Penthouse March 1976

Penthouse magazine
March 1976

March, 1976, and the Billboard Hot 100 of pop singles indicates that 'Oh What A Night', by the Four Seasons, is the top-selling song in the USA. At number 2 is the late Eric Carmen, with the weepy 'All By Myself'.

The latest issue of Penthouse magazine is on the stands. Let's take a look inside, shall we ?

The cover subject, and this month's Pet, is a lissome, twenty-six year-old English girl named Joann Witty. Joann coyly discloses that flying is her passion: '...the only thing I've ever found that excites me as much as making love.'

(According to PorPor Books Blog reader Lawrence, Joann, using the stage name 'Priscilla Barnes', starred as 'Teri' in the sitcom Three's Company !).

In the advertisements, we see yet another pitch for 'Hair Dimensions', a New York City medical office that got away a 'restoration' procedure that involved implanting plastic sutures into the scalps of balding men. Tufts of hair then were attached to the sutures. The procedure invariably led to infection of the scalp and loss of the attached hair. Victims of this 'breakthrough medical implant technique' required surgical removal of the sutures, with resultant scarring and disfigurement. 

Elsewhere in the March issue, we get an advertisement for an exploitative book called 'The Viva Rape Letters', a sleazy publication that no major magazine publisher would issue nowadays, in the 21st century. But things were different 48 years ago.

The music column for this March issue highlights a New York City band called Television, who are adamant that they are not a 'glitter' band (the term 'New Wave' was still some years in the future).

We have a cartoon that also would not pass muster nowadays........

The Interview in the March issue is with Star Trek producer and creator Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry goes to considerable effort to present himself as a Humanist of rare and powerful insight, as well as a Deep Thinker: towards the end of the interview he expounds on his theory of the 'socio-organism', a new 'species' that has come to dominate the planet.

Roddenberry is reticent about the status of the Star Trek film that he is working on at the time of the interview.  Of course, we now know, from Harlan Ellison's lengthy footnote in the 1981 Stephen King book 'Danse Macabre', that conflict between Roddenberry, his ego, and the studio, was complicating development of the film:

Paramount had been trying to get a Star Trek film in work for some time. Roddenberry was determined that his name would be on the writing credits somehow….the trouble is, he can’t write for sour owl poop. His one idea, done six or seven times in the series and again in the feature film, is that the crew of the Enterprise goes into deepest space, finds God, and God turns out to be insane, or a child, or both.

For a review by Ellison of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, readers are directed to this blog.

I hope you have enjoyed this excursion into pop culture, as it was 48 years ago.............