March 30, 2023 • 33 mins
Coming off the massive success of his men's sex magazine Penthouse, porn publishing king Bob Guccione has a new project… but for women this time. Enter Viva, one of the first erotic magazines for women.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I was brought up to respect women. End up, I've
never lost that respect. I've added to it, I've contributed
to it. It's the middle of the night, New York City,
and Bob Guccioni, the controversial founder and longtime publisher of
Penthouse Magazine, is being interviewed on the CBS show Nightwatch.
(00:21):
Nightwatch was an overnight news show that aired from two
to six in the morning, a time when you could
talk more freely about topics like sexual desire and porn
on network TV. I think that if you're looking at
a woman's anatomy, it must be beautiful in all of
its pots. We cannot take one part of the anatomy
and say that this is vulgar or obscene and that
(00:43):
the rest of it is okay, the rest of it
is decent. That just simply doesn't work. Since you at
the time of this interview, Bob Guccioni is one of
the richest men in the world. He's on the Forbes
four hundred list, one of the most powerful publishers in
America back when publishers had real power, and he's not
humble or shy about any of it. I'm gonna workaholic.
(01:04):
I work day and nine. I work seven days a
week at least twenty hours a day. I sleep in
average of three hours a night, and I don't go
anywhere socially. I do not surround myself with celebrities. I'm
not staw struck. Bob's wearing a creamy white silk shirt
that's unbuttoned nearly to his navel. His chest, hair is out,
his skins overtan. There are a dozen or more gold
(01:26):
chains around his neck. Though the interview takes place in
the early eighties, his look is full disco. He's the
picture of seventies masculinity, even a caricature of it. I've
got a good reputation with the girls that I've always
worked with in the past. You look after our girls,
working carefully. The host of night Watch is longtime anchor
(01:47):
Christopher Glenn, who looks particularly juxtaposed next to Bob, like
a Clark can't stand in a square. Glenn, like most
journalists at this time, is trying to knock Guccioni down
a notch, corner him on a number of fronts. Since
you started working in the area quote Men's Magazines, has
(02:09):
your personal attitude about women changed to a lot of
people say you're just an exploiter of women. Well, you know,
they can say what they like. My attitude toward women,
if anything, has grown more respectful over the years. In
what ways what I've come to understand them a lot better.
When I produced the women's magazine, some Musico cooled Viva,
which was very successful with the readership. The magazine he's
(02:31):
talking about, Viva, was a splashy but little known feminist
corn magazine Bob published a decade before this interview, from
nineteen seventy three until it was forced to fold it
in nineteen seventy eight. In addition to its groundbreaking full
frontal male nudes, beev was smart and cool. It treated
(02:51):
its readers like they had brains, publishing work by writers
like Mickey Giovanni were not a Adler and Erica John
and it was stylish. Anna Wintour was actually Viva's fashion
editor from nineteen seventy six to nineteen seventy eight. Viva
was a reflection of its time, a direct product of
(03:12):
the seventy sexual revolution, but maybe even more importantly, the
women's liberation movement. There is a serious questioning of the
role of women in our society. What do you think
men are doing wrong? They're in charge? Why do I
want it? Na? Viva came out fifty years ago, and
(03:34):
its story has more parallels to the issues around sexual
liberation that we're all still grappling with today than I
could have possibly imagined. But still almost no one remembers it,
and if they do, they get the story wrong. They
turn Viva into a joke about Dick's fashionable feminism plus
(03:55):
penises wrapped up in a blousy pussy bow que the
bow Chick a bow Wow music at the end. It's
safe to say that perceptions about female sexuality and empowerment
have been misconstrued and straight up dismissed by men since forever.
It's just unfortunate. Viva Zone. Bob GUCCIONI, porn mogul and
(04:18):
publisher of one of the first erotic women's magazines, was
just as clueless as the rest of them. But when
I started Viva, I thought I knew everything there was
to know about women. I thought I was the smartest
guy in the world as far as women were concerned.
I learned as a result of that experience, as a
result of working deeply with women, that I didn't begin
to know them, nor does any other man I know.
(04:39):
But what were these misunderstood women of Viva trained to
say with their feminist porn magazine And could they actually
pull it off? From crooked media? And iHeartMedia, I'm Jennifer
Romilini and this is stiffed. Episode one, Good Girls Walk
into a porn Magazine, Act one, the first word. The
(05:09):
first time I ever saw Viva magazine was in the
mid two thousands. Back then, I was working as a
mid level editor at a popular Conde Nast women's magazine
called Lucky, sitting at a desk just a few floors
down from Vogue. Before Lucky, I'd worked in junior positions
at Glamour and Cosmo, and women's magazines were then and
(05:30):
had always been messy, a lot of putting lipstick on
the internalized misogyny pig, a lot of exclusionary self esteem
eroding word salads that were beneath all of us, even
if we didn't really know we deserved better at the time.
But when I discovered Viva, I discovered that things hadn't
(05:51):
always been this way, and I was surprised to find
out that this revolutionary, cool, progressive women's porn magazine. All
seemed to have started with a man, Bob Guccioni, the
famous founder of the men's magazine Penhouse. I became very
interested in what was happening on the news stands, and
(06:11):
I saw that Playboy was the only men's magazine of
its kind and occurred to me in a very simplistic way,
that one might produce the British answer to Playboy. I
had no ideas in the beginning that I would ever
take this magazine to the United States. That's Bob again
on Night Watch, describing why he first decided to create Penhouse.
(06:32):
As you heard, he came up with the idea while
living in London with his family at the time. He's
just a family man with a big idea. But once
he actually finishes the first physical issue of Penhouse magazine.
It wasn't until I actually held the first issue in
my hand and looked at it and said to myself,
my god, this is something specialist, is something great. And
at that moment in time, as it came off the press,
(06:54):
the first bound copy, I looked at him and I said,
I'm going to take this to America. Enter a young
aspiring magazine editor named Gay Bryant. I'd gotten this job
as the first literally the first employee you've Penthouse in
the United States. You might know Gay Bryant now for
her work as the former editor in chief of popular
(07:16):
women's magazines like Mirabella, Working a Woman and Family Circle,
or for popularizing the term glass ceiling to describe barriers
women face in their careers. But before all that, back
in the sixties, Gay's just a girl in her twenties
with big career dreams, even if she's not entirely sure
how to make them happen. I grew up in a
(07:39):
time in England where you really sort of expected to
get married and that was about it. But I did
like writing. Being a nice English, well brought over English girl.
I was just sort of quiet and I learned fast
and I just absorbed it all. In other words, I
was nice, well behaved and a good listener. That was
(08:04):
the secret of my success. When Gay meets Bob GUCCIONI,
she's just a junior copy editor freelancing for Penhouse UK
before Bob offers her a big opportunity. It's her first break. Hey,
we're thinking of starting up in America and if you
get there, maybe you can get a job, so gay
(08:26):
moves to New York City to be the editor of
Penthouse US in the fall of nineteen sixty nine. She'd
never been to America before, and she knew almost no one,
but her new job at Penthouse kept her busy. I
was literally the only employee, so I did everything. You
had to know how to do covers that made guys
(08:48):
pick up the magazine and pay their money, And you
had to learn how to get advertising. You had to
learn the business. Gaye starts as a Penhouse employee, but
she's there for the beginning of Viva. And even though
she's one of the only people president Viva's start, you
wouldn't know this because her name is strangely nowhere on
Viva's first masthead. It's an oversight that will turn out
(09:11):
to be likely very intentional. But I'm getting way ahead
of myself. When gay first arrives in New York, this
buttoned up English girl is thrust no pun into an
entirely new world. But like she said, she's a fast learner.
She adapts quickly. And how did being a nice a
(09:32):
nice girl? How did that go along with working at
a porn magazine? Did you? How did you negotiate that.
I think I bought the line that it wasn't really
a porn magazine. It was a new product tackling the market,
and it was part of it. Like a David and
(09:54):
Goliath battle in the magazine newstand world the Golia Here's Playboy,
run by Bob's arch nemesis Hugh Hefner in the early seventies,
the porn landscape is still mainly limited to two men's magazines, Playboy,
the reliable old timer and Penhouse, the scrappy upstart. In fact,
Playboys around for almost two decades before Bob comes along
(10:17):
with Penhouse. For a long time it was the only
game in town. Here's Bob. Playboy had been so successful
for so long that they didn't recognize the possibility of
a threat. They didn't recognize any kind of competition. Playboy
was locked into a situation governed and controlled by its advertisers.
I didn't have any advertises when I gave into the market,
(10:38):
so I had nobody to bow to what cowtown do.
I did what I felt was necessary, what was right,
and what Bob thought was right, publishing a magazine that
was much more explicit than Playboy. Playboy came out of
the conservative fifties. It had an old fashioned, gentlemanly vibe.
Was widely considered respectable pornography just some preppy, naughty boys
(11:02):
being boys stuff. And one big reason for this was
Hugh Hefner never showed full frontal nudes. But Bob Gucci
on his whole sex vibe is much more naturalistic than Half's.
He's not into this sanitized sexual innuendo. He's over Americans
hang ups about bodies and sex. Here he is explaining
in an interview on Arlene Herson's cable Access Showing the eighties,
(11:25):
I determined by myself that it was wrong to publish
pictures of girls where you didn't see that the pubist,
because that is, to me, one of the most beautiful
pots of a woman's body, and I felt that the
world should look at it that way, and so we
did it. We took the step. It was daring at
(11:45):
the time, I suppose, but I really wasn't afraid of
what I was doing. I thought I was doing the
right thing, and I was prepared to defend that position.
But maybe more than anything, Bob sees more graphic nudity
as a smart business move. He thinks he can beat
Heffner by going bigger, by showing more. I knew then
and lay with that first issue, though, I come to
(12:07):
America with it, and that I would do battle with Playboy,
and that I would eventually take the market. So Bob
shows Pubic Hair and Penthouse basically from the jump, setting
off a public battle that half aptly deemed the Pubic Wars.
Penthouse shows Pubic Haare, Playboy shows Pubicare, Penthouse shows Labia,
(12:27):
Playboy shows Labia, and then well on it goes. So
Bob's image is sleazy lethario, but in reality he's a
hyper ambitious workaholic. He works tirelessly on Penthouse, and it shows.
It's US circulation numbers grow to millions within months, it
(12:47):
sells out in newsstands, the carry it, and it is
quickly one of the biggest magazine success stories of all time.
It's a cash cow that, unlike its competitors, is run
on a shoe string, which makes it the more of
a cash cow. And though Gay Bryant was hired on
as the editor, she picks up quick to Bob's business
savvy and in early nineteen seventy three, after four years
(13:10):
working for Bob and helping him build Penhouse. I began
to think, Gee, you know, why can't women who are
now part of the sexual revolution and the women's movement
and so on, why can't they have a magazine like
this for them? Kay Bryant suddenly had a magazine idea
(13:31):
of her own, and she shares it with her male
colleague at Penhouse. I went and talk to Ernie, the
publishing expert there, and I said, you know, I think
the company should do a magazine for women, a sexy magazine.
It's time. And he said, yeah, pretty idea. Why don't
you write up a proposal and I'll pass it up
(13:53):
to Bob. Gay's excited. She gets to work right away.
She's got lots of ideas. I wrote up the proposal.
I cooled it Mia because at the time Mia Farrow
was like cool and intelligence and draw all those things.
I gave it to Ernie, Ernie gave it well, I
(14:15):
don't know, I guess Ernie gave it to Bob. Nothing. Nothing.
And by the time Gay here's back, Well, the magazine
she pitched is about to get green lit, but not
necessarily in the way she might have hoped. Act to
(14:44):
an unexploited resource. Here's the thing, Gay Bryant wasn't the
only woman working for Penthouse and coming up with big
innovative ideas for Bob. And we'll get back to her
magazine proposal and the response to it in just a minute,
but first it's important to talk about Bob and his
hiring practices because for the time they were pretty unique.
(15:08):
In the early seventies, Bob Guccioni hired tons of women.
He hired them, he promoted them, he gave them big titles.
In nineteen seventy four, you either went to Nis magazine
or you went to Penthouse because there was no other
place of his hiring women. That's a former Penthouse executive
named Nancy Lewinter speaking in the twenty thirteen Bob Guccioni
(15:30):
documentary Filthy Gorgeous. She's talking about magazine publicity and advertising,
but this applied to editorial too. Here's Bob's partner, Kathy
Keaton from the same documentary. Bob Guccioni was very smart.
He understood that women were an unexploited resource. Hiring women
(15:51):
was something Bob was known for, a big deal, something
he bragged about all the time. This is Bob again
on Night Watch in his interview with Christopher Glenn. You
have some rather high ranking officers of your organization. Are women?
Are they now? Yes? In fact, the three highest paid
individuals are women, and we have many more women executives
(16:11):
than we have men. And this has done simply because
I think they do a better job. And Guccioni may
have thought that women did a better job, but that
didn't mean he always let them do it. And if
he didn't let them do their jobs, if he sidelined
them or took credit for their work, the women who
worked for Bob Guccioni, well, they had little recourse. Remember
(16:35):
this is the seventies and the professional landscape for women
is not great. Yes, we're in the middle of the
women's liberation movement. It's a time of radical progressive change
for women. Sure, but women still can't apply for a
loan or get credit cards in their own name, and
sexual harassment is rampant in most industries, more the rule
(16:58):
than the exception. So women who wanted to work at
this time often took what they could get. Working for
a porn king like Bob Guccioni, who gave them opportunities
was often worth the price of admission. I started working
at Penthouse actually when I was seventeen, as a temporary
secretary during the summer between high school and college, my
(17:21):
very first job except for babysitting. But yeah, that's Robin Walliner.
Robin's a former executive at c NEET and the founder
of Parenting magazine. You can imagine the reactions of my
parents to their seventeen year old daughter working at this place.
Parent approval or no. Working at Penhouse is the job
that helps put Robin through college. But while Robin is
(17:42):
finishing her degree at Cornell and working part time at Penhouse,
Gay Brian is running Penhouse's editorial and waiting to hear
back about her new magazine Idea and future Viva editor.
Pat Lindon's a fresh faced young reporter, a Berkeley graduate,
working her first magazine job. The first time I spoke
with Pat, it was over the phone. So I went
(18:03):
to work for Newsweek, and I was thrilled at some
fifty four dollars a week for six months until and
I was told, this is a really good job for
a woman. At Newsweek. Pat's hired as a quote editorial assistant,
but she's doing a lot more. She reports on local
and national politics, establishes high level sources, and even break stories,
(18:26):
but she's forced to give those stories to established male journalists,
men who get the buyelines and all the credit for
her work. For all the female reporters at Newsweek's work,
we decided that we wanted to get recognized on the
masthead for what we were doing. We didn't want to
be called editorial assistance anymore, and we wanted to be writers, correspondents,
(18:48):
that sort of thing. Pat's a key witness and a
landmark gender discrimination suit against Newsweek, a case brought by
forty six of the magazine's female journalists that changes publishing
workplaces forever, A case that inspires the book Good Girl's
Revolt that was later turned into the twenty fifteen TV
(19:08):
show of the same name. Women like Pat and Robin
and Gay are all trying to sort out who they are,
both professionally and personally. Here's Pat again, this time not
over the phone. We had no idea what we were
going to do or if we were going to do anything,
but we started going to these consciousness raising groups. Consciousness
(19:32):
raising groups literally groups of women sitting around and talking
without men were incredibly popular with second wave feminists in
the late sixties and early seventies, particularly in New York.
Women would sit around Network Bitch and share stories about
being moms, their careers, and their sex lives openly and
(19:54):
ways they hadn't before. And it's not just Pat attending.
Gay Bryant belongs to a women's consciousness raising group two
and on one Summer nine in nineteen seventy three, She's
got a lot to talk about, a lot to unload.
Remember Gay's big magazine proposal. Well, after months, She's finally
(20:16):
got an update, and it's from Nora Efron, of all people. Yes,
that Nora Ephron, the one behind when Harry met Sally
sleepless in Seattle feeling bad about her neck. I opened
up New York Magazine and Bob Guccioni is telling I
think it was Nora Efron in an interview about how
(20:38):
he was gonna start a really cool new erotic magazine
for women. Bob doesn't say the name of the magazine,
But for Gay this announcement is awfully coincidental, suspiciously so
Gay Shore Bob is screwing her over stealing her idea
get along story short, I was pretty pissed off. So
(21:00):
I was in some consciousness raising group with other female
writers and editors, and I told them the story, and
I told them how outrageous it was Gay's venting, and
like anyone who's had a man or any boss take
credit for their idea, she's flooded with rage, incensed. And
one of them called Nora, and Nora interviewed me, and
(21:21):
that too, appeared in New York Magazine, saying I had
had the idea, but not everyone agrees with Gay's account.
It was entirely his idea, and I was great. Okay.
So a big voice missing from this series is Bob Guccioni.
He unfortunately passed away in twenty and ten, but we
(21:41):
did have the privilege of speaking to his son, Bob
Guccioni Junior. It was near the beginning and as he
was thinking it through, but he felt that women wanted
the same kind of a magazine that men wanted. Bob
Junior is one of the few people still alive who
worked at Viva from the start. He'd go on to
have his own success full career in publishing as the
(22:02):
founder and publisher of the music magazine's Spin, but in
the seventies. Bob Junior is a teenager and Viva magazine.
Well it's his first job, and as far as he's concerned,
it was his dad's creation. You know, he named it.
He named it. He just came up with the name.
(22:22):
He was Italian, Viva means life in Italian, and he
drew a logo on a note bed and the magazine
came from there. Now we can't know for sure who
invented the magazine. I'm inclined to believe Gay, though to
be fair, Bob's ultimate decision to green light Viva may
(22:43):
have come from a desire to keep pace with Hugh
Hefner Please Girl, launched just a few months before Viva.
Whatever the case, the seat of Viva is now out there.
But after spilling the beans to Nora Gaze, filled with
insecurity over her decision to talk, I do remember having
that of, oh my god, what have I done? And
(23:04):
to my eternal shame, I went to Bob and apologized
and said, of course, of course I didn't really mean
nat and of course it's your magazine. And I quit,
So Gay quits, and let's just call it really misplaced shame.
(23:25):
And Bob moves on finishing Viva's first issue without her.
Here's an excerpt from Bob's editor's letter in Viva Magazine's
first issue, read by writer and podcast host Alex Pappadimus.
He'll hear him read Bob throughout this series, So thank you, Alex.
The magazine you hold in your hands is my newborn child, fragile, undisciplined,
(23:46):
painfully vulnerable. Bob's editor's letters become a regular column in Viva,
called the first Word, and in his first words, here
Bob's introducing his Viva to the world. The first issue
is published in October of nineteen seventy three, and even
today it's a visual standout. The cover is a full
(24:09):
bleed shot, an extreme soft focus closeup of a woman's
face in profile, her blue, eyeshadowed eyes closed in ecstasy,
her coral lipsticked, lips parted in a provocative pout, a
pink tongue jetting out just a bit across the top
of the model's face is the Viva logo, bold white
(24:31):
in a font that screams seventies. The letters made from
a series of thin vertical somehow disco elnes. It's a
beautiful magazine, and Bob Guccioni was at the top of
it all. Viva is Bob Guccioni Senior's baby in a
way he writes about literally here's his editor's letter again.
(24:54):
This child of love is my child, and I want
to see her grow and have all the advantages of
success that and attention can provide. Next to this letter
is a picture of Bob himself. He's forty three here
and artfully lit. He looks sensitive, pensive, a thinking man's pornographer.
(25:15):
I want to watch her develop firm, young limbs and
a fine, strong posture. I want to see her acquire
the sort of education that promotes knowledgeable opinions, bold, positive
attitudes toward life and love and sex, and that creates
above all character and personality. Just to be clear, because
(25:35):
it's not so much from his editor's letter, Bob was
making a magazine for adult women, not unformed baby ladies.
And he was also making an erotic magazine for grown
women who loved men. But what did he serve up Well,
a lot of vulva and naked breasts. There's a fifteen
(25:57):
page centerfold where a mustachioed man and a brunette woman
in a bonnet caused play as old timey people on
a picnic, a picnic where all they seem to be
serving is the woman's naked body. This issue also serves
up a quick hit piece on Jane Fonda and a
comic strip called the Little Hooker where a skinny blonde
(26:21):
woman with big tits engages in sex with a bear.
Oh and Bob made some interesting choices when it came
to who would be writing for Viva two. Here's the lineup.
White male novelist JP don Levy and I sometimes do
profess the actual facts of one's existence. White male political
(26:46):
reporter Tom Wicker perhaps will relapse into that more quiescent
mood wants the current a fad for investigative journalism that
stems out of Watergate. White male photojournalist Eddie Adams. When
I did the picture, I back the AP office and
I handed him to stroll a fill and said, I
think I got somebody healing somebody and I went out
to lunch. Was that simple white male essayist slash known
(27:11):
misogynist Norman Mailer. And there is an element in Women's
liberation that tera five mean. It terrifies me because it's humorists.
Because with the exception, let's say of German Greer's book,
There's been almost no recognition that the life of a
man is also difficult. Here's what Gay thought when she
first saw it. Viva was always a man's idea of
(27:32):
what women wanted, and I don't believe that they really
knew what women wanted. Viva was Bob's creation alone, and
he wants the world to know it. It's all pretty cross,
particularly for Gay, who had a very different vision for
this magazine. But to Gay's credit, she quickly moves on.
(27:53):
She starts her own magazine called New Dawn, a Viva competitor.
She's a big name editor and writer for decades. She's okay.
But hearing Gay's story and now knowing where it ends,
it all makes sense. This was a messy beginning to
a messy magazine in a messy time, and the women
who would become involved in trying to grow Viva as
(28:15):
an intelligent, sexy magazine for other women, they were up
against it from the beginning. Nora Efronz slams Viva's first
issue in New York Magazine with a review titled Guccioni's
miss Print. She blames Bob for all of it, including
stealing Gay's idea. Here's my producer, Megan Donnas reading Nora's peace.
(28:38):
The original concept of Viva was a woman's Guccioni claims otherwise,
claims that the concrete idea for Viva hit him like
some transcendental bolts last year on a transatlantic plane, but
the actual product, in fact, came from a Viva editor
named Gay Bryant, who wrote a fifty page outline proposing
(28:59):
and erotic general interest magazine for intelligent women. Guccioni adopted
Bryan's idea and added a couple of fillips of his
own the name, the logo, and most important, the overall tone.
It's a tone, Nora, and turns out a lot of
people hate a tone that Bob couldn't necessarily control since
(29:22):
while it was his own. Here's Bob Junior again. The
entire thing was through his lens rather than a woman's lens,
and that was a mistake. But you can understand why
Bob's senior would make this kind of mistake. He's just
off the biggest career win of his life. The success
of Penthouse is unimpeachable, and like many founders of Megas,
(29:42):
successful things Bob's Senior now thinks his instincts are unimpeachable too.
Penthouse was such a fantastic success because it was an
update on Playboy, the more modern, more authentic, real magazine
about men's lives in the late sixties in the seventies.
(30:03):
Viva was intended to be the woman's version of that.
So he traded the magazine. He thought it through, He
believed in that concept, in that vision at the time,
and he was going to execute it. And the truth
was that even with Bob's shadow hanging over it, some
women in media were happy to see Viva come into
existence at all. A feminist erotica magazine marked progress. No
(30:29):
matter who was making it. There was a need for
a magazine like Viva, a hole in the marketplace. So
Bob Senior's instincts are not all wrong. After Viva's first issue,
after Nora Ephron's complaints, he starts to hire highbrow female writers,
female sex therapists, and eventually editors and writers with serious
(30:49):
journalistic cred including Pat. I mean, Newsweek was at a
real place, you know, it was a place where it
was like boot camp, and this standards were very high.
Pat was a bona fide journalist who knew her value.
But after the Newsweek case, she didn't know where to
go next. So she started networking, kicking the professional tires,
(31:12):
meeting up with other female journalists. I can't remember her
last name, and I think she was also from miss
and we were talking walking down the street and I
told her I was interested in leaving. She said, oh, well,
I know the perfect place for you, and that was Viva.
Somebody had said that, you know, some pornographer was running it.
I wouldn't have gone there, but these were bona fide
(31:33):
feminists right. As for Robin, after working as a secretary
at Penthouse, the choice to move over to Viva was easy.
She knew Bob paid. I got to live in wage
at Viva. And I was quite proud to work for
Viva because we saw the jet the version of Viva
that I worked for. We were going to be the
(31:53):
intelligent woman's Cosmo. And here's pat Kathy Keaton had come
up with a auto for Viva, which she was using
in advertisements, and the Viva woman lives the life that
the Cosmo girl only dreams about. And we thought, well,
that's kind of cute. And even Nora Ephron's mostly scathing
(32:14):
review of Bob's first issue offers both Viva and its
female editors some hope. Here's Megan reading Nora again. I
realize I'm treating Viva as if it were a failure, that,
to be sure, is premature and wishful thinking. Viva may
well succeed, may find some formula that works. But did
(32:36):
Viva need a new formula or did it need a
new leader? Could Bob Guccioni be trusted to raise this
female newborn magazine child on his own? We're about to
find out. Stiffed as an original podcast from iHeartMedia and
(32:56):
Crooked Media. It's produced by Crooked Media, hosted and written
by me Jennifer Romalini, and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney
Raff is our associate producer, Story editing by Mary Knock,
music sound design and engineering by Hannis Brown. Our fact
checker is Julia Paskin. Additional production support from Noafola Kito
(33:19):
and Inez Maza. Thanks to Alex Peppadimus for reading the
voice of Bob Guccioni from Crook and Media. Our executive
producers are Sarah Geismer, Katy Long, and Mary Nooff. With
special thanks to Alison Falzetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia.
Our executive producers are Beth Anne Macaluso and Julia Weaver.
I was brought up to respect women. End up, I've
never lost that respect. I've added to it, I've contributed
to it. It's the middle of the night, New York City,
and Bob Guccioni, the controversial founder and longtime publisher of
Penthouse Magazine, is being interviewed on the CBS show Nightwatch.
(00:21):
Nightwatch was an overnight news show that aired from two
to six in the morning, a time when you could
talk more freely about topics like sexual desire and porn
on network TV. I think that if you're looking at
a woman's anatomy, it must be beautiful in all of
its pots. We cannot take one part of the anatomy
and say that this is vulgar or obscene and that
(00:43):
the rest of it is okay, the rest of it
is decent. That just simply doesn't work. Since you at
the time of this interview, Bob Guccioni is one of
the richest men in the world. He's on the Forbes
four hundred list, one of the most powerful publishers in
America back when publishers had real power, and he's not
humble or shy about any of it. I'm gonna workaholic.
(01:04):
I work day and nine. I work seven days a
week at least twenty hours a day. I sleep in
average of three hours a night, and I don't go
anywhere socially. I do not surround myself with celebrities. I'm
not staw struck. Bob's wearing a creamy white silk shirt
that's unbuttoned nearly to his navel. His chest, hair is out,
his skins overtan. There are a dozen or more gold
(01:26):
chains around his neck. Though the interview takes place in
the early eighties, his look is full disco. He's the
picture of seventies masculinity, even a caricature of it. I've
got a good reputation with the girls that I've always
worked with in the past. You look after our girls,
working carefully. The host of night Watch is longtime anchor
(01:47):
Christopher Glenn, who looks particularly juxtaposed next to Bob, like
a Clark can't stand in a square. Glenn, like most
journalists at this time, is trying to knock Guccioni down
a notch, corner him on a number of fronts. Since
you started working in the area quote Men's Magazines, has
(02:09):
your personal attitude about women changed to a lot of
people say you're just an exploiter of women. Well, you know,
they can say what they like. My attitude toward women,
if anything, has grown more respectful over the years. In
what ways what I've come to understand them a lot better.
When I produced the women's magazine, some Musico cooled Viva,
which was very successful with the readership. The magazine he's
(02:31):
talking about, Viva, was a splashy but little known feminist
corn magazine Bob published a decade before this interview, from
nineteen seventy three until it was forced to fold it
in nineteen seventy eight. In addition to its groundbreaking full
frontal male nudes, beev was smart and cool. It treated
(02:51):
its readers like they had brains, publishing work by writers
like Mickey Giovanni were not a Adler and Erica John
and it was stylish. Anna Wintour was actually Viva's fashion
editor from nineteen seventy six to nineteen seventy eight. Viva
was a reflection of its time, a direct product of
(03:12):
the seventy sexual revolution, but maybe even more importantly, the
women's liberation movement. There is a serious questioning of the
role of women in our society. What do you think
men are doing wrong? They're in charge? Why do I
want it? Na? Viva came out fifty years ago, and
(03:34):
its story has more parallels to the issues around sexual
liberation that we're all still grappling with today than I
could have possibly imagined. But still almost no one remembers it,
and if they do, they get the story wrong. They
turn Viva into a joke about Dick's fashionable feminism plus
(03:55):
penises wrapped up in a blousy pussy bow que the
bow Chick a bow Wow music at the end. It's
safe to say that perceptions about female sexuality and empowerment
have been misconstrued and straight up dismissed by men since forever.
It's just unfortunate. Viva Zone. Bob GUCCIONI, porn mogul and
(04:18):
publisher of one of the first erotic women's magazines, was
just as clueless as the rest of them. But when
I started Viva, I thought I knew everything there was
to know about women. I thought I was the smartest
guy in the world as far as women were concerned.
I learned as a result of that experience, as a
result of working deeply with women, that I didn't begin
to know them, nor does any other man I know.
(04:39):
But what were these misunderstood women of Viva trained to
say with their feminist porn magazine And could they actually
pull it off? From crooked media? And iHeartMedia, I'm Jennifer
Romilini and this is stiffed. Episode one, Good Girls Walk
into a porn Magazine, Act one, the first word. The
(05:09):
first time I ever saw Viva magazine was in the
mid two thousands. Back then, I was working as a
mid level editor at a popular Conde Nast women's magazine
called Lucky, sitting at a desk just a few floors
down from Vogue. Before Lucky, I'd worked in junior positions
at Glamour and Cosmo, and women's magazines were then and
(05:30):
had always been messy, a lot of putting lipstick on
the internalized misogyny pig, a lot of exclusionary self esteem
eroding word salads that were beneath all of us, even
if we didn't really know we deserved better at the time.
But when I discovered Viva, I discovered that things hadn't
(05:51):
always been this way, and I was surprised to find
out that this revolutionary, cool, progressive women's porn magazine. All
seemed to have started with a man, Bob Guccioni, the
famous founder of the men's magazine Penhouse. I became very
interested in what was happening on the news stands, and
(06:11):
I saw that Playboy was the only men's magazine of
its kind and occurred to me in a very simplistic way,
that one might produce the British answer to Playboy. I
had no ideas in the beginning that I would ever
take this magazine to the United States. That's Bob again
on Night Watch, describing why he first decided to create Penhouse.
(06:32):
As you heard, he came up with the idea while
living in London with his family at the time. He's
just a family man with a big idea. But once
he actually finishes the first physical issue of Penhouse magazine.
It wasn't until I actually held the first issue in
my hand and looked at it and said to myself,
my god, this is something specialist, is something great. And
at that moment in time, as it came off the press,
(06:54):
the first bound copy, I looked at him and I said,
I'm going to take this to America. Enter a young
aspiring magazine editor named Gay Bryant. I'd gotten this job
as the first literally the first employee you've Penthouse in
the United States. You might know Gay Bryant now for
her work as the former editor in chief of popular
(07:16):
women's magazines like Mirabella, Working a Woman and Family Circle,
or for popularizing the term glass ceiling to describe barriers
women face in their careers. But before all that, back
in the sixties, Gay's just a girl in her twenties
with big career dreams, even if she's not entirely sure
how to make them happen. I grew up in a
(07:39):
time in England where you really sort of expected to
get married and that was about it. But I did
like writing. Being a nice English, well brought over English girl.
I was just sort of quiet and I learned fast
and I just absorbed it all. In other words, I
was nice, well behaved and a good listener. That was
(08:04):
the secret of my success. When Gay meets Bob GUCCIONI,
she's just a junior copy editor freelancing for Penhouse UK
before Bob offers her a big opportunity. It's her first break. Hey,
we're thinking of starting up in America and if you
get there, maybe you can get a job, so gay
(08:26):
moves to New York City to be the editor of
Penthouse US in the fall of nineteen sixty nine. She'd
never been to America before, and she knew almost no one,
but her new job at Penthouse kept her busy. I
was literally the only employee, so I did everything. You
had to know how to do covers that made guys
(08:48):
pick up the magazine and pay their money, And you
had to learn how to get advertising. You had to
learn the business. Gaye starts as a Penhouse employee, but
she's there for the beginning of Viva. And even though
she's one of the only people president Viva's start, you
wouldn't know this because her name is strangely nowhere on
Viva's first masthead. It's an oversight that will turn out
(09:11):
to be likely very intentional. But I'm getting way ahead
of myself. When gay first arrives in New York, this
buttoned up English girl is thrust no pun into an
entirely new world. But like she said, she's a fast learner.
She adapts quickly. And how did being a nice a
(09:32):
nice girl? How did that go along with working at
a porn magazine? Did you? How did you negotiate that.
I think I bought the line that it wasn't really
a porn magazine. It was a new product tackling the market,
and it was part of it. Like a David and
(09:54):
Goliath battle in the magazine newstand world the Golia Here's Playboy,
run by Bob's arch nemesis Hugh Hefner in the early seventies,
the porn landscape is still mainly limited to two men's magazines, Playboy,
the reliable old timer and Penhouse, the scrappy upstart. In fact,
Playboys around for almost two decades before Bob comes along
(10:17):
with Penhouse. For a long time it was the only
game in town. Here's Bob. Playboy had been so successful
for so long that they didn't recognize the possibility of
a threat. They didn't recognize any kind of competition. Playboy
was locked into a situation governed and controlled by its advertisers.
I didn't have any advertises when I gave into the market,
(10:38):
so I had nobody to bow to what cowtown do.
I did what I felt was necessary, what was right,
and what Bob thought was right, publishing a magazine that
was much more explicit than Playboy. Playboy came out of
the conservative fifties. It had an old fashioned, gentlemanly vibe.
Was widely considered respectable pornography just some preppy, naughty boys
(11:02):
being boys stuff. And one big reason for this was
Hugh Hefner never showed full frontal nudes. But Bob Gucci
on his whole sex vibe is much more naturalistic than Half's.
He's not into this sanitized sexual innuendo. He's over Americans
hang ups about bodies and sex. Here he is explaining
in an interview on Arlene Herson's cable Access Showing the eighties,
(11:25):
I determined by myself that it was wrong to publish
pictures of girls where you didn't see that the pubist,
because that is, to me, one of the most beautiful
pots of a woman's body, and I felt that the
world should look at it that way, and so we
did it. We took the step. It was daring at
(11:45):
the time, I suppose, but I really wasn't afraid of
what I was doing. I thought I was doing the
right thing, and I was prepared to defend that position.
But maybe more than anything, Bob sees more graphic nudity
as a smart business move. He thinks he can beat
Heffner by going bigger, by showing more. I knew then
and lay with that first issue, though, I come to
(12:07):
America with it, and that I would do battle with Playboy,
and that I would eventually take the market. So Bob
shows Pubic Hair and Penthouse basically from the jump, setting
off a public battle that half aptly deemed the Pubic Wars.
Penthouse shows Pubic Haare, Playboy shows Pubicare, Penthouse shows Labia,
(12:27):
Playboy shows Labia, and then well on it goes. So
Bob's image is sleazy lethario, but in reality he's a
hyper ambitious workaholic. He works tirelessly on Penthouse, and it shows.
It's US circulation numbers grow to millions within months, it
(12:47):
sells out in newsstands, the carry it, and it is
quickly one of the biggest magazine success stories of all time.
It's a cash cow that, unlike its competitors, is run
on a shoe string, which makes it the more of
a cash cow. And though Gay Bryant was hired on
as the editor, she picks up quick to Bob's business
savvy and in early nineteen seventy three, after four years
(13:10):
working for Bob and helping him build Penhouse. I began
to think, Gee, you know, why can't women who are
now part of the sexual revolution and the women's movement
and so on, why can't they have a magazine like
this for them? Kay Bryant suddenly had a magazine idea
(13:31):
of her own, and she shares it with her male
colleague at Penhouse. I went and talk to Ernie, the
publishing expert there, and I said, you know, I think
the company should do a magazine for women, a sexy magazine.
It's time. And he said, yeah, pretty idea. Why don't
you write up a proposal and I'll pass it up
(13:53):
to Bob. Gay's excited. She gets to work right away.
She's got lots of ideas. I wrote up the proposal.
I cooled it Mia because at the time Mia Farrow
was like cool and intelligence and draw all those things.
I gave it to Ernie, Ernie gave it well, I
(14:15):
don't know, I guess Ernie gave it to Bob. Nothing. Nothing.
And by the time Gay here's back, Well, the magazine
she pitched is about to get green lit, but not
necessarily in the way she might have hoped. Act to
(14:44):
an unexploited resource. Here's the thing, Gay Bryant wasn't the
only woman working for Penthouse and coming up with big
innovative ideas for Bob. And we'll get back to her
magazine proposal and the response to it in just a minute,
but first it's important to talk about Bob and his
hiring practices because for the time they were pretty unique.
(15:08):
In the early seventies, Bob Guccioni hired tons of women.
He hired them, he promoted them, he gave them big titles.
In nineteen seventy four, you either went to Nis magazine
or you went to Penthouse because there was no other
place of his hiring women. That's a former Penthouse executive
named Nancy Lewinter speaking in the twenty thirteen Bob Guccioni
(15:30):
documentary Filthy Gorgeous. She's talking about magazine publicity and advertising,
but this applied to editorial too. Here's Bob's partner, Kathy
Keaton from the same documentary. Bob Guccioni was very smart.
He understood that women were an unexploited resource. Hiring women
(15:51):
was something Bob was known for, a big deal, something
he bragged about all the time. This is Bob again
on Night Watch in his interview with Christopher Glenn. You
have some rather high ranking officers of your organization. Are women?
Are they now? Yes? In fact, the three highest paid
individuals are women, and we have many more women executives
(16:11):
than we have men. And this has done simply because
I think they do a better job. And Guccioni may
have thought that women did a better job, but that
didn't mean he always let them do it. And if
he didn't let them do their jobs, if he sidelined
them or took credit for their work, the women who
worked for Bob Guccioni, well, they had little recourse. Remember
(16:35):
this is the seventies and the professional landscape for women
is not great. Yes, we're in the middle of the
women's liberation movement. It's a time of radical progressive change
for women. Sure, but women still can't apply for a
loan or get credit cards in their own name, and
sexual harassment is rampant in most industries, more the rule
(16:58):
than the exception. So women who wanted to work at
this time often took what they could get. Working for
a porn king like Bob Guccioni, who gave them opportunities
was often worth the price of admission. I started working
at Penthouse actually when I was seventeen, as a temporary
secretary during the summer between high school and college, my
(17:21):
very first job except for babysitting. But yeah, that's Robin Walliner.
Robin's a former executive at c NEET and the founder
of Parenting magazine. You can imagine the reactions of my
parents to their seventeen year old daughter working at this place.
Parent approval or no. Working at Penhouse is the job
that helps put Robin through college. But while Robin is
(17:42):
finishing her degree at Cornell and working part time at Penhouse,
Gay Brian is running Penhouse's editorial and waiting to hear
back about her new magazine Idea and future Viva editor.
Pat Lindon's a fresh faced young reporter, a Berkeley graduate,
working her first magazine job. The first time I spoke
with Pat, it was over the phone. So I went
(18:03):
to work for Newsweek, and I was thrilled at some
fifty four dollars a week for six months until and
I was told, this is a really good job for
a woman. At Newsweek. Pat's hired as a quote editorial assistant,
but she's doing a lot more. She reports on local
and national politics, establishes high level sources, and even break stories,
(18:26):
but she's forced to give those stories to established male journalists,
men who get the buyelines and all the credit for
her work. For all the female reporters at Newsweek's work,
we decided that we wanted to get recognized on the
masthead for what we were doing. We didn't want to
be called editorial assistance anymore, and we wanted to be writers, correspondents,
(18:48):
that sort of thing. Pat's a key witness and a
landmark gender discrimination suit against Newsweek, a case brought by
forty six of the magazine's female journalists that changes publishing
workplaces forever, A case that inspires the book Good Girl's
Revolt that was later turned into the twenty fifteen TV
(19:08):
show of the same name. Women like Pat and Robin
and Gay are all trying to sort out who they are,
both professionally and personally. Here's Pat again, this time not
over the phone. We had no idea what we were
going to do or if we were going to do anything,
but we started going to these consciousness raising groups. Consciousness
(19:32):
raising groups literally groups of women sitting around and talking
without men were incredibly popular with second wave feminists in
the late sixties and early seventies, particularly in New York.
Women would sit around Network Bitch and share stories about
being moms, their careers, and their sex lives openly and
(19:54):
ways they hadn't before. And it's not just Pat attending.
Gay Bryant belongs to a women's consciousness raising group two
and on one Summer nine in nineteen seventy three, She's
got a lot to talk about, a lot to unload.
Remember Gay's big magazine proposal. Well, after months, She's finally
(20:16):
got an update, and it's from Nora Efron, of all people. Yes,
that Nora Ephron, the one behind when Harry met Sally
sleepless in Seattle feeling bad about her neck. I opened
up New York Magazine and Bob Guccioni is telling I
think it was Nora Efron in an interview about how
(20:38):
he was gonna start a really cool new erotic magazine
for women. Bob doesn't say the name of the magazine,
But for Gay this announcement is awfully coincidental, suspiciously so
Gay Shore Bob is screwing her over stealing her idea
get along story short, I was pretty pissed off. So
(21:00):
I was in some consciousness raising group with other female
writers and editors, and I told them the story, and
I told them how outrageous it was Gay's venting, and
like anyone who's had a man or any boss take
credit for their idea, she's flooded with rage, incensed. And
one of them called Nora, and Nora interviewed me, and
(21:21):
that too, appeared in New York Magazine, saying I had
had the idea, but not everyone agrees with Gay's account.
It was entirely his idea, and I was great. Okay.
So a big voice missing from this series is Bob Guccioni.
He unfortunately passed away in twenty and ten, but we
(21:41):
did have the privilege of speaking to his son, Bob
Guccioni Junior. It was near the beginning and as he
was thinking it through, but he felt that women wanted
the same kind of a magazine that men wanted. Bob
Junior is one of the few people still alive who
worked at Viva from the start. He'd go on to
have his own success full career in publishing as the
(22:02):
founder and publisher of the music magazine's Spin, but in
the seventies. Bob Junior is a teenager and Viva magazine.
Well it's his first job, and as far as he's concerned,
it was his dad's creation. You know, he named it.
He named it. He just came up with the name.
(22:22):
He was Italian, Viva means life in Italian, and he
drew a logo on a note bed and the magazine
came from there. Now we can't know for sure who
invented the magazine. I'm inclined to believe Gay, though to
be fair, Bob's ultimate decision to green light Viva may
(22:43):
have come from a desire to keep pace with Hugh
Hefner Please Girl, launched just a few months before Viva.
Whatever the case, the seat of Viva is now out there.
But after spilling the beans to Nora Gaze, filled with
insecurity over her decision to talk, I do remember having
that of, oh my god, what have I done? And
(23:04):
to my eternal shame, I went to Bob and apologized
and said, of course, of course I didn't really mean
nat and of course it's your magazine. And I quit,
So Gay quits, and let's just call it really misplaced shame.
(23:25):
And Bob moves on finishing Viva's first issue without her.
Here's an excerpt from Bob's editor's letter in Viva Magazine's
first issue, read by writer and podcast host Alex Pappadimus.
He'll hear him read Bob throughout this series, So thank you, Alex.
The magazine you hold in your hands is my newborn child, fragile, undisciplined,
(23:46):
painfully vulnerable. Bob's editor's letters become a regular column in Viva,
called the first Word, and in his first words, here
Bob's introducing his Viva to the world. The first issue
is published in October of nineteen seventy three, and even
today it's a visual standout. The cover is a full
(24:09):
bleed shot, an extreme soft focus closeup of a woman's
face in profile, her blue, eyeshadowed eyes closed in ecstasy,
her coral lipsticked, lips parted in a provocative pout, a
pink tongue jetting out just a bit across the top
of the model's face is the Viva logo, bold white
(24:31):
in a font that screams seventies. The letters made from
a series of thin vertical somehow disco elnes. It's a
beautiful magazine, and Bob Guccioni was at the top of
it all. Viva is Bob Guccioni Senior's baby in a
way he writes about literally here's his editor's letter again.
(24:54):
This child of love is my child, and I want
to see her grow and have all the advantages of
success that and attention can provide. Next to this letter
is a picture of Bob himself. He's forty three here
and artfully lit. He looks sensitive, pensive, a thinking man's pornographer.
(25:15):
I want to watch her develop firm, young limbs and
a fine, strong posture. I want to see her acquire
the sort of education that promotes knowledgeable opinions, bold, positive
attitudes toward life and love and sex, and that creates
above all character and personality. Just to be clear, because
(25:35):
it's not so much from his editor's letter, Bob was
making a magazine for adult women, not unformed baby ladies.
And he was also making an erotic magazine for grown
women who loved men. But what did he serve up Well,
a lot of vulva and naked breasts. There's a fifteen
(25:57):
page centerfold where a mustachioed man and a brunette woman
in a bonnet caused play as old timey people on
a picnic, a picnic where all they seem to be
serving is the woman's naked body. This issue also serves
up a quick hit piece on Jane Fonda and a
comic strip called the Little Hooker where a skinny blonde
(26:21):
woman with big tits engages in sex with a bear.
Oh and Bob made some interesting choices when it came
to who would be writing for Viva two. Here's the lineup.
White male novelist JP don Levy and I sometimes do
profess the actual facts of one's existence. White male political
(26:46):
reporter Tom Wicker perhaps will relapse into that more quiescent
mood wants the current a fad for investigative journalism that
stems out of Watergate. White male photojournalist Eddie Adams. When
I did the picture, I back the AP office and
I handed him to stroll a fill and said, I
think I got somebody healing somebody and I went out
to lunch. Was that simple white male essayist slash known
(27:11):
misogynist Norman Mailer. And there is an element in Women's
liberation that tera five mean. It terrifies me because it's humorists.
Because with the exception, let's say of German Greer's book,
There's been almost no recognition that the life of a
man is also difficult. Here's what Gay thought when she
first saw it. Viva was always a man's idea of
(27:32):
what women wanted, and I don't believe that they really
knew what women wanted. Viva was Bob's creation alone, and
he wants the world to know it. It's all pretty cross,
particularly for Gay, who had a very different vision for
this magazine. But to Gay's credit, she quickly moves on.
(27:53):
She starts her own magazine called New Dawn, a Viva competitor.
She's a big name editor and writer for decades. She's okay.
But hearing Gay's story and now knowing where it ends,
it all makes sense. This was a messy beginning to
a messy magazine in a messy time, and the women
who would become involved in trying to grow Viva as
(28:15):
an intelligent, sexy magazine for other women, they were up
against it from the beginning. Nora Efronz slams Viva's first
issue in New York Magazine with a review titled Guccioni's
miss Print. She blames Bob for all of it, including
stealing Gay's idea. Here's my producer, Megan Donnas reading Nora's peace.
(28:38):
The original concept of Viva was a woman's Guccioni claims otherwise,
claims that the concrete idea for Viva hit him like
some transcendental bolts last year on a transatlantic plane, but
the actual product, in fact, came from a Viva editor
named Gay Bryant, who wrote a fifty page outline proposing
(28:59):
and erotic general interest magazine for intelligent women. Guccioni adopted
Bryan's idea and added a couple of fillips of his
own the name, the logo, and most important, the overall tone.
It's a tone, Nora, and turns out a lot of
people hate a tone that Bob couldn't necessarily control since
(29:22):
while it was his own. Here's Bob Junior again. The
entire thing was through his lens rather than a woman's lens,
and that was a mistake. But you can understand why
Bob's senior would make this kind of mistake. He's just
off the biggest career win of his life. The success
of Penthouse is unimpeachable, and like many founders of Megas,
(29:42):
successful things Bob's Senior now thinks his instincts are unimpeachable too.
Penthouse was such a fantastic success because it was an
update on Playboy, the more modern, more authentic, real magazine
about men's lives in the late sixties in the seventies.
(30:03):
Viva was intended to be the woman's version of that.
So he traded the magazine. He thought it through, He
believed in that concept, in that vision at the time,
and he was going to execute it. And the truth
was that even with Bob's shadow hanging over it, some
women in media were happy to see Viva come into
existence at all. A feminist erotica magazine marked progress. No
(30:29):
matter who was making it. There was a need for
a magazine like Viva, a hole in the marketplace. So
Bob Senior's instincts are not all wrong. After Viva's first issue,
after Nora Ephron's complaints, he starts to hire highbrow female writers,
female sex therapists, and eventually editors and writers with serious
(30:49):
journalistic cred including Pat. I mean, Newsweek was at a
real place, you know, it was a place where it
was like boot camp, and this standards were very high.
Pat was a bona fide journalist who knew her value.
But after the Newsweek case, she didn't know where to
go next. So she started networking, kicking the professional tires,
(31:12):
meeting up with other female journalists. I can't remember her
last name, and I think she was also from miss
and we were talking walking down the street and I
told her I was interested in leaving. She said, oh, well,
I know the perfect place for you, and that was Viva.
Somebody had said that, you know, some pornographer was running it.
I wouldn't have gone there, but these were bona fide
(31:33):
feminists right. As for Robin, after working as a secretary
at Penthouse, the choice to move over to Viva was easy.
She knew Bob paid. I got to live in wage
at Viva. And I was quite proud to work for
Viva because we saw the jet the version of Viva
that I worked for. We were going to be the
(31:53):
intelligent woman's Cosmo. And here's pat Kathy Keaton had come
up with a auto for Viva, which she was using
in advertisements, and the Viva woman lives the life that
the Cosmo girl only dreams about. And we thought, well,
that's kind of cute. And even Nora Ephron's mostly scathing
(32:14):
review of Bob's first issue offers both Viva and its
female editors some hope. Here's Megan reading Nora again. I
realize I'm treating Viva as if it were a failure, that,
to be sure, is premature and wishful thinking. Viva may
well succeed, may find some formula that works. But did
(32:36):
Viva need a new formula or did it need a
new leader? Could Bob Guccioni be trusted to raise this
female newborn magazine child on his own? We're about to
find out. Stiffed as an original podcast from iHeartMedia and
(32:56):
Crooked Media. It's produced by Crooked Media, hosted and written
by me Jennifer Romalini, and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney
Raff is our associate producer, Story editing by Mary Knock,
music sound design and engineering by Hannis Brown. Our fact
checker is Julia Paskin. Additional production support from Noafola Kito
(33:19):
and Inez Maza. Thanks to Alex Peppadimus for reading the
voice of Bob Guccioni from Crook and Media. Our executive
producers are Sarah Geismer, Katy Long, and Mary Nooff. With
special thanks to Alison Falzetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia.
Our executive producers are Beth Anne Macaluso and Julia Weaver.
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