March 30, 2023 • 29 mins
After critics skewer Viva’s first issue, Bob Guccione decides to double down on his flawed vision for the magazine. Meanwhile, his feminist editorial staff finds a secret window into making the content they actually desire.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'm Arlene Hursson. We're back where with Bob Guccioni in
his town house in New York. Again. Thank you for
being on the show again. I know how busy you are.
Pressure the pressure is the vodka on? You mean the pleasure, God,
this pleasure. Okay, here's the thing. Bob Guccioni was a
charming dude and here he is practically charming the pants
(00:27):
off talk show host Arlene Herson in the eighties on
the Arlene Herson Show. I have to say, and to
see you success, to be here in this fabulous house,
I mean, there's no doubt that your success. Arlene is
clearly a fan of Bob's to say the least, but
even she has to admit that Bob has as many
detractors as he does fans. And when this relatively light
(00:48):
conversation takes a turn towards his critics, Bob tense is up.
You are worth, as we had mentioned earlier, over two
hundred and fifty million dollars. Penthouse is not the only publication.
You also have a form variations, the Girls of Penthouse,
Pentause Letters. But it all but that's a different kind
(01:12):
of magazine, omni different. Can you feel the defensiveness. Yet
there are other parts too, But there's a lot to
do with sex, with people's sexual problems. You know, you
show pictures of women in sexy poses. It's sex, sex sex,
that's really how you built your forty. But people have
said because of that, you've been called the king of sleeves. Now,
(01:32):
how do you react to something like Well, I just
I don't react to it really because I think people
who say things like that are very stupid, uninformed, because
there's nothing sleazy about sex. Healthy sex is the most
wonderful thing in the world. We wouldn't be here if
it wasn't from mothers and fathers appreciating the value of
healthy sex. So people who say things like that, it's
just stupid. Arlene's critiques here are the softest of softballs.
(01:55):
But you can tell even mentioning his critics rattles Bob's cage. Now,
everybody definition of pornography varies. What's your definition of put? Well, firstly,
when I say pornography, pornography is award with no legal contents.
It's just a stupid argument. These magazines represent healthy sexuality,
that's what they say. After the fact, that's absolutely untrue.
(02:16):
This interview took place more than two decades after the
launch of Penhouse and more than a decade after the
launch of Viva magazine, and even still here in criticism
years later. It fires him up, so you can imagine
how bent out of shape Bob must have been. After
the launch of Viva set off a media firestorm. After
the first issue, reporters called Bob's Viva self conscious, old hat, stale,
(02:42):
and even sick. They said the sex in Viva was
very well unsexy. There's a particularly rough review in Time
magazine that so incensed Bob. He addressed it in a
full page editor's letter that runs in Viva's January nineteen
seventy four issue. The letter is titled time off for
(03:02):
bad Behavior. Here's an excerpt. Whereas Time devoted one paragraph
to Viva's editorial content, they devoted five paragraphs to the
credibility content of its publisher. Time goes on to question
such disparate non secretos as whether or not the reader
could survive not the editorial content of the magazine, but
my own personal pretensions, my ability to judge and handle staff,
(03:24):
and my right to change pages weeks after the closing
deadline because Even though all the reviews are technically about Viva,
kind of more about Bob Guccioni himself. As Viva's editor
in chief. All roads, good or bad, but especially bad,
lead back to him. Bob was progressive in so many ways.
(03:47):
How he talks about healthy sex, and even the fact
that he started Viva makes him decades ahead of his time.
Bob's strong opinions got him far, They got him Penthouse,
and they earned him an empire. But Viva wasn't Penthouse.
It didn't fit his usual formula. He couldn't just throw
tits and ass and a few gonzo journalists at it
(04:10):
and call it a day. From the start, Viva played
by different rules, and the more Bob doubled down on
his vision, the more he tried to control it, the
more out of control it got. From crooked media and iHeartMedia.
I'm Jennifer Rommolini and this is stiffed. Episode two, time
(04:34):
off for bad behavior, Act one, awkward man ass. If
(04:54):
you pour over these early Bob Guccioni edited issues of Viva,
you're left with all sorts of question, things like why
so many boobs and so much bush? Who finds the
little hooker? Comic funny. But the biggest question you'll ask
if you read these early Bob Guccioni Viva magazines is
what kind of life leads a human man to believe
(05:16):
he should be in charge of a women's sex magazine.
Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabbatini Guccioni was born December seventeenth,
nineteen thirty, in Brooklyn into a big middle class Sicilian family.
You know, my father was an Italian American who grew
(05:37):
up with strong, strong Italian values. Here's his son, Bob Junior,
and what our Italian values founded on the mother, Respect
for the mother, respect for the matriarch. Later in life,
Bob Guccioni obviously loved women, but according to Bob Junior,
this comes from a genuine respect for women that was
(05:58):
instilled in him during his youth. My grandmother was a
very powerful woman. They had nothing, they grew up in
the depression, but she was powerful and you know, saw
beyond the horizon. And she also for danging to my
father as a you know, son of the universe, figured
he was destined for great things. But she instilled upon
him and in him a great respectful that was you know,
(06:23):
that was absolutely the foundation. It might be hard to believe,
but growing up GUCCIONI was not only a mama's boy,
but actually an altar boy too and true story. He
later studied for the priesthood briefly before instead marrying his
high school sweetheart, with whom he had his first kid.
(06:44):
Here's Bob and the Arlene Herson show again that eighteen
years old you were married for the first time. I
got married. Why I did everything very quickly, Okay, but
eighteen years old. I wanted a scene, feel and experience.
Everything was quickly as possible. That marriage ended quickly, and
after this Bob moved to Europe to be a classical painter.
(07:05):
With the story goes twenty four dollars in his pocket
and a handful of paintbrushes and newly single, Bob wasn't
single for long. Immediately married my second wife. I've been
married almost all my life. I married my second wife
practically the day that I divorced my first wife, so
I've always had a life companion. He has four more kids,
(07:28):
including Bob Junior. He supports the family by briefly managing
a chain of British laundromats and working as a cartoonist
for the London American. There's not enough money in painting
or cartooning or laundromats, so he sets his sights on
something bigger. You know. My thought it was a great painter,
and he grew up studying, you know, European painters, and
(07:52):
so he had this natural tendency to think, well, the
naked body, either way male or female. Art. With this
apparently innate interest in the naked body, it's not surprising
that Bob sets his sights on an industry which is suddenly,
in the sixties, extremely lucrative porn. And so in nineteen
(08:16):
sixty five Penthouse UK is born. Bob had about the
art and classiness even though he was a photographer. That's
Peter Block. Peter worked for Bob for nearly thirty years
as a copy editor at Viva and for longer as
the editor of Penthouse. Over those years, Peter heard many
(08:37):
many of Bob's stories, including the one about how Bob
first spotted a woman who would have a great deal
of influence over him, his third wife, slash business partner,
Kathy Keaton. Kathy was basically a stripper and with Bob
saw her. I don't know where and when he went
to her dressing room because he was acted to her.
(09:01):
She had a bunch of Financial Times or Wall Street
journals and things like that, because she was very smart,
and so he Again the official line was he realized
that she would be someone who would be very good
helping him sell advertising for his new magazine, and that's
how they got together. Kathy was a well paid exotic
(09:21):
dancer with no sales or publishing experience. I was very
impressed with her. I said, I want you to come
work on a magazine. And I said, well, I can't
hey you as much as you're making. And she says, well,
how much can you pay? I said fifteen pounds a
week and she said okay. Convincing Cathy to help him
sell ads for his new magazine may not have looked
(09:43):
to the outside world like the smartest business move. Cathy
was special and Bob knew it. Here's editor Peter Block again. Oh,
she was ambitious. She was very incredibly smart. She was
way ahead of her time. Hiring Kathy and giving her
a senior role shaping the company was one of Bob
(10:06):
Guccioni's first and most genius gut instincts, because like his
son told us earlier, Bob was actually kind of a genius.
He was also, like all of us, complicated, full of contradictions.
He was arrogant, full of male ego and hubris, but
also professionally generous and savvy, and he for sure had
(10:29):
an eye for talented people like him who also wanted
to push boundaries. I mean, here he is a guy
wearing you know, open shirts down to his waist and chains,
one of which might have had his own penis engraves
hunted and Kathie being in her you know, go go
boots and being an ex stripper. That's doctor Judy Curansky,
(10:54):
be of a sex columnist. But they were intelligent, you know,
they made they wanted to do something different in the world,
break all the taboos, and you know, go against society.
And that was his way of doing it because this
was the sexual revolution. Then he was way out there,
(11:16):
charging in front. You might recognize Doctor Judy's voice from
the nationally syndicated call in radio advice show Love Phones,
which he hosted from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety
eight before starting to write for Viva in the seventies.
Doctor Judy was a pioneering sex researcher a more serious academic.
Since I was a senior research scientist at Columbia at
(11:40):
the Psychiatric Institute, I was the protege of a number
of very senior psychiatrists who were approached by Masters and Johnson,
the grandfather and grandmother of sex therapy. So while I
was wearing the hat of studying psychiatric disorders, I was
also becoming this major known as the sex therapist. And
(12:02):
so I was approached to do a column for Viva.
Doctor Judy's on the Fence. At first, she'd never done
anything like this. It was a big choice. Since I
had such a reputation in the professional field, I had
to be concerned how would my colleagues perceive this. This
(12:25):
was a very sensitive time in the world that you
were either a proper, respected professional or you were part
of the sleazy pornographic world. But Bob sees something in
doctor Judy, and it maybe helps her see something in herself.
She takes the job. He struck me as he was
(12:45):
very intelligent. He was very forward thinking. He was highly creative,
and I appreciated that in him. And that's the thing
about Bob. He knows how to spot talent. But once
they join his team. He's not always great at playing
well with others, nor sharing his toys and Viva. At
this moment, it's Bob's favorite new toy and he seems
(13:08):
pretty obnoxious about it, but to be charitable. Like many
founders up to this point, Bob Guccioni's success had relied
heavily on betting on his own unyielding vision. Well, if
I backed myself ten out of ten times, I'm going
to win. And if I doubt myself ten out at
ten times, I'm definitely gonna lose. So even in the
(13:31):
case where he was wrong, and I think suspected at
the time that he was off center, he still had
this thing, well, if I backed myself ten times out
of ten, I will come out ahead. Not only did
Bob have confidence in his own abilities, but he had
confidence in his vision and creative perspective. For the time,
he was very progressive when it came to sex, sex
positivity and the fact that women had erotic inner lives.
(13:54):
He just maybe had a bit too much confidence when
it came to what those inner lives looked like. So
Bob Senior keeps backing himself controls most of Viva's editorial
and all of its images. Viva doesn't even get its
own cover shoots. Bob literally reuses outtakes from his penthouse shoots,
so the covers of this erotic women's magazine are well
(14:17):
topless penthouse pets with high hair and come hither looks
cropped from the shoulders up and inside the magazine, things
in Bob's early Viva aren't any less weird. There's an
adverse suction cup device called beauty Breast that's meant to
help increase a woman's bus size grow inches in just
fourteen days. Next to a Q and A with musical
(14:38):
theater director Bob Fosse, there's a wrinkled overtan man's ass.
Right next to a profile of actress and Bancroft. There's
a five page spread on I shit You not erotic
pocket watches, including one that's engraved with an image of
a couple engaging in the sex Act sixty nine. These
(15:01):
were all Bob's calls. Here's writer Annie Gottlieb, one of
Viva's first female calumnists. What women find sexy about men
was barely touched on in Viva. You know, men are
just so visual and women are much more multisensory about
what turns us on. Annie comes to Viva as a
(15:22):
twenty something feminist book critic. She's part of the young
New York intelligency of the time, writing for places like
The New York Times and The Village Voice. Annie is
one of a handful of young, ambitious women now working
at Viva. But did Bob rely on any of their
expertise to dictate what women wanted from a sexy women's magazine, No,
(15:44):
GUCCIONI kept sort of barging in like a bowl in
the china shop, and you know, and making it weird.
It was annoying, and it was also funny. Truth is,
if Bob had been open to feedback, women like Annie
may have offered ideas beyond awkward man ass in topless
penthouse pets. Here's Viva editor Robin Walliner. I don't think
(16:06):
he gave a moment's thought to what women wanted or needed,
and it wasn't just photos in Viva's editorial meetings. Bob's
the kind of boss who tells you how it's going
to be. He doesn't so much reject story ideas at
this point as not seemed to welcome them in the
first place. Now, Bob Guccioni is certainly not the first
(16:28):
nor last editor in chief to treat his magazine like
his own personal fiefdom. This behavior is practically in the
job description. As a result, Viva's off the mark in
big ways. But Bob's also wrong about smaller details that
have a big impact too. Here's Robin again the term feminist.
(16:48):
So we didn't use it in the magazine, but we
all were feminists. Yes, Bob and later Kathy hated the
word feminist, and they instruct the staff of their feminist
porn magazine not to use it. But like Robin said,
the Viva staffers are proud seventies feminists. They're buoyed by
(17:10):
the women's liberation movement, which is by nineteen seventy four
in full swing. They have a mission. And when these
young feminists find they can't walk through the front door
of the house of Guccioni, they go searching for a window.
(17:38):
Act two. Volva astray but make a feminist. So it's
not just Bob Guccioni. The Viva editors needed to work
around the environment they worked in. Could be off pudding
as well. Penhaus and Viva shared everything, copy editors and
(17:59):
art departments, and of course a coworking space. Here's a
Viva editor, Pat Lindon. There were these disgusting guys, disgustingly
slobby guys, and they lived there. Basically, they had actually
drilled holes in the wall and they were They would
smoke pot there at night and then they would blow
(18:19):
it out the hole so that it didn't smell it
the building, Pat and the entire viewa staff shared an
office with all of Guccioni's magazines, and in the seventies
that meant mainly Penthouse, but also Penthouse spinoffs like Forum
and Penthouse Letters. And they also shared office space with
a whole host of characters from Guccioni's family, who Bob's
(18:40):
senior famously employed to help run his empire. Bob Guccioni's
sister was in charge of merchandise, right and so on
her desk were a bunch of samples and there was
a blow up doll that was hanging on the walls.
It was a doll that men could have sexual intercourse
with and had came with the vagina and I guess
(19:03):
it came with some sort of cream or something. And
then there was an ash tray shaped like a volvo
so that men could stuff kill their cigars and that,
and Bob Guccioni's father had that same as straight down
in his office. Bob had hired his father, Anthony Guccioni,
then an elderly man, to be in charge of the
(19:25):
company's finances. He was built officially on the masthead a
secretary treasurer, and he had a rubber breast and you've
pushed the nipple that would summon his secretary. Come on,
it was a bizarre place. Here's Annie. I used to
have a terrible time getting paid. It would take six
weeks to get my check. And I remember Gay Bryant
(19:46):
saying to me, Anthony Guccioni doesn't like to sign checks.
And he of course had to sign the big checks
for the printer and the photographers, the color separations and
all the advertising and all that. He had to sign those.
So we took it out on the four hundred dollars people.
Bob Lay's out cash for big name male photographers and
(20:07):
even big name male writers like John Irving. But Viva's
few female writers and editors have to scrape by with less.
They have to fight to get paid. Still, for the
most part, they're just happy to be there, happy for
the work. Here's Betty Jane Raphael, who joined the Viva
staff as senior editor at the beginning of the magazine.
(20:30):
New York was not at its best everyone knows in
the seventies, but for young people in magazines it was
pretty exciting, I mean, at least for women. Viva is
Betty Jane's second job out of college. Before joining Viva,
she'd worked as an editor at McCall's, also in New
York City. And the world opened up in the sixties
(20:51):
because well, the pill came and so a lot of
us good girls didn't have to be so good anymore.
And we lived in the city, we didn't commute home,
and life was pretty exciting, I felt. Betty Jane's one
of only two female editors credited on these early issues
(21:12):
of Viva. Betty Jane and Viva's few female writers like
Annie are putting a little bit of the feminist spirit
they're experiencing outside of the office into the magazine. They're
finding ways to put their own stamp on it, even
if they do this mostly in secret. Because guess what
are the third issue of Viva. They found their window in.
(21:36):
It's a section of the magazine called Graffiti, which runs
over seven pages pages thirty three to forty each month.
It's a section devoted to art and music and film
and eventually whatever the hell the Viva editors want. It
was part of a sort of cultural inset that was
on non glossy paper, so everybody knew that was the
(21:58):
part you could skip if you were only interested in
sexy pictures in fashion. You know, it was kind of
like brown paper, the kind you would wrap a sandwich in. Remember,
most of Bob's Viva is luxurious feeling. He's a snob
about production, only cares about the pages that are high gloss.
You know. It had a very disposable look to it.
(22:20):
But within that setting, we had total freedom to write
whatever we wanted. You know, we were poorly paid and
no probably nobody read what we wrote, and that was
what set us free. And within this literal, brown paper
bag secret magazine. Within the magazine, the smart, progressive feminist
vision for Viva begins to come to life. Annie's covering
(22:42):
the book world, highlighting feminist poets. She's writing about Tony Morrison,
Sula and Alice Walker's stories of Black Women in Love
and Trouble. Each month, the graffiti section leads with a
personal essay on things like sexual pleasure, the pitfalls of marriage,
and work life balance, and these essays are written by
(23:02):
influential writers and artists of the nineteen seventies. I am
not an ogre. I just have this unpleasant conflict, thus
writer and podcast host Ashley Ford. She's reading Loraino Grady,
the legendary black conceptual artist and culture critic. Oh Grady
actually wrote in Viva's May nineteen seventy four graffiti section,
(23:25):
and it's an essay that honestly could be published today.
I want a loving relationship with a man built on
mutual respect and reciprocal give and take. But what I
really need is someone to make no demands on me
as a housewife. Not mind if I write until five
(23:46):
or six in the morning and still be there to
keep me company when I can no longer stand typing.
In other words, though I may want a husband, what
I need a wife. The graffiti section also included big
time writers like Nancy Friday, who wrote the best selling
(24:07):
sex fantasy's book My Secret Garden. Here's Nancy on Tom
Snyder's popular seventies late night talk show Tomorrow set it before,
and I'll say it again. Women have gone really socially
sexually with men just about as far as we can
go right now, and right now the time is from
men to really change. Nancy Friday went on to write
more than a half dozen books on women in sexuality.
(24:29):
She's widely considered an early sex positivity icon, an important
feminist figure in the sexual revolution in the world of media.
Even then she was a get. The fact that her
essay is relegated to Viva's brown paper bag inserts section
tells us a lot about who was actually calling Viva's
major shots, and it tells us a lot about how
(24:49):
much this middle aged male pornographer in chief had yet
to catch up to and adapt to the times. And
it also tells us a lot about the lengths to
which in these early days the women Viva fought to
execute their vision and work around him. Here's Betty Jane again.
We knew who we were working for, and we did
(25:11):
not let it strive from us. I would just go
after people I wanted to see in the maccine, and
it usually would be based on some book that was
coming out or recognition. We just did our stories or
articles and then had them put together with photo layouts
(25:38):
of soft porn, and by ignoring Bob's porn and landing
their own big name writers like Simone de Beauvois and
important up and comers like Nikki Giovanni, sometimes they managed
to pull their vision off. I guess we all felt
that we were like working against the tide and actually
(25:59):
kind of working under the radar, because I don't think
he ever read much of the magazine. And this this
was a shift because, with the exception of the graffiti pages,
Bob initially read most everything in Viva. It was a
big part of his job. And if Bob didn't read
the magazine anymore, what was he doing? Well? After months
(26:22):
of criticism and bad reviews pointed directly at him, he's
possibly rethinking the Viva formula after all, you know, the
thing to understand by my dad, because he was incredibly brilliant,
but he couldn't be a woman. He could beat many things,
but he couldn't be a woman, and therefore he couldn't
perceive how complex a woman's approach to six is. After
(26:47):
a few months, the criticism may have just become too
much for Bob, and he starts to lose interest in
his shiny new toy because in the issues following that
January nineteen seventy four editors letter at the beginning of
this episode, the one where Bob rails against Time Magazine
for criticizing his role as editor of Viva, Bob never
(27:07):
writes an editor's letter again, and in fact, by the
end of July of nineteen seventy four, there's an even
bigger shift in the magazine. Bob's name is no longer
on the masthead as editor. He's officially taken his editor
in chief ball and gone home. He never came. I
mean he would come into the office maybe once a month.
(27:29):
He was like a New York celebrity who never wanted
to leave the house. His father came into the office,
his sisters, children, lots of gucciono is in the office,
but not Bob. And the new editor, well, she's about
to push the magazine in a new direction and potentially
give Viva's readership what they actually want. What I do
(27:50):
remember was boxes of letters that would come in from
angry women who said show more. Cop Stiffed as an
original podcast from iHeartMedia and Crooked Media. It's produced by
(28:11):
Crooked Media. It's hosted and written by me Jennifer Romalini
and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney Rath is our associate producer,
story editing by Mary Knoff, music sound design and engineering
by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker is Julia Paskin. Additional
production support from Nafula Cato and Inez Maza. Thanks to
(28:34):
Alex Peppadimus for reading the voice of Bob Guccioni and
to Ashley Ford for reading Loreno Grady from Crooked Media.
Our executive producers are Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, and Mary Knoff,
with special thanks to Alison Falzetta and Lyra Smith from iHeartMedia.
Our executive producers are Beth Anne Macaluso and Julia Weaver.
I'm Arlene Hursson. We're back where with Bob Guccioni in
his town house in New York. Again. Thank you for
being on the show again. I know how busy you are.
Pressure the pressure is the vodka on? You mean the pleasure, God,
this pleasure. Okay, here's the thing. Bob Guccioni was a
charming dude and here he is practically charming the pants
(00:27):
off talk show host Arlene Herson in the eighties on
the Arlene Herson Show. I have to say, and to
see you success, to be here in this fabulous house,
I mean, there's no doubt that your success. Arlene is
clearly a fan of Bob's to say the least, but
even she has to admit that Bob has as many
detractors as he does fans. And when this relatively light
(00:48):
conversation takes a turn towards his critics, Bob tense is up.
You are worth, as we had mentioned earlier, over two
hundred and fifty million dollars. Penthouse is not the only publication.
You also have a form variations, the Girls of Penthouse,
Pentause Letters. But it all but that's a different kind
(01:12):
of magazine, omni different. Can you feel the defensiveness. Yet
there are other parts too, But there's a lot to
do with sex, with people's sexual problems. You know, you
show pictures of women in sexy poses. It's sex, sex sex,
that's really how you built your forty. But people have
said because of that, you've been called the king of sleeves. Now,
(01:32):
how do you react to something like Well, I just
I don't react to it really because I think people
who say things like that are very stupid, uninformed, because
there's nothing sleazy about sex. Healthy sex is the most
wonderful thing in the world. We wouldn't be here if
it wasn't from mothers and fathers appreciating the value of
healthy sex. So people who say things like that, it's
just stupid. Arlene's critiques here are the softest of softballs.
(01:55):
But you can tell even mentioning his critics rattles Bob's cage. Now,
everybody definition of pornography varies. What's your definition of put? Well, firstly,
when I say pornography, pornography is award with no legal contents.
It's just a stupid argument. These magazines represent healthy sexuality,
that's what they say. After the fact, that's absolutely untrue.
(02:16):
This interview took place more than two decades after the
launch of Penhouse and more than a decade after the
launch of Viva magazine, and even still here in criticism
years later. It fires him up, so you can imagine
how bent out of shape Bob must have been. After
the launch of Viva set off a media firestorm. After
the first issue, reporters called Bob's Viva self conscious, old hat, stale,
(02:42):
and even sick. They said the sex in Viva was
very well unsexy. There's a particularly rough review in Time
magazine that so incensed Bob. He addressed it in a
full page editor's letter that runs in Viva's January nineteen
seventy four issue. The letter is titled time off for
(03:02):
bad Behavior. Here's an excerpt. Whereas Time devoted one paragraph
to Viva's editorial content, they devoted five paragraphs to the
credibility content of its publisher. Time goes on to question
such disparate non secretos as whether or not the reader
could survive not the editorial content of the magazine, but
my own personal pretensions, my ability to judge and handle staff,
(03:24):
and my right to change pages weeks after the closing
deadline because Even though all the reviews are technically about Viva,
kind of more about Bob Guccioni himself. As Viva's editor
in chief. All roads, good or bad, but especially bad,
lead back to him. Bob was progressive in so many ways.
(03:47):
How he talks about healthy sex, and even the fact
that he started Viva makes him decades ahead of his time.
Bob's strong opinions got him far, They got him Penthouse,
and they earned him an empire. But Viva wasn't Penthouse.
It didn't fit his usual formula. He couldn't just throw
tits and ass and a few gonzo journalists at it
(04:10):
and call it a day. From the start, Viva played
by different rules, and the more Bob doubled down on
his vision, the more he tried to control it, the
more out of control it got. From crooked media and iHeartMedia.
I'm Jennifer Rommolini and this is stiffed. Episode two, time
(04:34):
off for bad behavior, Act one, awkward man ass. If
(04:54):
you pour over these early Bob Guccioni edited issues of Viva,
you're left with all sorts of question, things like why
so many boobs and so much bush? Who finds the
little hooker? Comic funny. But the biggest question you'll ask
if you read these early Bob Guccioni Viva magazines is
what kind of life leads a human man to believe
(05:16):
he should be in charge of a women's sex magazine.
Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabbatini Guccioni was born December seventeenth,
nineteen thirty, in Brooklyn into a big middle class Sicilian family.
You know, my father was an Italian American who grew
(05:37):
up with strong, strong Italian values. Here's his son, Bob Junior,
and what our Italian values founded on the mother, Respect
for the mother, respect for the matriarch. Later in life,
Bob Guccioni obviously loved women, but according to Bob Junior,
this comes from a genuine respect for women that was
(05:58):
instilled in him during his youth. My grandmother was a
very powerful woman. They had nothing, they grew up in
the depression, but she was powerful and you know, saw
beyond the horizon. And she also for danging to my
father as a you know, son of the universe, figured
he was destined for great things. But she instilled upon
him and in him a great respectful that was you know,
(06:23):
that was absolutely the foundation. It might be hard to believe,
but growing up GUCCIONI was not only a mama's boy,
but actually an altar boy too and true story. He
later studied for the priesthood briefly before instead marrying his
high school sweetheart, with whom he had his first kid.
(06:44):
Here's Bob and the Arlene Herson show again that eighteen
years old you were married for the first time. I
got married. Why I did everything very quickly, Okay, but
eighteen years old. I wanted a scene, feel and experience.
Everything was quickly as possible. That marriage ended quickly, and
after this Bob moved to Europe to be a classical painter.
(07:05):
With the story goes twenty four dollars in his pocket
and a handful of paintbrushes and newly single, Bob wasn't
single for long. Immediately married my second wife. I've been
married almost all my life. I married my second wife
practically the day that I divorced my first wife, so
I've always had a life companion. He has four more kids,
(07:28):
including Bob Junior. He supports the family by briefly managing
a chain of British laundromats and working as a cartoonist
for the London American. There's not enough money in painting
or cartooning or laundromats, so he sets his sights on
something bigger. You know. My thought it was a great painter,
and he grew up studying, you know, European painters, and
(07:52):
so he had this natural tendency to think, well, the
naked body, either way male or female. Art. With this
apparently innate interest in the naked body, it's not surprising
that Bob sets his sights on an industry which is suddenly,
in the sixties, extremely lucrative porn. And so in nineteen
(08:16):
sixty five Penthouse UK is born. Bob had about the
art and classiness even though he was a photographer. That's
Peter Block. Peter worked for Bob for nearly thirty years
as a copy editor at Viva and for longer as
the editor of Penthouse. Over those years, Peter heard many
(08:37):
many of Bob's stories, including the one about how Bob
first spotted a woman who would have a great deal
of influence over him, his third wife, slash business partner,
Kathy Keaton. Kathy was basically a stripper and with Bob
saw her. I don't know where and when he went
to her dressing room because he was acted to her.
(09:01):
She had a bunch of Financial Times or Wall Street
journals and things like that, because she was very smart,
and so he Again the official line was he realized
that she would be someone who would be very good
helping him sell advertising for his new magazine, and that's
how they got together. Kathy was a well paid exotic
(09:21):
dancer with no sales or publishing experience. I was very
impressed with her. I said, I want you to come
work on a magazine. And I said, well, I can't
hey you as much as you're making. And she says, well,
how much can you pay? I said fifteen pounds a
week and she said okay. Convincing Cathy to help him
sell ads for his new magazine may not have looked
(09:43):
to the outside world like the smartest business move. Cathy
was special and Bob knew it. Here's editor Peter Block again. Oh,
she was ambitious. She was very incredibly smart. She was
way ahead of her time. Hiring Kathy and giving her
a senior role shaping the company was one of Bob
(10:06):
Guccioni's first and most genius gut instincts, because like his
son told us earlier, Bob was actually kind of a genius.
He was also, like all of us, complicated, full of contradictions.
He was arrogant, full of male ego and hubris, but
also professionally generous and savvy, and he for sure had
(10:29):
an eye for talented people like him who also wanted
to push boundaries. I mean, here he is a guy
wearing you know, open shirts down to his waist and chains,
one of which might have had his own penis engraves
hunted and Kathie being in her you know, go go
boots and being an ex stripper. That's doctor Judy Curansky,
(10:54):
be of a sex columnist. But they were intelligent, you know,
they made they wanted to do something different in the world,
break all the taboos, and you know, go against society.
And that was his way of doing it because this
was the sexual revolution. Then he was way out there,
(11:16):
charging in front. You might recognize Doctor Judy's voice from
the nationally syndicated call in radio advice show Love Phones,
which he hosted from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety
eight before starting to write for Viva in the seventies.
Doctor Judy was a pioneering sex researcher a more serious academic.
Since I was a senior research scientist at Columbia at
(11:40):
the Psychiatric Institute, I was the protege of a number
of very senior psychiatrists who were approached by Masters and Johnson,
the grandfather and grandmother of sex therapy. So while I
was wearing the hat of studying psychiatric disorders, I was
also becoming this major known as the sex therapist. And
(12:02):
so I was approached to do a column for Viva.
Doctor Judy's on the Fence. At first, she'd never done
anything like this. It was a big choice. Since I
had such a reputation in the professional field, I had
to be concerned how would my colleagues perceive this. This
(12:25):
was a very sensitive time in the world that you
were either a proper, respected professional or you were part
of the sleazy pornographic world. But Bob sees something in
doctor Judy, and it maybe helps her see something in herself.
She takes the job. He struck me as he was
(12:45):
very intelligent. He was very forward thinking. He was highly creative,
and I appreciated that in him. And that's the thing
about Bob. He knows how to spot talent. But once
they join his team. He's not always great at playing
well with others, nor sharing his toys and Viva. At
this moment, it's Bob's favorite new toy and he seems
(13:08):
pretty obnoxious about it, but to be charitable. Like many
founders up to this point, Bob Guccioni's success had relied
heavily on betting on his own unyielding vision. Well, if
I backed myself ten out of ten times, I'm going
to win. And if I doubt myself ten out at
ten times, I'm definitely gonna lose. So even in the
(13:31):
case where he was wrong, and I think suspected at
the time that he was off center, he still had
this thing, well, if I backed myself ten times out
of ten, I will come out ahead. Not only did
Bob have confidence in his own abilities, but he had
confidence in his vision and creative perspective. For the time,
he was very progressive when it came to sex, sex
positivity and the fact that women had erotic inner lives.
(13:54):
He just maybe had a bit too much confidence when
it came to what those inner lives looked like. So
Bob Senior keeps backing himself controls most of Viva's editorial
and all of its images. Viva doesn't even get its
own cover shoots. Bob literally reuses outtakes from his penthouse shoots,
so the covers of this erotic women's magazine are well
(14:17):
topless penthouse pets with high hair and come hither looks
cropped from the shoulders up and inside the magazine, things
in Bob's early Viva aren't any less weird. There's an
adverse suction cup device called beauty Breast that's meant to
help increase a woman's bus size grow inches in just
fourteen days. Next to a Q and A with musical
(14:38):
theater director Bob Fosse, there's a wrinkled overtan man's ass.
Right next to a profile of actress and Bancroft. There's
a five page spread on I shit You not erotic
pocket watches, including one that's engraved with an image of
a couple engaging in the sex Act sixty nine. These
(15:01):
were all Bob's calls. Here's writer Annie Gottlieb, one of
Viva's first female calumnists. What women find sexy about men
was barely touched on in Viva. You know, men are
just so visual and women are much more multisensory about
what turns us on. Annie comes to Viva as a
(15:22):
twenty something feminist book critic. She's part of the young
New York intelligency of the time, writing for places like
The New York Times and The Village Voice. Annie is
one of a handful of young, ambitious women now working
at Viva. But did Bob rely on any of their
expertise to dictate what women wanted from a sexy women's magazine, No,
(15:44):
GUCCIONI kept sort of barging in like a bowl in
the china shop, and you know, and making it weird.
It was annoying, and it was also funny. Truth is,
if Bob had been open to feedback, women like Annie
may have offered ideas beyond awkward man ass in topless
penthouse pets. Here's Viva editor Robin Walliner. I don't think
(16:06):
he gave a moment's thought to what women wanted or needed,
and it wasn't just photos in Viva's editorial meetings. Bob's
the kind of boss who tells you how it's going
to be. He doesn't so much reject story ideas at
this point as not seemed to welcome them in the
first place. Now, Bob Guccioni is certainly not the first
(16:28):
nor last editor in chief to treat his magazine like
his own personal fiefdom. This behavior is practically in the
job description. As a result, Viva's off the mark in
big ways. But Bob's also wrong about smaller details that
have a big impact too. Here's Robin again the term feminist.
(16:48):
So we didn't use it in the magazine, but we
all were feminists. Yes, Bob and later Kathy hated the
word feminist, and they instruct the staff of their feminist
porn magazine not to use it. But like Robin said,
the Viva staffers are proud seventies feminists. They're buoyed by
(17:10):
the women's liberation movement, which is by nineteen seventy four
in full swing. They have a mission. And when these
young feminists find they can't walk through the front door
of the house of Guccioni, they go searching for a window.
(17:38):
Act two. Volva astray but make a feminist. So it's
not just Bob Guccioni. The Viva editors needed to work
around the environment they worked in. Could be off pudding
as well. Penhaus and Viva shared everything, copy editors and
(17:59):
art departments, and of course a coworking space. Here's a
Viva editor, Pat Lindon. There were these disgusting guys, disgustingly
slobby guys, and they lived there. Basically, they had actually
drilled holes in the wall and they were They would
smoke pot there at night and then they would blow
(18:19):
it out the hole so that it didn't smell it
the building, Pat and the entire viewa staff shared an
office with all of Guccioni's magazines, and in the seventies
that meant mainly Penthouse, but also Penthouse spinoffs like Forum
and Penthouse Letters. And they also shared office space with
a whole host of characters from Guccioni's family, who Bob's
(18:40):
senior famously employed to help run his empire. Bob Guccioni's
sister was in charge of merchandise, right and so on
her desk were a bunch of samples and there was
a blow up doll that was hanging on the walls.
It was a doll that men could have sexual intercourse
with and had came with the vagina and I guess
(19:03):
it came with some sort of cream or something. And
then there was an ash tray shaped like a volvo
so that men could stuff kill their cigars and that,
and Bob Guccioni's father had that same as straight down
in his office. Bob had hired his father, Anthony Guccioni,
then an elderly man, to be in charge of the
(19:25):
company's finances. He was built officially on the masthead a
secretary treasurer, and he had a rubber breast and you've
pushed the nipple that would summon his secretary. Come on,
it was a bizarre place. Here's Annie. I used to
have a terrible time getting paid. It would take six
weeks to get my check. And I remember Gay Bryant
(19:46):
saying to me, Anthony Guccioni doesn't like to sign checks.
And he of course had to sign the big checks
for the printer and the photographers, the color separations and
all the advertising and all that. He had to sign those.
So we took it out on the four hundred dollars people.
Bob Lay's out cash for big name male photographers and
(20:07):
even big name male writers like John Irving. But Viva's
few female writers and editors have to scrape by with less.
They have to fight to get paid. Still, for the
most part, they're just happy to be there, happy for
the work. Here's Betty Jane Raphael, who joined the Viva
staff as senior editor at the beginning of the magazine.
(20:30):
New York was not at its best everyone knows in
the seventies, but for young people in magazines it was
pretty exciting, I mean, at least for women. Viva is
Betty Jane's second job out of college. Before joining Viva,
she'd worked as an editor at McCall's, also in New
York City. And the world opened up in the sixties
(20:51):
because well, the pill came and so a lot of
us good girls didn't have to be so good anymore.
And we lived in the city, we didn't commute home,
and life was pretty exciting, I felt. Betty Jane's one
of only two female editors credited on these early issues
(21:12):
of Viva. Betty Jane and Viva's few female writers like
Annie are putting a little bit of the feminist spirit
they're experiencing outside of the office into the magazine. They're
finding ways to put their own stamp on it, even
if they do this mostly in secret. Because guess what
are the third issue of Viva. They found their window in.
(21:36):
It's a section of the magazine called Graffiti, which runs
over seven pages pages thirty three to forty each month.
It's a section devoted to art and music and film
and eventually whatever the hell the Viva editors want. It
was part of a sort of cultural inset that was
on non glossy paper, so everybody knew that was the
(21:58):
part you could skip if you were only interested in
sexy pictures in fashion. You know, it was kind of
like brown paper, the kind you would wrap a sandwich in. Remember,
most of Bob's Viva is luxurious feeling. He's a snob
about production, only cares about the pages that are high gloss.
You know. It had a very disposable look to it.
(22:20):
But within that setting, we had total freedom to write
whatever we wanted. You know, we were poorly paid and
no probably nobody read what we wrote, and that was
what set us free. And within this literal, brown paper
bag secret magazine. Within the magazine, the smart, progressive feminist
vision for Viva begins to come to life. Annie's covering
(22:42):
the book world, highlighting feminist poets. She's writing about Tony Morrison,
Sula and Alice Walker's stories of Black Women in Love
and Trouble. Each month, the graffiti section leads with a
personal essay on things like sexual pleasure, the pitfalls of marriage,
and work life balance, and these essays are written by
(23:02):
influential writers and artists of the nineteen seventies. I am
not an ogre. I just have this unpleasant conflict, thus
writer and podcast host Ashley Ford. She's reading Loraino Grady,
the legendary black conceptual artist and culture critic. Oh Grady
actually wrote in Viva's May nineteen seventy four graffiti section,
(23:25):
and it's an essay that honestly could be published today.
I want a loving relationship with a man built on
mutual respect and reciprocal give and take. But what I
really need is someone to make no demands on me
as a housewife. Not mind if I write until five
(23:46):
or six in the morning and still be there to
keep me company when I can no longer stand typing.
In other words, though I may want a husband, what
I need a wife. The graffiti section also included big
time writers like Nancy Friday, who wrote the best selling
(24:07):
sex fantasy's book My Secret Garden. Here's Nancy on Tom
Snyder's popular seventies late night talk show Tomorrow set it before,
and I'll say it again. Women have gone really socially
sexually with men just about as far as we can
go right now, and right now the time is from
men to really change. Nancy Friday went on to write
more than a half dozen books on women in sexuality.
(24:29):
She's widely considered an early sex positivity icon, an important
feminist figure in the sexual revolution in the world of media.
Even then she was a get. The fact that her
essay is relegated to Viva's brown paper bag inserts section
tells us a lot about who was actually calling Viva's
major shots, and it tells us a lot about how
(24:49):
much this middle aged male pornographer in chief had yet
to catch up to and adapt to the times. And
it also tells us a lot about the lengths to
which in these early days the women Viva fought to
execute their vision and work around him. Here's Betty Jane again.
We knew who we were working for, and we did
(25:11):
not let it strive from us. I would just go
after people I wanted to see in the maccine, and
it usually would be based on some book that was
coming out or recognition. We just did our stories or
articles and then had them put together with photo layouts
(25:38):
of soft porn, and by ignoring Bob's porn and landing
their own big name writers like Simone de Beauvois and
important up and comers like Nikki Giovanni, sometimes they managed
to pull their vision off. I guess we all felt
that we were like working against the tide and actually
(25:59):
kind of working under the radar, because I don't think
he ever read much of the magazine. And this this
was a shift because, with the exception of the graffiti pages,
Bob initially read most everything in Viva. It was a
big part of his job. And if Bob didn't read
the magazine anymore, what was he doing? Well? After months
(26:22):
of criticism and bad reviews pointed directly at him, he's
possibly rethinking the Viva formula after all, you know, the
thing to understand by my dad, because he was incredibly brilliant,
but he couldn't be a woman. He could beat many things,
but he couldn't be a woman, and therefore he couldn't
perceive how complex a woman's approach to six is. After
(26:47):
a few months, the criticism may have just become too
much for Bob, and he starts to lose interest in
his shiny new toy because in the issues following that
January nineteen seventy four editors letter at the beginning of
this episode, the one where Bob rails against Time Magazine
for criticizing his role as editor of Viva, Bob never
(27:07):
writes an editor's letter again, and in fact, by the
end of July of nineteen seventy four, there's an even
bigger shift in the magazine. Bob's name is no longer
on the masthead as editor. He's officially taken his editor
in chief ball and gone home. He never came. I
mean he would come into the office maybe once a month.
(27:29):
He was like a New York celebrity who never wanted
to leave the house. His father came into the office,
his sisters, children, lots of gucciono is in the office,
but not Bob. And the new editor, well, she's about
to push the magazine in a new direction and potentially
give Viva's readership what they actually want. What I do
(27:50):
remember was boxes of letters that would come in from
angry women who said show more. Cop Stiffed as an
original podcast from iHeartMedia and Crooked Media. It's produced by
(28:11):
Crooked Media. It's hosted and written by me Jennifer Romalini
and produced by Megan Donnas. Sidney Rath is our associate producer,
story editing by Mary Knoff, music sound design and engineering
by Hannes Brown. Our fact checker is Julia Paskin. Additional
production support from Nafula Cato and Inez Maza. Thanks to
(28:34):
Alex Peppadimus for reading the voice of Bob Guccioni and
to Ashley Ford for reading Loreno Grady from Crooked Media.
Our executive producers are Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, and Mary Knoff,
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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