Anyone paying a visit to the brownstone palace on New York`s Upper East Side that is shared by Kathy Keeton and Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione is likely to be stopped at the door for a quick frisk by Grundy.
Grundy, a 114-pound Rhodesian ridgeback with teeth that might make an alligator feel underendowed, is not big on negotiation, so it is advisable to stand very still and murmur such sweet nothings as ”Nice doggy” and ”Good boy” until the Lord or the Lady of the manor comes to the rescue.
Grundy lives there in canine splendor with his four brothers and sisters, any one of which could meet central casting`s requirements for the lead role in ”Hound of the Baskervilles.” They roam the spacious marble halls at will, bestowing wet kisses upon accepted guests, napping on rare antique furniture and helping themselves to hors d`oeuvres at party time. A reporter, granted a temporary visa by the pack, commented to Keeton that ”they seem gentle enough.”
Keeton`s sea-green eyes crinkled in amusement.
”Oh they are,” she said in the clipped accent of her native South Africa, ”but just try walking up that staircase to our living quarters and see what happens.”
It was an eminently refusable challenge.
Kathy Keeton, creator and publisher of Omni magazine and author of a new book called ”Woman of Tomorrow” (St. Martin`s/Marek, $16.95), settled down for an interview beside an exquisite indoor swimming pool imported tile-by-tile from an ancient Roman villa and reconstructed on the first floor of her palatial home, the walls of which are paved with original masterworks of art
–Picasso, Renoir, Chagall.
SECRETS OF SUCCESS
Servants are at her beck and call and her wardrobe is straight from Paris. Through Omni, the nation`s most widely read popular science and science fiction magazine, she has power, prestige and entree to the highest social circles. Keeton herself is a spectacular success and she wanted to tell other women how they might become one.
Her formula, like everything else in the harmonized bundle of seeming contradictions that constitutes her life, is likely to leave feminist leaders gnashing their teeth over its thrust, even as they salute its goal. Women, Keeton said, never will share power with men–nor should they–until they overcome their fear of science, master technology and stop playing silly macho games over jobs they have no business trying to hold.
”The more I talked to women, I found out that they are really frightened of science,” she said. ”They have been encouraged to believe they could not be good at it, that it was cold and impersonal, and that it`s really not them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Science and technology is making our world go `round. It`s creating our future, and if women, as they say they do, want to be involved in shaping that future, then they have to be involved in that which is shaping that future. Women must master science and technology. Anybody who wants to be involved in the future must.”
No feminist could argue with that, but when it comes to less glamorous jobs for which the National Organization for Women and other groups have fought and still do battle, Keeton was scornful.
”Doors are open for women everywhere today,” she said. ”There`s no bar against a woman doing pretty much anything she wants to do, but it`s wrong to try to force fire departments to lower their standards so that you can become a fireman because you`re a woman.
”A woman is biologically not as strong as a man and nothing will change that. To lower standards for fire departments so that women can join is really letting society down. The same is true for garbage collectors. Garbage will be collected by robots in the near future. What is all this wasted energy, rhetoric, complaint and strident screaming and shouting about something we shouldn`t bother with in the first place?”
PAIRED WITH GUCCIONE
The attitude will not be the first to get Keeton ostracized in the sisterhood of feminism. Since she met Guccione in London in 1965 when he was a starving artist just starting to formulate his Penthouse magazine and she was a former member of the Royal Ballet Theater, trying her hand in films, she has been intimately associated with the man who became the czar of the centerfold. Most feminists regard Guccione, with his nude Penthouse Pets and his famous golden chains, the living antithesis of their movement.
”I know they do–and me along with him,” Keeton said. ”I`m sorry for them. They`re twisted. I was an avid supporter of feminism when it first began, and so was Bob. We put our money where our mouths were. We put money behind ERA. We interviewed women like Germaine Greer very early on in Penthouse. We published the works of women like Anais Nin. We`ve always supported women. We support them in the best possible way. We give them jobs. Our company is run by more women than men, and they get paid more than the men.”
Grundy wandered into the interview, cocked an ear and, finding nothing with which to argue, clambered upon a settee, heaved a blast-furnace sigh and dozed off. Keeton paused, deep in thought.
”I think men are confused and bewildered by all this,” she said.
”Every time they hear women say `Men hate women, men are terrible to women,` men must think, `My God, what do they want?` I don`t think men hate women. There are men who are terrible and there are men who hate, but there are women who hate, too. These are the misfits in our society and we should pity them and try to help them. We shouldn`t think that because they are the way they are that is the way everyone is.
PRESERVING FEMININITY
”I don`t think women should become like men at all,” she said. ”It`s very important that they preserve their feminine qualities. It`s the feminine qualities the world needs. The idea that women should be like men or act like men is repugnant. Different is not less. Different is just different.”
For all her good words for the male animal, however, Keeton, in another paradoxical belief, would just as soon see him start staying home with the kids rather than running the world–a job in which she said he has a terrible track record.
”Societies that have caused all the problems in our world are those totally dominated by men,” she said. ”Hitler, Imperial Japan, the Middle East–all men. That frightens me, and that`s another reason why women have got to get involved. They are the moderating voice of society– the voice that says, `No, wait. Let`s think about it.`
”Women never have caused the problems that men have. Not ever. I`m not saying women can`t fight, and won`t fight, but they do it from a protective point of view, rather than from an aggressive point of view, and they do it with more forethought and consideration for alternatives. They don`t just leap into the fray the way men are apt to. When you`re sitting on a powderkeg, the way we are today, we need that voice.”
Keeton said science, technology and ”the high frontier” of space have been part of her psyche ever since she was growing up on her father`s farm in South Africa, where she remains a citizen. There, she read H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and dreamed of being a scientist. But Keeton was a girl, and girls, she was told, did not go into science. She was steered into ballet and ”came full circle” with the founding of Omni.
Her enthusiasm for the orbiting space habitat and moon bases frequently drives her to rhetoric that rings more of Norman Vincent Peale than of Alvin Toffler or Carl Sagan. Gloom, doom and the nightmares of nuclear winter and future shock have no place in her lexicon.
”We stand on the threshold of an unbelievable age, an age when wealth and plenty will be there for everybody,” she said. ”We stand on the threshold of the solar system. It`s just waiting for us to take it. Will we turn our backs on that? If you start from the point of view that `I can`t, it`s impossible,` you won`t. If you start from the point of view that `It`s terrible, it`s awful,` it will be. You have to think positively regardless of how bad things seem to be. The sun always comes up the next day. There`s always a way out.” —
