Playboy
March 1975
Let's take a stroll down memory lane to March, 1975. Frankie Valli is atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart with his single 'My Eyes Adored You.' Minnie Riperton, the mother of Saturday Night Live actress Maya Rudolph, sits at number 3 with 'Lovin' You,' while Olivia Newton-John is enjoying success with 'Have You Never Been Mellow,' a quintessential 70s 'Me Decade' song.
The latest issue of Playboy magazine is out on the stands. Its lead pictorial features the 27 year-old, up-and-coming actress Margot Kidder, who Baby Boomers will remember as portraying Lois Lane in the Superman films of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In posing for the magazine, Margot is adamant that it is an act of regaining control of the discourse on the female body and its presentation to the make gaze. Or something like that.........
Hopefully. these pictures are of a real honest-to-God in-the-flesh fucked-up-like-everybody-else human being. At first I said no to Playboy, pleading male chauvinism. Finally I said yes in a fit of missionary zeal. I'll show them what a real body looks like, I thought to myself. I'll be brave and outrageous and get the photographer to show me in all my imperfect glory.
Later in life, Kidder struggled with addictions and mental illness. She died in 2018 (by suicide), at age 69.
During the seventies Playboy editors idolized Kris Kristofferson, seeing him as the sort of rugged individualist, 'man's man' type who could fit comfortably into the counterculture and yet also credibly represent country music, with its reactionary sensibilities. 'Just A Good Ole Rhodes Scholar,' by Jack McClintok, treats Kristofferson with veneration.
John Hughes contributes 'Chariots of the Clods,' a satirical treatment of Erich von Daniken and the Ancient Astronauts franchise. It's a piece that would have been more at home in the National Lampoon. Later in the decade, Hughes would indeed be a major contributor to the Lampoon, and in the 80s, a very successful feature film director (National Lampoon's Vacation, The Breakfast Club).
'Up Out of Zoar,' by Ben Maddow (the pen name of author and playwright David Wolffe), illustrated by Doug Gervasi, is science fiction, and provides an offbeat examination of the Last Man on Earth theme. It is superior to many of the New Wave era treatments of this theme.
In 'The Jail,' by Jesse Hill Ford, an abrasive, affluent, New York City Jew finds himself caught up in Southern Fried Weirdness, Tennessee-style. The illustration is by Christian Piper.
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