With the door of her office in Playgirl`s high-tech Santa Monica headquarters ajar, the magazine`s managing editor eyes a daily parade of men eager to bare their bodies in the magazine`s centerfold.
”I see them all,” Tommi Lewis says. ”I kind of check them out as they walk by. `Cute.` `Not so cute.` ”
When Lewis talks about a certain centerfold model, though, her tone changes. ”If you could ever give a woman a dream date and you had to pick one guy, he would be a good person.
”Not only does he exude a healthy attitude about life and himself, he is an incredible person. When I met him, I was taken aback because he was shy, very humble.”
She is talking about Steve Rally, 27, of San Diego, whose appearance as Playgirl`s Mr. September generated more fan mail than any other centerfold in the magazine`s 12-year history.
A typical letter from two Tempe, Ariz., sisters reads: ”In the recent past, Playgirl centerfolds looked like they were barely past puberty. . . . However, Steve Rally was a refreshing as well as stimulating change.”
THE MALE EXOTIC dancer and aspiring actor so impressed the magazine`s largely female staff and its audience of 5 million readers worldwide that he recently was named Playgirl`s Man of the Year for 1985.
”Now things are starting to happen,” Rally says between puffs on a cigarette during an interview at Playgirl`s office. ”All the hoopla of signing autographs and women coming up and touching me–`Oh, I touched him`– and I`m thinking, `Lady, I`m the same kid that lived next door to you and played whiffle ball in the back yard.` She goes, `No you`re not. My next door neighbor doesn`t look like that.` It`s a little hard to deal with.”
The problem is that most people take him for a sex symbol. Unlike Lewis and other Playgirl staffers, they don`t get to know the man behind the image, the guy beneath the cliched facade of rippling muscles, brown velvet eyes, the ”Magnum P.I.” mustache, the perfect bikini tan line. That`s the problem, and Steve Rally is trying to find the solution.
IT ISN`T AN unusual problem. Lewis tells a funny story about what happened to one man who appeared in the magazine. He lived in Huntington Beach and used his real name in the magazine. He was hounded by phone calls from women who looked him up in the phone book. He got a new unlisted number, but that didn`t deter three persistent female fans who showed up on his front lawn at 3 a.m., stripped and caterwauled his name.
”That`s mild,” Rally says when he hears the story. ”I get propositioned 50 times a night in a club. I mean, these women are in there competing against 400 other women, and they have to get their point across in one or two sentences and, believe me, they do it. It`s incredible some of the lines they come up with. They are so audacious.”
The text that accompanied photos of the 6-foot-1-inch, 185-pound Rally in the September issue says he grew up in a 22-room mansion in Leesburg, Va., the son of a high ranking military officer. He turned to dancing as a career after a stint as a punter on a semipro football team failed to pan out. He jogs, works out with weights, plays racquetball. He`s a Sagittarius.
THE SECOND of five sons, Rally was raised in a household in which smoking and beer drinking were forbidden. He had a midnight curfew on his two dates in high school to the junior and senior proms. Vice president of the senior class, president of the Latin Club and all-round model kid, he received an appointment to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He lasted a month in the academy before he dropped out, headed home and enrolled in a technical college near Leesburg.
”As I look at it now I just wasn`t prepared,” he says. ”I was a sheltered little kid. I never had a job, never had a car. I never had to worry about anything. Every Sunday the family went to church all together. I was raised in a real strict family.”
His father kicked him out shortly after he returned home and never has forgiven him for leaving the military academy. His parents have divorced since, and Rally has seen his father only once in the last 10 years.
HE WORKED his way through school as a cook in a pizza parlor until some college girlfriends encouraged him to try male exotic dancing, although he
”can`t dance a lick.”
”I`m a great entertainer,” he says. ”I know how to entertain. The girls think that I`m a fantastic dancer. I`ve got good rhythm, but I`m not a dancer dancer. I gear my show toward entertaining.”
Since then his world has been filled with women. He quit college before his senior year and traveled an eight-state East Coast circuit of nightclubs and VFW halls stripping for wild crowds of women. When the money was good
–about $200 a night in tips on top of a salary of $140–the dancers earned it.
”We`ve gone out into the crowds and just had things ripped right off us. They`d knock you down and jump on you. They never really hurt us, but one of the guys had teeth marks on the rear end. It`s really hard to explain.”
HE MOVED to Southern California last January to take a job as a host at a male exotic dancing nightclub. It didn`t work out.
”I was supposed to work for six months for 6 and 7 bucks an hour just playing with women, just teasing women all night. That doesn`t interest me at all. I don`t mind entertaining on stage, but the social aspect of it all doesn`t interest me.”
While on the East Coast he had toyed with the idea of posing nude for Playgirl. With his career foundering in California, he decided the time was right to take the plunge. He figured the exposure couldn`t hurt, but even so, he checked with his mother before going ahead.
”My mom is struggling to pay her mortgage, and that`s what this is all about for me. I knew that unless I went out and. . . .
”Dancing kind of showed me that from a business standpoint I`m a marketable person. Why, I don`t know. What makes somebody more appealing than somebody else? I have no idea. But Playgirl said the fan mail is incredible, and every time I`ve been on stage, I`ve always done real well; and I`ve always held my own no matter who I`m working with or where I`m at. So that just tells me that I`m marketable; so if I can make the most of it with some business transactions I can come out all right and take care of my mom.”
THE COMPETITION is intense for the centerfold job, which pays $750. Men send or tote their portfolios into the office every day. Recently the magazine`s staff traveled to Atlanta to select 10 men to pose in a layout on the Southern gentleman. Eight hundred men showed up for the screening.
”The important thing that we have to remember,” Lewis says, ”is that there are a lot of women out there who like a lot of different things. Body builders don`t cut it, and we also try to stay away from very effeminate-looking men. It`s not sexy. They don`t photograph well.”
Although the magazine`s features include fiction, self-help articles and advice columnists, those are trimmings. Pictures of naked men are the heart of the magazine.
”We tell every potential model who comes here that full-frontal nudity is required. A lot of men come up here and think, `Well, they`ll love me so much that they`ll do me sideways or whatever,” Lewis says.
”They think they`re going to get away with it, but that is not what the magazine is all about. It`s a nude magazine.”
THERE`S A LOT more to nude photo sessions than meets the eye. Toni Brown, the magazine`s creative director, who selects the centerfold themes and settings, met with Rally and immediately knew what scenes would work. She envisioned photos of him walking through sun-baked fields, riding horseback and lounging on a Mexican blanket.
”He`s very rugged, a very outdoor type,” she says. ”Women, unfortunately, all they get to see is photographs, they never get to speak to him. So they really won`t know what he`s like unless I show him in an atmosphere that suits his personality.”
The final session was shot in a field in Lancaster, Calif., in May. The photographer, Richard Armas, put Rally at ease so that he could use his weight-lifting training and flex and tense his muscles.
”You have to be so professional,” Rally says. ”You have to be grown-up enough or mature enough to put all of the thoughts out of your mind that are pulling at you. You have to say, `Look, I`m here to do a job. This is what I`m being paid to do and you do it.` ”
TO MAKE ENDS meet he has taken his dance show on the road, putting thousands of miles on his 1976 Mercury Monarch with the ”MR SEPT” license plates as he drove from nightclub to nightclub in California and Arizona.
His first taste of fame came when the magazine booked him at a promotional appearance at the Midwest Autorama, a car show in Omaha, where he signed autographs alongside John Schneider of ”Dukes of Hazzard” and a Penthouse magazine centerfold model.
”These three girls came up. I said, `Hi, how you doing,` and they said,
`We want to get your autograph. That`s when it hit me. Here`s this movie star, and I`m sitting next to the guy.
”I get another type of attention where these women want to swoon and pinch and `Can I get a hug, how `bout a kiss, lay down on the table and take off your pants.` That makes it tougher to deal with. `Can I touch you, can I feel you, can I put my hand down your shirt?` It`s kind of hard to deal with. I`m sure I`ll get used to it, or I`ll reach a breaking point. Actually, I`d much rather have that than not have it. It`s not that I don`t like it, it`s just that I don`t understand it.”
STILL, NOTORIETY hasn`t changed Rally. He recalls that the highlight of the weekend was a chance to ride on Big Foot, a new, oversized pickup truck. And when the magazine held a publicity party at a Northridge disco to introduce the 1985 Man of the Year, Rally took his girlfriend and her mother. ”It`s difficult for me to put in perspective the public`s view of all this,” he says. ”I can sort of understand it, and the only thing that helps me put it in perspective is when I look at the Playmate of the Year for Playboy and when I think of what I always thought–`Wow, she`s just great.` I look at myself as the counterpart.
”Five months ago I was the same guy, but no one wanted my autograph.”
