As we approach the end of year seeking to tease super-secret fun things you may find both thrilling and affordable for this holiday season — all without getting in trouble with the boss — we thought it might be fascinating to look at a couple of editorials (and a couple advertisements) that appeared fifty years ago in our pages. Many view it as history; others of us might remember better than we wished.
Early Penthouse in Homespun Hardcore
Before we get to explaining the header image on this page, it seemed appropriate to set the mood. Fortunately, we were able to quickly set the mood as to the interests of the early Penthouse reader with a small section called “Happenings” in the January, 1975, publication.
Early Penthouse Warmth
Nothing is sacred anymore. Even quilts, pottery, and stained glass have now been injected with a substantial dose of erotica-erotica that sometimes borders on pornography.
Three artists of this newest erotica are Rhett Delford Brown with her “pornographic tapestries” (quilts), Jeffrey John Speeth with his “dirty windows” of stained glass, and Susan W. Beecher with her ceramic “pot erotica.” They’ve made it possible to have sexy bed quilts, windows, and even punch bowls.
If you think quilts are made by little old ladies in New England sewing their arthritic fingers to the bone, you definitely haven’t seen Rhett Delford Brown’s erotic quilts. Some people have used her creations of stuffed and stitched sex scenes for bedspreads, but the artist prefers to hang them on her walls and calls them “pornographic tapestries.”
“I regard my work as expressions of my sexual fantasies and my friends’ fantasies,” Delford Brown explained in her genteel Southern accent. “That’s why I put a voyeur in each piece; voyeurism is my thing.” Some of the sexual activities the fifty-year-old artist has illustrated in her tapestries include lesbianism, bestiality, homosexuality, and plain, old-fashioned oral-genital sex play.
The whimsically primitive people in her quilts are made of stuffed pink satin. Details are stitched in with crewel embroidery. Yarn serves for head and pubic hair, and weird buttons provide eyes popping out from sexual ecstasy and/or lust. “My yarns are my palette,” Delford Brown noted and showed off the fine detail work in her lesbian-fantasy quilt, “I Wanna Go Back to My Redneck Ways.” This pornographic tapestry depicts two nude female figures joyously grappling with one another’s private parts. Their nipples, made of rosy, pink satin, stand firmly erect. One of the girls’ fingers grope up the other girl’s vagina, which is rendered in loving detail. “See that diamond in her pussy?” Rhett asked. “Well, really it’s a rhinestone, but I thought it made a rather nice clit. And see here,” she continued in refined Southern lady accents, while lifting the diamond girl’s three-dimensional buttocks, “I even gave her an asshole.” You peer discreetly under the satin buns and, sure enough, there’s a neatly embroidered rectum. Rhett thinks of everything.
“I Wanna Go Back to My Redneck Ways” also features a male voyeur in the background, frantically clutching his cock, from which spurts delicately embroidered diamond semen. In another section of the quilt, two little furry bunnies are cheerfully having intercourse. Yes, Rhett thinks of everything.
There are several other “pornographic tapestries” hanging on the walls of the artist’s home, an 1887 public library in New _York’s Greenwich Village, which has been converted to a modernistic, funky-Bauhaus interior. She and her husband, avant-garde artist Robert Delford Brown, call their multileveled den of erotic art “The Temple of Hilarity.” The hilarity is provided by their extensive collection of antique erotic art, as well as Rhett’s quilts.
“At my gallery,” Rhett says, “people stand around and laugh at the exhibitions. It’s very smiley all the time.” You can see Rhett’s porno quilts at the Great Building Crack-Up Gallery in Manhattan. The quilts cost $1,000 each, but she has done “a pair of moles fucking for $100, because that was all that girl could afford.” Besides her pornographic tapestries, Delford Brown collects and sells Victorian pornographic photographs and 18thcentury miniature erotic etchings, which she hand-tints ($75).
How does she get such rare and weird antique erotica? “That’s easy,” Robert Delford Brown grinned. “My wife just walks into shops and very sweetly says, ‘Show me your hard-core porn.’ “
Early Penthouse Views
Stained glass usually evokes images of majestic cathedral windows, of Gothic rosettes and illustrated lives of the saints. But to Jeffrey John Speeth, stained glass means erotic windows. He calls them “dirty windows,” but they’re really his search for freedom in a beautiful but largely unexplored medium of artistic expression. “All I care about is that people open their eyes and see stained-glass windows as something other than religion or cutesy-poo daisies or little owls,” the bearded Speeth explained. “That’s why I’m trying to do cocks and cunts in stained glass as graphically as possible — to zap people in the face.”
Since pornography struck him as an obvious way to change people’s ideas about stained glass, Speeth deliberately set out to render his porno window, “The Blow-Job,” in glowing shades of green, brown, and flesh; it shows an erect male phallus just about to be inserted in a girl’s wide-open mouth. Her eyes are humorously blacked out, so she can’t be identified in this “shameless” act. “I’ve tried to do a real porn window,” Speeth said, “but there’s no way. Stained-glass windows have too much inherent majesty in them, so I have to settle for being just erotic. But I’d still love to make windows that people could get hard-ons from.”
For seven years, Jeffrey Speeth created modernistic windows for the rock nobility of southern California. “I’d make windows that people’d either bust holes in walls for or build their houses around,” he stated proudly. But about two years ago, Speeth decided to go back to nature and moved to a large farm on R.D. #1 in Friendship, New York, and plunged into the realm of erotica. The result was his first series of “dirty windows,” which sold for about $250 each.
Perhaps Speeth’s most impressive erotic work is “The Double-Hung Window.” It is actually a two-window set, showing a woman’s thighs, buttocks, and vagina in the upper window, with a man’s midsection and powerfully erect phallus in the lower window. When the two windows are slid together, the cock and vagina mesh. As light pours through the kaleidoscopic colors of the window, the glassy genitals of man and woman shimmer together sensuously, and the vibrant, pulsing colors of the glass elevate the sex act into an event of great spiritual and artistic beauty.
“When I showed my ‘dirty windows’ back on the West Coast, all people kept saying was, ‘Is that all you think about back East in the woods?’ “ Speeth chuckled. “Now I’d love to do enormous classic rosettes of cunts in Gothic arches. That would really zap people in the face, wouldn’t it?”
Early Penthouse Pottery
Portable orgy scenes are potter Susan W. Beecher’s specialty. She calls her work “pot erotica” — and that’s exactly what the ceramics are. Beecher’s bowls, vases, pitchers, and boxes start out as ordinary, hand-thrown pottery, but she adds on little four-inch-high figures who do the most amazing things. They copulate, masturbate, and just plain fool around with one another’s bodies, and it’s all captured under a heavy ceramic glaze. “Pot erotica” is certainly an eye-opener, especially if your idea of sexuality in pottery stops at a bunch of horny ancient Greek shepherds chasing some nymphs around an earthenware bowl.
To advance the art of pottery, Beecher paradoxically had to compromise for less-delicate, advanced styles in her work: “I have to make everything thicker, so the pots won’t collapse, so they’ll hold up under the people.” The little people themselves are a cross between primitive and modernistic art styles, and they’re always naked — the better to see what’s happening and the easier to glaze.
“Pot erotica” is more functional than most forms of erotic art. “Since the objects can be utilized, people have an excuse to keep them around,” the potter said. Some of her minor pieces, which sell for $100 and up at New York’s Show of Hands Gallery, include a large candleholder embellished with an entwined couple, or “boxes with a little couple screwing on top. They’re sweet,” Beecher said, “the perfect coffee-table item.”
Masturbation is one of Beecher’s favorite subjects. In her “Masturbation Pitcher,” each handle is made of a masturbating male or female figure. Her “Deep Throat” boxes, memorializing the controlled gag mechanism, were also popular sellers.
Being an erotic potter does cause some social problems, she admitted: “My two kids are nine and seven, and they’re very nonchalant about the whole erotic thing, but some of their friends’ parents have forbidden them to visit us.” Problems occurred, too, when she needed models for her sex scenes. “You have to pay professional models. I tried to use my friends,” Beecher sighed, “but they all got too nervous to perform.”
Early Penthouse Censorship Fight
The LA Star is an adventurous Los Angeles bi-monthly paper, whose existence is being severely challenged by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on obscenity and pornography. Some people think it’s a hardcore porn tabloid, and unfortunately, the southern California police happen to be among them. In the past year no less than eleven separate busts have been made on the Star.
This is a publication with an incredibly liberal and diverse editorial content, from “Was it the CIA that Shot Wallace?” to “How to Make an Obscene Phone Call and Score.” The Star is proud of printing pictures and stories from their readers, a generally creative lot, and the paper is thoroughly imbued with the age-old journalistic spirit: “You Read It-or Saw It Here First.” In its search for truth and beauty, the Star leaves no labia or engorged member hidden.
There are some “liberals” who poo-poo the Star’s point of view, saying it has no social or political value. But the Star’s editor, Paul Eberle, says, “If everyone in America could get turned on to balling and good times, all the crooks would be out of power.” Who can disagree that this is sexual politics at its strongest?
Mickey Leblovic, the paper’s co-founder and associate editor, is naturally aghast at the bustings. Because his family was run out of Czechoslovakia by the Communists, he is familiar with repression. “When I came here as a child,” remembers Leblovic, “we were taught that this stuff happens in Russia, but not here!”
The Star borders on financial crisis every day. Three of the eleven charges resulting from the busts were dismissed through deals in which the Star agreed not to distribute in certain cities. This has cut its circulation from 70,000 to 50,000. Moreover, thanks to the parodies the Star ran of every other publication in the area, it has gotten no press support on its home turf. “They said we didn’t deserve it because we made fun of them,” says Eberle.
But then everybody at the LA Star seems to thrive on official abuse. The paper started on $157, and It’s been going for over three years, even though Eberle and Leblovic have resisted the temptation for a large profit. “We didn’t go into this as a money hustle, and we haven’t made any money,” says Eberle. “It’s a love affair with journalism.”
Early Penthouse on Gifts
Finally to the header image we go, as the photograph (by XXX) represents what Penthouse considered to be the excellent Christmas gifts of the year. To be fair, we cannot be sure what manufacturers did — if anything — to be included on this list, but we present it simply as it was a half a century ago.
Front and center Is a contemporary “antique,” the Kentucky Flintlock pistol by Replica Models ($28.77), around which are displayed the Scarab Snake Bracelet ($40), Closed Tango Bracelet ($130), the Rocket Ring {$120), and the Baby BB Bracelet {$40) from the Barry Kieselstein Collection, all available at George Jensen. A Bowman pocket calculator ($79.95) leans against a rich Ventura 24K suitcase (S60), which contains a Snail Basket tor the escargot connoisseur from Hammacher-Schlemmer ($32). One Exquisite Goblet ($15), also from Hammacher-Schlemmer, holds a brass bell buckle from Shamey’s of the Shores ($75), behind which Is an original Mickey Mouse watch (S40) from the Tony Goodstone Collection.
Tucked Into the reading pocket of the traveling case is the Penthouse’s own Petlolio ($9.95). The Craig Stereo System ($233.95) supports a rare bottle of Remy Martin’s blend of fifty-to-one-hundred-year-old cognacs ($275) and a Canon F1 35mm camera ($699). In front of the sound system is a Minolta XL400 movie camera (S290) and a Sliver Roll Top Caviar Server ($35.50) from Hammacher-Schlemmer. The Scarab Box ($700) from the Kleselstein Collection Is tucked behind the elegant fruit cake. Atop the Akai Receiver ($349.95) is a quilt-framed porcupine box ($90) from Niall Smith. A Chinese wicker rooster ($275) from Hammacher-Schlemmer stands behind Electronic Table Tennis by Control Sales ($550), on which sits a Corn-Copia Mug ($12.95) from Hammacher-Schlemmer and a Kaywoodle Magnum pipe ($15.95). The Grand Com Ericphone ($59.95) sits atop a black leather telephone memo book from T. Anthony ($25): and a Nixon/ Agnew inaugural memorial coin from Harmer and Rooke ($80) is displayed on the Phone-Butler ($99.95) by BSR, behind which is Continental’s Conalr pro-style hairdryer ($28.99). In the far-right corner are three pieces of jewelry from the Swank collection (at $6, $7.50 and $10).
While early Penthouse highlights and education might be fascinating, do remember the time period in which this all originally appeared. … Yes, there was a time when playing “electronic table tennis” on your TV was worth $600 to some people. Heck, they even bragged about it. Even back then, though, we cannot imagine why one might desire a putter made from a bull’s penis, but maybe we need to ask somebody from Texas. Also, an Original Mickey Mouse watch these days will cost a lot more than forty bucks, whereas a similar Remy Martin fine cognac might cost you $13,000 today. … Finally, and for the record, despite the claims here, there was no such thing as an elegant fruit cake in 1975, nor is there such a thing today. Should some evil person convince you to actually taste a fruit cake this season, however, you may come away convinced it was originally baked in 1975. Those be nasty.
As for what we might be foreshadowing, hang in for a couple of weeks. If you liked this, you’re going to love the surprise.
