Good Nudes: Age No Barrier To Baring It All

LOS ANGELES - The woman onstage is a poofball of black, all silky long legs and fur trim. Her hair is bobbed in a spray of Easter chick yellow. When she talks to the hungry crowd at the Century Club, you can still hear her breathy bedroom voice. She is, as her news release would have it, a "sex kitten on the prowl again."

"I'm Joey, I'm a girl and I'm on the cover of Playboy," she coos, before promoting her pictorial with an encore of "I Get a Kick Out of You."

If Joey Heatherton is still a girl, then it would seem she's playing the part again and again until she gets it right. In fact, there's little visible evidence that the long-ago Rat Pack mascot has reached the lofty age of 52. Just open the current issue of Playboy, where her pink pouty lips and other more intimate trademarks seem almost cryogenically preserved. It wouldn't be hard to imagine her rising from the ashes of her fast life to sprawl on a TV bed selling Serta mattresses once again.

Heatherton is the latest in a lengthening line of women over 40 who are taking it all off to become objects of readers' desire - and curiosity. They're making mincemeat out of the truism that women "of a certain age" are over the hill. When presidential daughter Patti Davis posed at 41 nearly three years ago, she told Playboy she was irked by "the nasty little press reports that call me middle-aged. . . . I thought, `You know what? (Expletive) you. This is what middle-aged looks like."'

Of course, in the Playboy universe, middle-age looks like, oh, 24, give or take. Heatherton says she trained more than 30 hours a week for a month for her shoot. Davis lifted weights for seven years, and who knows what 50-year-old covermate Farrah Fawcett had been doing to stop the clock at 19 - and an awesomely fit 19 at that.

"It's like a P.T. Barnum thing: Come see this 60-year-old woman who looks like she's 20," says Susie Bright, author of "Sexual State of the Union" (Simon & Schuster). "Making up someone to be beautiful is like making up Boris Karloff to be Frankenstein."

As baby boomers inherit the Earth, they're declaring themselves the silver standard for beauty. Older women who were not long ago considered nearly invisible and certainly not sexual are being eroticized from one cultural extreme - the porn industry - to the other - the more rarefied pages of magazines such as Vanity Fair and Mirabella.

"This is not a fad," says Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of "The Anatomy of Love" (Columbine, 1992). "This is a real trend in human evolution and human culture. We'll see more and more middle-age women looking powerful and sexy."

Penthouse has run pictorials of over-40 newsmakers Gennifer Flowers and Lauren Hutton. "We have nothing against age," says editor in chief Bob Guccione. "It's just a question of finding them."

Hustler ran its first and only 50-year-old centerfold in 1975. "We were exploring a lot of new territory," publisher Larry Flynt says, "and at the same time we ran a girl who was eight months pregnant and a girl who weighed 300 pounds. But the readers were apparently titillated by the older centerfold. Why? I have no idea."

But Playboy didn't just stick its toe in the water when it published whatever-happened-to layouts of former centerfolds in the late '70s. Since 1981, when it published its first senior celebrity layout - the then 51-year-old Vikki LaMotta, wife of "Raging Bull" boxer Jake - the magazine has run almost a dozen such pictorials. So far, its oldest model has been Terry Moore, onetime amour of Howard Hughes and 55 when she posed for Playboy.

"Reaching 30 used to be a big deal," says photography director Gary Cole. "Reaching 40 used to be a midlife crisis. Now people don't have them until they reach 50, and as we get older, we don't want to be thought of as older.

"Does Playboy redefine or reflect? It does both. Playboy is not a cutting-edge magazine. We're in the wave, but we're not in the front of the wave because you can't be and sell so many magazines."

The person on Playboy's front line, the one scouting out West Coast centerfold talent, is - surprise - an older woman.

"I think it's good to have women editors because I don't know if men would have necessarily been the precursors of this movement," says Marilyn Grabowski, a longtime Playboy photography editor and Heatherton's contemporary. "They have to be taught this equation. In Europe, youth and beauty don't even begin to equate. Catherine Deneuve, Simone Signoret and Jeanne Moreau - these are the women men venerate and find very sexy."

Even in the halls of Playboy Studio West, Grabowski has noticed that 20-year-old women may take flack for taking off their clothes, but 50-year-old playmates are often told, "More power to you. Go for it."

"There are some women who reach a certain age and they give up, and they say, `It's beyond me and I'll be a grandmother' and that's fine for them," she says. "But there are other women who never stop exploring the limits and what's there for me now. They're the adventurers, and the adventurous ones can take their clothes off at that age."

But images of clock-stopping perfection send a double-edged message: Middle-age women are fabulous . . . as long as they spend hours working out, that is, and maybe have a little work done.

"The idea of it being OK not to be nubile is one of the appealing things about old age," says Susan Faludi, feminist social critic. "I don't want to be on the StairMaster at 70."