Raining Again Live at the Fonda La
Late nights at the Playboy Mansion, nibbles of acid, and a sexy girl taking photos of sexy girls. The true story of pioneering 'rebel camera girl' Suze Randall.
For the fifth straight day it's raining in Los Angeles, a near Biblical flood that's turned the hills of Malibu into a muddy mess. It's late January and I'm driving up a long, unmarked dirt road, windshield wipers working overtime as I pass an old-timey horse stable. This can't possibly be the way, I think, as some kind of Labrador stares at my car.
But this is the place. Atop the mountain sits a picturesque Spanish-style house spread on 30 acres with forever views of the Santa Monica mountains. Though the Kardashians live nearby in Calabasas, I've never felt so far from Hollywood's trappings.
A massive roaring fire awaits inside and I take my seat on a deep plush couch. The mood feels a bit like the beginning of Titanic, when the maritime mystery-solver (Bill Paxton) comes to meet a wizened Rose (Gloria Stuart). Likewise, here sits a gray-haired spitfire ready to shock with an unlikely tale of romance, self-discovery, and (yes) pornography. Suze Randall, now 70, was the first woman to shoot a full frontal for Playboy, a pioneering artist, and an unlikely impresario of online erotica who never quite got her due.
Understandably, Suze isn't quite sure where to begin. She's dressed in faded denim and a cotton sweater, with tight curls framing her face; she looks more like a contestant on The Great British Baking Show than someone who says she once seduced Warren Beatty. She points to a framed black-and-white photograph of herself from the 1970s. She'd just moved out of the Playboy Mansion, she explains, when she was introduced to Helmut Newton, who needed someone to show him around Los Angeles. In the photo, Suze is sitting outside a dilapidated apartment building wearing a t-shirt and no pants. "Helmut Newton took that photograph," she mutters matter-of-factly. "And that's my bush."
At 22, Suze was working as a nurse at a London teaching hospital in the late '60s while studying for her midwifery degree. She was sharing a crappy Earls Court flat with seven other nurses and dating an aspiring novelist named Humphry Knipe when she spotted an advertisement in an underground newspaper: "Attractive girls wanted for nude modeling. No experience needed. Make up to 100 pounds a day." Though Suze, who grew up in working-class Worcestershire, had never been described as shy, pornography was an unlikely side hustle. "I would've been very happy to stay a nurse," Suze says now, "but Humphry had these fantasies of becoming a very rich and powerful writer. I got into this to make some money."
One hundred pounds wasn't a fortune, but it was more than she was making changing bedpans. And shortly after visiting a pervy photographer at his office down a dodgy alley, Suze appeared in a London tabloid called Mayfair. The whole story might have ended there had David Hurn—the cameraman who memorably photographed Jane Fonda as Barbarella—not encouraged Suze to try modeling with her clothes on.
Suze never saw herself as a model; her legs weren't long enough, for one thing. But with her Mia Farrow-esque pixie cut, she had a look. An agency took her on, and she quickly booked catalog work and a feature for British Vogue. Feeling high on her future prospects, Suze waltzed down Bond Street and dropped about ₤900 that she didn't really have on a new Nikon camera.
But when the Vogue spread came out, she was barely recognizable. She tried acting, making a brief appearance as a saucy housekeeper in the 1972 Éric Rohmer film Chloe In the Afternoon, even popping up in the film's trailer. But the auditioning and waiting didn't suit her. Broke again, she picked up the Nikon and started to take topless photographs of her friends. Her playful work caught the attention of some editors at The Sun (a newspaper that famously printed topless photos on page 3), and Suze suddenly found herself with a promising second career.
Being her own boss for the first time was thrilling. "You're not asking some idiot to give you a job—on your knees, begging, giving him a blowjob or whatever it takes," she says. "I had the best gimmick in the business," she says, "a sexy girl taking pictures of sexy girls." If she had a lot to learn about lighting and composition, she had other advantages: women would sit for her who would never take their top off for men. "I wasn't trying to get in their pants," Suze explains. The tabloids even had a nickname for her: "rebel camera-girl Suze." The nice thing about nudes, she adds, "Is that you can sell them."
Suze had taken some snapshots of a young, leggy Norwegian model named Lillian Müller, and Playboy's man in London agreed to send the photos to the magazine's main office in Chicago. For weeks Suze heard nothing, and then the news came: Hef wanted her for the cover.
Suze was 29 years old when she and Lillian stepped off the plane in Chicago. But while Lillian was invited to the Playboy offices to meet the staff and do a test shoot, Suze was largely ignored. The magazine, Suze quickly realized, had no intention of hiring her as a photographer. "It was a boy's club," she says. "They said, 'Oh Suze, nudes and food are the hardest things to shoot. We can't have you do it. Come back when you have more experience.'"
They weren't exactly wrong about her lack of experience, though they'd woefully underestimated Suze's resolve. She threatened to sell the images to Penthouse, and the magazine's brass relented. Suze and Lillian would continue on to L.A. where Suze would photograph Lillian for the cover and a 12-page pictorial (everything but the centerfold). Where would they stay? The Playboy Mansion, of course.
The 29-room, 20,000-square-foot Playboy Mansion sits on five acres in Holmby Hills, a historic neighborhood that—along with Beverly Hills and Bel Air—forms the Platinum Triangle. Exotic birds are known to mill about the Playboy property. When Suze and Lillian's car pulled up to the gates that first night, a massive male peacock strutted across the entranceway with his feathers erect. Talk about symbolism. Suze and Lillian dropped their bags in their bedrooms and, within the hour, were splashing around in the Mansion's famous grotto, a wading-pool-hot-tub hidden behind a waterfall (at least, that's how Rob Lowe described it in his memoir). They would stay at the Mansion for three weeks, shooting at the Playboy studio on La Cienega Boulevard and partying at night.
Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood, and James Caan all frequented the Mansion in those days, as did Vincent T. Bugliosi, who famously prosecuted Charles Manson and later wrote the 1974 bestseller about the case, Helter Skelter. According to Suze, Sundays were dubbed the "Society Day," and a lavish buffet of shrimp and lobster would appear before everyone was ushered into the screening room. (Rumor had it that Hef ate exactly one meal a day—in his bedroom, sometime between midnight and 5 a.m.)
Suze's photographs of Lillian ran in the August 1975 issue of Playboy; on the cover, Lillian holds a rose between her legs. That the photographs were taken by a woman became a selling point. Under the headline—"Scandinavian Modern"— the text read like a Sapphic love story: the tale of a "restless college student specializing in languages" and a former model "who'd switched to the other side of the camera." The two women, the text teased, even "wound up rooming together."
Suze wasn't the first woman to shoot for Playboy. (That honor is believed to belong to Bunny Yeager, who photographed Bettie Page for the magazine in the 1950s.) But Suze was the first to shoot a full-frontal spread and worked exclusively for them for two years. That position came with challenges. She was such a curious sight that when legendary footballer Jim Brown (notorious for his NFL feats and for accusations of violence against women that trailed his career), stopped by the Mansion one day, he couldn't understand why Suze had a camera in her hand, Suze says. Or her clothes on. He'd just assumed she was another model.
That was a common sentiment. On one of her early shoots, Suze recalls a resentful male assistant telling her to "load your own damn film." Other men felt she hadn't earned her spot—and there was some truth to that. Hef never would have flown an unknown British photographer to the United States to photograph a nubile nobody. But a rebellious former erotic model with a camera? The more the merrier. "I got in through the backdoor," Suze admits. "I jumped the line." It didn't help that she was the only photographer Hef regularly invited to the Mansion, a playground generally off-limits to the hired help.
Suze had something else some of her male colleagues envied: an ease with the models, and an understanding of what it was to be in front of the camera. "A lot of the guys," she says, "were under pressure and didn't think about the model. They would stand you on a plain background and they'd say 'Do something!' One famous fashion photographer freaked me out so much that I couldn't walk." As a photographer," Suze adds, "you're only as good as your model feels." Oddly, her nursing degree proved to be an asset. "You learn a good bedside manner. And you're comfortable with people with their clothes off."
Though most of her male colleagues were more like competitors, Suze did have one ally: the magazine's legendary west coast editor, Marilyn Grabowski. In a 2005 interview with the L.A. Times, Hef referred to Marilyn as his secret weapon: "A woman's input is key," he said of her. "If you don't have that in mind, then you're going to be spending a lot of time in the locker room. Alone."
"Marilyn helped me in order to piss off the other boys," Suze says. It was Marilyn who taught Suze the art of draping. "This was before re-touching. I used cheats to cover up any imperfections and bring out the best qualities in the women. That was very important to me. Whereas a guy doesn't really see that."
In 1976, Suze took some racy self-portraits for Playboy titled "Picturing Herself." "This time around," the copy read, "Suze has photographed the gorgeous…Suze." In the text she talks about how she likes to have sex in elevators or "anyplace where there's a chance of being caught with my knickers down." And those nudes led to a rush of fan mail. Even now, she likes to note that she was paid the same rate as the boys for her photographs, and she was paid as a model.
During those two years—from '75 to '77—Suze and Humphry, who had joined her in L.A., were going to the Mansion three or four nights a week, pulling up to the gates in a rusted Mercury Comet that Suze had bought for $325. "We were the first ones to be descended upon by the valets," says Humphry. And Suze became something of an unofficial host, the one to kickstart the party. "People would just be sitting in the corner!" Suze says. "They didn't know how to introduce people or anything like that. I was quite good at it because I'd got an English education." It helped that she never wore underwear on those nights and that she'd spin around on the dance floor, pulling up her dress and flashing people to get things going.
"Hef used to come up to me, chewing on his cigar, and say, 'Do you think your lady will dance her dance tonight?'" Humphry recalls. "All the celebrities would be around in a big circle gaping at this girl flashing her pubes." Suze started referring to these Sunday parties as "going to church." She wasn't afraid to make a fool of herself to impress the boss. But she was always in control. Taking one-twentieth of a hit of acid before the parties helped keep her from ever getting drunk, she reports.
Suze's time at Playboy would ultimately be short-lived. While she was working at the magazine, she and Humphry collaborated on a book—an extremely readable, often dirty tome called SUZE: The Memoirs of the Stunning Sexess Who Clicked on Both Sides of the Playboy Camera that was published in 1977. Though the book is more kiss than tell, Hef felt betrayed—and perhaps rightfully so. Suze insists she told Hef's assistant about the book. But "assistants don't like to tell their bosses anything that might be a problem," Suze acknowledges. "She just kept saying, 'As long as you don't discuss drugs'—not that I ever saw Hef take drugs—'it should be fine.'"
But when the British rag News of the World published an excerpt in advance of publication, Hef wasn't happy. As Suze tells it, Hef didn't actually fire her until she photographed herself for Hustler in 1977—a publicity stunt designed to drive book sales. ("Playboy photographer shows pink," reads the coverline, over a photo of Suze draped across a tufted sofa with her fingers between her legs.) "Hef took himself too seriously," Suze says "He used to say, 'We're not pornographers!'" Like all breakup stories, the facts surrounding Suze's parting from Playboy are a little fuzzy, but Suze, needing to pay the bills, eventually took a gig with Hustler.
Famed Hustler publisher Larry Flynt encouraged her to start shooting erotic films, Suze's Hot Reels. (Humphry got in on the act as well, writing and directing a movie called Love Bites, in which a mosquito turns a woman into a sexual demon.) Suze shot a Robert Palmer album cover in Europe. Reuben Sturman, who the New Yorker once described as the "creator of the adult entertainment industry," employed her as well. (Sturman was later busted on tax evasion and died in prison. "Don't fuck with the tax man," Suze says.)
Ginger Lynn, whom the trade publication AVN once ranked as the #7 porn star of all time, did her first-ever erotic photo shoot with Suze during these years. "Here was this vivacious, energetic, naughty, foul-mouthed but sweet, brazen woman. Moving on to male photographers was a shock. I don't want to say there was a creep factor. Suze could say the exact same thing as a man would say, but when it came out of Suze's mouth, it was funny and acceptable. Suze would say, 'Oh, Spread your pussy lips for me darling.' And it would be, 'Alright!'"
"In so many ways, she inspired me," Ginger adds. "We were shooting in Mexico, and I was posing on a rock out in the ocean. Suze had just given birth. She was sitting up on these rocks getting these incredible shots with the waves splashing up. She had her camera in one hand and her baby scooped in the other, literally breastfeeding and shooting at the same time. She showed me: You can do anything. You can be in this industry and be a business woman and be feared and respected by men."
But the business was changing—and contracting. When Penthouse went bankrupt, founder Bob Guccione owed Suze something like $70,000. In lieu of cash—which he clearly didn't have—she asked for the rights to all of her photographs. She negotiated a similar deal with High Society when that magazine faltered.
If there was a silver lining to her departure from Playboy, it's the survival instinct it instilled in her: "All the other motherfuckers who kept on working for Playboy never owned their pictures. I became more independent." When the Internet exploded, some bottom-feeders inquired about licensing Suze's work. Humphry very wisely suggested they launch an online archive of Suze's work themselves; thus the porn site suze.net was born, featuring some 80,000 photographs. Very quickly, the site grew to 12,000 subscribers, each paying $24.95 a month. In its heyday, they were making $400,000 a year from the site alone. "The money was just rolling in," Humphry says. "It was embarrassing."
Suze's three children were born in the late '70s and mid-'80s. And while she swanned about Hollywood with them in tow—her daughter Holly recalls a family legend about her brother pissing in Larry Flynt's pool, "like it was a large urinal"—Suze was also quite strict at home. "People automatically assume I had a weird upbringing," says Holly, now 38. "But we could only watch TV on the weekends. Education was really important to my parents. We had dinner every night together." Holly knew her parents were photographers, she says, and "the photographs were for grown-ups only." Occasionally, Suze would come home to find detectives sifting through her trash looking for contraband. But these incidents were rare. As for what the parents at school thought, Suze explains: "I had an English accent and good manners. You can get away with murder."
Holly would eventually follow in her mother's footsteps (despite Suze's protestations), and when she first started shooting for Penthouse in the aughts, Holly says, people would often ask if Suze Randall was her mother. But these days, she admits, it happens less and less. "The newbies don't know who she is," she says. Budgets have shrunk; much of the romanticism—if you can call it that—is gone. "For a Penthouse centerfold, my mom would fly to Mexico and shoot for four days. The last time I shot for Penthouse, I had to do four photo-sets and four videos in one day."
There's a need for more women like her mom behind the camera, Holly says. "It's hard for some men to comprehend what it's like as a woman to be naked and vulnerable in front of a camera. But we get that. We understand the way women are conscious of their bodies and insecure about their flaws." Her mother taught her "to put the model's needs first," she says. "To make sure they're as comfortable as you can make them. Make sure that they're fed and hydrated and that they feel beautiful and happy to be there."
Her mother took care of the women, like Ginger Lynn, who often needed a surrogate parent. "[Ginger] said my mom came over with a joint and some homemade shepherd's pie—which my mom is famous for," Holly says, "and sat with her and talked her off a ledge." Ginger confirms Suze's influence: "I went down the cocaine path that so many people did in the '80s. It was not uncommon for me to celebrate after a job. Or when I got the job. I was celebrating more than I was working. Suze came to my home in Topanga Canyon and said, 'Get your shit together or get out of the business.' … She said, 'Make good decisions. Incorporate.' She guided me to see the adult industry as more than a quick buck but as a business. I know I'm not the only one she took care of."
"My mother never sought to be a pioneer," Holly adds. "That was not her goal. She didn't go in thinking, 'There are no women in the industry. I'm going to change the world and do this for women.' She saw an opportunity and steamrolled her way in. The fact that she inspired so many people is a side note to her."
Suze officially retired three years ago—a gradual slowing down made final by a freak accident: One of her horses kicked her in the face, and she lost her left eye. There are signs that a quiet reckoning is coming. This spring, Suze makes a brief appearance on an episode of Rashida Jones' Netflix series examining the porn industry, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On. But she's largely—and happily—retreated from view. Despite the accident, Suze says, "I'm trying to become a really good dressage rider."
In more ways than one, Suze's retirement coincided with the end of an era. In 2015, Playboy stopped featuring nudes altogether, in part to court advertising dollars. (They've since reversed that decision.) The Playboy Mansion was put on the market for $200 million and sold to the owner of a private equity firm that owns, among other companies, Hostess and Ghirardelli—with the understanding that Hef (who is now 90) could continue living there for the rest of his life. Some 20 years after Suze was fired from Playboy, she and Holly ran into Hef at Glamourcon, a sort of Comic-Con for the porn industry. If there were any hard feelings, they were water under the bridge. "It was nice," Suze says of the brief encounter. "I wanted to say hi. He'd been good to me."
When asked about her legacy, she demurs: "I try not to think about myself," she says. "Maybe I'm a trailblazer. I was always looking for the best. You outwork the men. You out-charm everybody." To this next generation of women—photographers, artists, activists—she is more direct, imploring them to simply: "Just kick ass, baby. I was brought up to enjoy fights and to fight the bully boys. I was encouraged by my parents to get thrown out of class and disobey the rules. It was a family motto."
By the way, Suze.net is still bringing in some cash every month, which is perhaps the best testament to Suze's legacy.
"They say three percent of people still pay for their porn," Humphry says.
Suze laughs. "Those are my fans," she says. "The Republicans and the Christians."
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
blackburnboyabseut.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.elle.com/culture/a43752/playboys-female-photographer/
0 Response to "Raining Again Live at the Fonda La"
Post a Comment