I hope fellow VEF members don’t mind me writing now and then about Karen. Hers is the second most visited Softcore Models Discussion thread—coming up on 200,000 views—so I hope I haven’t worn out my welcome, having made most of the posts myself. The lack of new material from PB is a problem, and I worry that the PM threads may lose support over time as a result. But Karen’s are still going strong, so I thought I’d try to do my best with the new material we have from other sources. And do please chime in—I know many of you have thoughts about Karen. It would be great to have a real discussion!
Thanks to UTube, we have more newspaper articles and appearance ads for Karen. One interview new to VEF helps us better understand how Karen became a PM and her feelings and experiences in her first months as a PM (I’ve written about that interview in two posts below). And Karen’s account in that interview of her photo shoots left me desperate to see more. She said that her shoots took place over three months. “Each session took a day, and sometimes we did three or four sessions a week.” Think of all the photos PB has in its vault, that it won’t let us see. I don’t mind them holding Karen’s photos hostage, but couldn’t they just make a ransom demand like any self-respecting hostage taker, and let us pay whatever they want with crowd sourced funding? Is there some problem in their contract with their web affiliate that has them holding on to her photos? Who really controls the vault? And does anyone there know how to run a business? Make money? Reward fans for their loyalty? Give customers what they want? They need to put a fan or two on the board of directors. I wouldn’t demand a vote—just a chance to say “help!”
Another article that UTube found, however, puzzled me. Karen was still making appearances as PB’s Miss January 1981 in the spring of 1984—more than a year after her original two-year contract had run out. I had thought (as a friend of Karen’s confirmed in a post on VEF) that Karen had so soured on her PB experience that she couldn’t wait for her obligation to PB to end. But there she was, nearly three and a half years later, doing the same kind of public appearance (a World of Wheels event at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds). And she used a publicity photo we hadn’t seen before, the most revealing photo of her that I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. The publicity photos I had seen before in newspapers showed Karen wearing a blouse or something more formal, or were cropped tightly to focus on her lovely face. PB apparently promoted Karen as she wished in 1981-2, as a genuine, down-to-earth girl-next-door. For example, in March 1981:
So it was a surprise to see something a bit hotter in April 1984—in the vein of the publicity photos she had always signed for fans—bare shouldered and leaving the rest to our hyperactive imaginations. Not that I’m complaining!
It seems to have been taken after Karen lost a lot of weight in an effort to look thin (not that she had to lose weight on our behalf. She always looked great! Indeed, it’s sad that PB felt the need to lie about how much Karen weighted when her layout was shot, claiming it was 123 pounds, when she admitted in an interview that she had been a very athletic and curvaceous 135 pounds—perfection!).
Of course, the photo wasn’t as torrid as the promotional photo PB published in OUI in December 1980 to sell her newsstand issue. Newspapers couldn’t go there. That ad was for the ages, even if the opening line of the copy was coy and uninspired. Couldn’t PB just let Karen’s passion and beauty, and Ken Marcus’s artistry, speak for themselves? Or if words were necessary, couldn’t they have spoken about Karen as a person, and about the erotic intensity of her performance? I did enjoy, however, the play on words in the bold script:
Don't Miss Jan.
And I can see why Karen might have had trouble looking at that picture of herself (“OMG! Did I do that?”).
But given how upset Karen was at being treated as a sex object rather than as a person, and how tired she was of most of the events PB booked for her, her promotional appearance in 1984 leaves me confused. Does anyone know how long she offered to make appearances as a PM? Maybe she was only under contract with World of Wheels, which may have had a license to hire former PMs for its shows. Anyway, I had thought Karen was done with PB by then and of promoting herself as a PM, but she wasn’t. Did she earn enough at these appearances to make them worth the aggravation?