Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 32
Guccione’s models often reported that they enjoyed being photographed. As Divina Celeste, the February 1982 Penthouse Pet, enthused, “He created this beautiful person I wasn’t expecting to see. It was so inspiring. I wish I could give one Penthouse day to every woman.”
Guccione described a typical shoot this way: “The first day, my models would think, ‘What a marvellous guy. He didn’t take one step toward me.’ The second day, they would think, ‘He’s a funny guy. He didn’t lay a hand on me.’ The third day, they would make a move to prove themselves, and I would have to leave till they cooled down.”
Jane Homlish, Guccione’s personal assistant, verified his version. “All the girls were crazy about Bob, and he’d have to come in and get me.”
As well as pin-ups, Penthouse—like Playboy—attempted to provide sophisticated, well-written editorial content by the smartest authors of the day. As Lynn Barber, a Penthouse editor, irreverently explained, “It was for connoisseurs of fine wine, connoisseurs of fine cars, connoisseurs of beautiful women with big tits.”
Penthouse was launched in Britain in 1965, outsold Playboy in its first week, then kept right on going. Guccione’s pride was palpable. “When I held the first copy in my hand, I said, ‘This is like a father holding a child for the first time,’ and I knew I would take this magazine out of England to the U.S. and do battle with Playboy.”
Guccione attributed the magazine’s success to its crystallization of changing attitudes. Bob Jr. agreed. “At that time in society, most men’s first experience with sex was in marriage. My dad understood that men wanted their guilty feelings lifted.”
Shortly after the launch, Guccione met the woman who would shape his personal and professional life for the next several decades. Kathy Keeton was nine years his junior. She had moved from South Africa to London at the age of thirteen to study ballet. Fifteen years later, she met Guccione while working as a burlesque dancer in London’s West End. He was impressed by the fact that her dressing room contained books on science and the Financial Times. She was impressed by Guccione’s entrepreneurial skills and by his dreams. “I was bored to tears with dancing, and I didn’t see any future in it,” said Keeton. “If I’d had a chance, I would have been a biologist, but girls didn’t do that in those days.”
Keeton told Guccione that she wanted to give up the stage to sell ads for Penthouse. When she brought in high-end clients such as Pernod, Barclay’s Bank and Riviera cigarettes, he made her his president and COO. They were well matched: Keeton was tough and cool while Guccione was warm and creative.
“My imagination has a career,” said Guccione. “I’m just tagging along.”
Keeton became the architect of Guccione’s business success, and ultimately his third wife. Under her leadership, Penthouse became one of the few magazines in the world almost exclusively run by women. Keeton called them “an unexploited resource.” She wasn’t bothered by his frequent affairs. “She knew Bob would come home to her and their relationship was more than just physical,” said Jane Homlish.
One of Guccione’s long-term affairs was with Penthouse Pet Victoria Lynn Johnson. “I was in love with him. So was everyone—his staff, his secretary, and I was ready to go for it. He exuded sexuality through his lens and his voice. He could make a woman melt like a scoop of ice cream. I was in the running with four models for Penthouse Pet, August 1976, which meant I’d be going to London with this man, and staying in the same apartment a whole day to work out this fantasy. Afterwards, he said, ‘I have cooked spaghetti for us.’ We had pasta and wine. We talked. He walked me to my room. I turned to say goodnight, to kiss him on the cheek. I never made it to his cheek. Making love to Bob was an experience. I never felt like I was his mistress, or one of the girls. I think he loved to give pleasure as much as to receive it, and maybe even more.”
I interviewed Victoria in Houston, Texas. While we were watching footage of her interview, she asked her boyfriend, a Houston dentist, “Would you mind leaving the room. I need to do this alone.” I stood up to leave as well, but Victoria stopped me. “Oh, no, you can stay.” And she began describing what it was like to make love with Bob Guccione. She described this in great detail, losing herself in the experience, till I felt like I was in a 190°F room. It was like Bertolucci’s X-rated Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider making raw, erotic love in an empty apartment. Since the character played by Maria shot Brando after having told him too much, this was a bit worrisome. When my scene with Victoria was over, I was still alive. Sweating, but alive.
I also interviewed a bona fide insider on the Gucionne-Keeton marriage: Xaviera Hollander, a New York madam who gained fame in the ’70s because of scandals that connected her with political figures. She described it all in her memoir The Happy Hooker. After her exile, for legal reasons, from New York, Guccione hired her to write a column for Penthouse, titled “Call Me Madam.” She poetically described her readers’ letters to me as, “Penis too big, penis too small. I’m coming too quick, I can’t come at all.” And, the edgier ones: “If I like seeing my wife and my boss making out, am I a homo?”
Hollander agreed to be interviewed if I would come to Amsterdam. I did as requested, soon discovering that she was a one-person Dutch industry. She owned dozens of bed and breakfasts, plus she was a playwright and producer who invested in the theatre. She owned a multimillion-dollar house in Amsterdam, which she called a Bed & Brothel. Her conditions: I was to pay her five hundred euros and to stay two nights. What was I getting into?
I explained the deal to Ken Ng, my lead cameraman, and added, “I’ll pay her, but I’m only staying one night.”
Xaviera answered her own door. A robust seventy-five, she was larger than life, both personally and figuratively. She grabbed, hugged and kissed me, saying, “Barry, I’m so happy!” She then identified herself as a Jew to make us simpatico. Her husband was sitting at a table covered with marijuana, from which he was removing the seeds.
Xaviera told me, “You can help yourself.”
“Okay.” When in Rome, savour the grapes.
Her walls were plastered with erotica. “We’ll do the interview later,” she announced. “You’re going to stay tonight and tomorrow night, right?”
“I can’t stay tomorrow night. I’m sorry but I have to leave.”
“Do you have the five hundred euros?”
I gave Xaviera an envelope, which I thought contained only the money. As it turned out, it also contained my boarding pass and airplane ticket for my return flight. Fortunately, I managed to take those back before she saw them.
While we waited for Xaviera’s makeup person, Ken set up his cameras.
She asked him, “What are you, Ken—Asian?”
“Yes.”
“Small penis.”
“No, that’s not true.”
“Yes it is. I’ve been with other Chinese movie stars, but a small penis—that’s okay.”
Ken said, “I don’t have a small penis.” Understandably, he was now in a bad mood. I had to wonder if my film would be in focus.
Xaviera’s makeup person arrived, and we did the interview.
I asked Xaviera a question to which I expected a connoisseur’s answer: “What was it like making love with Bob Guccione?”
She grumped, “Boring.” Xaviera also claimed to have had a three-way with Kathy Keeton: “Boring again. I don’t think she’d ever had an orgasm.”
Xaviera’s conversation then turned to specifics, but as it turned out, she was more interested in the quality of Guccione’s Italian shoes than his genitalia or his fabled sexual prowess. Afterwards, Xaviera wanted to take Ken and me out for dinner. That part was great, but next came the part where we had to sleep in her Bed & Brothel. By way of self-defence, I told her, “I’m sorry but I have to leave at three a.m. to catch my flight.”
She replied, “I can arrange a taxi for you. It will be fifty euros to the airport.”
I managed to finagle Xaviera’s detached coach house, leaving Ken to sleep in a room upstairs in Bed & Brothel. He was half-convinced he would be jumped in the night by someone with a tape measure. Even in the relative security of the coach house, I stayed up all night. I was waiting outside with my bag at 3 a.m.
Who turned up to take me to the airport? Xaviera’s husband.
The instant I climbed in his car, he said, “fifty euros.” I was happy to pay, simply to get the hell out of there.
Guccione launched Penthouse in the U.S. in 1969. At first, he was intimidated at the sight of Hef’s omnipresent tall-eared bunny logo—on nightclubs, on keychains, on the Playboy jet. Nevertheless, he made his intentions clear in an ad in the New York Times entitled, “We’re Going Rabbit Hunting.” It showed a silhouette of the Playboy bunny, head riddled by ten bullet holes. According to the ad’s designer, George Lois, when Guccione saw it, he did an Irish jig. The warning that Hefner might sue over trademark infringement only made Guccione happier. “Do you think he would? That would be great!” His own cartoon doodles included a Playboy rabbit with a tear dripping from one eye, and a pair of bunny ears sticking out of a toilet bowl.
Guccione described his assault on Playboy magazine as comparable to Hannibal’s attack on Rome, through the Alps, the snow and the ice, with elephants and troops ready to fight like guerrillas. It was an assault that hit Playboy, quite literally, below the belt, in what became known as The Pubic Wars. In earlier issues of Penthouse, the crotch between the spread legs of the Penthouse Pets had been covered. However, one issue featured a small side photo of a naked woman, strolling down a beach with a just-visible curl of black pubic hair. “When no one complained, our next issue had more pubic hair,” said art director Joe Brooks. “Then, when critics did jump in, Guccione used the previous issue as a precedent.”
He defended his first pubic-haired centrefold on the grounds of female liberation. “We repudiate that guilt-inspiring attitude that a woman’s genitals need to be hidden. Nothing is more beautiful than a woman’s body.” Bob Jr. supported his father’s decision. “Millions of American men were now seeing anuses and vaginas for the first time. My father was like a single-combat warrior for them, coming out like Batman in cape and boots.”
A shocked Hugh Hefner told Time magazine, “There will be no pubic hair in Playboy—ever.” Nine months later, a wisp of pubic hair made its first appearance in Hef’s magazine. There was no going back.
By 1980, Penthouse had caught up to Playboy in circulation, and was grossing $140 million a year. Guccione—well-built and handsome, with dark, curly hair—became a ’70s celebrity, and then a caricature. That was partly to do with his uniform. He wore tight Italian leather pants, high boots and open shirts that revealed a hairy, tanned chest, and so many gold chains that they jingled as he walked. Those chains meant more than mere wealth to Guccione. The first one had been given to him by his mom, who exuded pride in her notorious son.
“I wore my shirt open to school once,” confessed an aspiring Bob Jr., “but never again.”
Along with Penthouse’s sensational visuals, Guccione featured tougher, more investigative articles than Playboy and other men’s magazines. Political scandals, government corruption, even the Mafia’s misdeeds were catnip to him. He was a tireless supporter of Vietnam veterans, and printed article after article about their shabby treatment because of the unpopularity of that war. He even opened a Washington office specifically to lobby for their support.
“My fondest memories of working for Penthouse were visiting veterans’ hospitals,” said Penthouse Pet Davina Celeste. “I tried to visit every person in the hospital—privates, generals, sergeants. Bob was devastated about how they were being pushed around and forgotten.”
A scandal erupted in 1984 when Guccione printed erotic, lesbian, bondage photos of Vanessa Williams, the first black woman to be crowned Miss America. These nude photos, taken much earlier in Vanessa’s career, forced her to give up her Miss America crown. Since I had become friendly with Vanessa while shooting commercials for Kiss of the Spider Woman, I approached her to appear in the Guccione film. Her agent replied with a rude note which could be summed up as, “Are you out of your mind?”
I argued, “Vanessa Williams became a star overnight as a result of the scandal. Certainly, her career is safe enough to look back on this and comment.”
No way.
As Bob Jr. recalled, “We thought we’d sell maybe fifty thousand copies of Vanessa. Instead, we sold seven million. We couldn’t get paper to print them fast enough. People were paying a couple of hundred dollars for an issue, five dollars for a Xerox, one dollar for a look. Half of America had masturbated to Miss America, and now the pageant wanted to take it out on someone. I believe Penthouse was forever besmirched.” Hugh Hefner went on record to express his shock. “This is an invasion of Vanessa Williams’ personal life, and that is immoral.”
Guccione invested $US17 million of his own money to finance the epic movie, Caligula, with the intention of changing modern Western culture by showing Rome at its most erotically decadent. As Caligula, he cast Malcolm McDowell, with Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole in supporting roles. Gore Vidal was the original scriptwriter, but later withdrew his name. For the orgy scenes, with their lavish production values, the casting director was charged with finding big-breasted women who didn’t mind being naked, and men with large penises. Helen Mirren later described the film as “an irresistible mix of art and genitals.” Everything about the making of the film was controversial, including the editing. Guccione later lamented, “I had to steal my own film back, two hundred miles [of film] stuffed into luggage. Instead of the feature I wanted, the editor had created one that could be shown anywhere.”
Guccione also had to purchase his own New York theatre, which he renamed the Penthouse East, to show it. The more disgusted the reviewers, the longer the lineups. It played for a year, and had a limited release in other cities.
In 1982, Forbes ranked Guccione in their list of the world’s 400 wealthiest people, with a reported $400 million net worth. Along with his burgeoning success, he had adopted a luxurious lifestyle, expressed prophetically in his motto, “It’s easy to go down, so live it up.” His new 22,000-square-foot, Madison Avenue office and residence was outfitted like an Imperial Roman palace. Italian and French artisans were imported to install mosaic tiles, stately pillars and arches, a sumptuous pool with wall medallions, tons of marble and gilt (even on a toilet seat), along with Judy Garland’s gold piano. Guccione had also initiated what would become a world-class art collection, including works by Modigliani, Dürer, Picasso, El Greco, Pissarro, Renoir, van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse and Botticelli. “Visitors would stop and stare,” said art director Joe Brooks. “They would exclaim, ‘Is that a Holbein?’”
Of special significance was a painting by Edgar Degas of a woman disrobing with her back to the viewer. As a young boy, Guccione had fallen in love with a reproduction of that picture, which he had cut from a magazine and carried in his pocket. “One day, I am going to own this picture.”
Instead of the orgies once associated with Playboy Mansion, the centrepiece of Guccione’s mansion was a long, marble table, around which he collected scientists such as Carl Sagan, financiers like Malcolm Forbes, promising young artists and athletes, as well as the requisite beautiful women. A great compliment to his guests was when their host, a remarkably good chef, cooked the dinner.
Guccione’s social interests along with his business empire distracted him from being an involved father. “We kids just dealt with the fact that Dad wasn’t going to be there for us a lot,” said Nick, his youngest son. “Most of the time he was at a long table full of people, always at that distance, but we got through that.”
As for the Penthouse Pets always hanging about the mansion, Nick added, “My hormones were flying, but Dad told all these beautiful girls, ‘Don’t go near the kids,’ and he told us the same. The Pets were taboo.” Nevertheless, Nick confessed during our interview to sometimes scoring with them outside the mansion. This aroused the belated envy of Bob Jr., “My hero!”
Guccione became a voracious empire-builder. His General Media not only published Penthouse, but dozens of other magazines, including Forum, which provided advice on sex and relationships, and Omni, which featured scientific articles. “We were all looking for answers as to why we were here, and where we were going,” he said. “The church hadn’t moved ahead as quickly as it could. Only science was answering these questions.”
Guccione launched Anna Wintour’s career as a fashion editor at his Viva magazine. He also made Bob Jr. editor of his alternative rock magazine, a decision that led to a painful father-and-son scrap over ownership. The two were estranged because of the dispute for many years.
After pouring millions into a fusion energy plant that was never built, Guccione rolled the dice on his biggest gamble. He started construction on a $150 million casino in Atlantic City without first obtaining either a casino licence or the financing. In 1987, Guccione tried to sell the rusting steel framework of the unbuilt casino to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, which would make the Sands then a competitor to Donald Trump’s Atlantic City project. When Trump tried to block the sale, Penthouse threatened to expose his affair with Marla Maples. Trump ultimately won the battle, bought the property and built a new casino, making Guccione one of the biggest losers in gambling’s history.
