The $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant

In case you haven’t heard, the beauty-pageant biz Is about to be invaded by big bucks. During the first week of December, a field of international beauties from more than three dozen countries will convene at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, where Penthouse magazine will present an international event: the first annual $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant. Right: that’s what the winner will receive in cash and prizes. All the women entered in the finals already have won Pet of the Year pageants in their native lands, and the nations they represent stretch all the way from the Americas to Zimbabwe. The two-hour finals will be telecast globally by satellite, and in the United States alone the broadcast will be earned by more than 150 TV stations.

Penthouse’s $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant will not remind viewers of any beauty competition ever before witnessed on the tube, which should come as a relief to most of you. For decades, women have gone down to the sea in bikinis; maJor beauty pageants, however, continue to outfit competitors in outdated one-piece bathing suits. Instead of donning sexy evening gowns, contestants are similarly compelled to show up in fashions suitable for a high-school prom. They’re also expected to be entertainers. Where else but in beauty pageants have you ever seen such awful actresses, singers, poets, and ballet dancers? Pageant “personality tests” are even more embarrassing than the talent segments. They usually consist of a single, childish question asked with only one purpose in mind: to elicit an answer showing that the contestant is a good little girl. The good little girls quickly catch on to the game and often milk it to the max, with references to God and Country.

In any event, after the quiz the magic moment finally arrives, and the winner’s name is announced. The new Miss There-She-Is sheds precisely 3.2 perfunctory tears and then collects her crown and roses, two tons of assorted cosmetics, enough pantyhose to last five lifetimes, a small amount of cash, and a contract obligating her to ride In parades and appear at shopping centers for an entire year.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Let us now pan in on Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione, seated in front of a television set several years ago, watching Miss America being crowned. A thought comes to him: wouldn’t it be a turn-on to dispense with all the infantile nonsense and plan a beauty pageant in which women were free to be their sensual selves? Instead of pretending it’s still the 1950s, why not design a pageant for the 1980s? And why not instantly make it the world’s most important pageant by offering the winner the biggest haul in the history of the genre — a grand prize worth a million dollars?

Seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, and Guccione went for It. Says he, “We’re doing away with all the fatuous and unrealistic aspects of beauty pageants as we know them. Our Pet of the Year will be Judged on how she looks and moves, how bright and engaging she really is, and how she communicates with people — it all finally comes under the heading of personality … and that means sex appeal!”

Bob has a special bonus in store for his readers: soon after she wins her title, the $1,000,000 Pet of the Year will be the subject of an extensive Penthouse centerfold feature … to be photographed by — you guessed it — the boss himself.

We’re not talking about a slapdash promotion, either. Bob first considered putting on a million-dollar beauty pageant in the mid-seventies, but at that point he had neither the time nor the money to devote to the project. He was getting Omni off the ground, and whereas any other entrepreneur in his position would have borrowed the cash, Guccione did not. It’s not his style.

“I hate trying to raise money,” he recently told a visitor to his seven-story Manhattan townhouse. “You wind up doing two things: begging for money, on the one hand, while trying to convince people that you’ve got a good idea, on the other. The response you usually get Is that if it’s such a good idea, why isn’t somebody already doing it? Very demeaning! I had my fill of all that when I originally tried to start Penthouse, in 1962.”

At that point, Bob Guccione was an artist living and working in London. He spent 1962 through most of 1965 trying to raise money for Penthouse, and the only backer he ever found offered to invest £500 sterling — then worth about $1,250 — in return for 51 percent of the proposed magazine. Guccione told him to get lost.

“Aside from trying to start the magazine,” he recalled, “I hadn’t worked during those three years, and in 1965, by the time I had scraped up enough credit to put out the first issue of Penthouse. I was already six months behind in my rent. Since then, everything Penthouse has achieved has been paid for out of its own internally generated resources — I ’ve never gone out and borrowed money.”

That held true for Omni, and it also held true when Bob chose to get his feet wet as a movie producer. He didn’t want to make Just any film, of course. He wanted to produce a movie cut from the same cloth as Penthouse, which is to say he consciously set out to shatter every conventional concept of cinematic sex. The result was Caligula, the world’s first X-rated, big-budget movie epic.

Caligula didn’t start out as a big-budget movie epic, however. Initially, Caligula was supposed to cost $3 million, but as stars like Peter O’Toole, Malcolm McDowell, and Sir John Gielgud signed on, the film’s budget grew to $5 million and then to $8 million and finally mushroomed to $17.5 million. And Bob paid for the entire production out of his own pocket — a new record for the industry. “Again, I didn’t want to go around asking people for money,” he said, “and again, It turned out to be a fortunate decision.”

After slating an X-rated biography of Catherine the Great as his next film foray, Guccione finally got serious about producing the world’s ultimate beauty pageant.

His reasons for doing so seem sound enough. “Beauty pageants are enormously successful — even the Miss U.S.A. contest is one of TV’s top-twenty shows — but if you watch any of them,” he said, “you realize immediately how tacky they really are. The hosts talk in an unreal, game-show way about unreal, game-show women, and then the women come out and do their level game-show best to compound the unreality. Well, we’re no more interested in producing tacky TV than we are in promoting plasticized beauty. Our $1,000,000 Pet of the Year will be as earthy and real as the girls in our magazine. Add in a bit of taste, professionalism, and the million-dollar grand prize and I think our pageant will sweep every other beauty contest off the shelf.”

The logistics of putting on an international beauty pageant involving over forty countries is about as simple as persuading OPEC’s oil ministers to send out for bagels and lox. It’s an arduous process, especially when you start from scratch.

By the same token, producing an exciting two-hour pageant telecast is no piece of taffy, either. Pageant broadcasts invariably manifest all the style, taste, and wit of TV game shows. Penthouse’s $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant would have to be a radical departure from that standard, or else there’d be no point in doing it.

To accomplish this, Bob needed qualified help, and he knew where to find it.

Enter Bob Parkinson and Andy Friendly.

Parkinson, forty-five, is a former producer of the Miss Universe and Miss U.S.A. pageants, as well as of such TV fare as “Circus of the Stars.” When it comes to the Hollywood game, Parkinson, a trim six foot four, can talk that talk and walk that walk, but he also happens to be a bright and exceedingly decent guy. If Friendly’s name seems familiar, it’s probably because Fred W. Friendly, his father, produced the late Edward R. Murrow’s most famous telecasts and later served as president of CBS News. At thirty-one, Friendly already has spent a decade in the business, starting out as a news writer and later on becoming the original producer of “Entertainment Tonight.” Friendly quit that job when the program began shilling for show business instead of covering it. He met Parkinson soon afterward, when both began working on M-G-M’s “World of Entertainment,” starring Gene Kelly.

Last year the two formed Parkinson/ Friendly Productions, and they’ve since become one of Hollywood’s hottest production teams. The two TV pilots they produced last summer, This Is Your Life (for Ralph Edwards) and Taking Advantage, were both picked up as network series, and following that, Parkinson and Friendly were hired by Richard Pryor to produce the comedian’s next concert film. The boys are doing just fine, thank you.

Parkinson first discussed a Penthouse beauty contest with Guccione almost ten years ago. “I think Bob was ready to go with it back then, but the timing wasn’t right,” Parkinson says. “Between Penthouse, Viva, and Omni, he was working twenty hours a day, seven days a week. He literally didn’t have time for anything else.”

Soon after Caligula was completed, however, Guccione and Parkinson resumed their talks about an international Pet of the Year competition. In September of ’82, Parkinson and Friendly flew to New York to confer with Guccione about actually going ahead with the event. Says Friendly, “Because of the way Guccione’s been portrayed in the media — gold chains, velvet pants, that kind of thing — I didn’t know what to expect. Bob turned out to be the most decisive man I’ve ever done business with. He wanted to know how much the production itself would cost — about a million dollars — and what the show would look like. After we told him, he committed fully to the project. That’s unusual in this business.”

Since then, Parkfnson and Friendly have been working hard to implement Guccione’s concept. “We’re setting out to do something beautiful,” Parkinson notes. “We’re not going to be cutesy, and people aren’t going to get the impression they’re watching a United Nations’ children’s concert. The $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant will do for beauty contests what ’Saturday Night Live’ did for comedy.”

Parkinson and Friendly both believe that the International Pet of the Year will become the Rolls-Royce of beauty pageants — and not just because of the $1 million involved. Along with Guccione, they’ve structured the pageant to feature the kind of woman one would meet at a party in Manhattan or L.A. or Des Moines — or London or Paris, for that matter. The idea is to present a composite Contemporary Woman, one who’s vitally concerned about herself, her career, her role in society, her relationships with men. Parkinson says, “We’re seeking out the kind of women who’d be fun to take to dinner — women who are confident about themselves, who are into art and politics, and who are comfortable with their bodies. This is one pageant that won’t award first prize to an air-head.”

The same sense of breaking new ground applies to the two-hour telecast. Friendly says, “The show itself will be a hip, funny, classy event. Bob and I want to completely revamp televised beauty pageants, starting with the basics-lighting, sets, and photography — and then going into more obvious areas like the host judges and entertainment.”

As this issue goes to press, stars Wayne Newton and Pia Zadora have agreed to lend their talents to the pageant telecast, and by the time you read this, you’ll have heard about other featured entertainers and pageant judges … one of whom will be Penthouse reader Marc A. Richardson, of Los Angeles, whose winning entry in Penthouse’s Here Comes the Judge contest earned him an envied position on this prestigious tribunal.

You won’t, however, have heard how the $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant differs from the competition.

To start with, uniforms are out. Why stuff the world’s most beautiful women into the same shapeless bathing suits? And how many blue chiffon evening gowns can we all look at before turning blue ourselves? The $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant is the first major beauty event that allows finalists to choose their own swimsuits and gowns — and if the ladies select bikinis and evening fashions that are more revealing and sexier than usual, so much the better.

Another point of departure: The Pet of the Year Pageant is not looking to discover The Complete Girl Scout. “We’re not judging what a girl does,” says Parkinson. “We’re judging who she is and how she does it. She can be married, divorced, Single — it really doesn’t matter.”

Working under Parkinson’s direction, Griff O’Neil, the pageant’s executive director, spent much of the past year helping to organize (and attending) Pet of the Year pageants throughout the world. O’Neil has logged nearly twenty years as a beauty-pageant administrator, starting with the Miss Teenage America and Miss U.S.A. contests and working his way up to Miss World, Miss Universe, and Miss America. O’Neil believes the $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant has attracted an outrageous group of sexy, sophisticated women.

“Forget their looks for a moment, although that’s pretty difficult to do,” he says. “I think the ladies who’ve won their way to Las Vegas have careers and interests as diverse as any group of women you could possibly find.”

O’Neil’s point seems well-taken. Brigitta Cimarolli, Austria’s Pet of the Year, was her nation’s chess champion in 1981 and once played Russia’s peerless Anatoly Karpov to a stalemate. Japan’s Yuko Nun-ome and Germany’s Carola Winter are graphic artists. Israel’s Sharona Marash is a photographer who now spends a good deal of time in front of the camera. Switzerland’s Pet of the Year, Monika Kaelin, appeared in the 1965 film version of Heidi when she was eleven years old and went on to become a kindergarten teacher. Monika returned to acting seven years ago and has since become a sensational-looking staple of the Swiss stage. South Africa’s Jilly Hutchings is a secretary for a Johannesburg engineering firm, New Zealand’s Kassie Dzemos is a fashion model, Spain’s Maria Jose Barbera de Lera is a stewardess for Iberia Airlines, and Brazil’s Talita Comin has finished two years of law school and plans to become an attorney in Sao Paulo.

Almost every winner of a national Pet of the Year Pageant has already received more in the way of prizes than titleholders of other major beauty contests. The domestic Pet of the Year, featured elsewhere in this issue, will be awarded nearly $200,000 in cash and prizes. Australia’s Pet of the Year, Marilyn Natty, a lovely thirty-one-year-old-blue-eyed blonde, earned more than $100,000 for winning her title. Marilyn’s favorite prize was a four-wheel-drive Jeep Hawk, which suits her perfectly: Marilyn is an outdoor adventurer who has climbed the Himalayas and has bred prizewinning palominos on her own stud farm. The United Kingdom’s Pet of the Year, English model Dawn Jones, came away with a Panther Kallister sports car, a full-length mink coat, and a wide range of other goodies. The rather obvious point being made here is that although only one of the finalists will strike it incredibly rich in Las Vegas, all of them already are winners.

Guccione, of course, stands to be the biggest winner of all. TV sponsors will probably underwrite most of the cost of the pageant, but even if they don’t, the event has already generated millions of dollars’ worth of publicity throughout the world — and that’s before the finals have been held. Thus far, the contest has gotten a warm welcome from the media, and Guccione doesn’t even expect feminists to find fault.

“Extremists within the feminist movement think of every beauty pageant as a cattle show, but when there’s a million dollars at stake, it changes things — and I think that is as it should be,” he says. “The lunatic fringe apart, most feminists know that we’ve supported their cause for a long time. Penthouse was the first corporation in New York to actually put money into the ERA movement, and I think we practice what we preach. Aside from myself, Penthouse’s three highest-paid employees are women. And they’re not paid for effect: if I don’t pay them what they’re worth, somebody else will.”

Still, no one has ever anted up a million dollars for a beauty-pageant winner, but then again, a few years ago who would have believed that pro basketball and baseball players would be knocking down seven-figure salaries? In the meantime, Guccione’s only taking what he sees as a very sensible gamble, and, given his track record, he’ll probably be proved right. Aside from the business part of the $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant, would you really like to know what’s in it for Guccione?

“I think the part I like best,” he says, “is that our Pet of the Year will pay more in income tax than every other beauty-pageant queen put together will win.”

Miss America, eat your heart out.

Maybe we should have mentioned at that outset that this story first ran in the December, 1983, edition of Penthouse.

As far as we have been able to determine, this glorious Pet Pageant never actually happened. Nor have we been able to find out why from any of our sources. Television was much more conservative and offered many fewer broadcast options back in 1983 obviously. Maybe the world was simply not ready to celebrate women who posed unabashedly naked back then. Sheila Kennedy won the 1983 title for Pet of the Year, so we took advantage of that with a Bob Guccione photograph in the header image for this article — in case you did not recognize her. If you take a look at History Central for 1983, though, you will notice that the world was a very different place. Two of the top three television spots were “Dallas” and “Dynasty” which certainly had beautiful women but tended rather to clothe them heavily (except Heather Locklear, but we do not want to get too far astray here). MTV was not even playing Black artists until December of 1983, after CBS essentially extorted them to do so by threatening to pull their entire stable from MTV unless they put Michael Jackson on the network. … We may not be there yet, but we have come a long way in 40 years.

For the record, we asked the current Penthouse Executives if they would like to resurrect the concept for the $1,000,000 Penthouse Pet Pageant this year, and they said — paraphrasing a bit here — “Um, no.”