Centrefold Venus of the Month 3: August - Yvonne Ekman

Yvonne. Elegant.

From August 1967 comes the extremely elegant Yvonne Ekman, Penthouse's first Danish Pet of the Month.

Beauty Queen Yvonne had been Miss Denmark for 1965 and Penthouse proudly trumpeted her status on the cover.

Yvonne (far right) in the Miss Europe contest

In its early days Penthouse presented a fair number of beauty queens from around the world.  Miss World (the UK equivalent of Miss Universe) was one of the most popular TV shows of the year on British television and Triple P remembers watching it with his family from quite a young age.

There was no question of any sexual interest in the women at that age, of course, but it was "event" televison, like the Eurovision Song Contest or the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show, and it would be much discussed afterwards at school. 

Agent Triple P's father, of course, who bought the copy of Penthouse from which Triple P scanned these pictures was certainly interested in women and it may well be that his commentary on their faces, legs (he was very much a leg man) and other attributes contributed to Triple P's later appreciation of women.

Triple P's mother, who had been a journalist for a major women's magazine, provided appropriate commentary on the relevant fashions that were paraded.  It was certainly the Miss World competition that made Triple P realise what vital statistics were and why they were important!

From Penthouse's point of view the appeal of beauty queens was, of course, that everyone wanted to know what they looked like out of their swimsuits.  In Yvonne's case the answer was not disappointing!

One fact that was generally agreed upon in Triple P's house was that the most beautiful girl rarely won the competition!  Yvonne had made the semi final of Miss World and also came 5th in Miss Europe that year. 

Penthouse discovered Yvonne on the set of the film The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966).  The magazine often featured pictorials from the set of a film that featured beautiful women and sometimes, as in this case, they persuaded some of these girls to pose for the magazine as well. 

She's in there somewhere!

This was the case for Brides but, oddly, Yvonne wasn't one of the girls chosen to display her charms in the original pictorial, which appeared in the May 1966 issue, as Penthouse rather shamefacedly admitted in the text accompanying her Pet of the Month feature. In fact, Yvonne's hair can just be glimpsed behind the girl in the purple dress in the bottom left picture on the page above.

Yvonne is tied to a pillar second from left in The Brides of Fu Manchu

Yvonne (right) decorates the set as Rupert (Maigret) Davies takes centre stage

In this film, based on Sax Rohmer's character (played by Christopher Lee as one of the unlikeliest looking Chinese on film) Fu Manchu is kidnapping the daughters of scientists and using this fact to blackmail them into working on his death ray.  Yvonne, of course, was one of the daughters who Fu Manchu kept tied up in his dungeon (quite understandably).

Yvonne was born in February 1945.

Yvonne's vital statistics were a nicely symmetrical 34.5/24/34.5 and she was 5'6" tall.

Yvonne was one of the candidates for Pet of the Year for 1968 (losing out to the hugely pneumatic Brandy) and this extra picture (above) of her appeared in the Pet play-off issue.

Yvonne, we have to say, had one of the best figures of any of the early Penthouse Pets.

Yvonne, who was 21 when these pictures were taken, made seven other Danish films between 1964 and 1971. What a splendid rear!

Yvonne appeared in several other mens magazines at the time.  Here she is as the centrefold (there were no other pictures of her) in the weekly Parade.  Published by City Magazines this featured jokes, short stories, cinema gossip, sports and news stories.  In this issue, for example there was an information piece on the new colour televisions (which were going to cost £300 in Britain!).  Black and white pictures of girls in swimsuits and topless (this was pre-Page 3) were scattered through the short (32 pages) weekly. Yvonne's pose here predates her Penthouse feature by two months. 

Here is Yvonne looking very sportif in Figure Photography even earlier, for Spring 1967.

Even more surprising is that photos from the same session of Yvonne's Penthouse shoot had already appeared in Cavalier magazine's May 1967 issue in the US.  This was before Penthouse was published in the US, of course.

The opening shots of the pictorial are all very swinging sixties with Yvonne very much a la mode in London.  We can date the time the pictorial was shot from the poster for the comedy thriller Our Man in Marrakesh on the bus.  This was released in the UK in April 1966; so more than a year before these pictures appeared in Cavalier and more than that until the Penthouse pictorial.  The 73 bus runs from Victoria Station to Stoke Newington via Park Lane, Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road and Islington but we don't recognise the building on the right so don't know what road this is.

All the other pictures are of her in the same interior as that in the Penthouse pictorial with the same flower behind her ear..

She was represented by the Paris-based  Élysée 3 modelling agency and here is her model card from 1969.



Centrefold Venus of the Month 2: August - Myrna Weber

From August 1958 we bring you spectacular redhead Myrna Weber, looking edible in a feature called Playmate on a Picnic.  Myrna is an Irish Gaelic name meaning "beloved".

The picture of, then just 19 year old, Myrna (although Fifties make-up makes her look older) was taken by photographer Bunny (real first names Linnea Elenor) Yeager (b. 1930) in Florida.

The story behind the pictorial was that Myrna was on a picnic, so we have a picture of her getting ready to set off to the beach.

When she gets there she obviously decides to strip off and go skinny dipping, although whether this is before the picnic or after is never made clear!

Myrna hardly reveals anything to the camera, even by the standards Playboy in the nineteen fifties.  Other pictures taken during the shoot are no different  and it is only in a couple, including this one, which didn't appear in the magazine, where she reveals a little glimpse of her nipple.

Here she is on the beach bo doubt tuning in to some hip and groovy rock and roll.

This is the most revealing shot she posed for in a series of rather nice interior studies.  The pictures in the magazine being mainly exterior shots.

This small colour shot appeard in the magazine some years later  but gives us the colour scheme for this sequence.

Finally, we have a few more colour shots of Myrna which appeared in the magazine on different occasions.

This was Myrna's Playmate review shot from the January 1959 issue.

Bunny Yeager clicks for the camera

Former glamour model Yeager had, of course, previously photographed cult model Bettie Page and had been instrumental in bringing her to the attention of Hugh Hefner who made her Playmate of the Month for January 1954.

Yeager was also famous for photographing the iconic shots of Ursula Andress from the Jamaican beach set of Dr No (1962).

Playboy photographers at the time worked to a strict artistic brief from Playboy HQ in Chicago. Yeager was told to produce a centrefold picture with a camp fire in the foreground against a sea reflecting a sunset. Now Yeager was based in Miami where the sea is to the east of the beach so had to drive across the whole of Florida to the Gulf of Mexico coast to find her west facing beach to enable her to catch the sunset.

Cool Venus revisted: Louann Fernald

During the hot weather (whatever happened to that in London?) at the end of June we posted a nice refreshing picture of Louann Fernald interacting with a jug of water to make us all feel cooler. http://venusobservations.blogspot.com/2009/06/cool-venus-louann-fernald.html What we didn't expect was that despite having only the one picture on the site she would end up as the ninth most visited item in July. Now to put this into context we had hits on 110 seperate subjects last month. Of these 61 were Penthouse or Playboy models so she is obviously popular; with only three Playmates coming in ahead of her last month.

Agent Triple P had decided, this month, to feature someone who we have mentioned in passing on the blog but who then subsequently gets a lot of visits. Given the result for last month we feel duty bound to present some more pictures of Louann getting wet.

Louann was born in Texas but raised in Florida. She was 5'4 1/2" tall and 35-23-34 when these pictures were taken in 1979. She was 22 at the time.

Lovely picture!

A nicely damp Louann leaves us with a typical late seventies naughty Playboy see-through knickers shot. It could even feature in a future episode of the Pubic Wars!

Most popular Items: July

She's sixteen, she's beautiful, she's barely legal!

These are the 15 most popular search results on Venus observations for July.

1 (2) Elizabeth Ann Roberts. Teenage Playmate hits number one, you perverts!
2 (1) The Pubic Wars. Now being rewritten with added pictures.
3 (4) Gloria Root. Urban planner and Playmate stays in top 5 for yet another month.
4 (5) Venus Observations. More hits than ever this month.
6 (-) Veronika Zemanova. Impossibly busty Czech girl.
7 (3) Melodye Prentiss. Playmate and artist is deservedly popular.
8 (-) Giselle Bundchen. Brazilian supermodel is most popular contemporary girl.
9 (-) Louann Fernald. Unexpectedly popular Playmate from 1979.
10 (12) Hyapatia Lee. Long haired lovely races up the charts.
11 (7) Liv Lindeland. Barrier breaking playmate as popular as ever.
12 (8) Lady Godiva. Naked lady on a horse.
13 (6) Mary-Louise O'Murphy by Boucher. The best nude painting in history?
14(11) Flaming June. Lord Leighton’s classic painting
15 (-) Sue and Louise Elvin. Racy penthouse mother and daughter pictorial.

Highest new entry goes to busty Czech photographer turned model Veronika Zemanova. Biggest climber is Hyapatia Lee with a not that impressive two places. New on the list are Veronika, Louann Fernald and Sue and Louise Elvin.

Just below the top fifteen but showing strongly are Liv Lindeland, Lady Godiva and Marie-louise O'Murphy. Big plunges for Farrah Fawcett and Bo Derek.

Hungarian Venus: By the Waterside by Molnár Pál

From Hungary we bring you this luscious blonde in "By the Waterside" by Molnár Pál (1894-1981). Hungarians, of course, present their surnames first so it is Mr Molnár who was born in Battonya in 1894. He began his studies at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1915. Later he travelled to Switzerland before spending some time in Paris from 1921 until 1922.

He returned to Hungary the following year and concentrated on illustrations and graphic works; particularly woodcuts. In the late twenties he spent three years in Rome. During the thirties his work as a painter came to the fore. Much of his work had a religious theme and he had many commissions from the Church between the mid thirties and 1970.

He published several technical books and his autobiography was published in 1994, thirteen years after his death. His apartment in Budapest is now a museum.

Nude by the Window

Nudes at the lakeshore 1926

Given his religious paintings the sensuality of his nudes is, perhaps, something of a surprise. he tried many different styles during his long lifetime from the sub-Modigliani of Nudes at the lakeshore to the Degas-like Female nude with blue hair ribbon.

Female nude with blue hair ribbon

Blonde

Finding accurate titles and dates for his pictures, many of which are in private hands, is not easy so it is hard to trace the evolution of his style. Agent Triple P, of course enjoys the series of blonde rear views of which the above two, together with our title piece, are fine examples. The particularly prominent dimples on the backs of the subject in these three paintings lead us to believe that they are of the same model.

Our final Molnár (for which we do have a title: Nude in front of a mirror) is notable for the accurate depiction of the model's lower anatomy. Such a glimpse of what the Italians would call La fica is unusual in fine art.