I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women's rights, but I just thought it would be fun. I found out later she'd asked Paul Newman first, but he turned her down. It would be a milestone in the sexual revolution, and she said I was the one man who could pull it off. She wanted the same prerogative for women. During a commercial break, she invited me to be the first male nude centerfold of the magazine.Īlthough no one had ever shown a naked man in a magazine before, Helen believed women have the same "visual appetites" as men, who'd been looking at naked women in Playboy since 1953. One night in early 1972, after Deliverance was in the can but before it was released, I was on The Tonight Show with Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and author of the best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl. Here, in an excerpt from the November 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan, more than 40 years after he posed atop the bearskin rug, Reynolds recalls the centerfold photoshoot in his own words.
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Still, despite his change of heart, Reynolds will be remembered as a man who played a significant role in Gurley Brown's own lifelong mission to put women's sexuality in the public eye. "They cared more about my pubes than they did the play." "Standing ovations turned into burlesque show hoots and catcalls," he wrote. In interviews throughout the last few years of his life, he expressed regret about the shoot and admitted that he looks back at himself during that time as "an egomaniac." In his memoir, My Life, Reynolds wrote that he found it strange how women reacted to him after the April 1972 issue hit stands. In 2016, Reynolds told Business Insider he felt the photo harmed his reputation as a "serious actor," and that Deliverance suffered because of the centerfold. The next year, when Doug Lambert created Playgirl, he credited the Reynolds centerfold as a source of inspiration.īut over the years, Reynolds grew to have a complicated relationship with the photoshoot that turned him into a sex symbol.
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Gurley Brown had pitched the idea to Reynolds as a "milestone in the sexual revolution." Prefacing the image was a declaration that a male centerfold was long overdue. He chose the photo that appeared in the magazine himself. His arm is strategically placed in front of his "tallywacker," as Reynolds later called it. He's got a smirk on his face, a limp cigarillo dangles from his lips, and a fuzzy bearskin rug is underneath his also-fuzzy body.
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Reynolds stretches across two full pages of the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan.
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"Well, nobody talked about it, but women liked to look at men naked. "At the time, you know, men liked to look at women naked," Gurley Brown later said. Shortly before Deliverance, his biggest film up to that point, was released, then-editor Helen Gurley Brown approached Reynolds to be the magazine's first-ever male centerfold. But in addition to his work on camera, Reynolds was also known as a heartthrob, and a now-iconic photoshoot that appeared in a 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan will forever be part of his legacy.