The founder of Playgirl even cited it as an inspiration for the entire creation of the magazine: "When I saw Burt Reynolds naked in Cosmo and saw what a winner that was, it came to me, that's what women want. The photo, which ran with text proclaiming that male editors had previously "neglected the visual appetites of us equally appreciative girls," was a sensation.
"He was a guest host, and I asked him off the air." The photo that ran was Reynolds' personal pick. "He's got a good body, he's got terrific legs, he's handsome, he's smiling up a storm and you can't really see any" - here, she paused - "men's genitalia … It's about as sexy and revealing as a photo can be, but it doesn't reveal anything that it shouldn't." "There's a big show in this country called 'The Tonight Show,'" she explained to me. She did manage to get Burt Reynolds' enthusiastic participation in her first-ever nude male centerfold. Somehow, her desire to objectify male bodies never got as far. She exhorted it as a liberated, occasionally transactional asset tarted it up for the cover of Cosmo and even declared its essential autonomy. What Helen Gurley Brown did for the female body is well known. "I thought one day when I was washing dishes that men like to look at our bodies, and we like to look at their bodies, though it's not as well known," Helen Gurley Brown told me by phone that year, when she was 86, for a story I wrote on the ad campaign in Women's Wear Daily. When I half-jokingly tacked it up, first on my cubicle wall and then on my apartment fridge, reactions were somewhere between horror and sexual fascination, or a mix of both. All this, among the highly waxed and toned female flesh of the 2007 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. The Cosmopolitan centerfold commissioned by Helen Gurley Brown in 1972 had been reborn as a gatefold ad for DirecTV (sans cigarette). I gasped when I saw it: Burt Reynolds, all careless lean muscle, his chest only slightly less thickly grown than the bear rug on which he languidly stretched.
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