’Tis Pity He’s a Whore
“Is she English?” the senior editor of Oui magazine wanted to know. With a deadline fast approaching, he was growing increasingly nervous. Fanned like rug remnants across his desk were proofs of Carol Lee Sinclair, subject of the upcoming issue’s major, nude photo spread.
“All I know is she’s blonde,” said the associate editor, feeling pressured as well. He nodded in my direction. “Does it matter? Just tell him what to do.” Earlier that day I had been recruited to dress Ms. Sinclair in 400 words of descriptive copy that would accompany her photographs.
The senior editor made a hasty executive decision. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, turning to me. “Make her American. We don’t have any American girls in the issue yet.” Then just as suddenly, he reconsidered. “I better check with the executive editor,” he said, and dashed from his office, tie flying, like a commuter sprinting for the last train home.
Back then, in the mid-1970s, Oui had carved an identity as Playboy’s raunchier, sister publication, billing itself as the magazine “For the Man of the World” — meaning the man who favored the frank photos in Penthouse and Hustler to the soft-core, Playboy photos that Hugh Hefner considered the mark of a sophisticated men’s monthly.
Much would be riding on Ms. Sinclair, and on me. For reasons unknown, the executive editor overruled the senior editor and decided to make her British. “Well, what do you want to rename her?” the senior editor asked me, now that her nationality had been established.
“How about Lynn Stanton?” I suggested.
“Make it Staunton,” he said. “There’s a town in Virginia I know by that name. By the way, she’s supposed to be visiting her parents’ dairy farm, in Scotland. You have your choice. You can have her fantasizing from her London flat, or from her folks’ farmhouse.”
Ms. Sinclair appeared, conveniently, to be “British” in type — pinched mouth, chiseled cheeks, piercing, heavily mascaraed eyes.
I recalled that the senior editor had described the previous month’s gatefold subject, Hildegarde, as “European.” “Really, where do you find these women?” I had asked him. “On some downtown Chicago street corner?”
He was taken aback, as if I had slapped his face. “We have agents all over Europe finding girls for us. American girls can’t look like this.” He pointed to Hildegarde’s layout, in which she appeared to be consternated, perhaps by what appeared to be a tiny blemish on her chin. “Her look — the eyes, the vulnerability — can’t be duplicated by American girls.”
Hildegarde was not the woman’s real name. Then again, I never learned the truth, or anything at all, about Ms. Sinclair, either. I never met her, never interviewed her. Unlike Playboy playmates, who turn up occasionally on soap operas or married briefly to professional athletes, the Oui women are unknowns.
“It’s probably best that way,” coached the senior editor, as I prepared to head home to write. He explained that one of their models had just that month been released from a German prison, following her arrest for prostitution.
Perhaps because of incidents like that, the Oui centerfold section had developed into a major market for fiction. “Go ahead!” encouraged the senior editor, as he escorted me from his office. “Write anything you like. There are no facts! You don’t know the facts anyway. We’ve already invented her name and nationality. Use your imagination. Make up her sexual fantasies. Just one rule: If her hair is blonde in the photos, keep it that way in the story. Otherwise, it’s anything goes. Try writing it tonight, in one sitting. Let’s see what you can come up with.”
I had never written pornography; one might wonder how I landed the job. Truth is, no one else wanted it. There is a certain stigma to writing “girl copy” (so described on my check voucher). It’s like writing for the supermarket tabloid, the National Examiner (sample front-page headline: HITLER IS ALIVE!). The pay is decent, but who’s going to leave copies on his coffee table? Thankfully, there was no byline for my mother to see.
As it happened, the writer I replaced was the late film critic, Roger Ebert. His women were written as alluring, Shakespearean; mine was attracted to roosters.
It was 4 a.m., hours since I had had a coherent idea, when I wrote in a near-hallucinogenic state, “Once when I was falling asleep on the divan I woke to find him [the rooster] nipping my thigh, near my private place. It felt like pins.” The senior editor was impressed. “Pretty good for your first try,” he enthused. “Want to try another?”
One thing still nagged at my conscience. What would this woman whose name, nationality and occupation I had changed, whose sexual proclivities I had utterly defiled, think as she read her biography in Oui?
“She will probably never see it,” assured the senior editor. “She was paid a thousand dollars. What does she care what you say about her?”
I stared at my own payment check, with the Playboy bunny logo in the corner. It read $150. I accepted the second assignment without hesitation.
Oui, which once boasted a circulation of 1.2 million, ceased publication in 2007. This essay originally appeared in Chicago magazine.
