April 27, 2023 • 29 mins
As Viva reaches the third of its six-year run, it’s having its own version of a midlife crisis, and the editors have to make some tough decisions about what kind of magazine Viva needs to be to survive.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
By the end of nineteen seventy five, Viva's de facto publisher,
Kathy Keaton's normally breezy, horny monthly editor's letters suddenly read
more like pointed manifestos or defensive strikes. Here's podcaster and
journalist Natalie Robamed reading Kathy.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Whenever I admit publicly that I enjoy being a sex object,
hotline feminists screep me with hoots of hostility.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
It's still the mid seventies, and Kathy's partner, Bob Guccioni,
is still in a highly public war with anti porn feminists.
But it's not just Bob anymore. The anti porn feminist
movement is now coming for Kathy too, for selling penthouse
ads and especially for her complicity in Bob's porn empire.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Out they come practically foaming at the mouth, the self
appointed defenders of the faith. We're through with all that,
they shout. Women no longer awe nor do they wish
to be sex objects.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Along with the letter is a photo of Kathy done
up in a gauzy white dress, pearly lipstick, her hair
and loose waves. Kathy's in her late thirties here, but
the photo styling is young and kittnish, and her image
matches her words. According to Kathy, she's a sex object
for men's consumption, and she loves it.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Being a sex object is just another way of saying
that I'm glad, I'm female, Glad, I'm womanly. I enjoy
being gloved, pampered, and needed. Now, why in God's name
would I want to deny myself that.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Kathy's letter is meant to be a counter attack against
the rise of anti porn feminists, but it reads more
like a jumble of internalized misogyny. In it, Kathy defends
putting a man's sexual needs before your own.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Sure, I'm playing a role if you want to call
it that. I'm serving him, giving him pleasure, but it
gives me pleasure at the same time.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
And she also talks about how a good sex object
should never threaten her man. With her career success.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
She doesn't talk about her talent, or her money or
her pa. Instead, she behaves as if he, rather than she,
is the center of that domestic weld.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Kathy's message, much like Viva at this time, is confused
as hell. Two years in and Viva is still experiencing
growing pains it's floundering around for cohesion, trying to make
all its feminist power and soft dicks blend. Sometimes it
goes corny and big, like in it can't be Spread
of nude male hairdressers, and other times it goes dull
(02:37):
and predictable, like in its makeovers of plain women who
don't need makeovers. A women's magazine trope, if there ever
was one. There's an essay on sexism in the film industry,
and frank talk on body image, and the same issue
where somebody writes about SHARE's secrets for staying quote spelt
essentially Viva can't really decide what it is. And Kathy's
(03:00):
at a bit of a crossroads as well. At the
time of this editor's letter, she's about to be thirty seven.
For most people now, that's young, but back then a
thirty seven year old woman might as well have been
fifty seven or eighty seven. Remember the late sixties movie
The Graduate, How Dustin Hoffman's twenty one year old character
(03:21):
was getting hit on by the forty five year old
Missus Robinson, the mother of his girlfriend. May I ask
you a question, what do you think of me?
Speaker 3 (03:33):
What do you mean?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Well, Anne Bancroft, who played Missus Robinson, was only thirty
five years old in that movie, which shows you what
Hollywood and even the general public thought about the sex
appeal of women who were no longer in their twenties.
By the way. In contrast, Hoffman was twenty nine in
that movie, playing a twenty one year old. But I digress. Now,
(03:57):
obviously women are sexy at all ages, but Kathy is
maneuvering through dated nineteen seventies values of women's looks, and
she can't quite seem to face the reality of seemingly
everyone telling her it's time to leave her super young
sex object years behind. Both Viva and Kathy are in
the midst of an awkward identity crisis, and time's had
(04:18):
ticken on defining exactly who and what they both really
are and want to be. From crooked media and iHeartMedia,
I'm Jennifer Romalini and this is stiff, Episode six, Midlife Crisis,
(04:50):
Act one, Lose the woman.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Kathy Keaton was a very very strong woman, but she
was insecure creatively.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
That's Bob Guccioni Junior, Bob Guccioni, Senior's son from his
second wife.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
And you know I don't think she frankly had the
abilities to be creatively in control. She wasn't a very
creative and a good writer, wasn't a very particularly visual person.
She wasn't necessarily an instinctual or reflex his editor, Like.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
A lot of people we spoke to, He's talking about
all the things Kathy Keaton wasn't. So who was she?
This is a tough question. Kathy was a confusing, even
mysterious figure for most of her Viva staff. She was
an unconventional boss, non confrontational. She hid in her office
a lot like Bob. She could be absent from the
(05:40):
day to day for weeks. She's credited as being the
publisher and editor of Viva. But if you've ever had
this kind of there but not really their boss, you
know that a title doesn't mean much if they don't
actually show up consistently to do the boring and necessary
work of bossing. Here's Viva, editor of al Monro.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I had any conversation with her was when I went
into their she had a little anti office and I
went in for a second and I'm not sure what for,
and she just looked up and she said something like,
may I help you? And I just looked at her
and I said, I don't think so, and I walked out.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
And even when she was there, Kathy wasn't the most professional.
She was chilly and removed, but also lacked boundaries and
even basic decorum. The kind of boss who inadvertently revealed
personal details about herself that as an employee, you don't
really want to know.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
We were at the house one time, Valerie Jenny me.
We went up there to have dinner with Kathy for
a business meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Let's via editor Pat Linden. She's talking about her colleagues, Valmonroe,
who we just heard from, and Ginny Kopecky.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Kathy said, does anybody want to smoke? And I didn't,
and I think just one of us did. And anyway,
in order to do that, we had to go into
their bedroom.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Kathy led Pat in her colleagues down a hallway right
to the entrance of the Gucci's bedroom.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
There was a beaded curtain, I think it was beated,
and that's he went through that in order to get
to the bedroom. And that's how he got to the bedroom.
We walked through a beaded curtain. They don't even have
a door in their bedroom.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
For all its opulence, the Guccioni homestead lacked a number
of normal house conventions, and this was something that could
be a bit freaky to the relatively traditional female editors, who,
if you recall, were forced to spend a lot of
time there since Bob mostly worked out of his home.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
And so in the bedroom was an enormous bed And
then on two sawhorses is door, and on the door
is a very very complicated puzzle. You know those fifteen
hundred word jigsaw puzzle that Kathy did. You know, she
was alone a lot, I think, and so she would
(07:47):
sit in her bedroom and do this jigsaw puzzle.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
If Kathy was alone a lot in her own house,
it wasn't because Bob wasn't there, remember he rarely left
the house. It was because he was on another floor
of their giant residence, namely the floor where Bob kept
his photo studio, a floor which contained extra bedrooms, a
floor where there were usually at least one or two
(08:12):
penthouse pets staying over. It was a space Rolling Stone
magazine once described as quote a dorm like arrangement where
pets were kept on a short leash and forbidden to
bring male guests into their bedrooms. I mean fucking yikes.
Here's another excerpt from Kathy Keaton's editor's letter.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Women enjoy the need to be appealing, seductive. A clever
sex object can be extremely aggressive, but so softly feminine
in her approach that she seems unobtrusive.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
So Kathy's publicly talking about how much she loves being
objectified and keeping it sexy core with Bob, but at
home things seem different.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
She wanted people to think that she had this fabulous
sex life because she was married to Bob. Goutcha and
I couldn't believe it, and I didn't and I don't.
We all agreed about that that there's a lot of talk,
and there's some magazines, but sex is not something that
is part of their life. And he didn't seem like
a sexy guy, and the house didn't seem like a
(09:16):
sexy place.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And maybe this puzzles at home floor away from a
penthouse pet's dorm life suit did Kathy fine. We'll never know,
but what we do know is it wasn't exactly the
life Kathy Keaton had originally imagined for herself growing up
as a kid in South Africa. Kathy had not aspired
to be an exotic dancer, nor a porn publisher, nor
(09:39):
a sexy Manhattan hostess, nor anything like any of the
roles she'd played up until this point.
Speaker 6 (09:46):
I wanted to be a scientist. Given an opportunity, I
would have become a biologist. But your little girls didn't
get to do things that in South Africa in those
days are in England, with America for that matter.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
That's Kathy being interviewed on Arlene hrson cable access show
in the eighties. By her own account, Kathy had always
been bookish and even academic, but as a lower class
girl born in the late thirties, the world wasn't so
welcoming to her academic curiosity nor her smarts. So instead,
(10:18):
like many ambitious women of her time of all times,
Kathy used her looks and old timey feminine wiles to
get ahead. By the time Viva's published in nineteen seventy three,
She's got all the makings of a seventies bombshell, the
slinky clothes, the blonde waves. But look at any footage
(10:39):
of her and you see that under the sex kitten veneer,
she's mostly awkward. She seems like a nerd at heart.
Here's editor Robin.
Speaker 7 (10:47):
You know, she dressed like the X stripper that she was.
But as is true with many people I've met in
the entertainment field, shyness can sometimes be there. They're comfortable
in character, but they're not personally comfortable.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Here's bel Monroe again.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
I saw that as as if she were a character,
you know what I mean, like some kind of character
in a play.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Kathy may be in character, but her awkwardness is a
parent no matter what her costume. And this is something Bob,
her partner, the founder of Penthouse, is not shy about
letting her know. Here's Kathy with Arlene Hrson again.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
Why didn't you photograph you for the MAXA. We always
told me I was the wrong time hm, which he
annoyed me. I wasn't good looking enough.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Oh how did you feel about that?
Speaker 6 (11:34):
I was serious about that.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Whether it's because she fears Bob's rejection or she's genuinely
into looking over the top sexy, Kathy mostly leads with
her bombshell persona, not her brains. Kathy was bold and
independent and progressive in so many ways. For example, she
and Bob didn't marry for decades and from accounts from
(11:57):
friends who spoke to us off the record, they didn't
want kids. By many many accounts, Bob and Kathy also
had an open relationship that we can't be sure whose
choice that was, or if that choice went both ways.
Here's Kathy's letter Again.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Being a sex subject has nothing to do with promiscuity.
In fact, being a successful sex subject often means being
happily faithful to just one man.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
See, even if Kathy had independent sexual or professional aspirations,
her attention was mainly in one place.
Speaker 7 (12:32):
She was really very focused on Bob. I don't think
she spent a lot of time thinking.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
About what it was like to be a boss. But
this the fixation on staying in the male gaze, needing
to be seen and validated by men, even if it's
just one man, in order to feel valuable. It's almost
always a doomed enterprise, a damned if you do, damned
if you don't, patriarchal trap. Too many women are stuck
(12:57):
in even today, and for Kathy at least, the need
to appear sexy to men and especially Bob, and especially
as she got older, may have grown bigger than the
need to do her job well. At Viva.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
The energy boostock at from being openly admired for my
looks is a whole lot better than any instant breakfast,
and I don't think it's interfered with my career. In fact,
I'm sure it's had the opposite effect.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
And even though the constant obsessing over her appearance didn't
exactly help her duties on the content side of Viva,
it did give her an edge when it came to
her other job selling ads, at least it did. For
a minute.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
She would go with this woman, Marianne Howardson, who was
also a fabulous looking woman.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Like Penhouse pr director Leslie J.
Speaker 8 (13:43):
Remembers, and the two of them. I once saw them
talking to one man, an advertiser on other side of him,
and I thought, oh my god, this man is buying pages.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Kathy and Marianne laid on the charm and it worked
like magic. Advertisers bought in.
Speaker 8 (14:03):
I don't know, they just it all worked. They were
fabulous looking, and they were terrific, and they obviously made
a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
This sex sells approach was particularly effective for drawing in
the Penthouse advertisers of the time. Marlborough man Big Tobacco macho,
booze companies men being men's stuff. But Viva was a
problem from the start. Brands that traditionally bought ads in
women's magazines were generally more conservative. Cosmetics companies, say, didn't
(14:35):
want an association with a pornographer like Bob, in part
because they were also selling to teens. For a company
like Procter and Gamble, a laundry detergent ad in Viva
wasn't worth the risk of turning off brutish housewives. They
couldn't afford even a whiff of connection to smut. So
after a decade selling ads for Penhouse and Viva, Kathy's
(14:56):
sales strategy is starting to hit a bunch of snags.
Here's Viva and Penhouse editor Peter Block.
Speaker 9 (15:02):
She knew she was great at selling ads, and she'd
do it by a combination of intelligence and flirtatiousness. But
with certain people, you don't do that. If you're trying
to give people to give you millions of dollars in
your magazine, that's not the way to do it. And
she'd wear these short skirts and kind of do her
flirtiness and all this stuff that worked with a lot
(15:26):
of people, and certainly and worked with a lot of advertisers,
but didn't work with everybody.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Kathy's using what she knows being alluring and unthreatening to men,
lightening their wallets by giving them what she thinks they want.
It's worked for her well all the way back to
her dancing days, but now it's starting to work less.
Like when Kathy goes to fundraise from some bankers with
her colleague Richard Cohen.
Speaker 9 (15:52):
Afterwards, the banker called him up and said, Richard, I'm
going to give you a piece of advice. Lose the woman.
And Richard said, you're talking about miss Keaton. He said,
lose the woman. You're not going to make a dime
with her.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I'm not going to cast dispersions here. Unlike Peter, I
think Kathy could totally do her job in a miniskirt
or a spacesuit. Who cares whatever. And it's impossible to
pinpoint exactly why Kathy's sales strategy stops landing the way
it once had. It could be because she's getting older,
or because the times are changing, or because in some
more conservative rooms sex just doesn't sell.
Speaker 5 (16:32):
She had no sense that this was inappropriate, that you know,
you just don't do this and she didn't know what
was going on in that sense.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Whatever the case with Kathy out dealing with ad sales
and Bob distracted out fighting anti porn feminists, the Viva
editors they have no real guiding light, no boss leading
them in any direction. The rape issue undid a lot.
Betty Jane had been fired. The amazing executive editor Patti
(17:01):
Bosworth is still at Viva, but she's heavily reeled in.
Morale amongst the staff is low, and the job it's
just not the same. As the calendar turned to nineteen
seventy six, as Viva turned three, the center no longer
held on this magazine experiment. Something had to give after
(17:21):
the break.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Most of my life was defined by the moment when
there was before Penis and after Penis Viva.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Act to the grand Neutering. By nineteen seventy six, Viva's
in trouble. Here's Leslie j who was head of pr
for Penthouse at the time.
Speaker 8 (17:47):
They weren't marketing it the right way. I feel because look,
nobody knows what the magazine was, that it was directionless, and.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
She's right, of course, the magazine's rudderless for all sorts
of reasons. It's currently a mishma of Limp Dick's hard
hitting feminist essays and Kathy's letters on how to put
your man first. There's a leadership vacuum and a morale problem.
But more than even all these things, the most important
thing in any creative enterprise always there's a money problem.
(18:19):
Unlike Penthouse, Viva is not selling. Here's Robin, and.
Speaker 7 (18:24):
We didn't sell a lot of subscriptions, but you know,
we didn't sell a lot of ads either.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
And remember Viva was reliant on subscriptions. Though it sold
in some newsstands, it was considered too explicit to be
carried on most. And it also needed ads, which had
always been and were now even with Kathy's charms, difficult
to scare up.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
Most of our readers were gay men because it was
the only way you could see nude men outside of
a porn environment at that time, which might be a
good market, but they're not going to be able to
sell mascara advertising.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yes, at this point point, Viva's readership is mostly gay men,
a fact that was always rumored, but now Robin could confirm.
She's seen the names on the subscriber list, and with
few ads, and few subscriptions and no significant female readership. Well,
the magazine's identity crisis is starting to affect people's abilities
(19:19):
to get their jobs done.
Speaker 7 (19:21):
I had to do a promotional piece for Viva, and
I could not figure out what this was.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Robin's just twenty one at this time, trying to navigate
this challenging environment.
Speaker 7 (19:34):
And so I said to Alma, my boss, I said,
I'm really struggling. I don't know what I can say.
I don't know any woman who would read this magazine.
I just don't get it. And she said, you know,
Bob and Taffy would take that well coming from you.
You know, given your background, you know, why don't you
write them a private letter? So I wrote it from
(19:54):
my heart. It was everything I believed.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Remember, Robin's been at the company since she was seventeen,
since the company was smaller. She's basically part of the family.
Her letter is impassioned, a plea to her bosses. In it, she.
Speaker 7 (20:08):
Says, I've got to tell you, I just don't understand
Viva and I find it impossible to promote I don't
know any of my friends. You know, I'm twenty one.
We're your target market. I don't know anybody who wants
to look at pictures of male penises. I just don't.
And you know, I like the idea of a sexy
(20:29):
magazine for women, but this isn't sexy to me.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Now hindsight is twenty twenty, but it's important to say
here there are loads of straight women who like looking
at all kinds of penises in all kinds of ways,
and who find pictures of penises extremely hot. Maybe not
in the soft, sad slung comedy way they were often
depicted in Viva, but anyway, back to Robin, she's hungry,
(20:54):
she's got that idealistic early career fight in her, and
she's found a cause worth fighting for. She thinks the
Viva dix are not only gross, but more that they're
dragging Viva down. And Robin's not the only Viva editor
who thinks the penises and Viva are not working. Here's pat.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
First of all, it was losing readers because women were
interested in naked men. And I read in something somewhere
that somebody said, you know, Bob GUCCIONI does not understand
that women don't want to see naked men.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
So Robin writes the memo and Kathy and Bob agree
with her. It works.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Most of my life was defined by the moment when
there was before Penis and after Venus.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
That's Bob Junior. At the time Robin was coming up
with her memo about the future of Viva, Bob Junior
is coming to a similar conclusion.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
The circulation department kept coming to my father and saying,
we're losing distributors. They don't they think it's a porn magazine.
They don't get an understand. You can tell him whatever
you want. You can tell you got award winning writers,
and we did have those.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
At this point. Anna east Nin, Maxine Hank Kingston, Nikki Giovanni,
and Rika Johng had all written for Viva, but it
still got the X rated taint, no pun of being
a sleezy porn magazine. In the seventies, this sleeze factor
is way easier to sell if you're making porn for men.
Penhouse and Playboy were both sold in porn stores or
(22:18):
porn sections of newsstands, places where men shopped and women.
Did not put five issues of Viva in the porn
section of a newsstand. Well by the end of the month,
all five would be right where you left them. The
new stand business was a smaller portion of sales, but
it was also a key way to be discovered by
new potential readers, and for Viva, newstand sales would always
(22:43):
be limited. No one knew how to help Viva sell
because women reading porn wasn't normalized, and even if Viva
was more than just porn, as long as there was
a picture of a dick next to its groundbreaking articles,
the distributors viewed the magazine one way and one way only.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
We have the best photographers in the world. Helmut Newton
was taking pictures for us an ADVD on mistaking pictures
for Viva the best, but the whole staler does know
that or care. He just sees the penis and he
thinks this goes into a porn stool. I don't have
any porn stores in my network. Why am I getting
this magazine? So it wasn't going on sale in a
lot of the country.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
The pressure is building up in terms of Viva not selling,
and Bob's usual, it's fine, the readers will catch up.
Attitude is beginning to falter finally, and.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Then one day just gave it to the pressure when
he realized the magazine was barely getting on sale outside
of New York and Los Angeles, another major beteput areas,
So the penises.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Went away by agreeing to cut the dicks from Viva.
Bob and Kathy meg a concession. It's a concession that
goes against the entire Viva promise, goes against the idea
that street women should have a place to stare at
naked men, to explore their R and X rated desires
like men had with Penthouse. And though the porn in
Viva was rarely executed appropriately, it was rarely through a
(24:04):
female lens, it was still the entire reason Viva was
made in the first place. And if Viva wasn't a
smart feminist porn magazine, then what in the world was it.
But Bob and Cathy don't give the staff much time
to sort this out. They're not what you'd call master
business strategists. They're capricious and impulsive. They decided that Dick
(24:26):
should go with no warning or vision for what happens next.
After Robin sends her memo, things move fast, faster than
Robin had imagined they would.
Speaker 7 (24:36):
I was a little bit set up in writing the memo.
I was not the catalyst for them changing Viva.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
After Robin's memo goes out, Bob and Cathy agree to
her direction, and Alma more Robin's boss who encouraged her
to write the memo, who'd never edited a magazine before
but clearly wanted to, now becomes Viva's main editor. Alma
Moore didn't want to talk to us for this part cast,
and since Patty passed away in twenty twenty, she's not
(25:03):
here to confirm this for sure, but judging from the mastheads,
Patty's out right after Robin's memo, which wasn't necessarily Robin's intention,
Patty Bosworth, the beloved editor who brought Viva some of
its most groundbreaking journalism, is thrown away with the dicks
very quickly.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
Most of the staff was fired, the new policy was announced,
Alma was announced as the editorial director, and I moved
over as an associate editor.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
It was kind of surprising, and so in the April
nineteen seventy six issue, Viva has a new masthead and
Kathy publishes a new letter announcing the magazine's new identity.
It's titled on Passed in Future Changes. In this letter,
written just months after the one at the beginning of
this episode, Kathy's tone completely There's no sex kitten rhetoric.
(26:03):
She's a career woman now shouting her accomplishments, highlighting the
lack of professional opportunities for women, and publishing stories on
things like how women should ask for a raise, gave us,
changing and growing and what's unspoken is so is Kathy.
Here's Natalie Robamt again. Reading Kathy Viva has always been
very personal to me.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That's why I see changes to this magazine on human terms.
First there was birth, then self definition, and now there's growth.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Alongside the letter, there's a photo in it. Kathy looks
a lot different than she did at the beginning of
this episode. She's decked out in power jewelry, chunky bracelets,
statement earrings, her nails are red, her hair's slicked back.
She's even smoking a cigarette. It's a transformation, akin to
Sandy's makeover at the end of Greece. If Sandy was
once an exotic dancer turned high powered girl boss. Kathy's
(26:59):
editors let her continues.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
What will be different, perhaps most obvious at first, will
be a change in our erotic photography with tastes developing
so rapidly, it's difficult to predict what's going to interest women,
but in our opinion, it's not going to be male nudity.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Kathy has done a full one eighty.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
It's an exciting time, and I believe a wonderful time.
Perhaps we will all be able to finally work in
a world in which a woman is allowed to work,
to be a respected member of society and retain her
own individuality.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
And as the remaining Viva women head into the late seventies,
the times are a change in. The anti porn feminists
who were fighting Kathy are drowning out, all other feminist voices.
Pornosic is heading out, and the Reagan era moral majorities
that sniffing around looking for a way in For Viva
editors like Pat and Robin, the Cox conundrum, the flaccid
(27:59):
dicks they hated, was at last settled. They no longer
need to keep up the charade. Here's Pat.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
We're bringing Viva on this new track. Now. Viva is
now going to be a terrific magazine. It's going to
be a feminist magazine. It's going to be exciting, it's
going to be better than Miss. It's gonna be different
from Cosmo.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Well, the focus is now on words, and even though
Viva no longer features groundbreaking mail nudes, that doesn't mean
it's photography will stop being both important and influential. Because
this little feminist porn magazine that no longer contains porn,
it's about to become a launching pad for a woman
who will become the most famous and powerful fashion editor
(28:40):
of all time.
Speaker 8 (28:41):
I remember when she came in, there was a big
to do with hell we have. Anna wintor.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Stiff is an original podcast from iHeartMedia and Crooked Media.
It's produced by Crooked Media. It's hosted and written by
me Jennifer Ramalini and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney Rapp
is our associate producer, Story editing by Mary Knopf, music
sound design and engineering by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker
(29:12):
is Julia Paskin. Additional production support from Nafila Cato and
Inez Maza from Crooked Media. Our executive producers are Sarah Geismer,
Katy Long, and Mary Knopf, with special thanks to Alison
Falsetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia. Our executive producers are
Beth Anne Macaluso. And Julia Weaver
By the end of nineteen seventy five, Viva's de facto publisher,
Kathy Keaton's normally breezy, horny monthly editor's letters suddenly read
more like pointed manifestos or defensive strikes. Here's podcaster and
journalist Natalie Robamed reading Kathy.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Whenever I admit publicly that I enjoy being a sex object,
hotline feminists screep me with hoots of hostility.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
It's still the mid seventies, and Kathy's partner, Bob Guccioni,
is still in a highly public war with anti porn feminists.
But it's not just Bob anymore. The anti porn feminist
movement is now coming for Kathy too, for selling penthouse
ads and especially for her complicity in Bob's porn empire.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Out they come practically foaming at the mouth, the self
appointed defenders of the faith. We're through with all that,
they shout. Women no longer awe nor do they wish
to be sex objects.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Along with the letter is a photo of Kathy done
up in a gauzy white dress, pearly lipstick, her hair
and loose waves. Kathy's in her late thirties here, but
the photo styling is young and kittnish, and her image
matches her words. According to Kathy, she's a sex object
for men's consumption, and she loves it.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Being a sex object is just another way of saying
that I'm glad, I'm female, Glad, I'm womanly. I enjoy
being gloved, pampered, and needed. Now, why in God's name
would I want to deny myself that.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Kathy's letter is meant to be a counter attack against
the rise of anti porn feminists, but it reads more
like a jumble of internalized misogyny. In it, Kathy defends
putting a man's sexual needs before your own.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Sure, I'm playing a role if you want to call
it that. I'm serving him, giving him pleasure, but it
gives me pleasure at the same time.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
And she also talks about how a good sex object
should never threaten her man. With her career success.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
She doesn't talk about her talent, or her money or
her pa. Instead, she behaves as if he, rather than she,
is the center of that domestic weld.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Kathy's message, much like Viva at this time, is confused
as hell. Two years in and Viva is still experiencing
growing pains it's floundering around for cohesion, trying to make
all its feminist power and soft dicks blend. Sometimes it
goes corny and big, like in it can't be Spread
of nude male hairdressers, and other times it goes dull
(02:37):
and predictable, like in its makeovers of plain women who
don't need makeovers. A women's magazine trope, if there ever
was one. There's an essay on sexism in the film industry,
and frank talk on body image, and the same issue
where somebody writes about SHARE's secrets for staying quote spelt
essentially Viva can't really decide what it is. And Kathy's
(03:00):
at a bit of a crossroads as well. At the
time of this editor's letter, she's about to be thirty seven.
For most people now, that's young, but back then a
thirty seven year old woman might as well have been
fifty seven or eighty seven. Remember the late sixties movie
The Graduate, How Dustin Hoffman's twenty one year old character
(03:21):
was getting hit on by the forty five year old
Missus Robinson, the mother of his girlfriend. May I ask
you a question, what do you think of me?
Speaker 3 (03:33):
What do you mean?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Well, Anne Bancroft, who played Missus Robinson, was only thirty
five years old in that movie, which shows you what
Hollywood and even the general public thought about the sex
appeal of women who were no longer in their twenties.
By the way. In contrast, Hoffman was twenty nine in
that movie, playing a twenty one year old. But I digress. Now,
(03:57):
obviously women are sexy at all ages, but Kathy is
maneuvering through dated nineteen seventies values of women's looks, and
she can't quite seem to face the reality of seemingly
everyone telling her it's time to leave her super young
sex object years behind. Both Viva and Kathy are in
the midst of an awkward identity crisis, and time's had
(04:18):
ticken on defining exactly who and what they both really
are and want to be. From crooked media and iHeartMedia,
I'm Jennifer Romalini and this is stiff, Episode six, Midlife Crisis,
(04:50):
Act one, Lose the woman.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Kathy Keaton was a very very strong woman, but she
was insecure creatively.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
That's Bob Guccioni Junior, Bob Guccioni, Senior's son from his
second wife.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
And you know I don't think she frankly had the
abilities to be creatively in control. She wasn't a very
creative and a good writer, wasn't a very particularly visual person.
She wasn't necessarily an instinctual or reflex his editor, Like.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
A lot of people we spoke to, He's talking about
all the things Kathy Keaton wasn't. So who was she?
This is a tough question. Kathy was a confusing, even
mysterious figure for most of her Viva staff. She was
an unconventional boss, non confrontational. She hid in her office
a lot like Bob. She could be absent from the
(05:40):
day to day for weeks. She's credited as being the
publisher and editor of Viva. But if you've ever had
this kind of there but not really their boss, you
know that a title doesn't mean much if they don't
actually show up consistently to do the boring and necessary
work of bossing. Here's Viva, editor of al Monro.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I had any conversation with her was when I went
into their she had a little anti office and I
went in for a second and I'm not sure what for,
and she just looked up and she said something like,
may I help you? And I just looked at her
and I said, I don't think so, and I walked out.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
And even when she was there, Kathy wasn't the most professional.
She was chilly and removed, but also lacked boundaries and
even basic decorum. The kind of boss who inadvertently revealed
personal details about herself that as an employee, you don't
really want to know.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
We were at the house one time, Valerie Jenny me.
We went up there to have dinner with Kathy for
a business meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Let's via editor Pat Linden. She's talking about her colleagues, Valmonroe,
who we just heard from, and Ginny Kopecky.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Kathy said, does anybody want to smoke? And I didn't,
and I think just one of us did. And anyway,
in order to do that, we had to go into
their bedroom.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Kathy led Pat in her colleagues down a hallway right
to the entrance of the Gucci's bedroom.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
There was a beaded curtain, I think it was beated,
and that's he went through that in order to get
to the bedroom. And that's how he got to the bedroom.
We walked through a beaded curtain. They don't even have
a door in their bedroom.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
For all its opulence, the Guccioni homestead lacked a number
of normal house conventions, and this was something that could
be a bit freaky to the relatively traditional female editors, who,
if you recall, were forced to spend a lot of
time there since Bob mostly worked out of his home.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
And so in the bedroom was an enormous bed And
then on two sawhorses is door, and on the door
is a very very complicated puzzle. You know those fifteen
hundred word jigsaw puzzle that Kathy did. You know, she
was alone a lot, I think, and so she would
(07:47):
sit in her bedroom and do this jigsaw puzzle.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
If Kathy was alone a lot in her own house,
it wasn't because Bob wasn't there, remember he rarely left
the house. It was because he was on another floor
of their giant residence, namely the floor where Bob kept
his photo studio, a floor which contained extra bedrooms, a
floor where there were usually at least one or two
(08:12):
penthouse pets staying over. It was a space Rolling Stone
magazine once described as quote a dorm like arrangement where
pets were kept on a short leash and forbidden to
bring male guests into their bedrooms. I mean fucking yikes.
Here's another excerpt from Kathy Keaton's editor's letter.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Women enjoy the need to be appealing, seductive. A clever
sex object can be extremely aggressive, but so softly feminine
in her approach that she seems unobtrusive.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
So Kathy's publicly talking about how much she loves being
objectified and keeping it sexy core with Bob, but at
home things seem different.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
She wanted people to think that she had this fabulous
sex life because she was married to Bob. Goutcha and
I couldn't believe it, and I didn't and I don't.
We all agreed about that that there's a lot of talk,
and there's some magazines, but sex is not something that
is part of their life. And he didn't seem like
a sexy guy, and the house didn't seem like a
(09:16):
sexy place.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And maybe this puzzles at home floor away from a
penthouse pet's dorm life suit did Kathy fine. We'll never know,
but what we do know is it wasn't exactly the
life Kathy Keaton had originally imagined for herself growing up
as a kid in South Africa. Kathy had not aspired
to be an exotic dancer, nor a porn publisher, nor
(09:39):
a sexy Manhattan hostess, nor anything like any of the
roles she'd played up until this point.
Speaker 6 (09:46):
I wanted to be a scientist. Given an opportunity, I
would have become a biologist. But your little girls didn't
get to do things that in South Africa in those
days are in England, with America for that matter.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
That's Kathy being interviewed on Arlene hrson cable access show
in the eighties. By her own account, Kathy had always
been bookish and even academic, but as a lower class
girl born in the late thirties, the world wasn't so
welcoming to her academic curiosity nor her smarts. So instead,
(10:18):
like many ambitious women of her time of all times,
Kathy used her looks and old timey feminine wiles to
get ahead. By the time Viva's published in nineteen seventy three,
She's got all the makings of a seventies bombshell, the
slinky clothes, the blonde waves. But look at any footage
(10:39):
of her and you see that under the sex kitten veneer,
she's mostly awkward. She seems like a nerd at heart.
Here's editor Robin.
Speaker 7 (10:47):
You know, she dressed like the X stripper that she was.
But as is true with many people I've met in
the entertainment field, shyness can sometimes be there. They're comfortable
in character, but they're not personally comfortable.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Here's bel Monroe again.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
I saw that as as if she were a character,
you know what I mean, like some kind of character
in a play.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Kathy may be in character, but her awkwardness is a
parent no matter what her costume. And this is something Bob,
her partner, the founder of Penthouse, is not shy about
letting her know. Here's Kathy with Arlene Hrson again.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
Why didn't you photograph you for the MAXA. We always
told me I was the wrong time hm, which he
annoyed me. I wasn't good looking enough.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Oh how did you feel about that?
Speaker 6 (11:34):
I was serious about that.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Whether it's because she fears Bob's rejection or she's genuinely
into looking over the top sexy, Kathy mostly leads with
her bombshell persona, not her brains. Kathy was bold and
independent and progressive in so many ways. For example, she
and Bob didn't marry for decades and from accounts from
(11:57):
friends who spoke to us off the record, they didn't
want kids. By many many accounts, Bob and Kathy also
had an open relationship that we can't be sure whose
choice that was, or if that choice went both ways.
Here's Kathy's letter Again.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Being a sex subject has nothing to do with promiscuity.
In fact, being a successful sex subject often means being
happily faithful to just one man.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
See, even if Kathy had independent sexual or professional aspirations,
her attention was mainly in one place.
Speaker 7 (12:32):
She was really very focused on Bob. I don't think
she spent a lot of time thinking.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
About what it was like to be a boss. But
this the fixation on staying in the male gaze, needing
to be seen and validated by men, even if it's
just one man, in order to feel valuable. It's almost
always a doomed enterprise, a damned if you do, damned
if you don't, patriarchal trap. Too many women are stuck
(12:57):
in even today, and for Kathy at least, the need
to appear sexy to men and especially Bob, and especially
as she got older, may have grown bigger than the
need to do her job well. At Viva.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
The energy boostock at from being openly admired for my
looks is a whole lot better than any instant breakfast,
and I don't think it's interfered with my career. In fact,
I'm sure it's had the opposite effect.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
And even though the constant obsessing over her appearance didn't
exactly help her duties on the content side of Viva,
it did give her an edge when it came to
her other job selling ads, at least it did. For
a minute.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
She would go with this woman, Marianne Howardson, who was
also a fabulous looking woman.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Like Penhouse pr director Leslie J.
Speaker 8 (13:43):
Remembers, and the two of them. I once saw them
talking to one man, an advertiser on other side of him,
and I thought, oh my god, this man is buying pages.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Kathy and Marianne laid on the charm and it worked
like magic. Advertisers bought in.
Speaker 8 (14:03):
I don't know, they just it all worked. They were
fabulous looking, and they were terrific, and they obviously made
a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
This sex sells approach was particularly effective for drawing in
the Penthouse advertisers of the time. Marlborough man Big Tobacco macho,
booze companies men being men's stuff. But Viva was a
problem from the start. Brands that traditionally bought ads in
women's magazines were generally more conservative. Cosmetics companies, say, didn't
(14:35):
want an association with a pornographer like Bob, in part
because they were also selling to teens. For a company
like Procter and Gamble, a laundry detergent ad in Viva
wasn't worth the risk of turning off brutish housewives. They
couldn't afford even a whiff of connection to smut. So
after a decade selling ads for Penhouse and Viva, Kathy's
(14:56):
sales strategy is starting to hit a bunch of snags.
Here's Viva and Penhouse editor Peter Block.
Speaker 9 (15:02):
She knew she was great at selling ads, and she'd
do it by a combination of intelligence and flirtatiousness. But
with certain people, you don't do that. If you're trying
to give people to give you millions of dollars in
your magazine, that's not the way to do it. And
she'd wear these short skirts and kind of do her
flirtiness and all this stuff that worked with a lot
(15:26):
of people, and certainly and worked with a lot of advertisers,
but didn't work with everybody.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Kathy's using what she knows being alluring and unthreatening to men,
lightening their wallets by giving them what she thinks they want.
It's worked for her well all the way back to
her dancing days, but now it's starting to work less.
Like when Kathy goes to fundraise from some bankers with
her colleague Richard Cohen.
Speaker 9 (15:52):
Afterwards, the banker called him up and said, Richard, I'm
going to give you a piece of advice. Lose the woman.
And Richard said, you're talking about miss Keaton. He said,
lose the woman. You're not going to make a dime
with her.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I'm not going to cast dispersions here. Unlike Peter, I
think Kathy could totally do her job in a miniskirt
or a spacesuit. Who cares whatever. And it's impossible to
pinpoint exactly why Kathy's sales strategy stops landing the way
it once had. It could be because she's getting older,
or because the times are changing, or because in some
more conservative rooms sex just doesn't sell.
Speaker 5 (16:32):
She had no sense that this was inappropriate, that you know,
you just don't do this and she didn't know what
was going on in that sense.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Whatever the case with Kathy out dealing with ad sales
and Bob distracted out fighting anti porn feminists, the Viva
editors they have no real guiding light, no boss leading
them in any direction. The rape issue undid a lot.
Betty Jane had been fired. The amazing executive editor Patti
(17:01):
Bosworth is still at Viva, but she's heavily reeled in.
Morale amongst the staff is low, and the job it's
just not the same. As the calendar turned to nineteen
seventy six, as Viva turned three, the center no longer
held on this magazine experiment. Something had to give after
(17:21):
the break.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Most of my life was defined by the moment when
there was before Penis and after Penis Viva.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Act to the grand Neutering. By nineteen seventy six, Viva's
in trouble. Here's Leslie j who was head of pr
for Penthouse at the time.
Speaker 8 (17:47):
They weren't marketing it the right way. I feel because look,
nobody knows what the magazine was, that it was directionless, and.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
She's right, of course, the magazine's rudderless for all sorts
of reasons. It's currently a mishma of Limp Dick's hard
hitting feminist essays and Kathy's letters on how to put
your man first. There's a leadership vacuum and a morale problem.
But more than even all these things, the most important
thing in any creative enterprise always there's a money problem.
(18:19):
Unlike Penthouse, Viva is not selling. Here's Robin, and.
Speaker 7 (18:24):
We didn't sell a lot of subscriptions, but you know,
we didn't sell a lot of ads either.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
And remember Viva was reliant on subscriptions. Though it sold
in some newsstands, it was considered too explicit to be
carried on most. And it also needed ads, which had
always been and were now even with Kathy's charms, difficult
to scare up.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
Most of our readers were gay men because it was
the only way you could see nude men outside of
a porn environment at that time, which might be a
good market, but they're not going to be able to
sell mascara advertising.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yes, at this point point, Viva's readership is mostly gay men,
a fact that was always rumored, but now Robin could confirm.
She's seen the names on the subscriber list, and with
few ads, and few subscriptions and no significant female readership. Well,
the magazine's identity crisis is starting to affect people's abilities
(19:19):
to get their jobs done.
Speaker 7 (19:21):
I had to do a promotional piece for Viva, and
I could not figure out what this was.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Robin's just twenty one at this time, trying to navigate
this challenging environment.
Speaker 7 (19:34):
And so I said to Alma, my boss, I said,
I'm really struggling. I don't know what I can say.
I don't know any woman who would read this magazine.
I just don't get it. And she said, you know,
Bob and Taffy would take that well coming from you.
You know, given your background, you know, why don't you
write them a private letter? So I wrote it from
(19:54):
my heart. It was everything I believed.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Remember, Robin's been at the company since she was seventeen,
since the company was smaller. She's basically part of the family.
Her letter is impassioned, a plea to her bosses. In it, she.
Speaker 7 (20:08):
Says, I've got to tell you, I just don't understand
Viva and I find it impossible to promote I don't
know any of my friends. You know, I'm twenty one.
We're your target market. I don't know anybody who wants
to look at pictures of male penises. I just don't.
And you know, I like the idea of a sexy
(20:29):
magazine for women, but this isn't sexy to me.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Now hindsight is twenty twenty, but it's important to say
here there are loads of straight women who like looking
at all kinds of penises in all kinds of ways,
and who find pictures of penises extremely hot. Maybe not
in the soft, sad slung comedy way they were often
depicted in Viva, but anyway, back to Robin, she's hungry,
(20:54):
she's got that idealistic early career fight in her, and
she's found a cause worth fighting for. She thinks the
Viva dix are not only gross, but more that they're
dragging Viva down. And Robin's not the only Viva editor
who thinks the penises and Viva are not working. Here's pat.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
First of all, it was losing readers because women were
interested in naked men. And I read in something somewhere
that somebody said, you know, Bob GUCCIONI does not understand
that women don't want to see naked men.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
So Robin writes the memo and Kathy and Bob agree
with her. It works.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Most of my life was defined by the moment when
there was before Penis and after Venus.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
That's Bob Junior. At the time Robin was coming up
with her memo about the future of Viva, Bob Junior
is coming to a similar conclusion.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
The circulation department kept coming to my father and saying,
we're losing distributors. They don't they think it's a porn magazine.
They don't get an understand. You can tell him whatever
you want. You can tell you got award winning writers,
and we did have those.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
At this point. Anna east Nin, Maxine Hank Kingston, Nikki Giovanni,
and Rika Johng had all written for Viva, but it
still got the X rated taint, no pun of being
a sleezy porn magazine. In the seventies, this sleeze factor
is way easier to sell if you're making porn for men.
Penhouse and Playboy were both sold in porn stores or
(22:18):
porn sections of newsstands, places where men shopped and women.
Did not put five issues of Viva in the porn
section of a newsstand. Well by the end of the month,
all five would be right where you left them. The
new stand business was a smaller portion of sales, but
it was also a key way to be discovered by
new potential readers, and for Viva, newstand sales would always
(22:43):
be limited. No one knew how to help Viva sell
because women reading porn wasn't normalized, and even if Viva
was more than just porn, as long as there was
a picture of a dick next to its groundbreaking articles,
the distributors viewed the magazine one way and one way only.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
We have the best photographers in the world. Helmut Newton
was taking pictures for us an ADVD on mistaking pictures
for Viva the best, but the whole staler does know
that or care. He just sees the penis and he
thinks this goes into a porn stool. I don't have
any porn stores in my network. Why am I getting
this magazine? So it wasn't going on sale in a
lot of the country.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
The pressure is building up in terms of Viva not selling,
and Bob's usual, it's fine, the readers will catch up.
Attitude is beginning to falter finally, and.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Then one day just gave it to the pressure when
he realized the magazine was barely getting on sale outside
of New York and Los Angeles, another major beteput areas,
So the penises.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Went away by agreeing to cut the dicks from Viva.
Bob and Kathy meg a concession. It's a concession that
goes against the entire Viva promise, goes against the idea
that street women should have a place to stare at
naked men, to explore their R and X rated desires
like men had with Penthouse. And though the porn in
Viva was rarely executed appropriately, it was rarely through a
(24:04):
female lens, it was still the entire reason Viva was
made in the first place. And if Viva wasn't a
smart feminist porn magazine, then what in the world was it.
But Bob and Cathy don't give the staff much time
to sort this out. They're not what you'd call master
business strategists. They're capricious and impulsive. They decided that Dick
(24:26):
should go with no warning or vision for what happens next.
After Robin sends her memo, things move fast, faster than
Robin had imagined they would.
Speaker 7 (24:36):
I was a little bit set up in writing the memo.
I was not the catalyst for them changing Viva.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
After Robin's memo goes out, Bob and Cathy agree to
her direction, and Alma more Robin's boss who encouraged her
to write the memo, who'd never edited a magazine before
but clearly wanted to, now becomes Viva's main editor. Alma
Moore didn't want to talk to us for this part cast,
and since Patty passed away in twenty twenty, she's not
(25:03):
here to confirm this for sure, but judging from the mastheads,
Patty's out right after Robin's memo, which wasn't necessarily Robin's intention,
Patty Bosworth, the beloved editor who brought Viva some of
its most groundbreaking journalism, is thrown away with the dicks
very quickly.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
Most of the staff was fired, the new policy was announced,
Alma was announced as the editorial director, and I moved
over as an associate editor.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
It was kind of surprising, and so in the April
nineteen seventy six issue, Viva has a new masthead and
Kathy publishes a new letter announcing the magazine's new identity.
It's titled on Passed in Future Changes. In this letter,
written just months after the one at the beginning of
this episode, Kathy's tone completely There's no sex kitten rhetoric.
(26:03):
She's a career woman now shouting her accomplishments, highlighting the
lack of professional opportunities for women, and publishing stories on
things like how women should ask for a raise, gave us,
changing and growing and what's unspoken is so is Kathy.
Here's Natalie Robamt again. Reading Kathy Viva has always been
very personal to me.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That's why I see changes to this magazine on human terms.
First there was birth, then self definition, and now there's growth.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Alongside the letter, there's a photo in it. Kathy looks
a lot different than she did at the beginning of
this episode. She's decked out in power jewelry, chunky bracelets,
statement earrings, her nails are red, her hair's slicked back.
She's even smoking a cigarette. It's a transformation, akin to
Sandy's makeover at the end of Greece. If Sandy was
once an exotic dancer turned high powered girl boss. Kathy's
(26:59):
editors let her continues.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
What will be different, perhaps most obvious at first, will
be a change in our erotic photography with tastes developing
so rapidly, it's difficult to predict what's going to interest women,
but in our opinion, it's not going to be male nudity.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Kathy has done a full one eighty.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
It's an exciting time, and I believe a wonderful time.
Perhaps we will all be able to finally work in
a world in which a woman is allowed to work,
to be a respected member of society and retain her
own individuality.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
And as the remaining Viva women head into the late seventies,
the times are a change in. The anti porn feminists
who were fighting Kathy are drowning out, all other feminist voices.
Pornosic is heading out, and the Reagan era moral majorities
that sniffing around looking for a way in For Viva
editors like Pat and Robin, the Cox conundrum, the flaccid
(27:59):
dicks they hated, was at last settled. They no longer
need to keep up the charade. Here's Pat.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
We're bringing Viva on this new track. Now. Viva is
now going to be a terrific magazine. It's going to
be a feminist magazine. It's going to be exciting, it's
going to be better than Miss. It's gonna be different
from Cosmo.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Well, the focus is now on words, and even though
Viva no longer features groundbreaking mail nudes, that doesn't mean
it's photography will stop being both important and influential. Because
this little feminist porn magazine that no longer contains porn,
it's about to become a launching pad for a woman
who will become the most famous and powerful fashion editor
(28:40):
of all time.
Speaker 8 (28:41):
I remember when she came in, there was a big
to do with hell we have. Anna wintor.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Stiff is an original podcast from iHeartMedia and Crooked Media.
It's produced by Crooked Media. It's hosted and written by
me Jennifer Ramalini and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney Rapp
is our associate producer, Story editing by Mary Knopf, music
sound design and engineering by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker
(29:12):
is Julia Paskin. Additional production support from Nafila Cato and
Inez Maza from Crooked Media. Our executive producers are Sarah Geismer,
Katy Long, and Mary Knopf, with special thanks to Alison
Falsetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia. Our executive producers are
Beth Anne Macaluso. And Julia Weaver
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