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In 1972, actor Burt Reynolds (1936-2018) posed
for
Cosmopolitan
magazine, becoming the world's first nude male centrefold.
NOTE
Burton Leon Reynolds Jr. (1936 – 2018) was an American actor, and male sex symbol, at the height of his fame in the 1970s and 80s. He was a guest on
The Tonight Show
in 1972 alongside Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.
During an ad break, Gurley Brown told Reynolds no one had ever put a naked man in a magazine and 'it would be a milestone in the sexual revolution'. She also told Reynolds he was the one man who could pull it off (later he discovered Paul Newman had been asked first, and declined).
'I said yes before we came back on the air,' Reynolds wrote in his memoirs. 'I may or may not have had several cocktails in the green room before the show.'
Three months before the film
Deliverance
opened (Reynold's breakout performance), Cosmopolitan hit the stands, quickly selling out all 1.5 million copies and raising Reynolds' public profile at a critical time in his career.
Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of
Cosmopolitan
at that time, believed women had the same 'visual appetites' as men. (Men had been able to look at naked women in Playboy magazine as early as 1953.) And she believed that her magazine should serve women’s appetites unapologetically.
Burt Reynolds centrefold, photographed by Francesco Scavullo for Cosmopolitan magazine, April 1972
The text
It’s Back to the Burt Reynolds Days of the 1970s
suggests both a retrograde step backwards, and nostalgia for an earlier status quo.
That status quo, now lost, was the product, perhaps, of superficially securer times. Society felt smaller and easier to navigate. The relationship between the sexes was clearly drawn (men first, women second). The world did not seem so big or alien or changeable.
It’s Back to the Burt Reynolds Days of the 1970s
challenges the primacy of men - here a man is objectified for the enjoyment of women. And it also expresses a cardinal truism of human nature: in uncertain times, it’s natural to look to the past for reassurance, to a time when everything seemed simpler and safer.
