Penthouse October 1983

Penthouse magazine

October 1983

Let's step back in time 40 years to October, 1983, when (in the week of the 22nd) the top song in the nation, according to the Billboard Hot 100 chart, was 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' by Bonnie Tyler.

The latest issue of Penthouse magazine is on the stands, with actress Pia Zadora on the cover. Anyone who purchased nudie magazines back then knew that such media regularly had celebrities of one sort or another posing, clothed, on the cover. But inside, of course, the eager, sweaty-palmed readers would discover that the whole thing was a marketing tease: inside the magazine, in the pictorial, the celebrity remained clothed. Would that be the case for this October, 1983, issue ? We shall see.....

Back then, you could get a good pair of boots for under $100:

At the time, for what I was earning as a clerk at a drug store, neither Northlake, nor the 'competition', were in my financial reach.

We've got a funny cartoon. And an advertisement for branded outdoor gear, that looks pretty cool, from Camel cigarettes. For those of cerebral bent, the October issue offers an interview with Simon Wiesenthal, and an article on wines.

As for the opening pictorial, it features Audrey, a winsome 22 year-old who, we are assured, is 'up for grabs'.

An article on computers, by Ken Uston, tells us all about the wondrous Coleco 'Adam'. For under $600, you get 80K memory, a reader for something called a 'floppy disk', a printer, a word processing program, and, via the purchase of an additional adapter, the ability to play the 400+ video games in the Atari VCS system.

The Penthouse Pet for this issue is athletic young woman named Nadine Greenlaw, who is photographed on the beach in the Philippines: 'curious Filipinos flocked around our blue-eyed blonde in delirious droves.'

None other than Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams, appears in the Fall '83 fashion section !

As for Pia Zadora: born in 1954 in Hoboken, New Jersey, as  Pia Alfreda Schipani, at the age of 18, she married the 53 year-old Israeli financier Meshulam Riklis. Her career as an actress gained momentum after that, and  in '83 she was the star of the film The Lonely Lady, based on the Harold Robbins novel and released in September. As part of the promo for the film, Zadora agreed to pose nude for Penthouse and Bob Guccione. And the front cover of this issue was no tease, because Pia is indeed baring all for this pictorial........

Guccione seems to have had a particular fondness for Zadora. According to John Colapinto's 2004 article in Rolling Stone magazine, 'The Twilight of Bob Guccione', in 1987 Guccione wanted his son Bob, Jr., who edited the magazine, to put Zadora on the cover of Spin. When Bob, Jr. refused, an infuriated Guccione announced the magazine would no longer be published, only to discover that his son owned the right to the name, and thus it could be resurrected by another publisher. Guccione essentially disowned Bob Jr., who went on to continue publishing Spin with the aid of other investors. 

We'll close with the article 'Love Me, Kill Me'. 

It's an excerpt from a book-shopping endeavor by Deborah Spungen, mother of the ill-fated Nancy Spungen (born 1958). 

Nancy gained notoriety for being stabbed to death by former Sex Pistols member Sid Vicious, on October 12, 1978 in a room in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. Her Mom's article makes clear that Nancy was an accident waiting to happen. Her last days were marked by drug addiction, violence, and squalor. 

And so, there we were, with our copy of Penthouse, forty years ago............