GRIN AND BARE IT
Burt Reynolds changed the way we thought about sex by getting naked
Burt Reynolds is stretched out on a bearskin rug like it’s a machoman’s chaise longue. He is tanned and — much like the beast beneath him — very, very hairy. Bulging veins line his arms, one of which is conveniently placed in front of his nether regions. He is smiling easily, like he’s amused by what he’s depriving you of.
The 1972 photo — Cosmopolitan magazine’s first male centrefold — was a radical statement: that women had desires that deserved not just to be acknowledged, but to be catered to.
Looking back after Reynolds’ death Thursday, the centrefold has a powerful legacy. It captivated readers, challenged ideas about sexuality and spawned a wave of new publications. But although it launched Reynolds into a higher stratosphere of celebrity, his relationship with the picture was complicated.
The idea came to Helen Gurley Brown, the then-editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, one day in the late ’60s while she was washing the dishes.
“Men like to look at our bodies,” Brown, who served as editor in chief for 32 years, said as she explained the centrefold’s origins in a 2012 Salon interview. “We like to look at their bodies, though it’s not as well known.”
After making a tough pitch to Hearst Magazine executives, many of whom told her she’d gone too far, Gurley Brown approached Burt Reynolds in 1971, during a commercial break while he was standing in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and asked if he’d be interested in stripping down for Cosmopolitan. Gurley Brown pitched the centrefold as a milestone in the sexual revolution. She buttered him up, telling him he was “the one man who could pull it off.” (Reynolds learned she’d gone to Paul Newman first, but he declined.)
“I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women’s rights, but I just thought it would be fun,” Reynolds wrote later, adding that he might have been more gung-ho because of the cocktails he’d downed in the green room.
On the way to the photo shoot, a nervous Reynolds stopped for a couple quarts of vodka. The freezing studio was “bad for a naked man’s self-esteem,” Reynolds wrote. Fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo — who became famous for celebrity portraits that graced Cosmopolitan’s pages over 30 years — took hundreds of photos, creatively obscuring Reynolds’ genitalia with props and tactful positioning.
The picture that was eventually published in the April 1972 issue was chosen by Reynolds himself. The cover bore a bold, teasing banner: “At Last A Male Nude Centrefold — The Naked Truth About Guess Who!!” Inside, it was prefaced by a bold declaration that such a spread — and the acknowledgment of women’s desires — was long overdue.
“We had the feeling the reason naked women so abound in magazines, while there is such a dearth of nude men, is that, until recently, those in control of publications have been men, who thought only of pleasing their brother men, and neglected the visual appetites of us equally appreciative girls,” the text read.
It sold out, with more than 1.5 million total copies flying off the shelves in short order. When Doug Lambert created Playgirl the following year, he cited the Reynolds’ centrefold as early inspiration.
“It came to me, that’s what women want,” Lambert said. (Lambert’s wife had been telling him this for years, but he hadn’t bought in until the centrefold, according to reporting from Esquire.)
Cosmopolitan’s notoriety led some retailers to keep it behind counters, elevating it even further, Landers wrote. By the early ’80s, it was selling 2.8 million copies a year.
Reynolds had a similar explosion of popularity. The morning after the magazine came out, a mob of women waited outside his home, clutching magazines. He got lewd fan mail — including a letter from a woman in Nova Scotia containing pubic hair, according to his autobiography. Once, when he checked into a hotel, he discovered himself imprinted on the bedsheets.
“It was a total fiasco,” Reynolds wrote, referring to the photo as one of his biggest mistakes. “I thought people would be able to separate the fun-loving side of me from the serious actor, but I was wrong.”
During a South By Southwest appearance in 2016, Reynolds said it was “stupid” of him and confessed he’d wondered if the picture had robbed him of an Oscar nomination for his breakout film, Deliverance.
Whatever muddled feelings Reynolds might have had about the photo as he aged, its legacy is undeniable. The man on the bearskin rug will surely be archived in the American memory for decades to come.