Every Playboy Centerfold 1954 - Today

[ryanstreet]

The year is 1989.

Controversy - August 1989
In it's 57-year history, Playboy has only experimented with a "Women of Wall Street" feature twice: Twenty years ago in its August 1989 issue and most recently in October 2008, just a month after the housing bubble went kaput and the market free-fell into a frenzied, out-of-control tailspin. Brandi Brandt, the ex-wife of Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx, appeared on the cover of Playboy's maiden "Women of Wall Street" issue clutching a Wall Street Journal and a briefcase. Just like Gordon Gekko a few years earlier, the issue tapped into the public's raw fascination with Wall Street's hedonistic image of excess in the late '80s.

H.R. departments, however, were not humored. The real controversy surrounding "Women of Wall Street" unfolded in the financial service offices where the women who lent their assets to the pictorial were employed. Shortly after the issue hit newsstands, Time Magazine caught up with Playboy's Wall Street ladies. The magazine discovered that seven of the nine workers featured in the cover story left their jobs. One of the three brokers in the issue went back to school. Things really didn't work out so well for Robin Mormelo, an administrative assistant and mother of two from New Jersey. She told the USA Today: "I want to be a centerfold and make a lot of money" (a blurb in the USA Today notes Playboy centerfolds were paid $15,000 at the time). A few months later, Mormelo was denied raises by her firm and quit, reports Time.