay two weeks and leave in a van loaded with 
fresh preserves. She stayed in a small room in the landlady's 
shed, a room she had equipped with a small television and re- 
frigerator. She paid the electric bill by a separate meter at the 
end of her stay. Again, the landlady was left without a profit, 
although, to be fair, her grandkids did stay with Aunt Alevtina 
in Moscow over Christmas holidays and got to see the Kremlin. 


On the night of Alevtina's arrival, the landlady was boiling 
a samovar on pinecones. She opened conversation with com- 
plaints about her miserly tenant. 

“Stingy, you wouldn't believe. First thing he tells me, he isn't 
going to use any power. Unmarried too.” 

“Huh.” 


“I said unmarried. Thirty-five years old. Not a crumb on his 
porch. What does he eat?” 

“Maybe he catches the bus to town, goes to the cafeteria 
there.” 

“Ha! The bus doesn’t stop here most of the time. Well, so 
how about my black currants? Will you buy any this year?” 

“Only if the berries are large.” 

“Large! After all the work, all the watering....” 

And the irritated landlady went on to stipulate the virtues 
of her black currants, hungry for a deal. Alevtina, rumor had 
it, lived in Moscow in great comfort and even wealth. At the 
thought of Alevtina's riches, the landlady wanted to boast. She 
mentioned two magnificent apartments that she gave to her 
daughters and their worthless husbands when their old house 
was demolished. One husband was in the police, the other a 
fireman at a factory; he worked one day and slept two, but try 
to get him to fix the roof—he's too busy watching soap operas. 
His brats are shipped to Grandma's every summer and she's 
expected to provide all the meals and so forth. 

At this moment, A.A. slipped in through the gate and 
climbed onto his porch. He reappeared with two buckets, 
filled them with water from the well and began washing 
himself down to the waist. The two Penelopes watched him 
over their teacups. 

“Alexeich,” the landlady called out with dignity, although 
a bit uncertainly. “I say, help (continued on page 144) 


79 


THUNDER 
ROAD 


The motorcycle market took a big hit in 2008. Baby boomers, the industry's traditional audience, were cash- 
strapped. Bikes were getting too expensive and feature-laden, losing their purity of purpose and fundamental 
role as fun transportation. Now sales are recovering, thanks to a new generation of simple, affordable, appealing 
motorcycles like the ones pictured here—all of them among the best ever made. 


BEST Sport Bike 


BEST Oruiser 


A 


THE 
Adventurer 


AGV's AX-8 Dual Evo helmet 
5400, agv.com) is lightweight 
and offers panoramic vis 
l-day comfort. Aerostich's 
Roadcrafter jacket (552/ 
3erostich.com| adds prot 


against impacts and Dad w 


оп апо 


ТНЕ 
Son of Anarchy 


The Bell Custom 500 [5140 bell 
iets.com| CPamum coodier 15 
lesigned to fit low to avoid that 
om look Icon's Asso- 
ciate vest (5450, revzilla.com) 
has a removable back protector 


nade of tough polymer 


BEST Adventure 


Café Racer 


go for an AGV RP60 Café 
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on Cobra 2 jacket 


THE 
Speed Freak 
Nexx's ХКІК Champion (54 ) 


x-usa.com] is the lightest 


full-face helmet with the larg- 
est field of vision. Alpinestars' 
TechAir suit ($5,000, alpin 


stars ilt-in 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY SATOSHI 


The Bike That 
Changed My Life 


Two well-known riders 
take a look in the rearview 


BEST Learner 


YAMAHA MOTOGP RACER 


Ben Spies 


"The Yamaha PW50. When I 
first got on and rode it as a kid, 1 
knew that riding would be a part 
of my life in a big way. My mom 
encouraged BMX and motocross, 
but that wasn't the same for me 
Those bikes were fun, but 让 was 
the PW50 I came back to. I started 
asking how to get into a club race. 
I was able to take my test to join 
the Central Motorcycle Roadracing 
d sim Association when I was eight years 
š old. I couldn't master the written 
test and was allowed to take it 
with the board members asking me 


sible. CCW's Tha Misfit is nearly 


00 pounds lighter than other 250s and uses 
a redes version of Honda's legendary CG motor | 


s as basic as an er gir 


noment stylish, genuinely fun to ride ied in ( : қ 
sive. Even starting out, you'll be able to use full-throttle acceleration the questions. My first race Каз 
Just avoid aggressive freeways; the bike's top speed isn't quite enough to keep up with the flow at the end of the year; I was still 


eight years old.” 


BEST Commuter 


TONIGHT SHOW HOST 


Jay Leno 


"The most influential motorcy- 
cle in my life was the Honda 
CBX1000 because it's the only 
one I ever bought new. I grew up in 
the 19606, when muscle cars were 
faster than motorcycles. Motor- 
cycle technology wasn't moving 
quickly. But when the Honda CBX 
came along in 1978, it came out of 


e | Honda's new jack-of-all :conomy. At 64 miles nowhere. And it was a six-cylinder! 

a per gallon, the bike is more frugal than the firm's 250 cc bikes but fast enough to out- An 85-horsepower, six-cylinder 

e lerate cars. It's equally at home with a solo rider or two-up and packs a motorcycle seemed like the most 
l ad better than nearly any other bike. Fit the al top box and p s and this audacious thing T'd ever seen. It 
thing will carry you on a cross-country camping trip or haul a week's worth of shopping for your was just unbelievable. I bought 
family. If you're looking to make the switch from four wheels to two, this is the bike to do it on one new, I crashed it, and with the 


insurance money I went down and 
got another one. And I still have it.” 


BEST Touring 
ж BMW к 1600 СТІ. $23,200 


BEST Electric 
— The Empulse R is the first fully elec- 
| 0 tric motorcycle that can travel 
a farther than 100 miles on a charge 


and top 100 miles per hour. It's also 
one of the best-handling bikes ever made. The 
tiny Oregon-based start-up Brammo modeled 
suspension geometry and ergonomics from one 
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But it's the electric drivetrain that elevates the 
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hardwiring your brain to the tires. Who knew 
breaking speed limits could be so eco-friendly? 


ә, 


ESE 
“i 


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Ж HARLEY-DAV 


fou сапт г 


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ie original. Harley has been manufactur 


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ENGINE ill 883 CC V-TWIN | TORQUE |! 55 FT.-LBS 
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BY ERIC SPITZNAGEL 
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL MULLER 


THE COMIC WHO REDEFINES THE WORD NERD COMES CLEAN 
ABOUT HIS DAYS ON MTV, HOW A JON STEWART INSULT CHANGED 
HIS LIFE AND WHY GEEKS ARE THE NEW SEX MACHINES 


01 


PLAYBOY: Your podcast, called Nerdist, gets 4 million down- 
loads every month. Are podcasts the future of comedy or just 
something to do while you wait to get cast in a sitcom? 
HARDWICK: | do podcasts for the same reasons І do stand- 
up comedy. | love it, and | don't care if anybody else gets 

it. | don't know if the podcast as a medium will ever have 
the cultural impact that TV and movies do. It may never be 
super-mainstream. For some people, you say podcasts and 
they're like, “What the hell is that?” They don't understand 
it's like a radio show you can download. Mainstream culture 


is like your mom: It's always a little late to catch on and gets 
easily confused by technology, but it means well. 


02 


PLAYBOY: What exactly is a nerdist? Is it just a fancy word 
for nerd? 

HARDWICK: | think the Urban Dictionary defines nerdist as 
“an artful nerd.” That's not bad. It's on the safe side of pre- 
tentious. Nerdists, unlike nerds, tend to be creators as much 
as consumers. They're creative consumers. They don't just 


86 


sit and watch passively. They're crafty. 
They make shirts and posters and con- 


fectionery things. 


3 


Nerds have been around 
since the dawn of time. Why are they 
getting respect now? 

Because nerds make 
money. | hate to say it, but because of 
humanity's capitalistic nature, money 
is important. And with money comes 
power. | think it's also about acces- 
sibility. So many people of this current 
generation have grown up with tech- 
nology and video games, it's not nerdy 
to like that kind of stuff anymore. Nerd 
culture is ubiquitous. 


4 


Nerdist Industries is the 
name of your media empire of websites, 
podcasts and YouTube videos. In what 
ways are you similar to ruthless 19th 
century industrialist George Pullman? 

In every way. [/aughs] 
Pve always had a fondness for that 
satirical, Terry Gilliam-esque evil 
corporate megastructure, the kind 
of business that hangs banners that 
Say MAKING YOUR LIFE BETTER as it throws 
kittens into the gears. | want Nerdist 
Industries to be like that. For a while 
we were using the slogan “Nerdist: 
Making Today the Yesterday of Tomor- 
row,” which is just stupid. It’s dumb 


doublespeak. But the whole idea of 
being an industry is about making fun 
of people's confusion. 


5 


You were born in Kentucky 
and raised in Tennessee, but you don't 
have even a trace of a Southern accent. 
Do you consider yourself a Southerner? 

| love the South. Although 
І grew up primarily in Memphis, my 
family moved around a ton when | 
was a kid. | guess | never stayed in 
one place long enough to pick up the 
accent, but I definitely identify as a 
Southerner. | fucking love grits, for one 
thing. | am a grits-eating motherfucker. 
І love all Southern cooking—collard 
greens, black-eyed peas, ІЛІ eat it all. 
Put me in the kitchen and you'll see 
how Southern I can be. 


6 


Your father is a retired pro- 
fessional bowler. Were you ever pres- 
sured to go into the family business? 

Absolutely not. Both 
my parents recognized early on that 
I wanted to do something іп com- 
edy, and they were really supportive. 
They're the ones who bought me 
Steve Martin records and let me watch 
R-rated comedies long before they 
probably should have. But I still spent 
a lot of time bowling as a kid, mostly 
because | grew up in bowling alleys. 


They were kind of my playgrounds. 
Not only was my dad a pro bowler, but 
my mother's father and brother both 
owned their own bowling centers. I 
still bowl today, though I wouldn't rec- 
ommend doing it with me. I'm not fun 
to bowl with, believe me. I take it way 
too seriously. 

1 


How did you discover 

your nerd tendencies growing up in a 
bowling alley? It's not a nerd-friendly 
environment. 

It can be. That's where 
І got into arcade games. My grand- 
father, my mom’s dad, who was a 
really smart and wonderful man, was 
a technophile. He was the first guy 
to buy those big laser-disc players in 
1979. He had the latest camcorders 
and stereo systems and Betamax play- 
ers. He noticed early on that video 
games were a big deal, so he set up a 
massive arcade in his bowling center 
in Florida. | spent all my time there. 
When | wasn't playing video games, 
my friends and | would play Dungeons 
& Dragons or chess at the bar. | had 
full access to all my nerd obsessions. 
I guess when | think about it, | was a 
spoiled piece of shit. 


8 


You're not a fan of competi- 
tive athletic (continued on page 141) 


STYLIST: ALEXIA SOMERVILLE AT DE ANNESLEY AGENCY; 


GROOMING: STEPHANIE HOBGOOD FOR EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS/REDKEN 


“Не is nice, well educated and a hard worker. But I'm only attracted to bad boys...!” 


87 


Mower Lower 


VENTURE INTO OUR SECRET GARDEN, WHERE WILD BLOSSOM MISS MARCH AWAITS IN FULL BLOOM 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY SASHA EISENMAN 


ith winter darkness primed to blaze into floral glory, our thoughts turn to one of Emerson’s most 

brilliant turns of phrase: “The earth laughs in flowers.” For true transcendence, we offer a ravish- 

ing bloom in human form: Miss March Ashley Doris, an exotic rose (and our first Connecticut-born 

and -bred Playmate) of black, Spanish, English and German extraction. She’s not afraid to get 
her hands dirty. “Not only have I worked in a florist shop since I was 18,” says the 23-year-old college senior, 
“but I’ve been obsessed with flowers all my life. Back in elementary school I’d bring a huge flower encyclope- 
dia for reading time, and I signed our yearbook “Ashley Doris, a.k.a. the Flower Queen.’” Ashley’s favorites 
are orchids, roses and hydrangeas. And listen up: The lady is hungry for a bouquet. “Гуе said to friends many 
times, ‘I wish a guy would just buy me flowers.’ To me that’s the most romantic thing you can do,” she tells us. 
“But I’ve received flowers from a boy only once—when I was 17. If you want to get a girl’s attention, call a flo- 
rist. It’s not hard, boys!” Miss March is also a romance-novel devotee, and her photo shoot allowed her to live 
out her most idyllic fantasies. “With literally buckets of fragrant roses, amaryllises and peonies on hand, along 
with the lacy vintage wardrobe, I swear I was channeling one of the romance-novel heroines I’ve loved for so 
many years.” She smiles. “Now that I’m a Playmate, the story keeps getting better.” 


` 
PLAYBOY'S PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH 


MISS MARCH 


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PLAYBOY”S PARTY JOKES 


For a РгАҮВОҮ sex survey we asked women 
if they had ever faked an orgasm. Forty-six 
percent responded, “Yes, yes! Oh God, yes!” 


А man lived next door to a porn star. He saw 
her as he was leaving to go on a date and then 
ran into her again on the way home. 

“How was your date?” she asked. 

“Ugh,” he replied, “I only got to first base.” 

The porn star commiserated, “Well, at least 
you got your asshole licked.” 


The older you get the more you enjoy things 
you hated as a kid—like taking naps and get- 
ting spanked. 


А man was waiting at the only pay phone left 
in the city. He stood outside the booth for five 
minutes, and after noticing that the guy inside 
wasn't speaking into the phone, he knocked. 

“Just hold on, buddy!” the man inside 
responded, covering the receiver. “I’m talking 
to my wife.” 


A blonde took her goldfish to the vet and told 
him, “I think it has epilepsy.” 

The vet took a look at the fish and said, “It 
seems calm enough to me.” 

The blonde responded, “Well, I haven't 
taken it out of the bowl yet.” 


Pıavsov classic: Why don't boxers have sex 
before a big fight? 
They don't like each other. 


Ап awkward boy called up a girl to ask for a 
date. “Would you like to see a movie with me 
Friday?” he asked. 

“Sure,” she said, “but I would like to go out 
to dinner first.” 

“Okay, great!” he answered. “Tell me where 
you're going and when you'll be done eating so 
І сап pick you up.” 


Why do dogs stick their noses in women’s 
crotches? 
Because they can. 


Two homosexual men were lamenting old 
flames. “My ex-boyfriend, what an asshole!” 
the first said. 

“Yeah,” the second replied, “and his cock 
wasn't bad either.” 


Doc, kiss me,” a woman cooed. 

“T can’t,” he replied. 

“Doc, please kiss me,” she begged. 

“Look, lady,” the doctor said, “I probably 
shouldn’t even be fucking you.” 


A survey was conducted to discover why men 
get out of bed in the middle of the night: Five 
percent said it was to drink a glass of water, 12 
percent said it was to go to the bathroom, and 
83 percent said it was to go home to their wives. 


A man came home from work early to find his 
best friend on top of his wife of 23 years. 

He looked despondent. He shook his head 
and said, “Steve, I have to, but you?” 


A young man who was home from college for 
Easter decided to come out to his parents. 

“Mom, Dad, I'm gay,” he said flatly. 

Silence hung over the dinner table for a few 
minutes before his mother piped up, “Does 
that mean you suck men’s cocks?” 

“Yeah,” he answered. 

She then said, “Don’t you ever complain 
about my cooking again.” 


My wife and I have been playing doctor 
lately,” a man told a friend whose marriage 
was in a sexual slump. “You and your wife 
should try it.” 

A few days later the man checked up on his 
friend to see how he was making out. “The 
role-playing isn’t much fun,” the second admit- 
ted. “The sex is the same, but now she keeps 
me waiting 45 minutes.” 


A young man who was visiting home on 
spring break called up an ex-girlfriend. “Are 
you free tonight?” he asked. 

“No,” she said, “but I can give you a reason- 
able price.” 


Send your jokes to Playboy Party Jokes, 9346 
Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 
90210, or by e-mail to jokes@playboy.com. 
PLAYBOY will pay $100 to the contributors whose 
submissions are selected. 


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50 YEARS 
of he 


PLAYBOY 


INTERVIEW 


Hunter S. 
Thompson 


The father of gonzo journalism 
took too many drugs, ran with 
the Hells Angels, chatted with 
Nixon and ultimately killed 
himself. A look back at a 

classic conversation with 

a classic iconoclast 


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SAL SATTERWHITE/MORRISON HOTEL GALLERY 


fter the journalist, politician, rogue, 
provocateur and unapologetic mad- 
man Hunter S. Thompson took his own 
life in 2005, his friends, including the 
actors Johnny Depp and Jack Nicholson, honored 
his last wishes. They fired Thompson’s ashes out 
of acannon. It would have been considered an un- 
usual choice for anyone else; for Thompson it was 
a fittingly incendiary and irreverent send-off of a 
man who had spent his life exploding convention. 

Thompson, who wrote for PLAYBOY, Rolling 
Stone, The Nation and other publications, had 
his first megahit with Hell's Angels: The Strange 
and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle 
Gangs, a book based оп a year he'd spent riding 
with the Angels. It was the first book written in 
Thompson's signature style of gonzo journalism, 
in which the author isn't merely an observer but a 
participant in the stories he covers, no matter how 
extreme his participation becomes. Thompson 
pushed gonzo further in his next book, Fear and 
Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the 
Heart of the American Dream, which chronicles 
his drug-fueled antics as he covers a conven- 
tion of district attorneys. The book is considered 
a classic, one of the funniest and most irrever- 
ent ever written. Soon after, Thompson became 
the model for Uncle Duke, a central character in 
Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip. 

In 1972 Thompson went back on the road, 
this time to cover the presidential race between 
George MeGovern and Richard Nixon. The re- 
sult was the brilliant Fear and Loathing: On the 
Campaign Trail. Increasingly, nothing separated 
Thompson's life from his work. He wrote about 
drugs and shooting guns—and he took drugs and 
shot guns. He wrote about politics, and he ran for 


political office. (He lost a bid to become sheriff of 


his Colorado hometown.) 

When he was 67, Thompson, who had suffered 
a series of ailments over the previous few years, 
committed suicide. 

Back in 1974 PLAYBOY sent journalist Craig 
Vetter to interview Thompson for the Novem- 
ber issue. In the interview Thompson extolled 
drugs and skewered Nixon, who, after winning 
the 1972 election, was embroiled in the inves- 
tigation of the Watergate burglary and its cover- 
up. The interview was almost complete when, 
nine days before deadline, Nixon resigned. *We 
might have finished this thing like gentlemen, 
except for Richard Nixon, who might as well 
have sent the plumbers’ unit to torch the entire 
second half, the political half, of the manuscript 
we have worked on so long," wrote Vetter. “All 
of it has had to be redone in the past few sleep- 
less days, and it has broken the spirit of nearly 
everyone even vaguely involved." 


PLAYBOY: Do you get off on politics the same way 
you get off on drugs? 

THOMPSON: Sometimes. It depends on the poli- 
tics, depends on the drugs...there are different 
kinds of highs. I had this same discussion in Mex- 
ico City one night with a guy who wanted me to do 
Zihuatanejo with him and get stoned for about 10 


days on the finest flower tops to be had in all of 


Mexico. But I told him I couldn't do that; I had to 
be back in Washington. 

PLAYBOY: That doesn't exactly fit your image as 
the drug-crazed outlaw journalist. Are you saying 
you'd rather have (continued on page 125) 


101 


rar 


DIAMOND MOUNTAIN 


People come from all over the world to Arizona’s Diamond Mountain 


Uc 


AUN 


AND 


Re Sç 


A 


University, hoping to master Tibetan teachings and achieve peace of mind. 
For some, the search for enlightenment can go terribly wrong 


an Thorson was dying of dehydration on an Arizona mountaintop, 
and his wife, Christie McNally, didn't think he was going to make it. 
At six in the morning she pressed the red SOS button on an emer- 
gency satellite beacon. Five hours later a search-and-rescue helicop- 
ter thumped its way to the stranded couple. Paramedics with medical 
supplies rappelled off the hovering aircraft, but Thorson was already 
dead when they arrived. McNally required hospitalization. 

The two had endured the elements inside a tiny, hollowed-out 
cave for nearly two months. To keep the howling winds and freak 
snowstorms at bay, they had dismantled a tent and covered the 
cave entrance with the loose cloth. Fifty yards below, in a cleft in 
the rock face, they had stashed a few Rubbermaid tubs filled with 
supplies. Even though they considered themselves Buddhists in 
the Tibetan tradition, an oversize book on the Hindu goddess 
Kali lay on the cave floor. When they moved there, McNally and 
Thorson saw the cave as a spiritual refuge in the tradition of the 
great Himalayan masters. Their plan was as elegant as it was 


By Scott Carney Y Illustration by Chris Buzelli 


104 


treacherous: They would occupy the 
cave until they achieved enlighten- 
ment. They didn't expect they might 
die trying. 

Almost irrespective of the actual 
spiritual practices on the Himalayan 
plateau, the West's fascination with 
all things Tibetan has spawned mov- 
ies, spiritual studios, charity rock 
concerts and best-selling books that 
range from dense philosophical texts 
to self-help guides and methods to 
Buddha-fy your business. It seems as 
if almost everyone has tried a spiri- 
tual practice that originated in Asia, 
either through a yoga class, quiet 
meditation or just repeating the syl- 
lable om to calm down. 

For many, the East is an antidote 
to Western anomie, a holistic coun- 
terpoint to our chaotic lives. We don 
stretchy pants, roll out yoga mats 
and hit the medi- 
tation cushion on 
the same day that 
we argue about 
our cell phone bill 
with someone in 
an Indian call cen- 
ter. Still, we look 
to Asian wisdom to 
center ourselves, 
to decompress and 
to block off time to 
think about life's 
bigger questions. We trust that the 
teachings are authentic and hold the 
key to some hidden truth. 

We forget that the techniques we 
practice today in superheated yoga 
studios and air-conditioned halls 
originated in foreign lands and feu- 
dal times that would be unrecogniz- 
able to our modern eyes: eras when 
princely states went to war over small 
points of honor, priests dictated social 
policy and sending a seven-year-old 
to live out his life in a monastery was 
considered perfectly ordinary. 

Yoga, meditation, chakra breath- 
ing and chanting are powerful physi- 
cal and mental exercises that can 
have profound effects on health and 
well-being. On their own they are 
neither good nor bad, but like pow- 
erful life-saving drugs, they also have 
the potential to cause great harm. As 
the scholar Paul Hackett of Columbia 
University once told me, "People are 
mixing and matching religious sys- 
tems like Legos. And the next thing 
you know, they have some fairly 
powerful psychological and physical 
practices contributing to whatever id- 
iosyncratic attitude they've come to. 
It is no surprise people go insane." 

No idea out of Asia has as much 
power to capture our attention as 
enlightenment. It is a goal we strive 
toward, a sort of perfection of the 


1. Christie McNally and lan Thorson, from their book on yoga. 2. The view of Diamond Moun- 
tain University from the area where Thorson died. 3. The entrance to the cave where Thorson 
and McNally spent nearly two months. 4. Michael Roach during a lecture in Arizona. 5. A chilling 
exchange, written during McNally's silent retreat, in which McNally addresses rumors of violence. 


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soul, mind and body in which every 
action is precise and meaningful. For 
Tibetans seeking enlightenment, the 
focus is on the process. Americans, 
for whatever reason, search for in- 
ner peace as though they're compet- 
ing in a sporting event. Thorson and 


à 


ok, Im Wh Mar W 


McNally pursued it with the sort of 
gusto that could break a sprinter’s 
leg. And they weren’t alone. More 
than just the tragedy of obscure 
meditators who went off the rails in 
nowhere Arizona, Thorson’s death 
holds lessons (continued on page 136) 


“Just because Гое made it to the top, that doesn't mean it's the only position I like.” 


105 


M MY MY Á 


Grooming 
Guide 


2; 
2 
2 
Z 


Қы 


ЖА 


ТНЕ СОТ 


% Because the short hair оп 
the sides and back of the 
head doesn't gradually blend 
into the much-longer hair 

on top, this style—recently 
repopularized by the band 
Arcade Fire and characters on 
Boardwalk Empire—is techni- 
cally called an undercut. 


HOW TO ASK FOR IT 


% “Use a number one clipper 
guard, then a number two all 
the way to the crown; leave 
the top heavy but even.” 


Photography by 


THE FADE HAIRCUT IS BACK AND COOLER 
THAN EVER. HERE'S HOW TO MAKE IT 
WORK WITH ALL TYPES OF HAIR 


RYLAN PERRY 


Illustrations by 


ELISABETH 
MOCH 


efore we bust out the scissors, let's talk terminology. A “fade” haircut 
is one in which the hair at the sides and back of the head is cut very 
short—usually short enough to see the skin underneath—with the hair 
gradually decreasing (i.e., fading) in length, starting out long at the top 
of the head and ending up short near the ears and nape of the neck. The 
fade can be traced back to the bons vivants of the Roaring Twenties, 
who made it the defining do ofthe decade. The style has been around 
ever since, cycling in popularity about every 30 years, most recently 
with barbers across the country reporting an increased demand for 
the Darmody—a version worn by the eponymous character on HBO's 
Boardwalk Empire. It's obvious why the fade has never faded away: It's 
easy to ask for and easy to take care of, and its endless variations fit 
almost every hair type and face shape. Although any barber worth his 
pole can make the fade fit what mother nature gave you, here's what 
you need to know to look your dapper best.—Adam Tschorn 


^ There's a rea- ) 

son every good ) p 
barber has a 
blow-dryer. 


THROW IN 
THE TOWEL 


Although we're big advo- 
cates of no-fuss towel 
drying (completely and 
thoroughly, we might 
add—the better to let your 
product work its magic), 
a blow-dryer is ап essen- 
tial tool for more dramatic 
fade hairstyles. One vir- 
tue ofthe fade is that you 
can easily convert it from 
office-sleek to a party- 
ready pompadour. 


STEP ONE 


Dry your hair with the 
blow-dryer set on medium— 
you don't want to singe 
your hair. 


STEP TWO 


2 Rub a dime-size dollop of 

product between your palms 

and work it through your hair 
from the roots to the tips. 


STEP THREE 


2 Brush your hair up 
and away from the scalp 
while blow-drying it one 

more time. 


М2 2, Scissor Fade 


THE CUT 


% This is one of the most 
popular and versatile ver- 
sions of the fade because of 
the not-so-severe scissored 
sides that make it appropri- 
ate for the office. Go David 
Beckham long or Adam 
Levine short. 


HOW TO ASK FOR IT 


% “Маке the sides short with- 
out using a clipper. Keep 
enough height so | can style 
itup, like a shorter James 
Dean cut.” 


Barber Daniel Alfonso’s 
Alfonsoat j | exquisite 
Baxter Finley Mizutani 
in Los Angeles. | iseissors 


Required = 
reading Arestored 
atthe best vintage chair at 
barbershops. Baxter Finley. 


í MY MY Á 


Grooming 
Guide 


N° 


fro Fade 


іш =. 
\ -一 y 
| A 
Na, 
Ж 
р 
THE CUT 


% For those with tight, coily- 
curly Afro-textured hair. Skip the 
Kid 'n Play vertical version and 
go for the scalp-hugging low 
fade worn dashingly by Usher. 


HOW TO ASK FOR IT 
% “Маке me look like Men іп 
Black Will Smith, not Fresh 

Prince Will Smith.” 


THE CUT 


% The quintessential fade has 
the most fading. The hair gradu- 
ally goes from scalp-short at the 
base to long on top. 


HOW TO ASK FOR IT 

* "| want it long enough on top so 
that | can slick it back. Blend it at 
the crown and gradually clipper 
down to a number one guard.” 


Take care ofthat fine head of hair 


YT THE MESI 


) | MAINTAIN IT 4 


* Go classic with C.O. * Use Grant's * Between visits to the 
Bigelow Barber series pomade ($17) for a barber, keep your side- 
Elixir Black hair sleek and shiny look. burns trimmed with 
and body wash ($10) Finish with a groom- the Wahl Chrome 
scented with amber and ing brush ($149) or Pro haircutting 
musk, or J.R. Liggett’s folding comb ($15) clipper kit ($40). 
bar shampoo ($8)— from British company Budding barbers 
one bar gives you as Kent, available at should invest in 
many washes as a groominglounge.com. 44/20 thinning 
24-ounce bottle of shears ($120). 


liquid shampoo. Follow 
soapsuds with suds 
of another sort with 
Duffy’s Brew Origi- 
nal Craft Beer E.S.B. 
conditioner ($20). 


Photography by SATOSHI 


> When humidity and exertion conspire against 
the best haircuts and products, all is not lost. For 
a stylish and instant solution to a bad hair day, 
don a goes-with-anything sleek black director’s 
cap from Gents ($49, gentsco.com). The elegant 
and authoritative low-profile design will make 
moisture a moot point. Use Axe’s new Reset 
waterless foam shampoo ($5) when you don't 
have time to shower. 


VECTOR ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROBERT HARKNESS 


01 
BAXTER FINLEY 


Los Angeles 


° This exquisitely 
designed shop offers 
movie-star-quality cuts 


for an everyman 40 bucks 


apop. David Beckham 
takes his kids here. 
Enough said. 


baxterfinley. com 


04 
MOJO BARBERSHOP 


Honolulu 


* The owners have cre- 
ated a social-club-style 
salon where customers 


can enjoy flatscreen TVs, 


vintage magazines and 
cold beer in Honolulu's 
Chinatown. 
mojobarbershop.com 


N° ES 


She Situation 


% There are some versions of 
the fade to evade, and the Sit- 
uation’s situation is Exhibit A. 


His cut doesn’t blend from 


clipper to scissor length until 
so high on the crown it bor- 
ders on faux-hawk territory. 


Plus, it’s too short on top to 
sweep away from the fore- 


head without creating a gelled 


cowlick halfway back. 


02 
THE BELMONT 
BARBERSHOP 


Chicago 


* Though less than a 
decade old, this shop, 
with its self-consciously 
cluttered interior and 
taxidermied marlin 
hanging on the wall, is a 
throwback to an unfussy 
era of manly grooming. 
belmontbarbershop.com 


gae 


Thebestofthe 


vetro barbershop 


Fevival 


05 
FRANK'S 
BARBERSHOP 


Knoxville 


* Dartboards and dark 
wood give this spot a con- 
fident masculine vibe we 
like when a dude's using a 
straight razor on us. 
franksbarbershop.net 


) | FADE OUT |4 


Two fade haircuts to avoid at all costs (unless it’s Halloween) 


03 : 
BLIND BARBER : 

New York : HOLD, 
。A free cocktail : PLEASE 
with every haircut? 
We're sold. Both 

the original Manhat- 
tan location and the 
new Los Angeles out- 
post have speakeasies 
in back. 
blindbarber.com 


Nothing ruins a 
primo haircut like bad 
product. Skip stiff and 

shiny gel and use one 
of the following. 


CLAY 


> The matte finish 
makes this good for 
providing hold while 
keeping hair looking nat- 
ural. Try Sebastian Craft 
Clay ($20). 


FIBER 


7? Use American Crew 
Fiber ($15) to build 
texture and volume in 
thinner hair and give a 
medium shine. 


PASTE 
: Paste gives a softer 
06 : hold you can rework 
: throughout the day. 
2B GROOMED : Supremo Magic Move 


STUDIOS : ($25) comes in varieties 


formulated for all 


SS. mans è hair types. 

* In addition to clas- ; 

sic cuts and a vintage : POMADE | 
1940svibe,thisbarber- : 7? Older brands аге oil 


or wax based, but newer 


shop offers traditional : water-based brands such 
straight-razor shaves. : as Mitch by Paul Mitchell 


2bgroomedstudios.com : ($20) wash out easily. 
: The shiniest of the bunch. 


“Є 
Vanilla Ice 


% What really puts Rob 
Van Winkle's onetime 
trademark do on the do- 
not-resuscitate list is 
the trio of shaved hori- 
zontal lines spanning 
his sidewalls. Leave the 
stars and stripes to Old 
Glory and tattoo artists 
and keep your head a 
graffiti-free zone. 


AN EROTIC GUIDE TO ALL 
THINGS SILKY AND SHEER 


AA mo Ң | | 


e all know men are enchanted by a 
woman in lingerie, but most are flum- 
moxed as to exactly why. Men tend 
not to talk of frills, lace or silk, but 
on a beautiful woman it's a language they in- 
stantly speak. To explore this : 
conundrum, we decamped to ( ` = 
a grand mansion on the out- 
skirts of Prague with a Victo- 
ria’s Secret photographer, а 
Hollywood fashion stylist and 
three beautiful women. We 
brought trunks of silk stockings, garter belts, 
corsets, camisoles and other diaphanous deli- 


cates to both conceal and reveal the beauty of 


the female form. On these pages you'll wit- 
ness what we uncovered and learn what you 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY 


Michael Bonaid | 


V 


need to know to help you the next time you're 
in the market for something unmentionable 
for the woman—or women—in your Ше. To 
assist us, we recruited stylist Jonas Hallberg, 
who has made beauties such as Megan Fox, 

= Jessica Alba and Scarlett Jo- 
- ^w hansson all the more beautiful 
in magazines and on the red 
carpet. This is a guy we trust, 
and you should too. “The point 
of lingerie,” says Hallberg, “із 
to help a woman be comfort- 
able with her body, while also making her feel 
and look sexier and more glamorous.” And 
yes, you’re going to have to splurge. “Think of 
it as an investment,” says Hallberg, “one that 
will pay off for both of you in the end.” 


When less is more 


A woman's beauty is at its 
purest without excessive 
adornment and unneces- 
sary layers. A diamond 
choker brings out the 
sparkle in her eyes. Sim- 
ple thigh-high stockings 
in basic black cover just 
enough but don't distract. 
“If you're a real playboy,” 
says Hallberg, “you have 
money. Spend a lot of 
it оп a very few things, 
such as stockings and a 
Tiffany or Harry Winston 
diamond necklace.” 


Potions 


The thighs have it 


Black thigh-high stockings 
highlight the curves of a 
leg, leaving just a flash of 
skin at the top. While the 
long seam down the back 

is an old-fashioned flourish 

in this day and age, the 
way it traces the exquisite 
contour of the thigh and 
calf is an anachronism to be 
embraced. Slip-on heels are 
designed to be kicked off. 


by Frederick’s of 
Hollywood. 


«Фф» 


Damson corset, 
$590, by Agent 
Provocateur. 
Essential sheer 
stockings, $74 
for two pairs, by 
Frederick's of 
Hollywood. 


9e 
242 
^ 


Invest to undress 


“The corset is possibly the most 
powerful piece of lingerie," 
says Hallberg. “It looks hot and 
sexy on any woman, no matter 
if they're skinny, medium or 
extra large." And if the art 
of the striptease is about the 
delayed reveal, the corset is the 
ultimate in access denied—albeit 
momentarily. Until access is 
granted, the garment's struc- 
tured shape accentuates the 
svelte hourglass contours of the 
torso. It can be kinky, it can be 
empowering, but above all it can 
be a dare to both people to con- 
tinue to figure out their roles in 
the game that ensues.... 


Ne. 1 


LACE OFF 


Fo unlace a corset, a 
woman needs a helper. It 
could be you...or it could 

be a third party. 


N. 2 


EN GARTER 


Garter belts keep thigh-high 
stockings from sliding down. 
Unclipping them adds to 
the drama of the moment, 
underscoring the fact that 
all lingerie is a puzzle of 
sorts, a mystery that leads to 
the question: How does this 
thing come off, and who is 
going to do it? 


No. з 


HEEL 


A good pair of stiletto 
pumps adds height and 
conveys power. The high 
heels push the hips back 
and the calves out. Shoes 
can count as a sort of 
lingerie in their own right. 


Damson corset, $590, 
by Agent Provocateur, || 
Essential sheer 
stockings, $14 for two 
pairs, by Freder- 
іск:5 of Hollywood. 
MODEL SITTING: Damson 
suspender brief, $790, 
by Agent Provocateur. 


o — 


You ое chee 


The lace up your sleeve 


A lace robe or camisole 
represents everything 
we love about lingerie. It 
can be kinky or innocent, 
depending on how a woman 
wears it. Above all, it’s 
transparent. “Lace harkens 
back to the golden age of 
Hollywood—Rita Hayworth, 
Ava Gardner and Marilyn 
Monroe,” says Hallberg. 
“It’s timeless and more 
right than ever.” 


PLAYBOY 


118 


ARAB SPRING 


(continued from page 66) 


proclaimed commander of the faithful 
and donned a chaste white caftan, the 
traditional woolen tunic, while allowing 
his subjects to continue to live in a land 
where anything goes. Marrakech, a rose- 
red city on the Sahara's edge, is where 
former International Monetary Fund 
head Dominique Strauss-Kahn sated 
his lust, and even the normally temper- 
ate Financial Times chose the city as the 
site of its luxury conference. Islamists 
in Morocco find themselves the butt of 
secular ridicule, not least from the lead- 
ers of a movement for Berber rights who 
promote their indigenous, pre-Islamic 
culture, decry Arabic as an Eastern co- 
lonial implant and call themselves “beer- 
beristes” to emphasize their rejection of 
Islam’s prohibition of alcohol. The bars 
at the back of the bourse in Casablanca, 
the country’s commercial capital on the 
shores of the Atlantic, seem to bask in 
more red lights than Amsterdam. Down 
the coast, past the mammoth Hassan II 
Mosque, one of the largest in the world, 
lies what may be the Muslim Arab world’s 
only transvestite bar, Le Village, run as a 
family business. Lady-boys in bras gyrate 
to African women banging tom-toms be- 
tween their legs. 

“What does he think of us?” I ask 
Latifa, a flmmaker by day and my guide 
through Morocco's seedier side by night, 
as she hands the keys of her sports car to 
a valet garbed іп a peasant's scruffy tunic. 
“That you're a Western source of corrup- 
tion, and P'm your pute,” she replies, lan- 
guidly wrapping an arm over my shoul- 
der to leave no room for doubt. 

Yet even here there is the furtive 
pitter-patter of the killjoy's advance. The 
kingdom's new Islamist prime minister, 
Abdelilah Benkirane, entered politics by 
campaigning for the contestants in a local 
beauty pageant to replace their swimsuits 
with woolly caftans, turning their hour- 
glass figures into body bags and hooding 
their hair. The intervening years have 
mellowed him into a merrier swashbuck- 
ler. His information minister marked 
Women's Day by giving his female em- 
ployees a box of chocolates and a red 
rose, and his justice minister likes women 
so much he married two. But “immod- 
est” women still make Benkirane flinch. 
He reduced the number of women in his 
cabinet from his predecessor's relatively 
profligate seven to a cautious one, whom 
he predictably appointed to head a wom- 
en's affairs ministry. At his inauguration 
ceremony in January 2012, Benkirane 
accused a bareheaded female journalist 
seeking an interview of molesting him. 

And though government officials in- 
sist they will not formally apply Islamic 
law for now, they are eagerly looking for 
alternatives to tourism—or “sex travel” 
in the words of a Moroccan official —the 
kingdom's foreign-currency mainstay. In 
an attempt to rein in the country's avid 


bikini culture, a relic of Morocco's former 
French rule, Benkirane's justice minis- 
ter won a legal battle to allow veils at the 
beach. “The king has 23 palaces,” he says. 
"At least let us have sand castles." On Fri- 
days, prayer mats jostle for space with 
beach towels. “Forsake not God's law on 
the beaches," rants a bearded doomsayer 
who stalks bathers at Mehdia, a popular 
resort north of Rabat. “O faithful, bare 
not your nudity." The sermon of Abd Al 
Samad Mirdas, a Casablanca preacher, 
reverberates from a car radio, likening 
women to devils. 


Morocco's Kulturkampf is mild com- 
pared with that of Tunisia, 1,000 miles 
to the east, as it lurches from fundamen- 
tal secularism to fundamental Islam. 
Though he ousted the French colonial- 
ists, Tunisia's first president, Habib 
Bourguiba, preserved their values with 
relish. He banned core Islamic practices 
such as the veil and polygamy and dis- 
couraged fasting during the holy month 
of Ramadan. Unique in the Arab world, 
women in tight-fitting jeans frisk men at 
airport security check-ins. Bourguiba's 
successor, a dour policeman named Zine 
al-Abidine Ben Ali, took subservience 
to Europeans one stage further, pros- 
tituting his subjects to their whims. His 
beaches served up "bezness boys" to offer 
relief to aging white women. (The French 
guidebook Routard helpfully lists where 
to find them.) And investors developed 
the southern isle of Djerba, where, leg- 
end has it, the “honey-sweet fruit of the 
lotus" seduced the mariners in Homer's 
Odyssey and, in more recent years, seedy 
bars help Europeans retracing the epic 
achieve a similar "state of lethargic bliss." 

Two years after chasing out Ben Ali, Tu- 
nisians remain torn between their desire 
for liberation from European bondage 
and dire necessity. Tourism, which plays 
a major role in the country's economy, 
declined 30 percent in the revolution's 
first year. In the Place de l'Indépendance, 
the heart of the capital city of Tunis, a 
stone likeness of the medieval Tunisian 
philosopher Ibn-Khaldün—perhaps the 
Arab world's greatest thinker—stands 
encircled by armored cars and webs of 
barbed wire, pondering in which direc- 
tion to turn. Just as Bedouin tribesmen 
burst out of Arabia in Khaldün's time, to- 
day Islamist hordes from the East seem 
poised to overthrow a value system culti- 
vated in the West. 

In the flea market that straddles the 
tracks where the last train arrived in the 
city of Menzel Bourguiba two decades 
ago, a former cave mate of Osama bin 
Laden's sells scarlet-colored women's 
panties. Musab is tall, diffident and pre- 
maturely old. He has an apologetic smile, 
wears a black leather jacket over a red 
shirt and takes a shine to my guide, Fari- 
da, an unveiled female journalist who, 
like Musab, had fled Ben Ali's dictator- 
ship and returned to her hometown only 


after his departure. Both had also spent 
time in Europe, where Farida discov- 
ered the secular highlights of Paris, and 
Musab, after dabbling in drugs, met a 
Belgian imam 一 before meeting Bin Lad- 
en in a Kandahar cave. In 2001, following 
the U.S.-led toppling of the Taliban, he 
was captured, held at a Pakistani military 
base and extradited to a Tunisian jail. He 
escaped in a breakout that followed Ben 
Ali's overthrow in January 2011. 

Though mild and understated, Musab 
is a hero to local unemployed kids who 
wear military fatigues and sport bum- 
fluff beards as old as the revolution. An- 
war, his aide-de-camp, a sort of Sancho 
Panza to Musab's Don Quixote, operates 
his own perfumery opposite Musab's 
stall and runs a sideline in fashionable 
sequined face veils. Like Saint Augustine 
of Hippo, another North African rake 
turned eremite, Anwar found God after 
tiring of a life of debauchery. His youth 
is evocative of that of Black Hand, an ille- 
gal immigrant immortalized in “Clandes- 
tino," a Manu Chao song beloved across 
Tunisia for depicting the fate so many 
share. Like Black Hand, Anwar reached 
"Babylon, a northern city," after traveling 
across the sea in a dinghy. He survived by 
trading cocaine, until one day an imam 
from an Italian mosque in Turin saved 
him. Following the flight of Ben Ali and 
his security apparatus, Musab and Anwar 
acquired a following that they fashioned 
into a morality squad. 'They wrested con- 
trol of Menzel's main mosque, warded 
off looters (who had torched the local 
bank) and harangued a local bar until it 
stopped selling alcohol. 

Few towns reflect the ebb and flow of 
Tunisia's fortunes more than Menzel 
Bourguiba. The French called it Fer- 
ryville, after the 19th century French 
prime minister and imperialist who con- 
sidered it his "duty to civilize inferior 
races" and turn their coastline into na- 
val bases. After independence, Tunisia's 
first president, Bourguiba, called it his 
home 一 in Arabic, Menzel Bourguiba. In 
keeping with his love of French customs, 
he kept its provincial French air. Cast- 
iron railings still enclose prim bungalows; 
in the graveled central square gardeners 
manicure the shrubs that circle a band- 
stand and whitewash the trunks of geo- 
metrically positioned plane trees; old 
codgers still play boules in their shade. 

But since the revolution, Musab's 
ideology—that of jihadi Salafism, which 
espouses holy war to re-create the world 
of the prophet Muhammad—has chal- 
lenged that decorum. Having conquered 
Menzel Bourguiba, his Salafis are now 
targeting nearby Bizerte, northern Tuni- 
sia’s largest city, which was once famed for 
its relaxed secular ways. The city's Mono- 
prix grocery store (part of the French 
supermarket chain) was torched for its 
commercial ties to Ben Ali's family. It 
has reopened—but only after liquor was 
removed from its shelves. Bizerte's red- 
light district lies abandoned; bootleggers 


119 


“Га ask you in, but I have to be at work shortly or my pimp’ll be furious." 


PLAYBOY 


and pimps have fled underground. Fewer 
women venture out unveiled. Even the Is- 
lamist movement, Ennahda, which won re- 
cent elections in Tunisia, is worried about 
the new antidemocratic and misogynist 
radicalism of the Salafis. A banner flutters 
from the balustrade of the local Ennahda 
office, reminding fellow Islamists that half 
the population is female and that the other 
half emerged from them. 

Back in Tunis, bons vivants drink to 
forget. A rare sight in the Arab world: By 
mid-afternoon the bars brim with women 
as well as men, the tables laden with beer 
bottles. In the Red Light Salon de Thé on 
downtown's Avenue de la Liberté, couples 
smooch around small arabesque coffee 
tables beneath neon signs of silhouetted 
naked girls holding the words Red Light 
District—Amsterdam. Girlfriends pet lov- 
ers, and waitresses in velvet waistcoats 
chase customers around the tables. On 
weekends, fathers take their families to 
La Plaza, a resort restaurant in a suburb 
of Tunis. While their children splash in its 
bayside pool, the men sneak into the disco 
below, where girls wrap themselves around 
them like ivy around drainpipes, licking 
and fawning over their fares. Disheveled 
drunks keel over onto the floor with their 
whiskey bottles. “Nothing has changed,” 
says the doorman when І ask about the 
advancing Islamist wave. 

Yet conversations inevitably return to 
the obscurantist threat advancing through 
the provinces. Newspapers report that in 
Jendouba, a town 100 miles to the west 
of the capital, Salafis in starched white 
tunics chased away the police, imposed 
Saudi-style laws and sliced off the hand 
of a suspected thief. The nearby town of 
Sedjenane, Musab tells me, had declared 
itself an Islamic emirate and converted 
the town hall into a sin-bin for drunkards. 
Like the Fatimids (Islamist upstarts who 
used Tunisia as a base to conquer North 
Africa a millennium ago), these moralists 
consider Tunisia the launchpad for their 
future theocracy. 

“The problem is that they just don't get 
laid,” says Amina, who makes candles for 
boutique hotels, as we chat in Le Light, the 
elite's cocktail bar in the Villa Donna ho- 
tel. “They need a fuck.” Others think the 
solution is less simple. Farida, who drove 
me to Menzel Bourguiba in her sports car, 
calls Amina and her Westernized ilk the 
Last of the Mohicans. She fears that her 
own nighttime clubbing is a swan song and 
has kept her apartment in Paris, she says, 
just in case. 

Even in the capital, the new Islamism 
seeps through the cracks. CD stalls in the 
market not far from the statue of the sa- 
gacious Ibn-Khaldún have stopped play- 
ing Western pop after reports that one 
had been torched for “distracting Mus- 
lims from the mosque.” As a precaution, 
the fruit-juice shacks broadcast Koranic 
chants, and in a city where only a few years 
ago a veil was cause for official suspicion, 
jilbabs (head scarves) are commonplace. 
During the first Ramadan since the revolu- 
tion about half the restaurants closed for 


120 lunch, up from 10 percent a year earlier. 


And the tranquil and well-to-do village of 
La Marsa—its picturesque jumble of pale 
blue-and-white plaster walls perched pre- 
cariously over a turquoise bay frequented 
by French impressionists—has become the 
unlikely front line for a cultural showdown 
on the edge of the capital. 

It began when Lofti El Hafi, La Marsa's 
bookseller, impishly decorated the window 
of his shop with volumes of Les Femmes au 
Bain, a collection of nude paintings with 
bare-breasted beauties on its cover. When 
an angry Islamist passerby took offense, El 
Hafi was initially sympathetic. “It's just the 
early buds of freedom," he explains, attrib- 
uting the protest that followed to a hothead 
from the nearby working-class suburb of 
Al Karm who had returned from jihad in 
Iraq a trifle deranged. Like Musab, the 
rabble-rouser had recently emerged from 
Ben Ali's jails. El Hafi moved the books to 
a back shelf out of deference—and at the 
urging of the police. Anyway, he adds, put- 
ting a brave face on the intrusion, "the at- 
tention was good for sales." 

But a few weeks later the hothead was 
back with hundreds of other hotheads 
in the art center next to the bookshop, 
pounding at the gates of an exhibition 
that ridiculed the Islamists' rise. One art- 


A minority of T'unisians 
are striking back at what 
they perceive as an alliance 
between two shades of 
Islamists to quash the last 
fires of hedonism. 


ist had painted God’s name as an army of 
ants; another had stuck images of women’s 
faces on punching bags and strung them 
inside a boxing ring. Thanks to Twitter, 
secular activists quickly formed a counter- 
demonstration. While police were busy try- 
ing to separate the protesters, the Salafis 
torched the police station. That evening, 
authorities imposed the first curfew since 
the revolution and rounded up dozens. 
Efforts to find middle ground have 
largely backfired. An attempt by President 
Moncef Marzouki, a former human rights 
activist, to host a joint workshop for opera- 
tors of Islamist Facebook pages (which have 
hundreds of thousands of fans) and their 
rival secular bloggers (who muster just a 
few hundred) degenerated into farce. The 
Islamists walked out after Jolanare—the 
lecturer and blogger—accused them of 
treating women like jawari, or concubines. 
At Manouba University in the capital, pha- 
lanxes of bareheaded versus fully veiled 
women clashed after Salafi toughs ejected 
the dean from his office for banning 
women from wearing the nigab, a cover- 
ing that hides a woman’s face as well as her 
hair. “You can’t make me free if you take 
away my rights,” read the placards carried 


by the veils. “Get back to the dark ages,” 
yelled the bareheads. 

In an attempt to pacify an increasingly 
polarized population, the new Islamist 
government tries to reassure everyone 
with doublespeak. Fearful of scaring off 
tourists, Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali 
has inaugurated tourism conferences 
where alcohol flows liberally. But his min- 
isters speak of quarantining tourists in 
resorts turned into ghettos guarded by 
checkpoints—thus protecting Muslim in- 
nocents from contamination by debauched 
Europeans. (A World Bank official calls this 
“market segmentation.”) Others court Gulf 
investment for halal, or religiously pure, 
tourism, which has already funded the 
construction of a vast but drab alcohol-free 
and disco-less entertainment complex on 
land reclaimed from Tunis’s estuary. Next 
summer, predict hoteliers, some Tunisian 
beaches could be segregated. 

The authorities are also quietly engi- 
neering a cleanup of the capital’s media— 
they detained a newspaper publisher 
and an editor for printing a photo of a 
German-Tunisian soccer star cupping his 
naked girlfriend’s breasts—along with its 
brothels. Sex workers in Tunis say police 
told them Jebali's government has de- 
clared Friday, the Muslim holy day, and 
Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, as 
times of rest. One Friday I visited Tunis’s 
officially authorized red-light zone on Ab- 
dallah Guech Street, near the dilapidated 
former Venetian consulate where I lived 
in the late 1980s. The red-light district 
has survived, despite attacks by Molotov- 
cocktail-wielding Islamists within weeks of 
President Ben Ali’s flight. The muezzin was 
broadcasting his call for prayer, and all but 
a few of the scores of booths that open onto 
the alleyway were tightly shut. At one of 
the open doors, a peroxided woman wear- 
ing slacks and clipping her toenails shooed 
me away before the beards found us. At 
another, a bawdier madam stopped wash- 
ing the red tints in her hair, ushered me 
hurriedly into her cabin and offered me an 
alternative place to prostrate for 20 dinars. 

A minority of Tunisians are striking back 
at what they perceive as an alliance between 
two shades of Islamists—the government’s 
statist version and the more antiestablish- 
ment Salafis—to quash the last fires of he- 
donism. An indignantly risqué magazine, 
Femmes de Tunisie, aspires to spawn a sexual 
revolution by sporting a front cover with 
a seductress wearing nothing but 1920s 
pearls and by offering women advice on 
the best way to chuck unsatisfying lovers. 
Farida plans a protest of her own: a trip to 
the beach with her girlfriends all kitted out 
in “le string"—their skimpiest thongs. And 
a wave of new bars and cabarets are open- 
ing across Tunis—including Le Regent, 
behind the Ministry of the Interior, where 
a husky-voiced woman sings and acts out 
the lyrics to Randy Newman’s “You Can 
Leave Your Hat On.” At the Peace and 
Love nightclub on the capital’s outskirts, 
waiters in bow ties bear champagne ice 
buckets across the dance floor between 
Tunis’s lithest bodies. Above them a DJ 
projects lewd images onto a giant screen to 


frighten off the Islamists: Photos of a pole 
dancer, a bikinied bum and the turntable 
are interspersed with images of a woman's 
tongue and the words Lick my deck; a crab 
with stiletto legs for claws entraps its prey. 
For a few raucous hours there's not a head 
scarf in sight. 


After the Maghreb's fleshpot safe havens, 
the public space in post-Qaddafi Libya feels 
sexless and arid. Along with millions of 
migrant workers, the Moroccan girls who 
worked at Tripoli's nightclubs fled the fight- 
ing that toppled the colonel. The rebels who 
took Qaddafi’s place claimed their legiti- 
macy in part by highlighting their godliness 
over the colonel's perversions (including his 
attempt to create heaven on earth with a ha- 
rem of 72 female bodyguards). 

Yet the rebels have proved to be 
strangely prone to temptation, as І discov- 
ered on a flight from Tripoli to Kufra, a 
trading post 800 miles deep in the Sahara. 
Libya's initial revolutionary leadership, the 
National Transitional Council, appropri- 
ated Qaddafi’s private jet, which came with 
cream-colored leather sofas and the services 
of a beautiful and curvaceous flight atten- 
dant, Ayad Abdel-Rahman. Even the 15- 
lamists on board found it hard not to drool 
over her tall, slender form, her doe eyes 
and her crimson skirt cut above the knee. 
Ten pairs of male eyes followed her be- 
tween the sofas as she prepared and served 
three-course meals. Unlike her previous 
employer, we were clearly not worthy of 
her attention. “He would never get angry,” 
she recalls wistfully. “He wasn't as wild as 
you people say.” 

Other Libyans are also trying to se- 
cure their share of the colonel's assets 
and rebalance 42 years of unequal dis- 
tribution of pleasure. Libya's militiamen 
have yet to disband—a reality all too 
vividly revealed by the killing of Chris 
Stevens, America's ambassador to Libya 
and perhaps its most engaging diplomat, 
in his Benghazi safe house. When they 
are not busy targeting foreigners, they 
prey on the former palaces of the colo- 
nel's offspring and sycophants, daubing 
their walls with the words Holy Property 
in an effort to give their theft religious 
legitimacy. In the vestibule of the Tripoli 
mansion of Qaddafi's daughter, guards 
lounge on the love seat she had commis- 
sioned in the form of a golden mermaid 
with a face cast in her image. South of 
Tripoli, another militia guards the hunt- 
ing pavilions and leopard zoo where the 
Qaddafi family spent its weekends. Теп- 
foot-long Russian missiles poke through 
the long grass. West of the capital, Lib- 
ya's Berber fighters use their newfound 
status and arms to fend off Salafi party 
poopers who seek to disrupt their frolics 
on isolated beaches with "fiancées" and 
bootlegged whiskey. As in Morocco, they 
dismiss such Islamist intrusions as cul- 
tural colonialism and use their control of 
the western border to smuggle Djerba's 
prostitutes in for the night. And at their 
all-female wedding parties, zamzamat— 
female troubadours smelling of whiskey 


and hashish—regale the bride with their 
ululations and tambourines. 


Even so, such are Libya's desert rigors 
that the sight of Alexandria—the first city 
to the east of the country—left me feeling 
almost as excited as Antony, the Roman 
general, arriving in the ancient port to 
court Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen who 
staved off Roman conquest by conquering 
her invaders in bed. Behind generations of 
grime, Alexandria's stately buildings and 
antique drinking parlors still ooze the deca- 
dence of their louche 19th century colonial 
patrons. The restored opera house, palaces 
and royal seat of government offer a win- 
dow on the sensual past of what Lawrence 
Durrell, a British wartime agent, novelist 
and husband to two of Alexandria's off- 
spring, called his “dream city." The Sport- 
ing Club—the city's colonial hub, which 


another Alexandria denizen, E.M. Forster, 
described as "tennis courts thronged by 
day, brothels by night”—still tries to exude 
exclusivity. Wizened waiters in green velvet 
smoking jackets and bow ties serve drinks 
on silver platters in the clubhouse, garden- 
ers mow croquet lawns with the care of 
barbers, and only the flutter of newspapers 
and the squeak of polished leather disturb 
the quiet in the library as elderly members 
slumber on sofas, their pates glistening be- 
neath the chandeliers sparkling overhead. 
Fleeing Europe's economic crisis, the 
city's Greeks, who numbered 150,000 be- 
fore the 1952 revolution, have begun trick- 
ling back, tempted by a city where their 
pensions are actually worth something. In 
the marina's Greek club behind the Qait- 
bay Fort, John Siokas, a leader in the Greek 
community, has opened a restaurant serv- 
ing chtapodi xydato—grilled octopus—and 
has plans to turn a dance hall favored by 


“TU have to call you back, dear. My secretary is trying to 
get my attention." 


121 


PLAYBOY 


122 


Egypt's last king, the debauched Farouk, 
into a nightclub called Fever. “Alex is Eu- 
rope, Cairo is Africa,” explains a taxi driver 
when I ask him why Alexandria, unlike the 
capital Cairo, seems to have rediscovered 
its joie de vivre since President Hosni 
Mubarak's 2011 fall, despite the Salafi 
surge. “Half its population," he adds by 
way of embellishment, "are the offspring of 
Greek, Jewish, Cypriot, Italian, Armenian 
and English bastards. A Western tempera- 
ment is in their genes." 

That said, the latest arrivals are outnum- 
bered by the departures. Since the bomb- 
ing of an Alexandrian church in 2011, the 
exodus of Copts, one of the Arab world's 
oldest Christian communities, has accel- 
erated. Salafis, complains the Sporting 
Club's maitre d', are defying the board's 
efforts to exclude them, with as much in- 
sistence as the Egyptian revolutionaries 
who in 1952 nationalized the exclusive 
British club and made themselves mem- 
bers. The club demolished its bar in the 
1980s, built its first mosque a decade later 
and recently stopped horse racing on its 
grounds under pressure from opponents 
of gambling. Peer pressure has reduced 
displays of supposed licentiousness such as 
bikinis, female gymnastics and swimming 


for girls over the age of 14. And from the 
royal box where the playboy King Farouk 
once frolicked with his mistresses, a female 
professor from Egypt's Islamic Al-Azhar 
University lectures on family values. “The 
colonial past means nothing; it's gone," 
says a Salafi member of the club who works 
as a lawyer to secure permission for specu- 
lators to tear down the facades of the last 
colonial villas and erect faceless towers in 
their place. Revolutionaries who torched 
the city land-registry office have given his 
business a boost. 

Where they have not swept away Alexan- 
dria's history, Salafis sternly ignore it. Kar- 
mouz, a poor neighborhood where Salafis 
rule, has built a high wall around Pompey's 
Pillar, the giant ancient column that stands 
among the ruins of the pagan temple of 
Serapis, a Greco-Egyptian god of the un- 
derworld. A local Salafi preacher whom I 
persuaded to join me on a tour beat a hasty 
retreat when we stumbled across a sculp- 
ture of a ram's head in a shrine dug into 
the rock beneath the pillar. 


And yet after two months of traveling be- 
tween liberals and Salafis, I began to won- 
der whether I had misread North Africa's 


= 
سے 
— 


Salafi school. Launched in Alexandria by 
five students from the city's medical col- 
lege, was it just another of the fertility cults 
the city had spawned over the centuries? 
Far from frowning on sex, as their West- 
ern counterparts might, they enjoy a spicy 
alternative form. The black covers hide a 
secret world of sexuality. Drawn from the 
Koran, the Salafi vision of paradise is an 
epicurean's delight, promising an after- 
life spent reclining on jeweled couches, 
served by dark-eyed houris with swelling 
breasts and immortal youths whose cups 
overflow with wine. Ibn Kathir, a stern- 
faced 14th century Syrian exegete whose 
Koranic commentaries are a fundamental- 
ist's gospel, describes an orgiastic paradise 
of girls whose "breasts are fully rounded, 
not sagging." According to Jalaluddin al- 
Suyuti, an Egyptian expositor who died in 
1505, "Each time we sleep with a houri we 
find her virgin, the erection eternal, and 
sensation of lovemaking so delicious that 
were you to experience it in this world you 
would faint. Each chosen one [i.e., Muslim 
male] will marry 70 houris, besides the 
women he married on earth, and all will 
have appetizing vaginas." 

The absence of female flesh on the 
streets, Salafi men told me, only increases 
the desire to uncover at night. Indeed, 
Salafi preachers see sex everywhere. The 
campaign fliers for the handful of Salafi 
women standing for election in Egypt sub- 
stituted roses for their faces. (The women 
were relegated to the bottom of the party 
list to protect voters' highly charged ap- 
petites. Women, like Christians, says a 
spokesman for the movement, could not 
be ministers since neither could domi- 
nate Muslim men.) Salafis proscribe some 
inanimate objects too, allegedly issuing 
fatwas against markets that display sexu- 
ally suggestive items such as eggplants 
and sliced watermelon. A shop assistant in 
Mondiana's, perhaps the largest in a row 
of downtown Cairo's notoriously risqué lin- 
gerie stores, says 40 percent of his custom- 
ers are Salafis, a percentage that is larger 
than their share of the total population. In 
the shop window, crotchless fishnet tights 
jostle for pride of place with gossamer-thin 
see-through panties and knickers with only 
a string at the front and back for covering. 

Salafi manuals that have sprouted on the 
sidewalks outside North Africa's mosques 
provide the most intimate details on sharia- 
compliant lovemaking. ("In God's name," 
the groom should pronounce when he con- 
summates his marriage.) Mehdi Boushaib, 
a religious graduate from the University 
of al-Karaouine, Morocco's premier di- 
vinity college, runs a stall in Casablanca's 
bazaar that offers homemade aphrodisi- 
acs. Based on the recipes he learned from 
a quack who abandoned her own stall for 
Paris, he recommends bouwa—powdered 
chameleon—as an alternative to Viagra. 
Roast it on burning coals, raise your tunic 
over its fumes and smoke your genitalia 
for 20 minutes, he instructs. Then shower, 
sleep and wait for your genie to rise from 
its slumber. 

Across North Africa I stumbled on 
Salafi acolytes who had repented for their 


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124 


bezness-boy lifestyles only to find fulfilment 
in the strangely dissolute Salafi code of con- 
duct. Anwar, the former drug trafficker, at- 
tracted male recruits with the promise of 
God-given rights to polygamy and muta, a 
temporary “pleasure” marriage that oppo- 
nents condemn as prostitution. Sympathet- 
ic sociologists note that muta offers a much- 
needed release for lovers unable to marry 
because of the prohibitive cost of housing 
and wedding ceremonies. Tunisia's Center 
for Research, Studies, Documentation and 
Information on Women recorded unprec- 
edented growth in the practice, particular- 
ly on college campuses, after the 2011 rev- 
olution. In northern Tunisia a Salafi-run 
paper, al-Jala, helpfully gives a rundown 
of the doctors offering the best "virginity 
recovery services." 

In a related bid for popular support that 
his followers considered a liberalization, 
Libya's first post-Qaddafi leader, Mustafa 
Abdel-Jalil, lifted the colonel's ban on mar- 
rying four wivesin the same speech in which 
he declared the country liberated. Cheer- 
ing the move, Salafi preachers took to their 
pulpits insisting that polygamy provides a 
critical social service in a country with tens 
of thousands of new war widows. Ezzedine 
Arafa, a short, balding chemistry professor 
who recently returned to Libya from Scot- 
land, praises the new order for licensing 
his polygamous dating agency, something 
the Oaddafi regime repeatedly refused to 
do. I found him one Saturday afternoon in 
his office situated above the courtyard of a 
19th century Tripoli mosque replete with 
a gently spitting fountain. "Write what sort 
of girl you want—tall or fat, young or ma- 
ture," he says, handing me a form. Having 
surveyed my own vital statistics, he advises 
me that my prospects are fair. In his first 
two months of operations, he signed on 
120 women and just 30 men. 

Indeed, sometimes I find myself won- 
dering whether it is the liberals or the 
Salafis who are leading the morality cam- 
paign. Secular gynecologists blame Salafi 
pleasure marriages for a spike in teenage 
abortions. Students, a Tunisian doctor tells 
me, are being lured into fleeting relation- 
ships based on assurances written on a 


INHERIT ALL MY 
»\ POSSESSIONS! 


sheet of paper that claim their marriages 
are underwritten by God. I met another 
gynecologist in Alexandria’s Cap d’Or 
mirror bar who was celebrating the end 
to another lucrative week repairing veiled 
women’s hymens. And secular Egyptian 
editors reduced a Salafi parliamentarian 
to a laughingstock after he was alleged to 
have taken Sama al-Masri, one of Egypt’s 
more riotous belly dancers with a bouncy 
cleavage, as a second wife. (His Salafi col- 
leagues, seemingly more exercised about 
the plastic surgery he had on his bulbous 
but God-given nose, stripped him of par- 
liamentary immunity for unwarranted in- 
terference with the creator’s handiwork.) 


By the time I reached Cairo, I realized I was 
becoming increasingly titillated by alterna- 
tive Salafi tendencies. Fearing for my sanity, 
an American journalist advised me to seek 
refuge in Cairo’s Jazz Club, but that only 
added to my confusion. On a small stage, a 
live band crooned such dulcet melodies as “I 
fuck this, I fuck that, I ram my cock into her 
twat.” With no veil of decency to hide be- 
hind, I ducked for cover behind my laptop 
screen, only to be accosted by Kim, a Cali- 
fornian aid worker and part-time preventer 
of morality and purveyor of vice. Promising 
to replace my laptop with lap-dancing, she 
led me to the Armada, a Nile cruiser turned 
discotheque, for a further assault on any 
vestige of adherence to Salafi values. 


My final stop, in beleaguered Gaza, was 
intended to offer an antidote. Once the 
ancient crossroads of Africa and Asia and 
a locus of cross-fertilization, over the past 
decade it has been forced into splendid iso- 
lation by the construction of Egyptian and 
Israeli walls. Locked behind these portcul- 
lises, 1.7 million people live under the rug- 
ged rule of Hamas, the Islamist movement 
that won power through a combination of 
ballots and bullets in 2006 and 2007. It has 
clung to power religiously ever since, and 
despite being pummeled by Israeli sieges, 
incursions and most recently a bombard- 
ment waged from land, sea and air, Hamas 


succeeded in forming and preserving the 
first Islamist government on the Mediter- 
ranean. Initially, God squads scoured the 
beaches, searching for female skin. Vigi- 
lantes interrupted lovers and hauled them 
into court. “When a man and a woman 
are together, their first thoughts are of 
fornication, so we have to take care,” ex- 
plains a guard outside rows of beach cha- 
lets where, he claims, Hamas’s corrupt 
secular predecessors—Yasir Arafat’s secu- 
rity guards—had swapped wives by locking 
them in their chalets, dropping the keys in 
a bucket and playing lucky dip. 

And yet once ensconced, the Islamists 
slowly relaxed. Despite the frowns of the 
religious affairs minister, Gaza clothes 
shops fill their windows with scarlet dress- 
es and heart-shaped cushions to celebrate 
Valentine’s Day, or as Palestinians call it, 
the Love Fest. Gazans call Hamas women 
“two jays” because they wear jeans beneath 
their jilbabs. Long bereft of cinemas and 
bars, Gaza at night bubbles with the honks 
of wedding parties touring the streets; the 
beaches where a few Gaza girls once dared 
to wear bikinis are now lined with resorts 
that celebrate mass weddings. Most curious 
ofall, I discovered that what claims to be the 
Mediterranean’s largest polygamous dating 
agency is government-subsidized—it sports 
a photograph on its walls of Gaza’s Islamist 
prime minister, Ismail Haniya, handing 
over a $100,000 check. The agency’s owner, 
Fahmi al-Atiri, cites Hamas’s stocky interior 
minister, who was reputed to have found at 
least one of his six wives through the agency 
(to keep within Islam’s statutory limits, he 
divorced two). Having put me in a suffi- 
ciently sympathetic frame of mind, al-Atiri 
gives me a guided tour of his “marriage- 
facilitation charity,” proudly plying me with 
albums of the women on offer. He suggests 
I assuage my wife’s doubts by letting her 
choose the second, in the name of equal op- 
portunity. It had worked for him, he says, 
noting with relief that his wife had selected 
a pretty divorcée 12 years his junior. Is- 
lamism and puritanism, I was beginning to 
learn, are far from one and the same. 


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-| HIM AND GET HIS BLESSING! 


THOMPSON 


(continued from page 101) 


been in the capital, covering the Senate 
Watergate hearings or the House Judiciary 
Committee debate on Nixon's impeach- 
ment, than stoned on the beach in Mexico 
with a bunch of freaks? 

THOMPSON: Well—it depends on the tim- 
ing. On Wednesday, I might want to go to 
Washington; on Thursday, I might want to 
go to Zihuatanejo. 

PLAYBOY: Today must be Thursday, be- 
cause already this morning you've had two 
bloody marys, three beers and about four 
spoons of some white substance, and you've 
been up for only an hour. You don't deny 
that you're heavily into drugs, do you? 
THOMPSON: No, why should І deny it? 1 
like drugs. Somebody gave me this white 
powder last night. I suspect it's cocaine, 
but there's only one way to find out—look 
at this shit! It's already crystallized in this 
goddamn humidity. I can't even cut it up 
with the scissors in my Swiss army knife. 
Actually, coke is a worthless drug anyway. 
It has no edge. Dollar for dollar, it's prob- 
ably the most inefficient drug on the mar- 
ket. It's not worth the effort or the risk or 
the money 一 at least not to me. It's a social 
drug; it's more important to offer it than it 
is to use it. But the world is full of cocama- 
niacs these days and they have a tendency 
to pass the stuff around, and this morning 
I’m a little tired and I have this stuff, so.... 
PLAYBOY: What do you like best? 
THOMPSON: Probably mescaline and mush- 
rooms: That's a genuine high. It's not just 
an up—you know, like speed, which is re- 
ally just a motor high. When you get into 
psychedelics like mescaline and mush- 
rooms, it's a very clear kind of high, an in- 
terior high. But really, when you're dealing 
with psychedelics, there's only one king 
drug, when you get down to it, and that's 
acid. About twice a year you should blow 
your fucking tubes out with a tremendous 
hit of really good acid. Take 72 hours and 
just go completely amok, break it all down. 
PLAYBOY: When did you take your first 
acid trip? 

THOMPSON: It was while I was working on 
the Hells Angels book. Ken Kesey wanted 
to meet some of the Angels, so I introduced 
him and he invited them all down to his 
place in La Honda. It was a horrible, mo- 
mentous meeting, and I thought I'd bet- 
ter be there to see what happened when 
all this incredible chemistry came together. 
And sure as shit, the Angels rolled in— 
about 40 or 50 bikes—and Kesey and the 
other people were offering them acid. And 
I thought, Great creeping Jesus, what's go- 
ing to happen now? 

PLAYBOY: Had the Angels ever been into 
acid before that? 

THOMPSON: No. That was the most fright- 
ening thing about it. Here were all these vi- 
cious bikers full of wine and bennies, and 
Kesey's people immediately started giving 
them LSD. They didn't know what kind of 
violent crowd they were dealing with. I was 
sure it was going to be a terrible blood, rape 
and pillage scene, that the Angels would 
tear the place apart. And I stood there 


thinking, Jesus, I'm responsible for this; m 
the one who did it. I watched those lunatics 
gobbling the acid and I thought, Shit, if it's 
gonna get this heavy I want to be as fucked- 
up as possible. So I went to one of Kesey's 
friends, and I said, “Let me have some of 
that shit. We're heading into a very serious 
night. Perhaps even ugly." So I took what 
he said was about 800 micrograms, which 
almost blew my head off at the time...but 
in a very fine way. It was nice. Surprised 
me, really. I'd heard all these stories when 
I lived in Big Sur a couple of years before 
from this psychiatrist who'd taken the stuff 
and wound up running naked through 
the streets of Palo Alto, screaming that he 
wanted to be punished for his crimes. He 
didn't know what his crimes were, and no- 
body else did either, so they took him away 
and he spent a long time in a loony bin 
somewhere, and I thought, That's not what 
I need. Because if a guy who seems level- 
headed like that is going to flip out and tear 
off his clothes and beg the citizens to punish 
him, what the hell might I do? 

PLAYBOY: You didn't beg to be scourged 
and whipped? 

THOMPSON: No...and I didn't scourge any- 
body else either, and when I was finished, I 
thought, Jesus, you're not so crazy after all; 
you're not a basically violent or vicious per- 
son like they said. Before that, I had this 
dark fear that if I lost control, all these hor- 
rible psychic worms and rats would come 
out. But I went to the bottom of the well 
and found out there's nothing down there 
I have to worry about, no secret ugly things 
waiting for a chance to erupt. 

PLAYBOY: You drink a little too, don't you? 
THOMPSON: Yeah...obviously, but I drink 
this stuff like I smoke cigarettes; I don't 
even notice it. You know—a bird flies, a fish 
swims, I drink. But you notice I very rarely 
sit down and say, "Now I'm going to get 
wasted." I never eat a tremendous amount 
of any one thing. I rarely get drunk, and I 
use drugs pretty much the same way. 
PLAYBOY: Do you like marijuana? 
THOMPSON: Not much. It doesn't mix 
well with alcohol. I don't like to get 
stoned and stupid. 

PLAYBOY: What would you estimate you 
spend on drugs in a year? 

THOMPSON: Oh, Jesus.... 

PLAYBOY: What the average American fam- 
ily spends on an automobile, say? 
THOMPSON: Yeah, at least that much. I 
don't know what the total is; I don't even 
want to know. It's frightening, but ГІ tell 
you that on a story I just did, one of the 
sections took me 17 days of research and 
$1,400 worth of cocaine. And that's just 
what I spent. On one section of one story. 
PLAYBOY: What do you think the drugs are 
doing to your body? 

THOMPSON: Well, I just had a physical, 
the first one in my life. People got worried 
about my health, so I went to a very serious 
doctor and told him I wanted every fuck- 
ing test known to man: EEG, heart, every- 
thing. And he asked me questions for three 
hours to start with, and I thought, What the 
hell, tell the truth; that's why you're here. 
So I told him exactly what I'd been doing 
for the past 10 years. He couldn't believe it. 


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PLAYBOY 


He said, “Jesus, Hunter, you're a goddamn 
mess"—thats an exact quote. Then he 
ran all the tests and found І was in perfect 
health. He called it a “genetic miracle.” 
PLAYBOY: What about your mind? 
THOMPSON: І think it's pretty healthy. 1 
think Pm looser than I was before I started 
to take drugs. Pm more comfortable with 
myself. Does it look like it's fucked me up? 
I'm sitting here on a beautiful beach in 
Mexico; I've written three books; I've got 
a fine 100-acre fortress in Colorado. On 
that evidence, I'd have to advise the use of 
drugs.... But of course I wouldn't, never in 
hell—or at least not all drugs for all people. 
There are some people who should never 
be allowed to take acid, for instance. You 
can spot them after about 10 minutes: peo- 
ple with all kinds of bad psychic baggage, 
stuff they haven't cleaned out yet, weird 
hostilities, repressed shit—the same kind 
of people who turn into mean drunks. 
PLAYBOY: What kind of flak do you get for 
being so honest about the drugs you use? 
THOMPSON: I'm not too careful about 
what I say. But I'm careful in other ways. I 
never sell any drugs, for instance; I never 
get involved in the traffic or the marketing 
end of the drug business. I make a point of 
not even knowing about it. I'm very sensi- 
tive about maintaining my deniability, you 
know—like Nixon. I never deal. Simple 
use is one thing—like booze in the 1920s— 
but selling is something else: They come 
after you for that. I wouldn't sell drugs to 
my mother, for any reason...no, the only 
person I'd sell drugs to would be Richard 
Nixon. I'd sell him whatever the fucker 
wanted...but he'd pay heavy for it and 
damn well remember the day he tried it. 
PLAYBOY: Are you the only journalist in 
America who's ridden with both Richard 
Nixon and the Hells Angels? 

THOMPSON: I must be. Who else would 
clam a thing like that? Hell, who else 
would admit it? 

PLAYBOY: Which was more frightening? 
THOMPSON: The Angels. Nobody can 
throw a gut-level, king-hell scare into you 
like a Hells Angel with a pair of pliers hang- 
ing from his belt that he uses to pull out 
people's teeth in midnight diners. Some of 
them wear the teeth on their belts too. 
PLAYBOY: How did you first meet the Angels? 
THOMPSON: I just went out there and said, 
"Look, you guys don't know me. I don't 
know you. I heard some bad things about 
you; are they true?" I was wearing a fuck- 
ing madras coat and wingtips, that kind of 
thing, but I think they sensed I was a little 
strange—if only because I was the first writ- 
er who'd ever come out to see them and talk 
to them on their own turf. Until then, all 
the Hells Angels stories had come from the 
cops. They seemed a little stunned at the 
idea that some straight-looking writer for a 
New York literary magazine would actually 
track them down to some obscure transmis- 
sion shop in the industrial slums of south 
San Francisco. They were a bit off balance 
at first, but after about 50 or 60 beers, we 
found a common ground, as it were.... 
PLAYBOY: It seems pretty clear you had 
something in common with the Angels. Did 


126 they ever ask you to join? 


THOMPSON: Some of them did, but there 
was a very fine line I had to maintain there. 
Like when I went on runs with them, I 
didn't go dressed as an Angel. l'd wear 
Levi's and boots but always a little differ- 
ent from theirs; a tan leather jacket instead 
of a black one, little things like that. I told 
them right away I was a writer, I was do- 
ing a book and that was it. If I'd joined, 
I wouldn't have been able to write about 
them honestly, because they have this 
"brothers" thing.... 

PLAYBOY: In one of the last chapters of the 
book, you described the scene where the An- 
gels finally stomped you, but you described 
it rather quickly. How did it happen? 
THOMPSON: Pretty quickly...I'd been away 
from their action for about six months. I'd 
finished most of the writing, and the pub- 
lisher sent me a copy ofthe proposed book 
cover and I said, "This sucks. It's the worst 
fucking cover I've seen on any book"—so I 
told them I'd shoot another cover if they'd 
just pay the expenses. So I called Sonny 
Barger, who was the head Angel, and said, 
"I want to go on the Labor Day run with 
you guys; I've finished the book, but now 
I want to shoot a book cover." I got some 
bad vibes over the phone from him. I knew 


I'm not too careful about 
what I say. But I'm careful 
in other ways. I never sell 
drugs, for instance. I'm very 
sensitive about maintaining 
my deniability. 


something was not right, but by this time I 
was getting careless. 

PLAYBOY: Was the Labor Day run a big one? 
THOMPSON: Shit, yes. This was one of 
these horrible things that scare the piss 
out of everybody—200 bikes. A mass Hells 
Angels run is one of the most terrifying 
things you'll ever hope to see. When those 
bastards come by you on the road, that’s 
heavy. And being a part of it, you get this 
tremendous feeling of humor and mad- 
ness. You see the terror and shock and fear 
all around you and you’re laughing all the 
time. It’s like being in some kind of hor- 
ror movie where you know that sooner or 
later the actors are going to leap out of the 
screen and burn the theater down. 
PLAYBOY: Did the Angels have a sense of 
humor about it? 

THOMPSON: Some of them did. They were 
running a trip on everybody. I mean, you 
don’t carry pliers and pull people’s teeth 
out and then wear them on your belt 
without knowing you’re running a trip 
on somebody. But on that Labor Day, we 
went up to some beach near Mendocino 
and I violated all my rules: First, never get 
stoned with them. Second, never get really 
drunk with them. Third, never argue with 


them when you’re stoned and drunk. And 
fourth, when they start beating on each 
other, leave. Га followed those rules for 
a year. But they started to pound on each 
other and I was just standing there talk- 
ing to somebody and I said my bike was 
faster than his, which it was—another bad 
mistake—and all of a sudden, I got it right 
in the face, a terrific whack; I didn’t even 
see where it came from, had no idea. When 
I grabbed the guy, he was small enough so 
that I could turn him around, pin his arms 
and just hold him. And I turned to the guy 
I'd been talking to and said something like, 
“Jesus Christ, look at this nut; he just hit 
me in the fucking face. Get him away from 
here,” and the guy I was holding began 
to scream in this high wild voice because 
I had him helpless, and instead of telling 
him to calm down, the other guy cracked 
me in the side of the head—and then I 
knew I was in trouble. That’s the Angels’ 
motto: One on all, all on one. 

PLAYBOY: How badly were you hurt? 
THOMPSON: They did a pretty good job 
on my face. I went to the police station 
and they said, “Get the fuck out of here— 
you're bleeding in the bathroom.” 
PLAYBOY: Who are the Hells Angels, what 
kind of people? 

THOMPSON: They're rejects, losers—but 
losers who turned mean and vengeful in- 
stead of just giving up, and there are more 
Hells Angels than anybody can count. 
But most of them don't wear any colors. 
They're people who got moved out—you 
know, musical chairs—and they lost. Some 
people just lie down when they lose; these 
fuckers come back and tear up the whole 
game. І was a Hells Angel іп my head for a 
long time. I was a failed writer for 10 years 
and I was always in fights. Га do things like 
go into a bar with a 50-pound sack of lime, 
turn the whole place white and then just 
take on anyone who came at me. I always 
got stomped, never won a fight. But I'm not 
into that anymore. I lost a lot of my physical 
aggressiveness when I started to sell what I 
wrote. I didn't need that trip anymore. 
PLAYBOY: Some people would say you 
didn't lose all your aggressiveness, that you 
come on like journalism's own Hells Angel. 
THOMPSON: Well, I don't see myself as par- 
ticularly aggressive or dangerous. I tend to 
act weird now and then, which makes peo- 
ple nervous if they don't know me—but I 
think that's sort of a stylistic hangover from 
the old days...and I suppose I get a private 
smile or two out of making people's eyes 
bulge once in a while. 

PLAYBOY: Your journalistic style has been 
attacked by some critics—most notably, the 
Columbia Journalism Review—as partly com- 
mentary, partly fantasy and partly the rav- 
ings of someone too long into drugs. 
THOMPSON: Well, fuck the Columbia Journal- 
ism Review. They don't pay my rent. That 
kind of senile gibberish reminds me of all 
those people back in the early 1960s who 
were saying, "This guy Dylan is giving Tin 
Pan Alley a bad name—hell, he's no musi- 
cian. He can't even carry a tune." Actually, 
it's kind of a compliment when people like 
that devote so much energy to attacking you. 
PLAYBOY: What is gonzo journalism? 


THOMPSON: It's something that grew 
out of a story on the Kentucky Derby for 
Scanlan's magazine. It was one of those hor- 
rible deadline scrambles, and I ran out of 
time. I was desperate. I was convinced I 
was finished, I'd blown my mind, couldn't 
work. So finally I just started jerking pages 
out of my notebook and numbering them 
and sending them to the printer. I was sure 
it was the last article I was ever going to do 
for anybody. Then when it came out, there 
were massive numbers of letters, phone 
calls, congratulations, people calling it a 
"great breakthrough in journalism." And I 
thought, Holy shit, if I can write like this 
and get away with it, why should I keep 
trying to write like The New York Times? It 
was like falling down an elevator shaft and 
landing in a pool full of mermaids. 
PLAYBOY: Are fantasies and wild tangents a 
necessary part of your writing? 
THOMPSON: Absolutely. Just let your mind 
wander, let it go where it wants to. 
PLAYBOY: Doesn't that stuff get in the way 
of your serious political reporting? 
THOMPSON: Probably—but it also keeps 
me sane. 

PLAYBOY: You were the first journalist on 
the campaign to see that George McGovern 
was going to win the nomination. What 
tipped you off? 

THOMPSON: It was the energy; I could feel 
it. If you were close enough to the machin- 
ery in McGovern's campaign, you could 
almost see the energy level rising from one 
week to the next. It was like watching pro 
football teams toward the end of a season. 
Some of them are coming apart and others 
are picking up steam; their timing is get- 
ting sharper, their third-down plays are 
working. They're just starting to peak. 
PLAYBOY: The football analogy was pretty 
popular in Washington, wasn't it? 
THOMPSON: Yes, because Nixon was into 
football very seriously. 

PLAYBOY: You talked football with Nixon 
once, didn't you, in the backseat of his 
limousine? 

THOMPSON: Yeah, that was in 1968. It 
never occurred to me that he would ever 
be president. 

PLAYBOY: You couldn't have been too pop- 
ular with the Nixon party. 

THOMPSON: I didn't care what they thought 
of me. I put weird things in the pressroom 
at night, strange cryptic threatening notes 
that they would find in the morning. I had 
wastebaskets full of cold beer in my room 
in the Manchester Holiday Inn. 

PLAYBOY: Why did Nixon let you ride 
alone with him? 

THOMPSON: We were at this American 
Legion hall somewhere pretty close to 
Boston. Nixon had just finished a speech 
there and we were about an hour and a 
half from Manchester, where he had his 
Learjet waiting, and Ray Price [Nixon's 
chief speechwriter] suddenly came up to 
me and said, "You've been wanting to talk 
to the boss? Okay, come on." And I said, 
"What? What?" By this time I'd given up; I 
knew he was leaving for Key Biscayne that 
night and I was wild-eyed drunk. On the 
way to the car, Price said, "The boss wants 
to relax and talk football; you're the only 


person here who claims to be an expert on 
that subject, so you're it. But if you men- 
tion anything else—out. You'll be hitch- 
hiking back to Manchester. No talk about 
Vietnam, campus riots—nothing political; 
the boss wants to talk football, period." 
PLAYBOY: Were there awkward moments? 
THOMPSON: No, he seemed very relaxed. 
I've never seen him like that before or since. 
We had a good, loose talk. That was the only 
time in 20 years of listening to the treacher- 
ous bastard that I knew he wasn't lying. 
PLAYBOY: Did you feel any sympathy as you 
watched Nixon go down, finally? 
THOMPSON: Sympathy? No. You have to 
remember that for my entire adult life, 
Richard Nixon has been the national bo- 
geyman. I can't remember a time when he 
wasn't around—always evil, always ugly, 15 
or 20 years of fucking people around. The 
whole Watergate chancre was a monument 
to everything he stood for: This was a cheap 
thug, a congenital liar...what the Angels 
used to call a gunsel, a punk who can't even 
pull offa liquor-store robbery without shoot- 
ing somebody or getting shot, or busted. 
PLAYBOY: Do you have any projects on the 
fire other than the political stuff? 
THOMPSON: Well, I think I may devote 
more time to my ministry, for one thing. 
PLAYBOY: You're nota real minister, are you? 
THOMPSON: What? Of course I am. I'm an 
ordained doctor of divinity in the Church 
of the New Truth. I have a scroll with a big 
gold seal on it hanging on my wall at home. 
In recent months we've had more converts 
than we can handle. 

PLAYBOY: What's coming up as far as your 
writing goes? 

THOMPSON: My only project now is a novel 
called Guts Ball, which is almost finished on 
tape but not written yet. 

PLAYBOY: When you actually sit down to 
start writing, can you use drugs like mush- 
rooms or other psychedelics? 

THOMPSON: No. It's impossible to write 
with anything like that in my head. Wild 
Turkey and tobacco are the only drugs I use 
regularly when I write. But I tend to work 
at night, so when the wheels slow down, 
I occasionally indulge in a little speed— 
which I deplore and do not advocate—but 
you know, when the car runs out of gas, 
you have to use something. The only drug 
I really count on is adrenaline. I'm basical- 
ly an adrenaline junkie. I'm addicted to the 
rush of the stuff in my own blood, and of 
all the drugs I've ever used I think it's the 
most powerful. [coughing] Mother of God, 
here I go. [more coughing] Creeping Jesus, 
this is it...choked to death by a fucking... 
poisoned Marlboro.... 

PLAYBOY: Do you ever wonder how you 
have survived this long? 

THOMPSON: Yes. Nobody expected me to 
get much past 20. Least of all me. I just as- 
sume, Well, I got through today, but tomor- 
row might be different. This is a very weird 
and twisted world; you can't afford to get 
careless; don't fuck around. You want to 
keep your affairs in order at all times. 


Excerpted from the November 1974 issue. 


KIMMEL 


(continued from page 62) 


question to Molly? This was last August 
while you were on an African safari—and 
you had the ring ready. 

KIMMEL: I had the ring. I enlisted her 
sister to help me because I have no idea. 
I'd bought my first engagement ring at 
Costco for $500, which at the time was 
more than two months' salary for sure. 
But yes, I planned this out. We had 
many discussions about where we were 
headed, and I felt comfortable enough 
to propose—not that she knew when 
it happened. We were on one of those 
rich people's safaris; it wasn't like we 
were camped out in the bush. My kids 
were on the trip with us, and I'd talked 
to them first; they seemed in favor of it. 
So on the last night of the trip, I pro- 
posed to her in our hotel room. By then 
I'd been carrying this ring, jammed in 
my backpack, for like a week and a half, 
through the Olympics in London and 
through Africa. I was nervously check- 
ing the whole time to make sure it was 
still there, never trusting the hotel safes. 
What's funny is the diamond probably 
came from Africa, then somehow made 
it to Beverly Hills and then back to 
Africa 一 and then back here again. 
PLAYBOY: Africa seems to spiritually alter the 
lives of whoever visits. Had you ever been? 
KIMMEL: Oh no. I turn into Woody Allen 
in those situations. I took a triple dose of 
malaria pills and got every shot I could 
get before we went there. I'm terrified of 
animals. So it really was great. We were 
riding around in an open jeep beside ani- 
mals running wild, and you could reach 
out and lose your arm if you wanted to. 
Everybody says they have this transfor- 
mational experience in Africa. It did not 
change my life. The closest that came to 
happening for me was picking up a copy 
of Oprah's magazine in the airport. 
PLAYBOY: Speaking of which, you shocked 
your faithful constituents by suddenly 
becoming an impassioned disciple of 
Oprah after she appeared on your Oscar 
night special last year. Were you in fact 
transformed? 

KIMMEL: I shocked myself. I’ve done 
more jokes about Oprah than about any 
other celebrity, so the idea that she's now 
a sun that I worship is crazy. Completely 
unbeknownst to her, I started off on a 
bad foot with Oprah. My ex-wife loved 
her and would regularly use against me 
whatever Oprah had said on her show 
that day. I almost got to the point of de- 
lusional paranoia, like, Why is Oprah 
fucking with me? I was secretly worried 
the whole day we taped our comedy bits 
together that at some point she was go- 
ing to pull me into a corner, put a knife 
to my throat and say, "Listen, mother- 
fucker, I know the shit you said about 
me. I'll cut you from ear to ear!” But I 
learned that even Oprah is bigger than 
Oprah and that I was merely a pecking 
little bird on the back of a magnificent 
steed. At the end of the day she gave 


a speech to my staff, telling them how 127 


PLAYBOY 


128 


great they were, and then had cases of 
champagne brought in. She just makes 
people feel good—and that's the secret, 
if there is one. It was then that I fully 
understood the power of Oprah. Also, I 
had a rash and she touched me and it 
instantly went away. 

PLAYBOY: Have you and Sarah come out 
on the other side of your breakup— 
after almost seven years together—in a 
friendly zone? 

KIMMEL: Definitely. Гуе said we're now like 
brothers. There just needed to be a period 
of complete separation and silence for a 
while. Then you kind of move on with your 
lives and things are going well for both of 
you and it's not as painful to communicate 
anymore. We have a real history, and some 
people think the way to go is to pretend it 
never happened or to erase it or run from 
it. But Sarah and I were good friends and 
still are. It doesn't go away just because we 
broke up. We didn't break up in an ugly 
way. It was definitely no fun, but it was 
relatively civilized. 

PLAYBOY: How do you two connect these 
days? In her otherwise candid 2010 mem- 
oir, The Bedwetter, you're barely mentioned. 
KIMMEL: She wrote that book right when 
the wounds were still fresh. It would've 
been uncomfortable—for both of us— 


SEX-ED 


if she'd written about the relationship. 
Plus she knows I'm uncomfortable shar- 
ing the details of my personal life, even 
with the person with whom I'm involved. 
Nowadays we mostly e-mail. We don't talk 
that much, but we've intersected at some 
events. I took a good picture of Sarah 
and Molly together at a party last year, in 
fact. They like each other. The picture, of 
course, was for Cousin Sal. 

PLAYBOY: You talk twice a week to a 
therapist—via iChat from your home— 
which boldly defies the old-school buga- 
boo about comedians avoiding psychia- 
try because they fear it will make them 
less funny. 

KIMMEL: Woody Allen disproved that theo- 
ry a long time ago. Some comics romanti- 
cize misery. Some of them seem to believe 
that happy equals shallow and anguish is 
an indicator of depth. It isn't. They're un- 
related. What is more important to com- 
edy than self-examination? 

PLAYBOY: So tell us what self-examination 
has taught you about yourself. 

KIMMEL: I've learned that anxiety af- 
fects almost every decision I make. I've 
learned about boundaries, though I still 
have trouble enforcing them. I have 
a hard time saying no to people. I've 
learned that most arguments have little 


5 A ~ 
my N 
/ Ч 


———À— 

Could I buy You a 
drink, or a Yacht ? 
| | N 


“...thus, the increased blood flow to the penis triggers the increased 
cash flow from the wallet." 


to do with what you're arguing about— 
that what people want most is to know 
they're being heard. Through most of 
my life my goal was to “win” an argu- 
ment. I was missing the point. That real- 
ization has been a great help to me. And 
I will fight to the death any man who 
dares say it hasn't. 

PLAYBOY: You're now pitted against the 
big boys at 11:35 P.M. in that never-ending 
fight known as the Late-Night War. What 
would winning there feel like? 

KIMMEL: I am stupidly competitive, espe- 
cially when it comes to baseball or Scrab- 
ble. I play even the most casual game of 
softball like Pete Rose would play game 
seven of the World Series. I slide head- 
first, I run out every ground ball, and yet 
I don't feel late night is such a big com- 
petition. I mean we're now at the point 
where a lot more people watch our show 
online than on television. People can 
cherry-pick the best stuff you do, which 
is why you don't get 10 million people 
watching like Johnny Carson did. I re- 
member when I was a kid, if Letterman 
had a guest I wanted to see, there was 
only one way to see it—stay up and watch. 
You don't have that anymore. The genie's 
out of the bottle. There won't be another 
king of late night to match Carson's domi- 
nance. There will be maybe a bunch of 
dukes and the occasional earl. I should 
add here that Dave transcends any time 
slot; he is the father of comedy as we now 
know it. I wonder if he knows what he 
means to every comedian under 50 years 
old. That NBC Late Night With David 
Letterman show was a revelation. 

PLAYBOY: You were 14 when that show 
debuted. You have admitted you were ob- 
sessed: Late Night-themed birthday parties, 
the L8 NITE license plate on your first car. 
KIMMEL: Some kids drew the Van Halen 
logo on their notebooks; I drew Dave's 
face on mine. I was authentically inspired 
by him, maybe to the deepest fanatical ex- 
treme. But it was sincere idolizing. I un- 
derstood even then that he was changing 
everything with that mix of quiet sarcasm 
and by just standing further back from the 
absurdities of life than anyone on televi- 
sion ever had, in order to show us things 
as they really are. 

PLAYBOY: Few people know that during the 
very first broadcast of JKL, you secretly 
wore the official T-shirt from Dave's old 
Late Night show. 

KIMMEL: That's true. Our then head writer, 
Steve O'Donnell, who had also been Dave's 
original Late Night head writer, gifted me 
with it the day of our first broadcast, and 
I decided to wear it under my shirt. It was 
meaningful. 

PLAYBOY: What does Jay Leno mean to 
you? 

KIMMEL: I had loved him from his early 
appearances on the Letterman show. 
Some friends once bumped into him at 
the airport and, for my 21st birthday, 
had him sign a pizza box for me. He 
drew his little face on it. Strangely I don't 
even like talking about him anymore. 
The only time I think about him is when 
I'm asked. I believe he's not just a smart 


politician but also a smart guy. I haven't 
met anyone who knows more than he 
does about how ratings and the business 
of late-night television work. Last fall, 
when Dave finally came оп my show— 
which was clearly the greatest thrill of 
my career—somebody suggested, “Well, 
maybe you guys should talk about Leno.” 
But for me that night was about my fond- 
ness for David Letterman, and Jay Leno 
had nothing to do with it. I didn't want 
him soiling our time together. When Гуе 
gone on Dave's show, I think it's been 
more relevant to make fun of Leno. 
PLAYBOY: You excelled atit, especially back 
in 2010 when he abruptly repossessed 
The Tonight Show from Conan O'Brien 
after his nightly prime-time Jay Leno 
Show had failed. 
You even imitated 
him, with the help 
of prosthetics, for a 
full installment of 
your own show. No 
mercy there at all? 
KIMMEL: I don't 
know. I always feel 
bad if I hurt any- 
body's feelings, 
but I don't believe 
Jay Leno has ac- 
tual feelings, and he 
doesn't seem to be 
that worried about 
other people's feel- 
ings. Anyway, І can 
do a pretty good 
Leno imitation. It 
was a lot of fun to 
be him—also much 
easier, particular- 
ly in constructing 
“his” monologue 
for that night. I 
have a filter mecha- 
nism in my head 
every night when 
I put together the 
monologue for our 
show: If I сап imag- 
ine Jay Leno telling 
a joke, then I won't 
do it, even if it's a 
good joke. There 
are three ways he 
does a joke, every 
single time, always 
with the same rhythm. The difference be- 
tween Leno's jokes and Letterman's jokes 
is like the difference between Celebrity Jeop- 
ardy! and regular Jeopardy! During Celebrity 
Jeopardy! anyone could get all the answers; 
there's an accessibility that makes you feel 
like you're smart. I think Leno's jokes are 
similar in that way. Real Jeopardy! requires 
an attempt at greater mind function. 
PLAYBOY: Admirably, you never broke 
character as Leno—though toward the 
end of that show you said, “Man, I'm get- 
ting tired of this.” Your memorable mo- 
ment came later that week when Leno had 
you appear via satellite on his prime-time 
show's 10 @ 10 quiz game. 

KIMMEL: That was thrilling—it really 
was—and also kind of dangerous, be- 


Evan Williams 


CINNAMON 


4 


cause І realized he wanted to commu- 
nicate to America that it was all just a 
friendly joke. That was the perception 
Leno clearly wanted out there. The 
more І thought about it the madder it 
made me. І didn't want him to just get 
away scot-free with what was happen- 
ing all over again. Keep in mind this 
was the second time he'd done this. The 
first time, he'd elbowed Dave out of the 
Tonight Show gig, and now he'd done it 
to Conan. І felt there had to be some 
kind of comeuppance—not that I knew 
Га do what I did. I assumed their plan 
was for us to at least playfully have it 
out on-air. Of course, other than a brief 
mention of my imitation, not even one 
of the 10 questions he asked was related 


intensely cinnamon 
INCREDIBLY SMOOTH 


The Smoothness of 
Evan Williams with 
a Hot Cinnamon Taste. 


to the controversy—as if none of it had 
ever happened. So I decided to jokingly 
bring every answer back to the Conan 
situation. I have to say I was surprised 
by Jay, because he just clung to that card 
full of innocuous questions no matter 
how I jabbed him. The smartest thing he 
could have done after the first two ques- 
tions would be to say, “All right, that was 
2 @ 10 with Jimmy Kimmel—we’ll be 
right back!” That he didn’t return fire, I 
still don’t understand at all. It was almost 
as though he leaned into the punches. 
PLAYBOY: Did you ever speak with Conan 
during that period? 

KIMMEL: No, but we’ve met at a couple 
of parties since. He was very, very funny 
and nice. We really didn’t talk about it, 


though. I don’t know that he took any 
pleasure out of that time in his life. I 
doubt he ever happily reminisces about it. 
PLAYBOY: Letterman appeared on your 
show last fall, during a week of /KL 
broadcasts from Brooklyn. Naturally, he 
squirmed throughout your professions 
of love, but he also said, “I think you’re 
gonna be perfect at 11:35 P.M. I couldn’t 
be happier to have you in the running.” 
KIMMEL: Some people interpreted that as 
a passing of the torch, whereas I'm pretty 
sure it was more like the passing of a Bic 
lighter—very generously, nonetheless. 1 
know Dave is more uncomfortable with 
praise than any person who's ever lived. 
I decided it would mean more to view- 
ers if I showed those teenage pictures 
of my Late Night 
birthday cake and 
license plate to 
prove that I wasn't 
just kissing his ass 
and that these are 
not things I made 
up. Ultimately I 
chose to make him 
a little bit uncom- 
fortable and hope 
that he could deal 
with that. By now 
he definitely knows 
it’s authentic, and 
he must appreci- 
ate it or else why 
would he do the 
show? Not because 
he’s a fan of mine. 
Let’s be honest— 
he’s doing it to be 
nice. But I sensed, 
toward the end, 
he started to warm 
up to my compli- 
ments. After we fin- 
ished he said to me, 
"Lets start over 
and do it again.” 
PLAYBOY: The fact 
that you were se- 
lected to pay trib- 
ute to him onstage 
at last December's 
Kennedy Center 
Honors ceremony 
suggests he holds 
you in no small re- 
gard. Plus he had to enjoy your refer- 
ence to that medal hanging around his 
neck: “There's a 40 percent chance he'll 
hang himself with it.” 

KIMMEL: He was very gracious at the din- 
ner after the show. He thanked me and 
asked me to “please stop doing this.” But 
the highlight of the night came earlier, 
on the red carpet, where reporters from 
various entertainment news programs 
ask you why you're there and what Dave 
means to you. As Dave passed behind me, 
he gave me a hard, one-handed shove 
into a row of budding Mario Lopezes. Or 
is it Mario Lopezi? I'm not sure. What I 
do know is that Dave shoved me. 


129 


PLAYBOY 


REDNECK 


(continued from page 76) 


created another Lawrence of Arabia, but 
what really got the suits sweating at Uni- 
versal Pictures, the studio newly cash-rich 
from nervy, small-risk movies like American 
Graffiti and Jaws, was the opening-night 
view from the rear of the theater: aisles of 
posh velvet seats, mostly empty. 

At Radio City Music Hall, where hit 
movies might be held over for months, 
Smokey and the Bandit got the boot after 
one short week. 

From the vantage point of more than 
30 years, Needham—who had been Holly- 
wood's highest-paid stuntman, working in 
signature films directed by Roman Polanski 
(Chinatown) and Mel Brooks (Blazing 
Saddles) and as an action double for John 
Wayne, James Stewart, Kirk Douglas, Steve 
McQueen and Burt Reynolds—says, “Га 
warned Universal about opening the movie 
at the Music Hall: “We won't make enough 
money to pay the damn Rockettes.” The 
studio should have listened. Needham not 
only knew his audience, he also never for- 
got where he came from. The charismatic 
Memphis-born sharecropper's son, ex- 
logger, Korean War paratrooper, billboard 
cigarette model and sometime actor had 
cemented his hairy-chested gonzo rep by 
leaping off a runaway stagecoach and jump- 
ing from horse to horse for Little Big Man, 
driving a car off a dock and landing on a 
moving ferry 80 feet away for White Light- 
ning and scoring a world record by jumping 
a boat 138 feet over a swamp for Gator. 

Famed also for his four-letter vocabulary 
and for having lived with his buddy Burt 
Reynolds for well over a decade, Needham 
was summoned by the Universal brass to a 
post-Music Hall postmortem. Recalls Need- 
ham, “They started saying stuff like “Should 
we cut the movie? Is it too this, too that?’ It 
got drastic. It got heated. I said, “Wait a min- 
ute, folks. I didn’t make Smokey for big-city 
audiences. I made it for the South, the Mid- 
west and Northwest. Those are my people.’” 

As a sop to Needham’s people, the same 
people who composed Reynolds’s fan 
base, Universal booked the flick in a hand- 
ful of Southern theaters and drive-ins. 
Needham, Reynolds, country music favorite 
Reed, Reynolds’s friend and protégé Alfie 
Wise and other celebrities rode tractor- 
trailers through downtown Atlanta for a 
down-home-style second “premiere.” Says 
Reynolds, “If you want to know if some- 
thing's going to be a hit, ask a kid. There 
were lines of kids around the block. It looked 
like a riot was going on.” Universal played 
up the movie's huge success in Southern 
states and reopened it in New York, the rest 
ofthe East and the Midwest. Says Needham, 
“Everywhere it played, it went bananas. All 
the bad reviews I got, the ones saying Burt 
walked through the movie and Jackie Glea- 
son was a buffoon? Didn’t matter. People 
told each other how funny the movie was, 
and word of mouth spread. I finally had to 
think, Maybe it is a movie for everybody.” 

By late June the flick had hauled in an 


130 impressive $12 million. By year’s end, 


only Star Wars topped it as 1977’s biggest 
moneymaker. Today, Smokey and the Bandit 
is estimated to have grossed in the neigh- 
borhood of $365 million worldwide. 


In hindsight, the signposts for the movie’s 
big breakthrough look as big and broad as 
a barn door. Four months before the film 
stormed theaters, newly sworn-in presi- 
dent Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn 
had begun to bring a touch of the New 
South to the Beltway. The CB-radio craze 
had millions zooming the highways, swap- 
ping tips on ways to outfox cops enforc- 
ing the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit im- 
posed in 1974. C.W. McCall’s 1975 ditty 
“Convoy 一 about a cross-country trucker 
rebellion—held the number one posi- 
tion on the country charts for six weeks. 
Truckers were celebrated as modern-day 
cowboys. Country artists had plucked and 
twanged their way into the mainstream 
thanks to million-selling hits from Waylon 
Jennings, Dolly Parton, George Jones and 
Willie Nelson, among others. Movies came 
down with a case of country fever too, with 
such low-budget, high-octane material as 
Macon County Line, The Great Texas Dynamite 
Chase and Eat My Dust flexing blue-collar 
muscle at the box office. But Smokey and 
the Bandit put an openhearted, irreverent, 
multiracial face on the emerging South. As 
actor-director Billy Bob Thornton put it, 
“To the rest of the country, Smokey and the 
Bandit was just a movie. Here in Arkansas, 
it was a documentary.” 

Fittingly, the movie’s origins were of the 
“just plain folks” variety. Needham, at the 
age of 45 in 1976, was becoming tired af- 
ter two decades of stunting. On location 
he was fascinated that a maid kept raiding 
his hotel minibar for bottles of Coors. “It 
shocked me that it was illegal at the time 
to sell Coors east of the Mississippi River,” 
he remembers. “When I heard that, my 
mind went crazy. Everything in Smokey 
came from the simple idea of cases of Coors 
everyone east of the Mississippi wanted to 
get their hands on. I liked that it wasn’t 
about killing or hurting people, but it was 
action and about doing something illegal. I 
thought, What if someone were driving a 
truck full of beer and there were lots of fast 
cars and a lot of cops chasing him? My idea 
was to make it funny for anybody who has 
ever driven fast, gotten a ticket and driven 
away saying, ‘Goddamn cops.” 

Needham figured his best shot at getting 
to direct the movie himself was to pitch it as 
a quick and dirty Roger Corman-style proj- 
ect costing $1 million or less. He tapped his 
wild-man friend Jerry Reed to star as an 
ace driver and ladies’ man nicknamed the 
Bandit. Reed, then 39, a ferocious guitar 
player, session musician and songwriter for 
Elvis Presley and Dean Martin, was also 
known for warbling toe-tapping hits such 
as "When You're Hot, You're Hot." Invited 
to appear in movies in 1975 by his friend 
Burt Reynolds, Reed expanded his audi- 
ence via Reynolds vehicles, playing a musi- 
cian in 1975's W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings 
and a vicious crime boss in 1976's Gator. 

Needham scrawled the entire Smokey 


script in longhand and slipped it to 
Reynolds, the former college halfback and 
smoldering Brando look-alike who, start- 
ing in the late 1950s, spent more than a 
decade doing stunt work and acting on 
TV Westerns and detective series before 
taking his friend Clint Eastwood's ad- 
vice to head to Italy, where Reynolds was 
cast in the 1966 spaghetti Western Navajo 
Joe. Reynolds and Needham had become 
friends in 1959 when Needham stunted 
for the actor on the period adventure TV 
series Riverboat. Recalls Reynolds, “I told 
Hal I'd do his movie, but I also said, “This 
is the worst script I’ve ever read in my 
fucking life'—and he was so cheap that he 
still only had it in his own handwriting on 
a legal pad. I told him to hire a typist and 
some writers to make it better. Hal couldn't 
have gotten his movie made without me, 
unless he did it on a $50 budget." 

Needham moved Reed to the side- 
kick role and got screenwriter pal James 
Lee Barrett (Shenandoah) to tinker with 
the script. Needham says, "I had a pretty 
good reputation for doing action and 
second-unit direction. The script had com- 
edy and action, and having Burt Reynolds 
in my ass pocket, I thought, This is going 
to be a slam dunk." Despite having an in- 
creasingly bankable movie star onboard, 
Needham was thrown out of some of the 
best studio offices in town. But if Hol- 
lywood executives balked at Needham 
directing the movie, Reynolds says, ^You 
only had to be around Hal to get it. He 
was ready, a guy who came up fast in TV 
and stunts and, more than that, a guy who 
could be in charge. He was like the first 
Marlboro Man, and he had the balls of 
fucking King Kong." 

With his options dwindling, Needham 
grabbed the attention of producer Mort 
Engelberg, who had easy access to hit- 
making movie executive Ray Stark (The 
Way We Were, The Sunshine Boys). Engelberg 
helped set up the show at Universal with a 
lowball budget of $5.3 million, $1 million 
of which went to Reynolds. Universal pres- 
ident Ned Tanen was, according to Engel- 
berg, the only Hollywood honcho willing 
to roll the dice, as he had done earlier with 
the offbeat low-budget, high-profit movies 
American Graffiti and Car Wash. Says Need- 
ham, "They didn't have to tell me that 
they were making the movie because of 
Burt. They figured if it was going to go in 
the toilet, with Burt as the star at least they 
had a pretty good chance of getting their 
money back." 

According to Sean Daniel, then a rising 
young film executive who later became 
Universal's president of production, a 
few studio bosses might have sensed the 
zeitgeist and seen Smokey and the Bandit 
as a lighter country cousin of angry, anti- 
establishment, era-defining material such 
as Dog Day Afternoon and Five Easy Pieces. 
"There was this great wave of antiauthori- 
tarian movies in the 1970s, movies that 
mostly came out of New York and Los An- 
geles and were part of the new direction 
in American cinema," Daniel says. "Smokey 
and the Bandit had its own version of rebel- 
lious, antiauthoritarian characters. It came 


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from a different place, but it tapped into a 
similar American mind-set and spoke most 
directly to an audience waiting for movies 
made for them.” 

To punch up the screenplay, Universal 
hired writers including Robert L. Levy 
(who later produced Wedding Crashers), 
Charles Shyer (who later wrote and pro- 
duced Private Benjamin) and Alan Mandel 
(who later wrote for Who's the Boss?). Need- 
ham recalls, “I told them, Don't change the 
title, the names of the characters or the ac- 
tion. Just jazz up the jokes.’ They came back 
to my office about a week later, and І was so 
angry when І saw that the title was changed 
and Burt's character had a new name that 1 
yanked a toothpick out of my mouth, threw 
the script in the wastebasket, picked up the 
tooth cap that Pd pulled out along with the 
toothpick and told them, 'You're fired.’” 

With the script in limbo, Reynolds took 
the lead in pursuing Sally Field to co- 
star as a bride who flees her wedding to 


the handsome but doltish son of a small- 
town sheriff. Field had been struggling 
to shuck her perky, sexless image as star 
of TV sitcoms Gidget and The Flying Nun, 
finally startling audiences with an Emmy- 
winning performance as a woman combat- 
ing multiple personality disorder in Sybil. 
Says Reynolds, “Universal asked, “Why 
do you want the goddamn Flying Nun or 
Sybil?’ They wanted someone who would 
have been all wrong for the picture. І told 
the studio, “You guys don't get what sexy 
is. Sexy is talent. Sally is sexy.” Anytime 1 
had any problems with the studio assholes, 
Га go to [MCA/Universal chairman] Lew 
Wasserman, the smartest, most brilliant 
man, so І never had to bother with those 
numb-nuts. For Sally, І went to Lew, and 
he just fixed it.” 

Reynolds had reason to second-guess 
the project himself. “All, and I mean all, 
my advisors and friends went down on 
their knees, begging me in tears not to 


make Smokey,” he recalls. “Later, those 
same people said things like ‘Boy, I'm 
glad I kept after you to do that picture.’ ” 
Whether or not those same advisors and 
friends also convinced him to turn down 
M*A*S*H, Star Wars and One Flew Over the 
Cuckoo's Nest, among other films, Reynolds 
remained loyal to Needham. He also 
continued to exercise his smarts and star 
muscle when it came to casting the role 
of Sheriff Buford T. Justice, the racist, 
explosive, good-old-boy cop who chases 
the Bandit. “I told Hal that the character 
should be dangerous, totally unpredict- 
able, insane and, most of all, funny,” says 
Reynolds. “I basically told them that if the 
great Jackie Gleason didn't play Buford, 
I wasn't doing the movie. My father was 
chief of police in Jupiter, Florida; he knew 
a cop named Buford Т. Justice and also 
said sumbitch all the time. The studio ass- 
holes wanted Richard Boone, an actor 1 
loved but not for this role. Of course, Lew 
Wasserman loved the idea of Jackie Glea- 
son, and his marketing brain kicked into 
gear immediately, saying, ‘I see 8 million 
Jackie Gleason sheriff dolls.’ ” 

Gleason, the burly, acid-tongued 
comedian-musician dubbed the Great One 
by Orson Welles, had been hugely popular 
on TV in the 1950s with The Jackie Gleason 
Show and The Honeymooners, followed by 
less successful 1960s movie roles. Happily, 
Gleason's Oscar-nominated turn in The 
Hustler helped the public forget his critical 
and box-office duds Gigot and Papa's Deli- 
cate Condition. By the mid-1970s, Gleason 
had lived large, gambled, womanized and 
boozed; his health and fortunes needed a 
boost. Needham went into courtship mode. 
Says Needham, ^I called Gleason and he 
asked, “What makes you think I would do 
this?' I said, “Well, Mr. Gleason, I am a big 
fan, and I've seen every Honeymooners and 
many other shows and movies you made. 
I wrote this script and I'm going to direct 
it, so nothing's etched in stone. If you play 
this character, I can see that you would be 
very, very funny.' The shorthand version of 
it is that he said, ‘I’ll do the movie.’” 


To find someone to play Big Enos Bur- 
dette, the puffed-up millionaire who 
wagers $80,000 that the Bandit can't run 
the bootleg beer across state lines in 28 
hours, Reynolds helped Needham by pur- 
suing mountain-size Pat McCormick. A top 
comedy writer for Don Rickles, Red Skel- 
ton and Phyllis Diller, McCormick spent 
12 years crafting some of Johnny Carson's 
best Tonight Show monologues. His rep as a 
gonzo wit was matched by his renown as a 
carousing eccentric. Songwriter, composer, 
actor and frequent Tonight Show guest Paul 
Williams (McCormick's junior by only 13 
years but cast as his frustrated, vertically 
challenged offspring, Little Enos) recalls, 
"My first conscious memory of this strange, 
funny man is the two of us coming into the 
blinding light out of a bar across from NBC 
in Burbank after we'd been there all night 
drinking. I'm five-foot-two and he's six- 
foot-seven. He looked down at me and said, 
“Jesus, you look like an aerial photograph of 


a human being.’ Burt thought we'd be fun- 
ny together, so we did Smokey and the Bandit, 
Smokey and the Bandit II and even worse.” 
Needham himself made one of the single 
shrewdest casting decisions of the entire 
movie when he chose as the Bandit's car a 
1977 black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Spe- 
cial Edition sporting the “screaming chick- 
en” eagle decal. “When I saw a picture of it 
in a magazine, I said, “That's the car I want 
to put the Bandit іп,” Needham says. “I 
called Pontiac, where nobody had heard of 
me, of course, and said, ‘Га like some Trans 
Ams for Burt and three LeManses for the 
sheriffs car.’ There was some back-and- 
forth, and they gave me four Trans Ams 
and two LeManses. After the movie came 
out, though, you had to be on a waiting list 
for six months to even get a Trans Am.” 
Devised as Pontiac’s 
answer to Ford’s 
1964 breakaway hit 
Mustang, the Trans 
Am saw sales jump 
by 20,000 units after 
the movie made the 
pony car a regular 
guy’s equivalent to 
007’s Aston Martin. 
Cast and crew 
corralled, the movie 
kicked off filming 
during the sum- 
mer of 1976 in 
West Palm Beach, 
Florida; Ojai, Cali- 
fornia; and Georgia 
locations including 
Jonesboro, Cum- 
ming, McDonough, 
Redan and Atlanta. 
Two days before 
production be- 
gan, a Universal 
hatchet man de- 
scended on Atlanta 
to shave Needham's 
budget by $1 mil- 
lion, reducing it to 
$3.3 million after 


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five A.M. the next day, everybody would be 
ready to go again, in good shape." 

Well, more or less. Recalls Reynolds, 
"Gleason had this assistant named Mal who 
had been working for him for decades. 
Gleason would yell, “Mal? Hamburger!” 
and Mal would rush over with a glass of 
vodka and a sandwich. Gleason would start 
eating ‘hamburgers’ around nine A.M.” 
Production manager Peter Burrell, who 
would go on to work on Smokey and the Ban- 
dit II, says, "Any scene requiring Jackie to 
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all too human. Says 
Alfie Wise, memora- 
bly cast in the movie 
as a state trooper, “Burt would be riding 
high and then have deep fatigue. A medi- 
cal checkup found that his blood sugar was 
too low; he had hypoglycemia.” Explains 
Needham, “It meant he might be able to 
work three, four hours at most. Well, so 
much for Burt covering my ass and pro- 
tecting me from Universal. I had to re- 
arrange the entire shooting schedule and 
on a reduced budget, but it showed them 
that I could handle things.” 

Collaborators on Smokey and the Bandit 
and subsequent Needham-Reynolds mov- 
ies describe the on-set vibe as “fun and 
games,” “summer camp” and “testosterone 
city.” Reynolds credits Needham with set- 
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who gained his sobriety in 1991, says, “Ev- 
ery day Gleason would have this predict- 
able arc where he’d go from being a little 
quiet around 10 a.m. to little funnier, then 
to even funnier, to being in a great mood, 
and then you'd have the beginnings of his 
going to a dark place.” Adds Burrell, “He 
was a brilliant comedian, and when you 
had him from ‘even funnier’ to ‘in a great 
mood,’ he had so many ad-libs, we had to 
bite our lips to keep from ruining takes.” 
Early on, Gleason had made it clear to 
newbie director Needham what he was in 
for. “The Sunday night before we were 
to begin our first day of shooting, Jackie 
called and asked if I'd go over to his ho- 
tel to talk about the script,” Needham says. 
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person, and I thought, Uh-oh, but I went 
over and he invited me in wearing exactly 
what you’d expect he would—slacks and a 
sports jacket with a red carnation in the la- 
pel. He fixed drinks; we toasted to a good 
shoot, got completely plowed and never 
once talked about the damned script. The 
next day I found him on the set sitting in 
his chair wearing his clothes from the night 
before, except that his shoes were on the 
wrong feet. He raised his cup in salute, 
leaned back in his tall chair, lost his balance 
and rolled all the way down a 12-foot in- 
cline.” Says Reynolds, “We all ran toward 
him and I said, ‘Jackie, are you all right?’ 
He got right back up and said, ‘Never 
spilled a drop.” 

Although Gleason’s comic gifts had his co- 
workers in hysterics, his work methods chal- 
lenged the film edi- 
tors. Says Reynolds, 
“He was so wonder- 
fully inventive, he 
never did the same 
thing twice when the 
camera was on him.” 

Recalls Need- 
ham, “Seventy-five 
percent of Jackie 
Gleason’s dialogue 
Gleason wrote him- 
self, like calling 
Mike Henry [the 
former Tarzan actor 
who plays his doo- 
fus son] ‘tick turd’ 
and telling him, 
“There's no way, no 
way, that you came 
from my loins. Soon 
as I get home, first 
| thing I'm gonna do 
ispunch your mama 
in the mouth.” I 
mean, who could 
improve on that?” 

According to 
Needham and fel- 
low crew members, 
the high-spirited 
Jerry Reed was a 
blast of white light- 
ning. During the 
first week's shoot- 
ing, Reed asked 
Needham to have a 
listen as he tore into 
a snappy new tune he'd written called “East 
Bound and Down.” Says the director, “It 
was getting-down-the-road-truckin' music 
and told the story just right. After he fin- 
ished, I was quiet because I was blown away. 
Jerry blurted out, “Okay, you don't like it. 
Let me come up with another song.’ I said, 
“Jerry, change one thing about that song and 
ГІ fuckin’ kill you ”After the movie came 
out, the song became a number one hit and 
Reed's most requested song in concert. 


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Although his five-year reign as the coun- 
try's number one box-office attraction 
began a year after the filming of Smokey, 
Reynolds's good looks and laid-back 
charm—not to mention his 1972 nude 


133 


PLAYBOY 


134 


centerfold in Cosmopolitan—had already 
made him a much-written-about sex god 
reputed to have enjoyed the charms of ac- 
tresses Mamie Van Doren, Inger Stevens 
and Catherine Deneuve, among others. 
Wise, who frequently worked and traveled 
with Reynolds, recalls routinely scouring 
the star's hotel suites in advance of his ar- 
rival, sometimes finding amorous female 
fans hidden in closets and under beds. 
Says Paul Williams, “Why do you think we 
all hung so close around Burt? You could 
get raped just by standing close to him. ІҒ 
your clothing was just a little bit loose, you 
could experience an accidental fondling. 
Burt has always attracted a rather extensive 
crowd of attractive, free-spirited ladies.” 
But few failed to notice the attraction be- 
tween Reynolds and his appealing co-star 
Field. “The audience actually saw Burt and 
Sally falling in love on screen,” Needham 
says. “That added so much to the fun of the 
movie and spoke volumes for their char- 
acters’ relationship in the movie too. They 
were complete professionals about it.” 
Smokey collaborators say the bond be- 
tween Reynolds and Needham, also a mag- 
net for women, was tight. Says Wise, “In a 
closed town like Hollywood, Burt opened 
a lot of doors for Hal. They're like broth- 
ers.” The relationship caused much chatter 
and head-scratching around gossipy Holly- 
wood. Reynolds explains, “Hal knew every- 
thing about cowboying, horses and action, 
and І was a Broadway actor who had been 
at the Actors Studio and gone through all 
kinds of bullshit for looking too much like 
Marlon Brando when I was trying so hard 
not to. I knew that I could do comedy, and 
that's why І did so much comedy guesting 
on The Tonight Show. By the time of Smokey, 
I was ready. Hal encouraged that.” Long- 
time friend Marilu Henner, Reynolds's co- 


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star іп 198375 The Man Who Loved Women 
and 1984’s Cannonball Run II, says that 
Reynolds and Needham “spoke the same 
language and had that hard-drinkin”, hard- 
lovin”, real-guy mentality.” Jamie Farr, who 
co-starred in Needham and Reynolds's two 
Cannonball Run movies, remembers, “Hal 
looked out for Burt. They worked in tan- 
dem. Burt would make suggestions, and 
Hal always listened.” 

But the director needed no advice when 
it came to staging blowout chases, fender 
benders and vehicle crushers. Working 
with a trusted crew on a tight budget, 
Smokey alumni recall one of Needham’s big 
stunts nearly spinning out of control dur- 
ing a scene in which Field’s character hur- 
tles the Trans Am over a fence and crashes 
onto an athletic field, sending child and 
adult extras scrambling every which way. 
“Just talking about this out loud scares the 
shit out of me,” says Reynolds. “Everybody 
was convinced that the stunt double for 
Sally had done major stunts before because 
she was living with well-known stuntman 
Bobby Bass. She hadn’t. The car jumped 
the fence fine, but she jammed her foot on 
the accelerator. Bobby Bass was in the car 
with her and only had to deck her with one 
punch, but he couldn’t pry her fingers off 
the wheel or pry her foot off the accelera- 
tor. In the movie, you see children looking 
terrified in front of the car coming right 
toward them. Some of the women in the 
stands fainted, and Sally, Hal and I went 
over to them to make sure everybody was 
all right. The kids, of course, were laugh- 
ing, saying that they wanted to do it again. 
But it was insane to do that.” 

Needham says, “It wasn’t that the scene 
was ill planned or anything, but we didn’t 
take into consideration that the field would 
be so slick. I had a camera in the car, and 


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"You'd best go. His show's nearly finished and he'll notice you." 


I thought we had killed a kid for sure. My 
heart was pumping so hard. It was so dan- 
gerous, but it looked so good I said, 'Shit, 
I've got to have the extra shot.' We built 
the back of a dugout out of boards and 
things and had the car just come crashing 
right through it. That scene killed that par- 
ticular Trans Am." 

Another Trans Am wrecker was the po- 
lice car chase that ends with the Bandit's 
muscle car jumping a rotted-out bridge. 
Needham explains, “The approach to 
the bridge was short, so I had replaced 
the stock engine with one of my NASCAR 
800-horsepower race car engines. We pret- 
ty much shot the other car by bouncing on 
curbs, racing through ditches and going 
down embankments. To finish the movie 
with our last car, we had to use parts from 
the other cars that wouldn't run anymore. 
For the last scene in the movie, the only 
car we had left wouldn't start, so we had 
to have another car push it into the shot. 
Considering the wear, tear and abuse we 
put those cars through, I’m surprised they 
lasted as long as they did." 


Two years after Smokey and the Bandit com- 
pleted its initial theatrical release, it nailed 
down the number 12 position on Variety's 
list of the biggest movie moneymakers of 
all time. Needham (whose first Smokey per- 
centage check reportedly came to $400,000, 
about $1.5 million in today's currency) 
became overnight a go-to action director. 
Reynolds rocketed to America's number 
one box-office attraction in 1978 and stayed 
there through 1982. Field's best actress 
Oscar for 1979's Norma Rae vaulted her 
into a whole new stratosphere. The Pontiac 
Firebird Trans Am became the American 
ride, NASCAR edged out Formula One as 
the country's favorite form of racing, and 
countless tail-chasing movies and TV shows 
such as The Dukes of Hazzard were spawned. 

Needham, Reynolds and Field stuck to- 
gether for 1978's middling financial suc- 
cess Hooper, a semiautobiographical action 
flick about an aging stuntman attempting 
one last stunt in a rocket car, before suc- 
cumbing in 1980 to pressure for more 
Smokey. Needham was more gung ho about 
the prospect than Reynolds, who wanted to 
team with his friend and director in some- 
thing grander. Says Reynolds, "I wanted to 
star in a remake of the 1930s movie Captain 
Blood, something where I could swing from 
ropes doing that Errol Flynn pirate shit. 
I wanted to show that I had chops. They 
wanted another Smokey." 

With the sequel's budget upped to 
$10 million and Reynolds's take now at 
$3 million, Reynolds again helped Need- 
ham fill out the cast of the project— 
variously called Smokey and the Bandit Have 
a Baby, Smokey and the Bandit Ride Again and 
Smokey and the Bandit 10-4—this time with 
close friend Dom DeLuise, who had made 
a splash in Blazing Saddles. The Pittsburgh 
Steelers’ Terry Bradshaw and Charles Ed- 
ward Greene (a.k.a. football star "Mean 
Joe" Greene) also joined the cast. This time 
around Pontiac filled Needham's order for 
10 black Trans Ams, 25 red Bonnevilles 


and 25 white Bonnevilles. With the tab- 
loids hotly reporting the ups and downs 
of the Reynolds-Field relationship, rumors 
emerged that Reynolds was considering 
replacing Field with Julie Kavner, best 
known today for voicing Marge Simpson. 
In the end, Field did the film. 

On its August 15, 1980 release, Smokey 
and the Bandit II scored what was then the 
second-highest box-office debut in movie 
history and eventually grossed more than 
$66 million. But the charm, heart and pea- 
pickin’ good-time funkiness of its predeces- 
sor were missing—especially considering 
how Reynolds's character had morphed 
into an arrogant, wasted, falling-down 
drunk whom Field’s character actually ac- 
cuses of being a “fame junkie” who feeds 
intravenously on People magazine and Na- 
tional Enquirer headlines. The sour barbs 
prompted a San Francisco movie reviewer 
to observe that the stars “seem to be air- 
ing private beefs.” Reynolds admits today, 
“We were fighting at the time. Sally would 
say something pretty strong to me and P'd 
say, ‘Write down all of that,’ and she wrote 
all that dialogue. We did that arguing 
scene in one take, and she really cried. I 
told Hal, “You're going to print that ver- 
sion. I don't think there'll be a second one.” 
She was fucking amazing. That's what the 
movie needed more of.” Needham recalls 
Reynolds calling him into his trailer two 
days before the film wrapped to announce 
that he and Field were calling it quits. 

The critics were so brutal (the Philadelphia 
Evening Bulletin called suicide “a pleasurable 
alternative") that Needham flipped them 
off by taking out trade-paper ads featuring 
caustic reviews alongside a photo of him 
outside a bank with a wheelbarrow over- 
flowing with cash—gangsta style before the 
term was coined. Recalling that ad today, 
Needham says with a hearty laugh, "Wasn't 
that cute? So many producers and directors 
congratulated me for having the balls to say 
‘Fuck the critics.’ Burt and I were going to 
do that ad together, but finally he said, 'You 
know, Hal, you may not give a shit, but I've 
got a career I’ve got to watch.” 

When the studio suggested a third 
Smokey, Needham decided that he too had 
a career to watch. Both he and Reynolds 
flipped off Universal. Needham's lack of 
enthusiasm could not have been helped 
by a $3 million lawsuit filed in 1977 by 
Michael T. Montgomery charging him and 
others with plagiarizing both a 1975 treat- 
ment and full screenplay. The Los Angeles 
Times reported in July 1983 that a jury vote 
of 11 to one had called for a settlement. 
Explains Needham, "When I was looking 
for somebody to rewrite and build it up, 
some schmuck I met one time said it was 
all his idea. It cost the insurance company 
$100,000 and he went away. I hope to hell 
he choked on the money." 

Reynolds and Needham hooked up 
again for the dismal NASCAR comedy 
Stroker Ace, a reject with audiences and crit- 
ics. Meanwhile, Universal announced in 
the fall of 1982 that production was soon to 
begin on Smokey Is the Bandit, starring Jackie 
Gleason in dual roles and with TV direc- 
tor Dick Lowry at the helm. In an April 


277, 1983 article, venerable Variety reporter 
Army Archerd wrote that sneak-preview 
audiences had been so baffled by Gleason's 
playing both the sheriff and the Bandit that 
Universal hastily arranged reshoots with Jer- 
ry Reed playing the Bandit. But even with a 
brief cameo by Reynolds (who donated his 
fee to charity), fans smelled trouble, and the 
flick released as Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 
stalled after making only $7 million. 


Since the glory days of Smokey and the 
Bandit, it's easy to see the cultural skid 
marks the movie left on car-crazy succes- 
sors such as The Fast and the Furious and 
the self-conscious Gone im Sixty Seconds 
remake. In 2007's Death Proof, Eli Roth 
croons "East Bound and Down," and HBO 
paid homage with Danny McBride's series 
of the same name. Smokey and the Bandit 
references mark everything from episodes 
of Two and a Half Men to the videos for Kid 
Rock's “Cowboy” and Nelly's “Ride Wit 
Me” to Jeffrey Dean Morgan's performance 
in Watchmen. Smokey fans included movie 
suspense maestro Alfred Hitchcock (who 
considered Burt Reynolds for several film 
projects), as well as My Name Is Earl star Ja- 


By late June Smokey and 
the Bandit had hauled in 
an impressive $12 million. 
By year's end, only Star 
Wars topped it as 1977's 
biggest moneymaker. 


son Lee, who says, "I saw it as a kid, and 
it was badass—the car, Burt's clothes. Sally 
was hot, and it was full of action. We liked 
going on the ride with them. As an adult, 
Smokey reminds us how much better shit 
was when movies weren't all cheesy, super 
tough guy, full of CGI and bad one-liners." 

For some true believers and diehards, 
the movie is—and has always been—about 
hot wheels. There's Georgia-based Tyler 
Hambrick, for instance, whose 1979 Ken- 
worth 900W truck and 40-foot trailer are 
painted to replicate the semi Reed drives 
in the film. Hambrick's rig has helped 
raise funds for the Wounded Warrior Proj- 
ect, which helps veterans. Hambrick, who 
leads Smokey location tours, has also par- 
ticipated in every weeklong Bandit Run, 
an annual event in which Smokey buffs— 
many in restored Trans Ams and from as 
far away as Europe and Canada—cruise a 
predetermined route through the South, 
with pit stops at museums, automobile 
factories and local car shows. Says Bandit 
Run organizer and sponsor Dave Hall, a 
former computer-software designer whose 
Lincoln, Nebraska garage Restore a Mus- 
cle Car is a haven for owners willing to 
spend as much as $100,000 to restore their 


Smokey 'Trans Ams: "Mention a Trans Am 
and people know it as the Smokey car, so the 
demand for these cars is always there. Pull 
into a gas station in one of those cars and 
everyone wants to talk to you. You become 
someone you're probably not when you're 
driving your minivan." 

North Carolina resident Debbie Ciepiela, 
who publicizes the Bandit Run, laughingly 
says she must compete with her husband's 
"motorized mistress”—a fully restored Ban- 
dit car he bought in 1976. Says Ciepiela, 
"Smokey and the Bandit is a fun, feel-good 
piece of Americana that I've probably seen 
at least 100 times. The Bandit Run at- 
tracts CEOs, college students, construction 
workers, mechanics and other unexpected 
types. When we drive through these small 
towns and people see our cars, they yell and 
cheer. You can't help but get caught up in 
the excitement." Comments Reynolds, who 
organizers hope will attend the 2013 Bandit 
Run, which this July will travel from Lin- 
coln, Nebraska to Golden, Colorado, “I’ve 
had five big, tough, burly guys show me all 
across their backs these incredible tattoos 
of me as the Bandit. After I said Wow 一 
what else can you say?—these big guys were 
actually blushing. It was so sweet." 

After Smokey and the Bandit II, Reynolds 
and Needham created yet another car-cult 
franchise when they reunited in 1981 and 
then 1984 for the free-for-alls The Cannon- 
ball Run and Cannonball Run II. About an 
illegal, secret cross-country race, the films 
feature some of the biggest stars of the day: 
Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Telly Sava- 
las and fabled Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, 
Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Shirley 
MacLaine. Reynolds remembers throw- 
ing parties in his hotel every night while 
filming. The movies would later inspire 
everything from a short-lived 2001 reality- 
'TV series to the Cannonball Rat Race, a 
six-day New York to California road race 
and treasure hunt with an $8,995 entry fee 
that kicked off in New York on September 
3, 2011. But Cannonball Run II star Marilu 
Henner says some experiences can't be 
duplicated at any price: "Burt and Hal 
liked to have a good time and made sure 
the rest of us had one too. The real party 
was hanging out in the bar at the Arizona 
Inn in Tucson with idols like Frank Sina- 
tra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Shirley 
MacLaine—and to have Sammy Davis Jr. 
suddenly break out in song? Secretly, I was 
pinching myself." 

The 1970s and 1980s are long gone, 
but fever for the revved-up Needham- 
Reynolds movies rages on. “I know the 
movies are always showing somewhere," 
says Needham, "because we all get residual 
checks from the U.S., Finland, Australia, 
New Zealand." The director, who in 2011 
published his autobiography Stuntman! 
and tools around town these days in a Mini 
Cooper, looks back on it all, saying, "My 
movies weren't artistic. I kept the jokes 
funny, I made the action fast, and I never 
killed anybody. Who knows? Maybe it's 
time we did another truck movie." Need- 
ham has an Oscar now. Maybe he's right. 


135 


PLAYBOY 


ENLIGHTENMENT 


(continued from page 104) 


for anyone seeking spiritual solace in an 
unfamiliar faith. 


Until February 2012, McNally and 
Thorson were rising stars among a small 
community of Tibetan Buddhist medita- 
tors and yoga practitioners who had come 
to the desert to escape the scrutiny and 
chaos of the city in order to focus on spiri- 
tual development. McNally was a founding 
member of Diamond Mountain University 
and Retreat Center—a small campus of 
yurts, campers, temples and retreat cabins 
that sprawls over two rocky valleys adja- 
cent to historic Fort Bowie in Arizona. In 
the past decade Diamond Mountain has 
risen from obscurity to become one of the 
best-known, if controversial, centers for 
Tibetan Buddhism in the United States. Its 
supreme spiritual leader is Michael Roach, 
an Arizona native, Princeton graduate and 
former diamond merchant who took up 
monk’s robes in the 19805 and remains one 
of this country's most enthusiastic evange- 
lists for Tibetan Buddhism. McNally was 
Roach's most devoted student, his lover, 
his spiritual consort and, eventually, some- 
one he recognized as a living goddess. 

For 14 months McNally led one of the 
most ambitious meditation retreats in 
the Western world. Starting in December 
2010 she and 38 other retreat participants 
pledged to cut off all direct contact with the 
rest of the planet and meditate under vows 
of silence for three years, three months 
and three days. Unwilling to speak, they 
wrote down all their communications. 
Phone lines, air-conditioning and the in- 
ternet were off-limits. The only way they 
could communicate with their families 
was through postal drops once every two 
weeks. The strict measures were intended 
to remove the distractions that infiltrate 
everyday life and allow the retreatants a 
measure of quiet to focus on the structure 
of their minds. 

Thorson's death might have gone unno- 
ticed by the world if, days after, Matthew 
Remski, a yoga instructor, internet activist 
and former member of the group, had not 
begun to raise questions about the retreat's 
safety on the well-known Buddhist blog 
Elephant Journal. He called for Roach 
to step down from Diamond Mountain's 
board of directors and for state psycholo- 
gists to evaluate the remaining 30-odd re- 
treatants. His posting received a deluge of 
responses from current and former mem- 
bers, some of whom alleged sexual miscon- 
duct by Roach and made accusations of 
black magic and mind control. 

Roach rose to prominence in the late 
1990s after the great but financially im- 
poverished Tibetan monastery Sera Mey 
conferred on him a geshe degree, the high- 
est academic qualification in Tibetan Bud- 
dhism. Conversant in Russian, Sanskrit 
and Tibetan, he was an ideal messenger 
to bring Buddhism to the West and was 


136 widely acclaimed for his ability to translate 


complex philosophical ideas into plain 
English. He was the first American to re- 
ceive the title, which ordinarily takes some 
20 years of intensive study. In his case, he 
was urged by his teacher, the acclaimed 
monk Khen Rinpoche, to spend time out- 
side the monastery, in the business world. 
At his teacher's command, Roach took a job 
at Andin International Diamond Corpora- 
tion, buying and selling precious stones. 
According to a book Roach co-authored 
with McNally, The Diamond Cutter: The Bud- 
dha on Managing Your Business and Your Life, 
in 15 years he grew the firm from a small- 
time company to a giant global operation 
that generated annual revenue in excess of 
$100 million. 

The book cites a teaching called “The 
Diamond Sutra,” in which the Buddha 
looks at diamonds, with their clarity and 
strength, as symbolic of the perfection of 
wisdom. But the diamond industry, par- 
ticularly during the years Roach was active 
in it, is one of the dirtiest in the world — 
fueling wars in Africa and linked to mil- 
lions of deaths. During a lecture Roach 
gave in Phoenix last June, I asked him how 
he could reconcile his Buddhist ethics with 
making vast sums of money through vio- 
lent supply chains. 

Roach stared at me with moist, sincere- 
looking eyes and avoided the question. 
“If your motivation is pure, then you can 
clean the environment you enter,” he said. 
“I wanted to work with diamonds. It was 
a 15-year metaphor, not a desire to make 
money. I wanted to do good in the world, so 
I worked in one ofthe hardest and most un- 
ethical environments.” It was the sort of an- 
swer that plays well with business clients. Ra- 
tionalizations like this are not uncommon in 
industry, but they are for a Buddhist monk. 

If Roach was unorthodox, he was also 
indispensable. His business acumen 
might have been enough for some early 
critics to look the other way. His share of 
Andin’s profits was ample enough that he 
could funnel funds to Sera Mey to estab- 
lish numerous charitable missions. His 
blend of Buddhism and business made 
him an instant success on the lecture cir- 
cuit, and even today he is comfortable in 
boardrooms in Taipei, Geneva, Hamburg 
and Kiev, lecturing executives on how 
behaving ethically in business will both 
make you rich and speed you along the 
path of enlightenment. 


Ian Thorson had always been attracted to 
alternative spirituality, and he had a mag- 
netic personality that made it easy for him 
to win friends. Still, “he was seeking some- 
thing, and there was an element of that 
asceticism that existed long before he took 
to any formal practice of meditation, yoga 
and whatnot,” explains Mike Oristian, a 
friend of his from Stanford University. 
Oristian recounts in an e-mail the story of 
a trip Thorson took to Indonesia, where he 
hoped a sacred cow might lick his eyes and 
cure his poor eyesight. It didn't work, and 
Thorson later admitted to Oristian that “it 
was a long way to go only to have the feel- 
ing of sandpaper on his eyes.” 


Roach gave Thorson a structure to 
his passion and a systematic way to think 
about his spiritual quest. After Thorson 
began studying Roach's teachings in 1997, 
Oristian remembers, some of his spontane- 
ous spark seemed to fade. Kay Thorson, 
lan's mother, had a different perspective. 
She suspected he had fallen under the sway 
of a cult and hired two anti-cult counselors 
to stage an intervention. In June 2000 they 
lured him to a house in Long Island and 
tried to get him to leave the group. “He was 
skinny, almost anorexic,” she says. They 
tried to show him he had options other 
than following Roach. For a time it seemed 
to work. Afterward he wrote to a friend 
about his family’s attempt to deprogram 
him: "It's so weird that my mom thinks I'm 
in a cult and so does Dad and so does my 
sister. They talk to me in soft voices, like a 
mental patient, and tell me that the people 
aren't ill-intentioned, just misguided." For 
almost five years he traveled through Eu- 
rope, working as a translator and tutor, but 
he never completely severed ties. Eventu- 
ally he made his way back to Roach's fold. 

In 1996, when she was only two years out 
of New York University, Christie McNally 
dropped any plans she'd had to pursue an 
independent career and became Roach's 
personal attendant, spending every day 
with him and organizing his increasingly 
busy travel schedule. And though his 
growing base of followers didn't know it, 
she would soon be sharing Roach's bed. 
The couple married in a secret ceremony 
in Little Compton, Rhode Island in 1998. 

As had many charismatic teachers before 
him, Roach established a dedicated follow- 
ing. As it grew he planned an audacious 
feat that would take him out of the public 
eye and at the same time establish him in 
a lineage of high-Himalayan masters. He 
announced that, from 2000 to 2003, he 
would put his lecturing career on hold and 
attempt enlightenment by going on a three- 
year meditation retreat along with five cho- 
sen students, among them Christie McNally. 

In many ways, Roach's silence was 
more powerful than his words. Three 
years, three months and three days went 
by, and Roach's reputation grew. Word of 
mouth about his feat helped expand the 
patronage of Diamond Mountain and the 
Asian Classics Institute, which distributed 
his teachings through audio recordings 
and online courses. Every six months he 
emerged to teach breathless crowds about 
his meditating experiences. At those events 
he was blindfolded but spoke eloquently 
on the nature of emptiness. Finally, on Jan- 
uary 16, 2003 he dropped two bombshells 
in a poem he addressed to the Dalai Lama 
and published in an open letter. 

In his first revelation he claimed that 
after intensive study of tantric practices 
he had seen emptiness directly and was 
on the path to becoming a bodhisattva, 
a sort of Tibetan angel. The word /antra 
derives from Sanskrit and indicates secret 
ritualized teachings that can be a shortcut 
to advanced spiritual powers. The second 
revelation was that while in seclusion he 
had discovered that his student Christie 
McNally was an incarnation of Vajrayogini, 


the Tibetan diamond-like deity, and that 
he had taken her as his spiritual consort 
and wife. They had taken vows never to 
be more than 15 feet from each other for 
the rest of their lives and even to eat off 
the same plate. In light of her scant quali- 
fications as a scholar, Roach legitimized 
McNally by bestowing her with the title 
of “lama,” a designation for a teacher of 
Tibetan Buddhism. 

These revelations severely split the Ti- 
betan Buddhist community. The repri- 
mands were swift and forceful. Several re- 
spected lamas demanded that he hand back 
his monk's robes. Others, including Lama 
Zopa Rinpoche, who heads the Founda- 
tion for the Preservation of the Mahayana 
Tradition, a large and wealthy group of 
Tibetan Buddhists, advised that he prove 
his claims by publicly showing the mirac- 
ulous powers that are said to come with 
enlightenment—or be declared a heretic. 
That Zopa Rinpoche was one of Roach's 
greatest mentors made the criticism all the 
more pertinent and scathing. 

Robert Thurman, a professor of reli- 
gious studies at Columbia University, met 
with Roach and McNally shortly after 
Roach published his open letter. He was 
concerned that Roach had broken his vows 
and that his continuing as a monk could 
damage the reputation of the larger Ti- 
betan Buddhist community. “I told him, 
“You can't be a monk and have a girlfriend; 
you have clearly given up your vow, ” 
Thurman says. “То which he responded 
that he had never had genital contact with 
a human female. So 1 turned to her and 
asked if she was human or not. She said 
right away, “He said it. I didn’t.’ There was 
a pregnant pause, and then she said, “But 
can't he do whatever he wants, since he 
has directly realized emptiness?’” On the 
phone І can hear Thurman consider his 
words and sigh. “It seemed like they had 
already descended into psychosis.” 


Intensive retreats where monks meditate in 
isolated caves are mainstays of Buddhism 
in Tibet, where they are typically used to 
establish the credentials of an important 
teacher. However, such retreats make less 
sense outside Tibet's historically feudal 
world. The human mind is reasonably frag- 
ile, and isolation can act like an echo cham- 
ber. For the retreatants, Diamond Mountain 
was a ritualized place where they could try 
to sharpen their minds to see as little of the 
ordinary world as possible and allow their 
visualizations to be the focus of their daily 
life. For better or worse, Roach and McNally 
emerged from their first great retreat as dif- 
ferent people than when they began. Much 
of the explanation for this comes down to 
physical changes in the brain. 

In its purest form meditation is a way to 
look at the mind in isolation. By calming 
the body and watching thoughts come and 
go, an experienced meditator can uncover 
astonishing things in his or her physiol- 
ogy and psychology. Meditation is a little 
like putting your mind in a laboratory and 
seeing what it does on its own. Although 
everyone's experience is different, it is 


common to see walls shift, hear noises that 
aren't there, observe changes in the qual- 
ity of light or have time inexplicably speed 
up or slow down. Neuroscientists have dis- 
covered that over the long term meditating 
can cause changes in the composition of 
brain matter, and even short stints can cre- 
ate significant physical alterations in one's 
neurological makeup. 

Whatever changes occur during short, 
daily meditations are only amplified on 
silent retreats. Although comprehensive 
clinical studies on the potential adverse 
side effects of such retreats are just get- 
ting under way (one led by Willoughby 
Britton, a neuroscientist at Brown Uni- 
versity, is in its second year), it is clear that 
some people find the isolation and mental 
introspection too intense. Some lose touch 
with reality or fall into psychotic states. The 
world generally embraces meditation as a 
method of self-help, but a 1984 study by 
Stanford University psychologist Leon Otis 
of 574 subjects involved in Transcendental 
Meditation (one of the more benign forms) 
showed that 70 percent of longtime medi- 
tators displayed signs of mental disorders. 

Another explanation is that our expec- 
tations for meditation are often too grand. 
From a young age we in the United States 
are steeped in tales of superheroes and 
jedis who are able to perform great feats 
through their innate specialness and in- 
tensive study. We hear stories of levitating 
yogis and the power of chakras, tai chi and 
badass Shaolin monks, and quietly think to 
ourselves that maybe anything is possible. 
McNally's speedy elevation to Vajrayogini 
and lama mirrors those nascent desires. 
For those who aren't instantly anointed, 
the religion offers a clear method: Medi- 
tate often, keep your vows and, if you're in 
a hurry, start practicing tantra. 

From a certain standpoint Roach's ap- 
proach was a success. Members of the 
group noted that during the period when 
Roach and McNally were in a relation- 
ship, attendance at events and lectures 
was never higher. They taught together, 
and their mutual confidence and earnest- 
ness seemed to be an open door to enlight- 
enment. If it was okay to take a spiritual 
partner along for the ride, couples could 
join and work on their spiritual practice 
together instead of following the more or- 
thodox custom of practicing alone. 


After the 2008 retreat, Roach and McNally 
continued to forge a spiritual path that, to 
outside observers, looked less like Tibetan 
Buddhism and more like a new faith that 
mixed elements of Buddhism, Hinduism, 
Christianity and good old-fashioned show- 
manship. They co-authored half a dozen 
books on Tibetan meditation, yoga and 
business ethics, one of which attained best- 
seller status. 

Sid Johnson, a musician who was briefly 
on the board of directors of Diamond 
Mountain, worried that the group was be- 
coming too focused on magical thinking. 
His concerns came to a head in 2005 dur- 
ing a secret initiation into the practice of 
the bull-headed tantric deity Yamantaka, 


WERE D š 


b6 OMEN 
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whose name translates as “destroyer of 
death.” As part of a four-day ritual, all the 
initiates had to meet privately with Geshe 
Michael and Lama Christie, as their stu- 
dents called them, in a yurt for their final 
empowerment, which would help them 
conquer death. Johnson was nervous when 
he entered the room wearing a blindfold 
and heard Roach ask him to lie down on 
their bed. When he did so, McNally started 
to massage his chakras, starting with his 
head and ending at his penis. “I'm not 
sure who undid my pants, but it was part 
of the blessing,” says Johnson. When they 
were done, he sat up—still wearing the 
blindfold—and felt McNally's lips press- 
ing against his. They kissed. “There is a 
part of the initiation when your lama offers 
you a consort, and the way Geshe Michael 
teaches it, the things that happen in the 
metaphysical world also have to happen in 
the real one,” says Johnson. Afterward, he 
says, they all giggled like children at a sum- 
mer camp, as though they were breaking 
taboos and no one else would know. Ten 
minutes later Johnson left and they asked 
Johnson's wife to come in alone. Altogeth- 
er, almost 20 students had private initia- 
tions with the couple that night. 

By most accounts McNally began to 
take center stage in the spiritual road 


show. It was as though Roach was step- 
ping back and allowing his partner to 
teach philosophy and meditation in his 
stead. “He seemed distracted and unen- 
gaged whenever she would speak, just 
staring at the ceiling while she was talk- 
ing, as if distancing himself from what- 
ever Christie was saying,” says Michael 
Brannan, another longtime student and 
current full-time volunteer at Diamond 
Mountain. “He called her Vajrayogini. 
Can you imagine being promoted to deity 
by your spouse and guru?” 

Even though she was a lama, McNally 
wanted to prove she could be a leader on 
her own. She pressed for a second great 
retreat, this one even more ambitious than 
the first. Instead of only a few humble yurts 
on a desolate property, they would build 
dozens of highly efficient self-cooling solar- 
powered structures—permanent infra- 
structure on Diamond Mountain property 
that could host scores of retreatants for 
long periods. Roach and McNally planned 
to lead 38 people into the desert on a quest 
to see emptiness directly. They had no 
problem finding followers to foot the bill. 

Participants were required to build and 
pay for their own cabins, with the expecta- 
tion that when they were done with their re- 
treat, ownership of the cabins would revert 


"I didn't catch his name. But then, we didn't talk much.” 


to Diamond Mountain. Modestly priced 
cabins cost around $100,000, while more 
lavish spaces hovered closer to $300,000. 
Volunteers and contractors labored on the 
designs for several years while Roach and 
McNally prepped the spiritual seekers with 
philosophy and meditation techniques. 

By the middle of 2010, plans for the sec- 
ond great retreat were coming together, 
but Roach and McNally's relationship was 
falling apart. The reasons for the split are 
unclear. Members of the group speak about 
illicit sexual liaisons between Roach and 
other students and covert theological power 
struggles. No one knows for sure, and nei- 
ther Roach nor McNally commented on the 
split for this story, but the fallout reverber- 
ated through the community. 

Michael Brannan remembers "a lot of 
people just sort of swapped partners," in- 
cluding McNally. Former member Ekan 
Thomason remembers that Thorson 
dropped off his then girlfriend at her 
house with a sleeping bag and disap- 
peared into the desert. The next time 
Thomason saw Thorson, he and McNally 
were dancing under a disco ball at a party 
at the Diamond Mountain temple. In Oc- 
tober 2010 McNally and Thorson mar- 
ried in a Christian ceremony in Montauk, 
New York. Faced with being confined on 
a silent retreat with his ex-wife, Roach 
quietly backed away from his commit- 
ment to participate and gave over leader- 
ship of the affair to McNally. 


For McNally the second great desert re- 
treat would be a major testing ground for 
her as a spiritual leader. At its conclusion 
she would have had almost seven years of 
silent meditation under her belt, a quali- 
fication few Buddhist practitioners—even 
in Tibet—can claim. With 38 people look- 
ing to her for spiritual guidance, including 
a new husband for whom she was guru, 
goddess and wife, she needed to impart 
something special. She found her answer 
outside Tibetan Buddhism, in the Hindu 
goddess Kali. 

Kali isn't an ordinary member of the 
Hindu pantheon. Although a few ma- 
jor temples, including the famous Da- 
kshinewar Kali Temple in Calcutta, are 
devoted to her worship, most mainstream 
Hindus invoke her name only in times of 
violence or war. In the 1700s British co- 
lonialists popularized and exaggerated 
stories of Kali worshippers called thuggee 
(from which we get the English word thug), 
who murdered unsuspecting travelers on 
isolated roads and used their bodies in 
sacrifices to the goddess to gain magical 
powers. The few Hindus steeped in tant- 
ric practice—usually quite different from 
Buddhist tantra—will sometimes appeal 
to Kali for female spiritual power, called 
Shakti. Although Kali is considered untam- 
able, wild and dangerous, it seems McNally 
wanted to add the goddess to her tantric 
meditation in order to speed her journey 
to enlightenment. 

In October 2009 McNally staged a 10- 
day Kali initiation with more than 100 
prospective devotees. She decorated the 


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temple with weapons: swords, guns, cross- 
bows, chain saws and menacing-looking 
garden implements meant to show the 
violent side of the deity. In a symbolic rite 
reminiscent of India's now-banned thug- 
gee cult, members were "kidnapped" on 
the road between holy sites and stuffed 
into a small wooden box to heighten their 
fear. Roach held his own version of the rit- 
ual nearby as Ekan Thomason met Lama 
Christie in a structure called Lama Dome. 
There, McNally gave her a medical lancet. 

“Kali requires something from you. She 
requires your blood," McNally said, re- 
minding Thomason of a beautiful swash- 
buckling pirate as she ran a finger across 
the sharp edge of the knife. 

'The ceremony was designed to be terri- 
fying, and participants were split in their 
reactions. Some had accepted McNally as 
an infallible teacher and hoped to learn 
despite the theatrics. Others worried that 
Diamond Mountain was turning toward 
a dark, occult version of Hinduism. But 
a year later almost 40 retreatants would 
lock themselves in a valley under Lama 
Christie's sole spiritual direction. 

In the months leading up to the retreat 
in 2010 the group showed signs of stress 
as members became increasingly con- 
fused between the spiritual world they 
were trying to access through meditation 
and the real world, where actions had 
predictable consequences. Under Roach 
and McNally's direction they threw par- 
ties in the temple at which they served 
"nectar," specially blessed booze they 
could drink despite their vows of absti- 
nence. At one of these parties some mem- 
bers, who wish to remain anonymous, say 
they saw Roach and McNally perform 
miracles—allegedly walking through a 
wall of the temple building by bending 
the laws of space and time. Such stories 
became commonplace around the camp, 
and the communal hysteria vaulted 
Roach and McNally to godlike status. 

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, co- 
authors of The Guru Papers: Masks of Au- 
thoritarian Power, explain these perceived 
miracles on a psychological level. Kramer 
says, "People can convince themselves 
they have seen many things that are really 
just projections of their own mind." Alstad 
adds that disciples give their mental en- 
ergy to a guru and the guru reflects the 
energy back to them. It seems likely that 
McNally learned to see the world through 
Roach's lens. “Roach took her mind 
over—or she gave it to him," says Alstad. 
"That's what followers do: They totally 
surrender. She surrendered to him as a 
young, unformed woman. And a similar 
process was probably reversed between 
Thorson and McNally. She was his lama, 
his guru and his wife." 

When the retreat started, no one had 
much of an idea how their relationship 
would hold up. Then, in March 2011, after 
three months of silence, Thorson knocked 
on the door ofa retreatant who was a nurse 
practitioner. He was bleeding profusely 
from three stab wounds. She was afraid 
to treat him and recommended he go to a 
hospital. But the second person to see him, 


a doctor on retreat, reluctantly tended to 
the slashes on his torso and shoulder. The 
wounds were so deep, the doctor said, they 
"threatened vital organs." 

At the time, McNally and Thorson gave 
no explanation for how it happened, but 
soon rumors of domestic abuse began to 
circulate in the same hushed whispers as 
the talk about Roach's supposed sexual 
liaisons with various students. With most 
people under vows of silence, it is no sur- 
prise that almost a year passed before the 
event became publicly known. 

In February 2012, Lama Christie recused 
herself from her vow of silence to give a 
public lecture on her realizations during 
meditation. Wearing her trademark white 
robes and with a silken blindfold across her 
eyes, she sat on a throne and talked about 
the spiritual lessons she had learned while 
grappling with an increasingly unstable 
and violent relationship. 

In an act she described as playful, 
McNally said she stabbed Thorson three 
times with a knife they had received as a 
wedding present. He could have died in 
the exchange, and few people in the crowd 
could grasp what the lesson was supposed 
to mean. Could violence be a route to their 
ultimate spiritual goals? Had their teacher 
gone crazy? 

Referencing her newfound grasp of the 
goddess Kali, she asked the crowd to learn 
from her experience with violence. Al- 
though the original recording of her talk 
has been taken off the internet, she later 
explained the incident in a public letter: "I 
simply did not understand that the knife 
could actually cut someone.... I was active- 
ly trying to raise up this aggressive energy, 
a kind of fierce divine pride.... It was all 
divine play to me." She went on to write 
about the tantric lessons Kali had taught 
her through the event and how she was 
trying to cope with occasional violence in 
her relationship with Thorson. 

Jigme Palmo, a nun who sits on Dia- 
mond Mountain's board of directors, 
stated later that the board was worried 
the focus on violence might spur other 
meditators down a dangerous path. The 
directors immediately convened emer- 
gency meetings and discussed various 
plans of action. "It was an impossible situ- 
ation," says Palmo. "We didn't know what 
was happening inside the retreat, and yet 
the board was ultimately responsible if 
something went wrong." They consulted 
a lawyer and sent urgent written messages 
to McNally asking for more information 
about domestic violence and her increas- 
ingly erratic decisions. 

Suddenly aware that her teachings had 
created a rift in the community, McNally 
tried to shore up her control of the medi- 
tators by banning all correspondence with 
the outside world. She ordered that all 
mail deliveries cease and instructed the re- 
treatants to refuse contact with their fami- 
lies. The board members decided they had 
no choice but to act unilaterally to remove 
McNally from her role as teacher and to 
remove McNally and Thorson from the 
retreat itself. 

The board sent them a letter explaining 


their decision and gave McNally and 
Thorson an hour to pack their things and 
leave, offering to cover their relocation 
expenses, including hotel costs, a rental 
car, prepaid cell phones and $3,600 cash. 
The message was clear: Get out now. But 
McNally and Thorson had taken vows to 
stay in Diamond Mountain's consecrated 
area, and they had a different plan. Instead 
of leaving, McNally and Thorson planned 
to find a nearby cave where they could 
continue to meditate and still have contact 
with some of McNally's students. 

Before they made their final arrange- 
ments to leave, McNally met privately 
with Michael Brannan to discuss the 
board's decision. McNally kept her vow of 
silence, and the two passed notes back and 
forth, creating an effective transcript of 
her thoughts at the time. The document, 
which Brannan shared with me, sheds 
light on McNally's state of mind. In it 
she mentions ordinations that took place 
and the pressure that people—especially 
Thorson—felt while they were “locked 
up” on retreat. 

But it all also fit into a broader plan. “Ev- 
erything is perfect, you'll see” she begins, 
adding, “I have inherited my holy lama's 
[Roach's] style of pushing people past 
their breaking point.” She blames her for- 
mer husband for having “stoked the fire” 
and making people fear her as a teacher. 
Perhaps the real problem was her former 
lover's jealousy over her current husband. 

She then disappeared without any fur- 
ther communication with the board of di- 
rectors or most of the other retreatants. 
She, Thorson and two attendants hauled 
gear up a rugged mountainside. They 
found an ancient cave just out of sight of 
the retreat valley where they could finish 
their three years of silent meditation unob- 
served. The few people they let in on the 
secret promised to ferry them supplies as 
needed. Water would be placed at strategic 
points where one of them could retrieve it 
without being seen. 

Objectively, the decision to live out the 
rest of the retreat on an Arizona mountain- 
side was fatal from its inception. Sergeant 
David Noland, who coordinated the rescue 
effort, has seen 36 people die of dehydra- 
tion or exposure to the elements in his 
county in the past three years. “At that point 
a death was inevitable,” he says. The cabins 
at Diamond Mountain were built with the 
environment in mind, but the pockmark in 
the rock where McNally and Thorson laid 
their sleeping bags was exposed. For two 
months the couple was battered alternately 
by rain, wind and snow. 

Though their decision proved to be 
fatal, McNally and Thorson weren't sui- 
cidal. They thought they were exceptional 
and the rules for ordinary humans didn't 
apply anymore. They were on the cusp 
of greatness. Enlightenment was within 
reach. Three days before Thorson died, 
McNally's supporters published a 31-page 
manifesto she had written, titled “A Shift 
in the Matrix," in which she explains their 
spiritual lessons over the past year. She 
writes: "One of the highest tantric vows 
there is is the vow of how you should see 


your lama and how to behave toward 
them. When you are with a partner, your 
partner becomes your highest lama. So 
I have been [Ian's] lama for many years, 
but he recently became mine as well. Your 
lama is unquestionably a divine being and 
your job at all times is to fight any desire 
to see them in a lesser way. You should 
trust your lama with your life, and totally 
surrender to them." 

'To them their cave was a challenge they 
would overcome together, a sacred location 
in the tradition of the high-Himalayan la- 
mas, whose asceticism and hardships were 
a path to greatness. 

McNally and Thorson had been running 
low on water and began to drink brown, 
polluted runoff rainwater. On the morning 
of April 22, 2012, Thorson wouldn't wake 
up, and McNally activated the emergency 
distress beacon she had packed. Thor- 
son was barely breathing. It would take 
another seven hours for the search-and- 
rescue team to bring them down off the 
mountainside. An autopsy would eventu- 
ally attribute Thorson's death to dehydra- 
tion. His corpse weighed only 100 pounds, 
but McNally did not want to be separated 
from it and fought the police and morti- 
cian with fists and tears when they tried to 
take it into custody. 

McNally recuperated in a hospital in 
nearby Wilcox, Arizona. Several days later 
she vanished. Rumors have flown that she 
is on another silent retreat, meditating on 
the meaning of her husband's death. Ac- 
cording to various accounts, she is in the 
Bahamas, South America, Colorado, Kath- 
mandu or California, but no one really 
knows what she is doing or if she is safe. 


I saw Roach one more time, during a one- 
day stopover in Phoenix on my way back 
to California. He had avoided my e-mails 
and requests the entire time I was in 
Arizona, and this was my only chance to 
have a private word with him. His lecture 
that night, on the importance of mindful- 
ness, lasted three hours, and when he was 
done I got in line behind a 50-ish Indian 
woman carrying a Louis Vuitton hand- 
bag. She chatted with other people in the 
line and examined a beaded necklace she 
hoped Roach would bless. “I can't believe 
I'm going to meet the enlightened one," 
she said excitedly. 

When it was my turn I stood in front of 
his throne and introduced myself. I tried to 
phrase a question about how he was deal- 
ing with Thorson's death. "It was a very sad 
event," he said, "but why are people not in- 
terested in my teaching? One person dies 
in the desert and suddenly everyone pays 
attention. People should be talking about 
all the good works that I've done instead." 

It wasn't a satisfying answer. It was as 
if Roach couldn't take a minute to reflect 
on the profundity of what had happened. 
To him it may just have been karma rip- 
ening, and perhaps the story didn't end 
when someone died in the desert. It might 


have just begun. 


HARDWICK 


(continued from page 86) 
sports. As a spectator or a participant? 
HARDWICK: Neither. I don't think there's 
anything inherently wrong with sports; I 
just don't give a shit. When I see dudes 
in sports bars shoving chicken wings in 
their faces, watching a game and saying, 
"Thats my team," it mystifies me. I'm 
like, You're sitting on your fat ass. What 
are you doing that makes you a con- 
tributing member of the organization? 
You've lifted nothing but drumsticks for 
the past three hours. 


09 

PLAYBOY: Have you considered joining a 
fantasy league? They have statistics and 
math, all the nerd staples. 

HARDWICK: Yeah, that's not a bad idea. I 
would have to look at it like a chess game, 
as a strategy. If I did that, I could prob- 
ably find a way in. It would make my life 
a lot easier if I could find a way to appre- 
ciate sports. I mean, I've never watched 
an entire football game. It's horrifying. 
So many dudes try to bond with me 
over sports. They'll come up to me and 
say, "Hey, do you know the score of the 
game?" I won't even know what to say. 
Game? What game? I can give you some 
quotes from the last Harry Potter movie. 
Does that help? 


010 


PLAYBOY: You majored in philosophy at 
UCLA. Were you just not interested in 
making money or having a career? 
HARDWICK: Steve Martin, my comedy 
idol, was a philosophy major in college. 
He once said that philosophy is a great 
thing for comedians to study because it 
screws up your thinking just enough. 
If you're going into stand-up, you're 
hyper-analyzing the world and asking 
as many questions about a thing as you 
possibly can so you can figure out the ul- 
timate nature of that thing. If you want 
to get into comedy, it's really the only 
subject worth studying. 


O1 
PLAYBOY: Your first big career break was 
as a co-host with Jenny McCarthy on the 
MTV dating show Singled Out. Which 
leads to the obvious question 
HARDWICK: No, I did not fuck Jenny 
McCarthy. 


012 

PLAYBOY: Actually, that's not what we 
were going to ask, but thanks for clearing 
that up. We were wondering if hosting 
the show taught you any big life lessons 
about dating. 

HARDWICK: For me, the lessons of Singled 
Out weren't about dating. They were about 
fame. I learned that just being on MTV 
doesn't make you famous. When I got the 
job, I was like, Oh man, P'm going to be on a 
private jet with fucking Kurt Cobain. We'll 
be toasting martinis and getting blown by 
mermaids. And of course none of that hap- 


pened. The show ended, and I became an 141 


PLAYBOY 


142 


out-of-work comic with a drinking problem. 


13 

PLAYBOY: Is it true m Stewart mocked 
you into sobriety? 

HARDWICK: In a way. I was in my apartment, 
watching The Daily Show, and McCarthy 
was a guest. Stewart made a joke about me. 
Somehow my name came up, and Stewart 
was like, “He gets our coffee now.” It dev- 
astated me. It was the first moment I took a 
long hard look at my life and my career. It 
made me realize, Oh my God, I’ve become 
that MTV stereotype I always worried about 
becoming. I was proud of Jenny, and I say 
that with no bitterness. There are only a 
handful of people who started their careers 
on MTV who managed to keep it going. 
There’s Jenny and Pauly Shore and maybe 
a few others. But it never happened for me. 
I became the washed-up drunk loser with 
floppy hair who used to be on a dating show. 


014 

PLAYBOY: How did you dig yourself out of 
that hole? 

HARDWICK: When І look back, every time 
I felt something bleak was happening 
with my career, І would make some sort 
of survival-based choice, doing something 
І could control. І was very lazy about do- 
ing stand-up when I was hosting Singled 
Out. I was like, “Whatever, I have a job.” 
But when I had nothing, it was a lifeline. 
It made me feel I was finally taking con- 
trol of my career. The same thing with the 
podcast. Every time I was rejected by the 
entertainment business, which was a lot, 
I'd be like, “Well, fuck you. I'm going to do 
my own thing.” Even if nothing happened 
with it, it was my thing and they couldn't 
touch it. Of course, the business didn't give 
a shit at the time, but I was still muttering 
under my breath like a crazy person. 


015 


PLAYBOY: You wrote a self-help book called 


The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level 
(in Real Life). Are you better at giving ad- 
vice or taking it? 

HARDWICK: It's so much easier to give ad- 
vice than to take it. But I tend to trust any 
advice that comes from years of fuck-up 
research. When I was younger, my par- 
ents used to say, "Trust us on this. We 
have more experience than you." And I 
was like, "Shut up, you don't know any- 
thing!" But I was an idiot. They did know 
more stuff because they'd experienced 
more things. They'd fucked up more of- 
ten than I had. There's no better path to 
knowledge than fucking up. 


016 


PLAYBOY: You were part of a regular Dun- 
geons & Dragons game with comedians 
Brian Posehn, Patton Oswalt and others. 
Why are comics drawn to fantasy role- 
playing games? 

HARDWICK: 1 really don't know. Maybe 
because D&D is the perfect mental exer- 
cise. It's math and fantasy. It's statistics 
and Lord of the Rings. It requires you to 
use your mind but also be social. Our 
game was amazing just because everyone 
involved was so goddamn funny. Patton 
had a drunken dwarf character called 
Stump Hammer. I was а lawful good wiz- 
ard named Blaividane, sort ofan anagram 
of David Blaine's name. Brian had a ninja 
character who was obsessed with pickles. 
It was some of the best times Tve ever had 
playing D&D. I really miss it. 


17 

PLAYBOY: You m si anymore? 

HARDWICK: The bummer thing about a 
D&D game is that it's like having a band. If 
one person can't show up, then the whole 
thing falls apart. Our game ended because 
our dungeon master got a girlfriend, and 
she didn't want him playing D&D on Sun- 
days with a bunch of guys for five hours. 
We'd run into him later, and it was always 


"Of course I love my computer more than I love you. My computer 
responds when I touch it." 


awkward. It was like we were a dude and 
he was our ex-girlfriend. 


018 


PLAYBOY: You're a regular at Comic-Con in 
San Diego. Are we correct in thinking it's 
like Plato's Retreat with Spock ears? 
HARDWICK: There is an element of that, 
yeah. Hey, nerds made porn available on 
the internet—what else do you need to 
know? But that's the vibe at comic book 
conventions in general. When I was grow- 
ing up, nerds had this reputation for being 
virgins who lived in their parents' base- 
ments. That's certainly not the case now. I 
would say that nerds, as a rule, are much 
more sexually active than the average per- 
son. There's a lot of anxiety and stress in 
the nerd brain, so sex is good for that. 


019 

PLAYBOY: You're a Star Wars fanatic. Isn't 
your girlfriend, Chloe Dykstra, part of Star 
Wars royalty? 

HARDWICK: In a way, yeah. Her dad did the 
effects for Star Wars. He helped develop the 
technology for the lightsaber. The freaking 
lightsaber! I'm not saying that's why I go 
out with her, but it's definitely a big check 
in the "pro" box. A couple of months ago 
she brought me this gift bag, and she was 
like, “Yeah, I was just rifling around my 
dad's garage." It was an original Star Wars 
crew T-shirt, with a design I'd never seen 
before, and an original Star Trek: The Motion 
Picture crew shirt. It was the best gift Tve 
ever gotten. I went on a tour of Skywalker 
Ranch a couple of years ago and saw the 
original everything—the original droids, 
the original concept art, the original light- 
sabers. I saw the original Yoda, and ГЇЇ be 
honest, I wanted to spoon with him. 


020 


PLAYBOY: As a card-carrying nerd, this is 
probably the most important question 
you'll ever be asked. If and when you have 
kids, how will you introduce them to the 
Star Wars movies? In what order? 
HARDWICK: You're not kidding about it be- 
ing an important question. I talk about this 
alot. It's a big moral quandary. Do you want 
your kids to experience it like you experi- 
enced it, or do you go in the proper order? 
I've heard arguments on both sides. The 
problem with doing it in numerical order is 
that it ruins the Vader "You are my father" 
surprise. The most convincing case I've read 
was by this guy Rod Hilton, who came up 
with something called the Machete Order. 
He recommends showing them like this: 
A New Hope, then Empire, then Attack of the 
Clones, then Revenge of the Sith, then Return 
of the Jedi, completely leaving out Phantom 
Menace. His point is Phantom is unnecessary, 
and parts two and three play like a flash- 
back. It makes sense, but I still don't know. 
I saw Star Wars in the theater with my dad, 
so if I had a kid, I'd maybe want to show the 
movies to him or her in that order, just for 
the tradition ofit. [pauses] I don't know. This 
is too much pressure. It's like asking where 
I want to be buried. Can I get back to you? 


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144 


PARKA 


(continued from page 79) 
yourself to what fruit's on the ground.” 

“Excuse те?” The teacher quickly re- 
treated and disappeared. 

Alevtina giggled, but the landlady, un- 
daunted by the teacher's clever escape, 
pressed her point loudly. 

“Thirty-five, like I said, and nothing.” 

"What do you mean— nothing?" 

"Well, you know, a waste of goods." 

"What goods?" pretended Alevtina. In 
fact, from the moment the landlady men- 
tioned A.A. she'd been poring over all 
those women she knew in Moscow who 
were withering from drudgery and loneli- 
ness, while right here was a healthy speci- 
men with four limbs who didn't stammer 


and was mentally stable (with some luck). 

"You don't think he has a lady friend in 
Komarovka, eh?" Alevtina asked. 

"How would I know?" croaked the land- 
lady and stood up to go to bed early, be- 
cause, she explained importantly, she was 
allergic to the sun and got up to pee at 
four. She relieved herself under the berry 
bushes, "for fertilizer," and shuffled inside. 

Little stars sprinkled across the dark- 
ening sky. Alevtina sighed deeply in the 
direction of the porch. Nina, that's who 
he needs. Thirty-seven years old, a phar- 
macist, mother died recently, lives in a 
studio on the outskirts. The few admir- 
ers got shooed off by the old witch, who 
had been correct: Where would the new- 
lyweds sleep, under Mama's bed? (Nina's 
mom was a distant relative of Alevtina's 


husband.) Well, well, hummed Alevtina. 
She held her breath and waited. The un- 
born child also waited in the dark. Noth- 
ing stirred. Black silhouettes of the apple 
trees loomed in the twilight. The warm 
air smelled of phlox. 

A.A.'s shadow cut through the orchard 
in the direction of the outhouse. Alevtina 
liked his deftness. A few minutes later A.A. 
emerged and breathed out the foul air. 
Alevtina pounced. 

"Good evening, sir. How can you ex- 
plain yourself?" 

"Excuse me?" A.A.'s foot froze in midair. 

"I don't need your excuses. How much 
do you owe?" 

"Who, me?" A.A. thought for a second 
that the woman mistook him for someone 
else, and instead of fleeing to his porch and 
hiding under the blanket he took the first 
step toward the samovar. 

“Tm not going to yell at the top of my 
lungs; there are people sleeping," Alevtina 
remarked drily. 

A.A. approached her gingerly. In the 
twilight, heavy Alevtina resembled a bust 
of a Roman emperor. She addressed A.A. 
imperiously. 

"So how are we going to solve this 
problem?" 

All of a sudden A.A. began to babble 
something about the well, saying it wasn't 
his fault the well was empty by the end of 
the day; he took only five gallons and used 
his own buckets, others took 50 to water 
their vegetables and so on. 

“I see. Well, we'll find a solution some- 
how. Remind me of your name again?" 

"Excuse me?" That was one of A.A.'s 
favorite evasive techniques, perfected on 
his pupils. 

"It's Andrey, correct?" 

"Could be." 

"So how about a cup of plain tea—I have 
all this hot water left—what do you say, 
Andrey Alexandrovich?" 

"No, thanks. Actually, I'm Andrey 
Alexeevich...." 


It was the height ofthe summer, the blessed 
time when fruit and berries ripen and fall. 
Alevtina hired a van and loaded it with jars 
of preserves. A.A. did all the loading, while 
the driver, a local resident, watched him 
idly. (Tormented by rumors about fabu- 
lous Moscow wages, local men had stopped 
working altogether and were swiftly turn- 
ing into full-time alcoholics.) The landlady 
too watched Alevtina's evacuation without 
offering to help. But suddenly she jumped: 
The teacher grabbed two huge canvas bags 
off his porch, threw them into the van, 
waved her good-bye and left with Alevtina. 
The landlady was right in the middle of 
a fantasy where she got rid of the useless 
fireman and married her younger daugh- 
ter to her tenant. 

In the van, Alevtina too was thinking that 
A.A. was the husband she'd want for her 
daughter if only she had one, but instead 
there was a son and a leech of a daughter- 
in-law, and an only grandson, the light of 
her life. The boy was 14, spent most of his 
time examining his pimples and refused 


to speak to his grandmother even on the 
phone. For him, for her grandson, Alevtina 
had spent her vacation sweating over the 
stove, boiling and pickling—the boy loved 
her cooking. Her own son barely ate any- 
thing; he preferred homemade liqueurs 
to food, but her daughter-in-law shoveled 
by the pound (she also smoked and cursed 
like a plumber) and frequently suggested 
that they discuss “future arrangements” 
concerning Alevtina’s property. 

At the end of this golden summer day, 
the van wheeled into the beautifully main- 
tained yard in front of Alevtina's building. 
They loaded all the jars on the elevator 
and then carried everything into Alevtina's 
spacious one-bedroom apartment, which 
was decorated with rugs and a crystal 
chandelier. On the train back, А.А. fan- 
tasized about an apartment just like that, 
in the same neighborhood, and also a 
sweet wife, and a boy of his own to whom 
he could teach everything he knew. He'd 
quit his wretched public school where kids 
munched on sunflower seeds and wore 
headphones to class. All of this came to 
pass some years later. 


He met Nina ас Alevtina’s birthday party— 
Alevtina had wired him money to pay for 
the train. By that point she must have bro- 
ken off with her daughter-in-law because 
none of her family was present. Nina didn't 
impress A.A. She was heavy, very shy, with 
large pale eyes. But he did notice her 
casual, almost indifferent manner when 
she was examining some old prescriptions 
of Alevtina's—the manner of a true expert. 
Next time he saw Nina was at the hospi- 
tal. He came to see his dear Alevtina at his 
own expense, significant for his little sal- 
ary. Alevtina talked to him clearly, though 
with some effort, and gave him a consider- 
able sum—"for books." She managed not 
to add "to remember me by." Although 
A.A. didn't cry, he must have looked pretty 
miserable because Nina's eyes filled with 
such sympathy and kindness that he had 
to turn away. Only after they were married 
did he find out that Nina alone had looked 
after Alevtina, feeding her pureed soups 
and fresh juices and staying with her every 
night after work. 

It was Nina who sent him the final tele- 
gram. His train was late and A.A. had to run 
through the subway, then took the wrong 
exit and got lost; he asked for directions 
to the morgue from the only person who 
was out in that terrible neighborhood—a 
woman with a dog—and she told him pre- 
cisely; she must have known the place from 
personal experience. At the morgue he was 
asking small groups of people where they 
were burying such and such, but then he 
saw Nina and throughout the ordeal stood 
next to her. Everyone else in the party 
stared at him wildly, but later, at the crema- 
torium, they asked him to help carry the 
coffin, as if accepting his presence. Nina 
didn't cry, just trembled. Alevtina looked 
serene and very young; she had lost a lot 
of weight. They closed the coffin and ham- 
mered down the lid. 

The crematorium bus took them back 


to the city and dropped them off in the 
middle of an unfamiliar street. Tipsy rela- 
tives crowded the sidewalk. Finally, one of 
the cousins announced that close friends 
and relatives were invited to the wake. He 
avoided looking at A.A.; they all avoided 
him. Suddenly, a drunk woman cousin 
pointed at him and inquired loudly, “And 
who is he? What's he doing here?" 

"This one's looking for a drink," ex- 
plained the grandmother. 

Alevtina's fat son Victor sidled up to 
Nina. 

"So how are things? Married yet? Come 
to the wake, get something to eat, to drink. 
You should come to all our get-togethers, 
you know. Where else will you go? And 
who is he?" 

"A friend," Nina said after a pause. 

"Right. Look, you'd better make me 
your heir; you never know what to expect 
with out-of-towners." 

"What do you mean, my heir? Don't I 
have sisters?" Nina seemed shocked. 

"Idiot! If you marry him, he'll inherit 
your apartment. He can kill you just to 
get it!" 

Here A.A. spoke up in his teacher's 
voice, “Nina! It's getting late." And Nina 
simply turned her back on Victor and 
walked away. She walked slowly, with the 
dignity of a freshly insulted person. A.A. 
tore after her: At least he had to find out 
how to get to the subway and guessed she 
was headed there. He was too cowardly to 
ask his future wife for directions and just 
trudged behind her. He was leaving for 
home on a night train. 

Suddenly a small truck drove onto the 
sidewalk in front of A.A. and began un- 
loading. A.A. wanted to walk around it, but 


a wave of pedestrians pushed him back. By 
the time he made it to the other side Nina 
had disappeared. He didn't know her last 
name, and there was no one to ask. Alev- 
tina used to speak so much about Nina, 
about her wretched life with the difficult, 
ailing mother whom Nina had endured to 
the end after her two sisters couldn't take it 
anymore and left the old woman. A.A. used 
to listen to these stories with an inward 
smile: He understood perfectly well what 
was behind them and he also knew why 
Alevtina had called for him at the hospital. 
Alevtina's scheming had always caused in- 
ner resistance in him; he had been resist- 
ing Nina silently for a long time, but now 
that Alevtina was gone there was no one to 
resist, and his life lost its meaning. 

'Ten hours remained before his train. 
He stood in front of the subway station 
in the freezing wind, cold and hungry, 
aching from unrelieved tears. Then he 
turned around and walked back to the 
truck where he had last seen Nina. From 
there he returned to the subway station. 
He shuffled back and forth between the 
truck and the subway and suddenly he 
saw her: She was running in his direction, 
crying, her enormous eyes searching for 
his. They fell into each other's arms. He 
scolded her for running off like that— 
he'd almost lost her! Then he begged 
her to calm down, to stop crying, every- 
thing was fine, they'd found each other. 
He took the heavy bag from her unfeel- 
ing hand, like all husbands do, and they 
walked off together. 


Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers. 


"Things are always so easy for you." 


145 


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There are, in fact, second 
acts in American lives. 
After being named 
PMOY 2001, Brande 
Roderick has become 
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This year Brande plays 
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“Becoming Playmate of 
the Year was my biggest 
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she says, “and winning 
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mate business accolade." portfolio: 
beauty, 
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sense. 


@CRYSTALHARRIS 
Miss December 

2009 gives you the 
warm shoulder 


1. At the American 
Music Awards, PMOY 
1994 Jenny McCarthy 
attacked the defenseless 
Justin Bieber and covered 
him with kisses—making 
her the Beliebers' least 
favorite Playmate. 


2. Three blonde minxes, 
Heather Knox, Jessa 
Hinton and Tiffany 
Toth, were flown to New 
Zealand to launch 
Hallenstein Brothers' 
summer clothing line. 


3. It was Rabbit 
vs. Penguin at Super 
Megafest when 
Miss August 1999 
Rebecca Scott 
ran into Batman's 
archenemy. 


” 


BRITTANY BINGE 


Things you may not kno out Mi June 2007: 
She’s in bed most nights by | P.M. She's working on a 
jewelry Ш 


ine with Pascal M 
She plans to open a cla 
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Wouldn’t you like to skate with Miss PLAYMATE 


October 2011? As part of a project by 


photographer Edward Duarte, you can get 

a strikingly sexy image of Amanda on the 

bottom of a seven-ply Canadian maple skate- 
board deck. Don’t you dare grind on it. PENNELOPE JIMENEZ became Miss 
March 10 years ago this month. She 
had worked on a commercial for the 
XFL (remember that?) with PMOY 1998 
Karen McDougal, who suggested her to 
PLAYBOY. When we met Pennelope she 
made us want to try new things. For 
instance, she said her ideal evening 
was to “sit at home in sweats, order a 
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the dressing pairs best with pepperoni 


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GIRL NUMBER ONE, LENA DUNHAM. 


INSIDE EDM WITH TRAINSPOTTING'S IRVINE WELSH. 


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WONDERS IF AMERICA IS READY FOR THE LATEST BIG DEAL. 


GHOST IN THE MACHINE—TRACY “THE D.O.C.” CURRY PUT OUT 
ONE CRAZY GOOD ALBUM BEFORE DAMAGING HIS VOCAL CORDS 
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HITMAKER—PRODUCER CLIVE DAVIS HAS HELPED LAUNCH 
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STEWART, CARLOS SANTANA AND MANY OTHERS. HE TALKS 
SHOP IN A CATCHY PLAYBOY INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SHEFF. 


OUR KIND OF GIRL—LENA DUNHAM, THE CONTROVERSIAL 
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COMING SOON TO A STATE, AND A PLATE, NEAR YOU. 


NEXT MONTH 


CLIVE DAVIS: THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN EARS. 


THE SKINNY TO DAVID RENSIN ІМ 200 ON THE HIT SERIES, 
HER $3.7 MILLION BOOK DEAL AND WHY VOTING IS LIKE SEX. 


POT AND CIRCUMSTANCE—WITH MARIJUANA BECOMING LEGAL 
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THEMED DINNERS AND BOUTIQUE DISPENSARIES SELLING 
ORGANIC STRAINS, THE DRUG HAS GONE LEGIT AND LUXE. YOU'LL 
WANT TO PASS ALONG OUR COAST-TO-COAST GANJA GUIDE. 


MIXED CROWD—NOT ONLY HAS LARRY’S DATE BEEN STOLEN 
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WITH SWINGING OCCULTISTS. IT'S AN EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW 
OF JAKE ARNOTT’S WILD THRILLER THE HOUSE OF RUMOUR. 


TWO LIVES LOST—SEAN SMITH, AN ENVOY KILLED IN THE 
ATTACK ON THE U.S. CONSULATE IN LIBYA, LED A DOUBLE LIFE. 
IN A STRANGE ONLINE WORLD CALLED EVE HE WAS ALSO A 
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PLUS—A CLASSIC PLAYBOY INTERVIEW WITH DAVID BOWIE BY 
CAMERON CROWE, THE STYLINGS OF DJ AND RAPPER DIPLO, 
THE LOVELY MISS APRIL WELCOMES SPRING, AND MORE. 


Playboy (ISSN 0032-1478), March 2013, volume 60, number 2. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August issues by Playboy in national and regional editions, Playboy, 
9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210. Periodicals postage paid at Beverly Hills, California and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agree- 
ment No. 40035534. Subscriptions: in the U.S., $32.97 for a year. Postmaster: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); nonpostal and military facilities, send address changes to Playboy, P.O. Box 37489, 
Boone, Iowa 50037-0489. From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive 
such mailings, please send your current mailing label to: Playboy, P.O. Box 37489, Boone, IA, 50037-0489. For subscription-related questions, call 800-999-4438, or e-mail plycustserv@cdsfulfillment.com. 


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