The famed Francesco Scavullo photographed me on a bearskin rug. On the way to the photo shoot, I stopped for two quarts of vodka and finished one before we got to the studio, which was freezing cold (bad for a naked man's self-esteem).
(I may or may not have had several cocktails in the greenroom before the show.) I said yes before we came back on the air. 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. 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. But over the years, Reynolds grew to have a complicated relationship with the photoshoot that turned him into a sex symbol.
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