Speaking of
folks who died last week,
Bob Guccione (probably my favourite pornographer of all time, whose effect on my own budding tastes would be well nigh impossible to overstate) finally succumbed to cancer
last Wednesday after years of
ill health and
poor fortune.
I regret I can't really do the man any kind of justice here in a blog tribute: there's simply too much to say about
Guccione, too much ground to cover - his roots as a
painter, inauspicious beginnings running a chain of laundromats (cleaning other people's dirty sheets, ha ha), his
global adventures and increasing sophistication...
Penthouse magazine's initial
delivery scandal and subsequent sales phenomenon, its introduction of pubic hair to magazine viewers, the combination of
"sex, politics, and protest" - as their byline put it - frequently running expose stories on government corruption and the like.
"We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Guccione told The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. He added that he attained a stylized eroticism in his photography by posing his models looking away from the camera. "To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen," he said. "That was the sexy part. That was the part that none of our competition understood."
Penthouse had the best photography of naked women available, and that was probably its chief virtue, plain and simple. Guccione himself was often
behind the camera, devoting
painterly aesthetics (and what appeared to be large amounts of gauze) toward creating boudoir fantasies that were their own little soft-focus world, sometimes taking days to complete a shoot. Arty photography was a mainstay of the magazine's pictorials and, later on in the 1990s, I for one thrilled to
Tony Ward's B&Ws.
But I digress. Penthouse had the
best comics in
the back, Penthouse Forum (worthy of a post in and of itself),
Xaviera Hollander writing an
advice column, genuinely
interesting articles and insightful interviews with big name personalities and thinkers, a sense that sexuality was something
worthy of exploring and considering, a willingness to feature kinks and unusual behaviour, even some good fiction occasionally.
Of course, in addition to publishing Penthouse,
Guccione gave the world
Omni,
Viva, Newlook,
Longevity, and, in conjunction with his son Bob Jr.,
Spin. Also, the singular cinematic
sex gross-out saga of all time,
Caligula. Celebrity
photo shoots we all know and love. The
Penthouse Pets. Then too a failed casino and nuclear power plant. By the end of his life, Guccione had sadly fallen out with much of his family, and (like another
NYC pornographer we've looked at here) done the whole rags to riches thing in reverse.
Of all the porn that was around when I was growing up,
Penthouse was by far my fave, better even than the odd expensive hardcore mag one might chance across. Like a lot of people at that time, I found Playboy boring and fake, Hustler gross and ugly. By contrast,
Penthouse Pets, the Forum,
Call Me Madam, Wicked Wanda -- this was a world of exotic, self-assured and often dominant women, women who would gladly lead you into kinky sex adventures if only the opportunity presented itself (or so it appeared).
For all that, I say thank you, Mr. Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione.
