Playboy October 1973

Playboy 

October 1973

October, 1973, one of the most momentous months in the entire decade of the 1970s. I was 13 and the beginning of the month was unremarkable, just Fall coming into focus as it always did at that time of the year.

 

Atop the Billboard 200 album chart was Goat's Head Soup by the Stones. Leading the Top 40 singles was Cher, with 'Half Breed.'  

Looking at the Cashbox Hot 100 for the middle of the month, at the lower reaches there are all sorts of overlooked little gems......like 'Outlaw Man' by the Eagles, sitting at number 49. A great rock n roll number !

The mellow mood of October began to change with the start of the Yom Kippur War on October 6, and the increasing threats by OPEC to leverage oil exports to the West as a political weapon.

On October 19, angry that Nixon had sent massive amounts of military and financial aid to Israel, and worried that the Israelis were going to invade Syria and Egypt, King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia implemented an oil embargo on the U.S. The effect was catastrophic for a nation that was unaware of its reliance on oil imports. The economic shock of the embargo would resonate throughout the decade.....

For now, though, let's pretend it's the second week of the month and no crisis is in the offing. Let's open up the latest issue of Playboy, with centerfold Valerie Lane posing on the cover. 

There's a spicy pictorial of American Indian actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, aka Maria Louise Cruz. After her death in October, 2022, Little feather's family revealed she had no Indian ancestry. But for that magical early October of 1973, she was a 'legitimate' Native American.

For a fiction piece, we have another of Robert Sheckley's many contributions to the magazine, a short story titled 'Voices,' featuring a middle-aged, paunchy, secretive accountant named Mr. West. Mr. West begins hearing a voice in his head; they seem to know a lot. Initially skeptical, West discovers that following the recommendations of the voice is an invaluable aid in business. 

There is a creepy, sleazy note to the story, involving West's niece, but that's how things were 50 years ago. 'Voices' does have a great illustration by Dan Morrill.

One of the men profiled in 'On the Scene' is an up-and-coming Country and Western artist named Waylon Jennings.  

Playboy's History of Organized Crime has another installment, this one about the New York City mob during Prohibition. It's rather dull.

Considerably more rewarding is the pictorial of Ms Lane, a hair stylist at 'Mr. Ron's' salon in Newport Beach.

 

 

 

 

The Air Force, like all military services, was struggling to attract recruits. Perhaps the promise of working with computers - and tape drives and punch cards - would aid recruitment ?

Morton Hunt provides an article on 'Sexual Behavior in the 1970s,' an opportunity for Playboy readers to see who was doing what, as compared to their own erotic behaviors. This type of 'survey research' always is suspect, so I'll simply provide the graphs, without comment.

And so we end our little sojourn, fifty-three years into the past, and bask in that Autumn glow, when gas was 36 cents a gallon, when an LP record cost $5, and when soft-focus redheads looked alluring........