Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America by Elizabeth Fraterrigo;

Author:Elizabeth Fraterrigo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.2The women who starred in Bond films also appeared in Playboy. Along with a pictorial on “James Bond’s Girls,” this issue featured an interview with actor Sean Connery, who portrayed agent 007 on the screen. In the 1960s, Playboy serialized several of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and promoted the Bond films, fueling the popularity of the suave action hero. (Reproduced by special permission of Playboy magazine © November 1965 by Playboy.)

Bond reached the status of “popular hero” in the mid-1960s, bringing an explosion of press coverage and Bond-themed merchandise and advertising. Colgate-Palmolive launched the 007 line of men’s toiletries, with a misogynistic slogan that called forth the linkage of seduction and masculine power in the Bond narratives: “007 gives any man the license to kill . . . women.” During this period, sales of Fleming’s Bond novels peaked, and several other Bond-inspired playboy-spy-adventure films appeared. James Coburn played swinging bachelor Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967), entertaining four women in his flower-shaped bed. Dean Martin starred in the Matt Helm series beginning in the mid-1960s. In the first film, The Silencers (1966), retired spy Helm worked as a men’s magazine centerfold photographer until he was called back into service. In the series, Helm lived in a plush bachelor pad complete with fabulous technological accouterments, including a mechanized bed that transported him to a swimming-pool-sized bubble bath. Like Bond, Matt Helm and Derek Flint encountered plenty of available young females.31

The “Bond girl” became a cultural phenomenon, helped along by pictorials in Playboy and other men’s magazines such as Mayfair. Significantly, the pictorials became a contractual obligation for the actresses who played Bond’s companions. Playboy even teamed with United Artists to sponsor a James Bond Girl contest that awarded the winner a role in a subsequent 007 film. Like the Playmate, the Bond girl made no demands for security and marriage. Providing voyeuristic pleasure, she also embodied unencumbered sexuality. Each new Bond girl was “totally lacking in deference, independent, self-reliant, yet also caring, loving, solicitous for Bond’s well-being and willing to cater to his every need without making any demands in return”—qualities reminiscent of the Single Girl envisioned by Helen Gurley Brown.32 Thus, like the Playmate and Single Girl, the Bond girl enjoyed sex outside of the marriage bed, but put herself and her sexuality in service to the male figure in her life.

Beyond the Bond girl, other variants of the Single Girl permeated the nation’s entertainment forms in the 1960s and into the next decade. Already a bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl received wider notice with the release of a movie version under the same title. On television, the Single Girl appeared in new programs that spotlighted the unmarried working girl while also fitting her safely within acceptable limits of independence and gender advancement. That Girl (1966–1971), although ostensibly devoted to the self-sufficient life of a young working girl, contained the independence of the lead character, Ann Marie, through the presence of the men in her life, an overprotective father and a fiancée.

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