Tuesday 29 November 2011

Centrefold Venus of the Month 30: Suzanne (Linda Lusardi), November 1977




For a very long time Miss Lusardi has been the most popular search on Venus Observations.  We first posted her February 1977 pictorial from Mayfair in February of last year and, since then, she has regularly topped the list of most viewed post.  Last month, for example, she accounted for no less than 20% of all the search results for this blog but then when we Googled her today our Venus Observations entry was the third one on the list.


 Fiesta November 1977


What better way of celebrating our thirtieth Centrefold of the Month than revisiting her and presenting her notorious Fiesta set from November 1977.


Fiesta, October 1977


Oddly, Linda didn't appear on the cover of the November issue but had, in a picture taken in the session that would feature in November, on the October cover.




Not unusually, Linda appeared under another name, Suzanne, which, perhaps was what led her to try and deny she had ever posed for such an explicit set in the future. 




There are quite a few pictures from this set on the web but most of them are of poor quality.  We have  done our own scans, as usual, to ensure we have nice crisp pictures (given the limits of the far from quality printing in the magazine itself).




The pictures were shot by Allan Johns which is obviously a pseudonym for the photographer who discovered her, John Allum.




Eschewing the clothed shots that were still being used in Penthouse, for example, at the time Johns really only uses Lusardi's red dress to add a flash of colour to what is, in fact, a pictorial with a very limited colour palette.



What she does keep on, in every shot, are her stockings, which have an enticing lace top.




The pictorial only utilises one setting which features a large round chair which is dressed up in several ways.




A little more colour is introduced through the use of a green feather boa and some apricot covered, rather slimy-looking, seventies sheets.




The overall colour of the pictorial is predominantly black and tan, however, the overall lack of fussiness focussing us very clearly on Miss Lusardi's teenage form.




It was only really in 1976 that UK mens' magazines stopped retouching their pictures to avoid the models' labia showing.   By 1977, when this pictorial was shot, not only were genitals not hidden but had become the focus of the pictorials and this is certainly the case with Linda's pictorial here.




There is no Penthouse style soft-focus or dreamily romantic portraits or clothed shots here, just Linda displaying her (rather splendid) pussy.  This is the last of the pictures from the November 1977 pictorial and she never did such explicit shots again.




This picture is very similar (but flipped) to her Fiesta October 1977 cover.










Other pictures from this shoot popped up in a number of places afterwards.  We did not scan these pictures so the quality is variable but we are nothing if not a completist so include them here, starting with a set featuring the red dress and the white chair.








The rest feature the dreaded apricot sheet, starting with these ones of Linda from the rear.









Since we posted the original Mayfair set of her back in February last year we actually met her briefly at an event in London; she seemed rather charming, we thought, and still looked very good.







Someone left a comnent to the effect, on our earlier post, that they felt she had rather demeaned herself with these pictures, given that they appeared after she had made her first appearance as a Page 3 girl. That is a much larger debate, outside the remit of this post, to do with questions of taste and the artistic aesthetic. Triple P tends to be of the opinion, as someone once wrote in Men Only at about this time, that "why can't a pretty girl have a pretty cunt?"  Something Miss Lusardi certainly displays rather well.




Our only negative thought on this pictorial is that Linda has a particularly dazzling smile (which we are sure is the main reason - after the obvious two - for her overwhelming popularity as a Page 3 girl) so it is a pity to see her looking so glum in this set.   

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