Haresh Shah
Playmates, Playmates, Playmates. Überall
Barbara was a good sport. If she was disappointed, she didn’t let on. We laughed at her ghost images and I even stack loaded the slides and projected them on the wall. However faint the images, we learned from them what poses worked and what didn’t. As relaxed as she was, there were still traces of a certain stiffness in those poses that reflected the initial discomfort and nervousness that both of us must have felt in front of the camera and behind.
We stuck to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass LP and played over and over again My Sweet Lord and Wah-Wah – the track that followed. Those tunes carried her moods and the movements. We repeated the session of the week before. Now more relaxed and really getting into the swing of it, we continued the routine over the next couple of weekends. Those sessions resulted into some naturally beautiful shots of Barbara’s youthful energy, exuberance and her flirtatious and teasing smiles. We went outdoors and did a series of headshots to capture her achingly natural good looks.
Barbara was a natural model. Not only was she comfortable in her nudity, she was almost unaware of it as she danced to the music and flirted with the lens, as if it were the man she most desired and was determined to lure into her orbit. Just like those songs and dances in Bollywood movies. Those weekends, not only yielded us some wonderful photos, but they also began to morph into what would turn out to be a lifelong friendship. A year and a half later, coincidentally we both found ourselves living in southern California. Me in Santa Barbara, and her a hundred and fifty miles south in San Clemente. In the interim, she had married Scott and had moved to the US and I found myself “cost cut” from Playboy. Feeling absolutely free after nineteen long years of schooling and working, I accepted on impulse my friends Mark and Ann’s invitation and returned to the US and settled close to them in California. Barbara and I having found ourselves within driving distance and so far away from home, we saw each other frequently, worked on some serious photographic projects, of which though nothing came out, but we did have lots of fun and laughs in the roles of the photographer and his muse. Now 38 years later, we’re still in touch and try to see each other whenever we can. If not as frequently as we would like, but when we do, its back to being transposed back to those weekends and those days in California.
Getting back to the beginning; what I loved the most about Barbara was that she was in no hurry to become a Playmate and was willing and ready to shoot as many sessions as it took to be able to present the best the two of us had to offer as a team.
When I finally showed a small selection of what we had shot, and handed them her four page-long Playmate Data Sheet, both Rainer and Freddy loved how naturally beautiful and how German she looked. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that we had stumbled upon the best possible Playmate candidate to be called the First. Twenty-one years old, she weighed 54 kg. (120 lbs.) and was 173 centimeter (5’.7”) tall. Her vital statistics measured 93x63x93 (36.5” x25”36.5” ). She came from an old Bavarian family in which “everyone loved to drink.” While her father’s ancestors transported salt across the country, the ancestors on her mother’s side were brewers; “hence the enormous thirst in the family.” And having born and grown up in the city of the legendary Oktoberfest made for a perfect storyline. Ironically, she is only a moderate drinker.
At the time, she worked as Executive Secretary to Münchener Olympiade, had graduated from high school majoring in home economics and aspired to be a social worker. In answer to Why do you want to be a Playmate? she wrote; so that I can show my kids how beautiful their Mama looked when young. What can be more down to earth and wholesome? Beyond that, Chicago’s approval was a mere formality.
Freddy and other executives saw an enormous promotional potential in her. She would become the darling of the press, appear on television talk shows and the advertising department could tag her along to meetings with their clients. She would be the special attraction at trade shows and the conventions. The potential was limitless. There was palpable excitement in the air. Freddy, Heinz, Rainer and other top executives began to see why Chicago was so keen and insistent on them to producing their own Playmates.
Everything was ready and set to go. Peter Brüchmann – one of the top glamour photographers of the country was hired to shoot the pictorial. But the problem was producing of the centerfold. By Hefner’s personal decree, it had to be shot on the large 20×25 (8”10”) format studio camera, thus ensuring the highest possible reproduction quality over the spread stretching out on to three full pages. After much discussion, it was decided that instead of allowing Peter to shoot it and him learning by trial and error, taking a long view, why not send him, Barbara and our photo editor Susi Pletz to Chicago and have Pompeo Posar – one of the Playboy’s star photographers do the first centerfold, with Peter assisting and learning, but mainly Susi picking up nuts and bolts of Playmate production and bringing back home that knowledge. This delayed the project by several months, because that’s how long it took to get everyone’s schedules in sync.
In the meanwhile, Susi had come up with three more Playmate candidates, one of them she had plain spotted in the supermarket and approached, the others came as submissions from professional photographers. Among them: Jacques Alexandre’s portfolio of gorgeous nudes of the sultry redhead Dagmar Puttkammer from Wuppertal. No problem with the photos as submitted. Jacques shot some more “story” photos capturing her life in and around her hometown, featuring the places and the people in her life. That is: except the centerfold. The luck would have it, Pompeo Posar happened to be in Italy at the time on a project from the U.S. edition. We were able to have him come over to Munich for a long weekend to help us out. Susi organized the location, the props and acquired a large format camera, set up weekend processing of films and we together assisted Pompeo into shooting what would become the first ever Playmate of Playboy’s German, and therefore the foreign editions.
While reluctant at first, now Freddy couldn’t have a German Playmate soon enough. And thus by default, Dagmar became the first German Playmate making her debut in March 1975. Barbara followed in July 1975.
© Haresh Shah 2012
Illustration: Jordan Rutherford
SISTER SITE
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HERR DOKTOR SHAH
Nope, I don’t have a doctorate of any kind. Even if I did, I would be petrified to have such a pompous title precede my name. But our editorial assistant Tim Nater decided, that’s just what I needed.
playboy stories 
Gosh, 1975, really? I remember the arrival of both Susi and Barbara to Chicago and
my dear, handsome brother remembers the German Playmate even better. I remember him driving my little white Toyota all over the Chicago/Indiana border with
the Thanksgiving turkey in the car trying to meet up with her for their very brief winter affair. My father kept asking where the turkey was but I just couldn’t tell him. Yeah, I guess it was 1975, afterall.