By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Many women I interviewed in Hollywood expressed disappointment or regret over appearing nude in movies or photo spreads. Shannon Tweed, who turns 65 today, was not one of them. ‘I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t like to be sexually desired,’ she told me. ‘Every woman wants to be and as long as that’s not the absolute essence of what I am, then that’s just fine. If this is being exploited, bring it on.’
I first interviewed the Canadian actress and Playboy Playmate of the Year at the Playboy Mansion where, aged 26, she was living with Hugh Hefner, then 56 (pictured above). On the wall behind her, she languished unabashedly and imperiously naked in a life-sized photograph. Seated below, in the flesh and fully clothed, she was amiable and pleasingly candid.
Born in Newfoundland, she had parlayed her Playboy fame into an acting career with a role on the CBS primetime soap ‘Falcon Crest’ starring Jane Wyman with occasional appearances by Kim Novak and Lana Turner. Tweed told me producers of the show had seen her doing commentaries on the Playboy Channel and she hoped to destroy the notion that girls in the magazine were ‘dumb, stupid and couldn’t act’.
She accepted that the image would cling to her. ‘I don’t think it will ever leave me because I think I’m the first to have something notable to make the papers,’ she said. ‘But that’s good. It’s good for the rest of the girls, too.’ She went on to star in erotic B-movies with occasional TV appearances in shows such as ‘Baywatch’, ‘Frasier’ and ‘Cagney & Lacey’.
Her first tests for Playboy Magazine, after she placed third in the Miss Canada contest, were not successful. She ran a bar called Shannon’s in Ottawa for a time while working as a model. She confessed to ‘a little sillicon work’ and when the Canadian TV show ‘Thrill of a Lifetime’ set up a Playboy shoot for her, she became Playmate of the Month in November 1981. In June 1982, she was named Playmate of the Year.
Her modeling career had included a lot of lingerie shots not least because it paid double rates. ‘When you’re in the business, you’re changing in front of everybody all the time,’ she noted. ‘I was already so comfortable with myself that how could posing nude in a magazine be much different? It was the more tasteful of magazines I could think of and the girls were always very beautiful.’
That remained true even when she became Hugh Hefner’s partner although she said the lifestyle depicted in the magazine was not her reality living with him in a private apartment in the Playboy Mansion. All the beautiful women? ‘Bugs the shit out of me,’ Tweed said. ‘Drives me crazy. He kisses and feels everybody up, that’s nothing new. There’s a photo coming up in the magazine of Kimberly McArthur, who’s a friend of mine, a Playmate with humongous bonkers. Okay, he’s behind her, holding her and she’s flashing them for the camera. I said, “Couldn’t you hold her around the waste or something?” You know, I kid him about stuff like that but it doesn’t mean anything. There are girls who will try to intrude but you nip them in the bud very quickly. I’m usually bigger than they are. It doesn’t take much.’’
When I saw her in Toronto the following year, she was single again. We met late one evening in her room at the Four Seasons Hotel and chatted over a bottle of wine about two feature films, ‘Hot Dog … the Movie’ and ‘The Surrogate’. The demands of work had caused the rift with Hefner, she said. ‘I started to get busier and busier and needed to get up in the morning and it just started to piss him off. One morning he said something to the extent of, er, we’re not making each other happy anymore. He asked me not to take on as many assignments but I said I couldn’t do that. You only get one shot at it, you know? So this was the other way.’
She said she still loved Hefner and was still welcome at the Mansion as were all of Hefner’s earlier partners such as Sondra Theodore, Barbi Benton and Heather Waite. ’They’re around all the time,’ Tweed said. ‘It’s not just: Leave!.’
She was still looking for romance. ‘I’d like to have chidlren in my early 30s,’ she told me. ‘Whose they’ll be, I don’t know. Just because my relationship with Hugh Hefner has ended, it doesn’t mean my romantic urges have. I’m certain there’ll be a new love in no time at all provided I can find somebody that suits me. I don’t think it should be too hard. I’m pretty open-minded.’
In 1983, she began a relationship with Kiss rocker Gene Simmons (pictured above) and they have been together ever since with two children.