Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione (December 17, 1930 – October 20, 2010)

After a long battle with cancer Bob Guccione founder of Penthouse has died in Texas at the age of 79.  We have covered much of his early life and inspiration for creating Penthouse magazine in our series of posts on The Pubic Wars on our other site: Venus Observations.   Starting and finishing his career as a painter Guccione had a vision of a men's magazine for the common man in London in the mid 1960s to counter Playboy. 

The first issue of Penthouse: September 1965

Launching in London in 1965 on the back of a storm of (welcome) publicity and questions in parliament he eventually took his magazine to the US and a battle with Playboy in 1969.

Margueite Cordier by Bob Guccione

 

A talented photographer (as even Playboy had to admit) he took many of the photographs for Penthouse (initially because he couldn't afford to employ a photographer); especially in the first twenty years of the magazine.  Using his painter's eye for colour and composition he developed a soft-focus, impressionist approach to his photographs of naked women which enabled him to portray them in an increasingly explicit manner without, at least initially, crossing the boundaries of bad taste.  While The Pubic Wars with Playboy and, later, Hustler eventually led to the genitally focussed photographs that dominate pornography today initially he was trying to create an atmosphere of genuine sensuality and eroticism in his pictorials.  His greatest contribution to the photography of naked women being the idea that the model was being observed unawares rather than presenting herself to the viewer, a la Playboy.

 

Despite the sterling work of his third wife, Kathy Keeton, in building a good business foundation for the magazine a series of disastrous financial deals put paid to his Empire.  Penthouse, Guccione estimated, earned $4 billion over the years and his personal wealth amounted to over $400 million in the nineteen eighties.  The high watermark of the magazine was the September 1984 issue which featured (and brought down) the first black Miss America, Vanessa Williams.  It sold 6 million copies and generated $14 million in revenue.  Incidentally, because that month's Pet of the Month, Traci Lords, turned out to be fifteen when her pictures were taken it is now almost impossible to buy a copy.  1984, however, perhaps appropriately, saw a huge change in the market for pornography with the increasing availability of cheap, pre-recorded video cassettes.  The advent of the internet, much of the compression technology  for which was driven by the porn industry, hit print magazines even further. 

Janine Lindemulder in Penthouse's first hard core pictorial in September 1997

 

Guccione, wrongly, thought that the only way to compete was for the magazine to go hard-core in the mid nineties.  However, this limited the retail outlets the magazine was available from and when the company went bankrupt in 2003 the magazine was taken over in October 2004 and the hardcore content was removed.  Penthouse, unlike Playboy never made much revenue from advertising and the loss of retail outlets saw circulation drop by 33% from 1997 to 2001. Today it has a circulation of just 178,000 a month, down from its 1984 high of 6 million. 

Guccione direct hard core inserts for Caligula with a positive cornucopia of Pets including  Juliet Morris, Carolyn Patsis and Suzanne Saxon

Poorly performing investments, including a proposed casino in Atlantic City and huge amounts of money spent on fusion power research further eroded Guccione's fortune.  In the end he had to sell his 30 room new York City mansion for $49m to Wall Street financier Philip Falcone to pay his debts.  Oddly, although his 1979 film Caligula is often touted as a financial disaster it was actually the most successful independent film of all time.

Self portrait of the artist with Patricia Barrett in 1972

In decline since the death of Kathy Keeton in 1997 (he continued to list her on the masthead of the magazine until he lost control of it), Guccione spent his latter years painting once more.

Guccione and his last wife in 2008

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Whipped Cream and Other Delights by Herb Albert and the Tijuana brass

Here, from 1965, is one of the most recognisable LP covers of all time. It certainly helped push the sales of Herb Alpert's album to sales of over 6 million copies in the US alone.

Despite the name of the group, there was nothing Mexican about Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. Herbert Albert was born in Los Angeles of Russian and Romanian Jewish origins. He learned to play the trumpet at the age of eight and gradually developed a musical career involving both singing and songwriting. A visit to a bullfight in Tijuana in 1962 gave him the idea, having seen mariachi bands perform there, of trying to recreate something of the atmosphere of the occasion.

In his home studio, set up in his garage, he produced what was to become the first single of the fictional group Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass; The Lonely Bull. Initially using Los Angeles session musicians by the time Whipped Cream... appeared as his fourth album the demand for live performances was such that he actually had to form a real band; none of whom were Mexican or even Latin, however. The year after Whipped Cream was released Albert had the never repeated feat of having five albums simultaneously on the Billboard pop albums chart.

Two of the many parodies of the cover

The much parodied cover, designed by maverick record cover designer Peter Whorf, features 28 year old model Dolores Erickson covered in what appears to be whipped cream but is actually shaving foam sprayed over a blanket (although it really is whipped cream on her head). She had to be cleverly photographed as she was three months pregnant at the time. Erickson was a friend of Alpert's and had been present in his garage studio when he recorded parts of the Lonely Bull album three years earlier.

Erickson appeared on a number of other record covers at the time; notably another sixties middle of the road classic and staple of the Agent Triple P lounge; Guantanamera by The Sandpipers. Erickson later went to art school and is now a painter living in Washington state.

Dolores today

The cover has been much imitated and when Albert did a remixed version of the album in 2006 it featured model Bree Condon dressed in far less "whipped cream" to far less effect.

Bree Condon in a "whipped cream" bikini

It's hard to credit now but the original cover was actually considered quite racy at the time.  Erickson remembers the cream slipping down her bust during the shoot and thinking that they would never be able to use the pictures.  People actually bought the album just for the cover and Alpert would tell audiences at concerts when playing tracks from the album "Sorry, we can't play the cover for you."

 An outatke from the photographic session

The fact is that Erickson looks magnificent in the pictures: pregnancy clearly agreeing with her and, as we can see from the black and white shot below, contributing to the most magnificent bust.

The album itself, loosely themed around tracks with titles relating to food, is not exactly a masterpiece but it does contain the classic A taste of honey.  It was perfect background music for Agent Triple P's pre-dinner drinks with his companion on the balcony of his hotel in Houston at the weekend.

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