Burt Reynolds' Nude Cosmopolitan Spread: Photos And Why It's Iconic

By | April 1, 2020

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Source: Worthpoint

When Burt Reynolds posed for the centerfold of the April 1972 Cosmopolitan magazine, it was a risky move. He wasn't the legendary star we remember him as now -- he was a TV actor, known for GunsmokeHawk, and Dan August, who had been trying to break into movies for a few years. Deliverance, a film that would make him a movie star, was slated to come out later in the year. And male nudity was taboo -- the male body, naked as a jaybird, in all its hairy glory, was not something the public seemed to want. That was the conventional wisdom, anyway -- naked women were beautiful and deserving of admiration, but a naked man just wasn't. Those were the rules of the man's world. But Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief Helen Gurley Brown liked nothing more than breaking the rules. 

The Right Guy For The Job

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Burt Reynolds in all his '70s glory (Cosmopolitan)

Brown had made a career out of challenging assumptions about what women do or don't want, ever since the publication of her book Sex And The Single Girl a decade earlier. Reynolds was willing to bare his bushy altogether for the magazine -- "I have a strange sense of humor," he explained. In fact, Reynolds occupied a strange place in Hollywood at the time. He was a beloved personality, a popular guest on talk shows hosted by Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin, despite not having had a hit movie. He'd been asked to take over James Bond from Sean Connery, and he'd been offered his own talk show, but turned both down. Brown wanted to debut her male centerfold concept with a star, and had initially picthed it to Paul Newman, who said no thanks. But Reynolds was game, and Brown seized the moment. A banner on the cover of the issue boasted, "At last a male nude centerfold - the naked truth about guess who!!"