Culture
The inside story of the publication that Anna Wintour briefly called home.
Two nude hippies their toned bodies tanned from the sun languidly stroll on a pebbly beach.
Walking away from the camera, they each rest a tanned hand over the others bare derriere.
Simone de Beauvoir, Joyce Carol Oates, and Nikki Giovanni all wrote for it.
Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison were interviewed.
John Lennon and Paul Newman posed for its pages (clothed).
Anna Wintour did its fashion spreads at one point.
It was so beautiful, so high-end, and really progressive sexually, says journalist Jennifer Romolini.
Romolini first came across it while searching for vintage prairie dresses on eBay in the early 2000s.
Intrigued, she bought her first issue the one with the naked couple on the beach.
She had never seen anything like it in her years working at womens magazines.
It wasn’t self-serious likeMs., but it also treated the readers like they were substantive, she says.
And there was real journalism in it and then of course, all these naked penises.
What madehimwant to publish a magazine for women?
And how did its largely female staff manage to make it so… good?
Romolini is now telling that story.
Her new eight-episode podcastStiffed, a weekly co-production of iHeartPodcasts and Crooked Media, launched on March 30.
It charts the rise and fall ofViva, one of Americas first womens porn magazines.
Bob Guccione I mean, he was no great suffragette, but he did want to do this.
Guccione startedPenthousein 1965 while living in London, as a more sexually explicit competitor toPlayboy.
He was a really fascinating character, says Romolini.
But he was also daring and courageous and experimental and very open-minded.
Guccione was one of the only magazine moguls who hired women and gave them good wages, too.
He convinced Kathy Keeton the highest-paid stripper in Britain to sell ads forPenthouse.
(She later became his third wife.)
It was Bryant who first had the idea of creating aPenthousefor women.
Bryant told Romolini onStiffed.
[Guccione] was brilliant in so many ways, but he was also cocky, Romolini says.
He just thought, Well, how different could it be to put out a magazine for women?
Yet its first issue suffered from Gucciones excessively macho point of view.
It was annoying and funny.
I would just go after people I wanted to see in the magazine.
I dont think he read anything, says Haskell, who also wrote for theVillage VoiceandMs.
Plus, it was the only thing like it at the time devoted to women.
Cosmowas: How do you dress to get a man?
What do you do in bed once you get the man?
What do you cook for that man?
Enjoy being a woman; enjoy your body; enjoy sensuality.
He came up withVivas most notorious spread: a pubic hairstyles shoot styled by famed hairdresser Paul Mitchell.
You have to remember that this is the 1970s, Romolini says.
Deep Throatwas in the Top 10 box office hits [of 1972]; porn is everywhere.
It was edgy, cool, kind of avant-garde.
Getting celebrities [for the magazine] was not a problem because porn was cool.
The problem was getting advertisers.
By 1977,Vivastopped doing full-frontal shots.
It hired Wintour, who had just been fired fromHarpers Bazaar, to class up its fashion pages.
Guccione and Keeton kept going through different editors with drastically different visions.
In the end,Vivaresembled a conventional womens magazine.
Its last issue, January 1979, included a feature on how to fight cellulite.
I think it failed because people weren’t ready for it, Romolini says.
We weren’t ready to see women liberated sexually, professionally, personally.
And maybe we still arent.
I just wanted to tell their stories and do right by them.
This article was originally published onApril 6, 2023
