Still, despite his change of heart, Reynolds will be remembered as a man who played a significant role in Gurley Brown's own lifelong mission to put women's sexuality in the public eye. "They cared more about my pubes than they did the play." "Standing ovations turned into burlesque show hoots and catcalls," he wrote. In interviews throughout the last few years of his life, he expressed regret about the shoot and admitted that he looks back at himself during that time as "an egomaniac." In his memoir, My Life, Reynolds wrote that he found it strange how women reacted to him after the April 1972 issue hit stands. In 2016, Reynolds told Business Insider he felt the photo harmed his reputation as a "serious actor," and that Deliverance suffered because of the centerfold. The next year, when Doug Lambert created Playgirl, he credited the Reynolds centerfold as a source of inspiration.īut over the years, Reynolds grew to have a complicated relationship with the photoshoot that turned him into a sex symbol. Gurley Brown had pitched the idea to Reynolds as a "milestone in the sexual revolution." Prefacing the image was a declaration that a male centerfold was long overdue. He chose the photo that appeared in the magazine himself. His arm is strategically placed in front of his "tallywacker," as Reynolds later called it. He's got a smirk on his face, a limp cigarillo dangles from his lips, and a fuzzy bearskin rug is underneath his also-fuzzy body.
Reynolds stretches across two full pages of the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan.
"Well, nobody talked about it, but women liked to look at men naked. "At the time, you know, men liked to look at women naked," Gurley Brown later said. Shortly before Deliverance, his biggest film up to that point, was released, then-editor Helen Gurley Brown approached Reynolds to be the magazine's first-ever male centerfold.
But in addition to his work on camera, Reynolds was also known as a heartthrob, and a now-iconic photoshoot that appeared in a 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan will forever be part of his legacy.