Margot Kidder and Playboy: Why She Posed Naked, Then Wrote the Words Herself
Three years before she became Lois Lane, Margot Kidder posed for Playboy. That part isn't unusual. What she did with the deal is. She told the magazine's editors she'd do the shoot on one condition: they let her write the words that ran next to the pictures. What she handed in wasn't a flattering bit of copy about herself. It was a blunt, funny, occasionally brutal essay about how Playboy itself had made her feel like a failure as a teenage girl.
A quick note before we get into it. The essay touches on disordered eating and body image in a fairly unflinching way, since that's what it's about. If that's not something you want to read about today, it's worth knowing going in.
Quick answers
• When did Margot Kidder pose for Playboy? March 1975, not 1976 as it's often repeated online, three years before she was cast as Lois Lane in Superman.
• Why did she agree to the shoot? She only said yes on the condition that she wrote the accompanying text herself, rather than have an editor caption her body for her.
• What did she actually write about? A candid essay about how Playboy's own photos had wrecked her self-image as a teenager growing up in Vancouver, comparing her own body to the models' page by page.
• What happened to Kidder later in life? She was diagnosed bipolar after a highly publicised breakdown in 1996 and died by suicide in May 2018.
Who Margot Kidder was before Playboy ever called
Kidder was born in Canada in 1948 and spent her adolescence moving around with her family, including a stretch in Vancouver. By the early 1970s she was working steadily as an actress, and her breakout came in Brian De Palma's psychological thriller Sisters in 1973. In 1975, the same year the Playboy pictorial ran, she co-starred opposite Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper and married the novelist Thomas McGuane, with whom she'd go on to have a daughter, Maggie. Superman, and Lois Lane, and the fame that came with both, were still three years away. In 1975 she was a working actress with a growing profile, not yet a household name.
The one condition she put on the deal
Playboy pictorials of the period came with text, usually written by an editor rather than the model herself, and usually along predictable lines. Kidder said later that she'd pictured exactly the kind of line an editor might slap under her naked photos, something like "Margot has more curves than the Santa Monica Freeway," and that the thought of it was enough to make her say no outright the first time the magazine asked. She only agreed once she'd secured the one condition that mattered to her: she would write the words herself.
What she actually used the space to say
Instead of a flattering bit of self-promotion, Kidder used the assignment to describe, in detail, what it had done to her as a fourteen-year-old to pore over Playboy every month. She wrote about buying the magazine at a pharmacy in Vancouver and hiding it under a copy of Scientific American so she wouldn't be caught, then locking herself in the bathroom to compare her own body to the centrefold's, feature by feature. She wrote about a crush on a boy who she was certain preferred the long legs of that month's Playmate to her own. None of it was written for sympathy. It read as someone settling an old score with a magazine that had, by her own account, spent years quietly convincing her she wasn't good enough.
The lengths a fourteen-year-old will go to
The essay doesn't stop at feelings. Kidder described specific things she tried as a teenager to look more like the women in the magazine, including a battery-powered rubber belt sold in department stores at the time that promised to melt fat away with electric pulses, and a dangerous laxative-based weight loss trick a friend had sworn by. Both, by her own telling, backfired badly and taught her nothing except how far a self-conscious teenager will go chasing an image that was never real to begin with. It's the part of the piece that still lands hardest, because none of it reads like exaggeration for effect. It reads like someone remembering exactly how it felt.
Why this was almost unheard of at Playboy in 1975
Handing a model creative control over her own pictorial's text wasn't how Playboy normally operated, and there's no clear record of another actress negotiating quite the same deal before Kidder did it. The closest real precedent is Salvador Dalí's Playboy shoot two years earlier, where the magazine let the artist himself direct the entire concept rather than simply photograph him. Playboy also built its reputation partly on individual models who used the exposure to build careers well outside modelling, the same way Diane Webber turned her own Playboy notoriety into work as a nudism advocate, a B-movie mermaid and a belly dancing pioneer. Kidder's version of that leverage was different again: she didn't use it to build a persona. She used it to take the persona apart.
The photographs themselves were shot by Douglas Kirkland, a Toronto-born photographer already well known in Hollywood circles for an intimate 1961 session with Marilyn Monroe and decades of celebrity portraiture that followed. No interview or memoir passage from Kirkland specifically about photographing Kidder appears to survive in public print, so what he made of the unusual arrangement is something we simply don't know.
The year everyone gets wrong
Almost every modern retelling of this story, including the widely shared version that first brought the essay back into circulation online, dates the shoot to 1976. The magazine itself says otherwise. Collectors' listings and the photographer's own archive both place the pictorial in the March 1975 issue, paired that month with an interview with tennis star Billie Jean King. The 1976 date appears to trace back to a 2018 online transcription of the essay, posted the day after Kidder's death without a cited source for the year, and the error has simply been repeated ever since.
From this to Lois Lane
Three years after the Playboy shoot, director Richard Donner cast Kidder as Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in 1978's Superman, a role that would define her public image for the rest of her life far more than the pictorial ever did. She reprised the role across three sequels through the 1980s, becoming one of the most recognisable actresses of the era.
The breakdown that made headlines, then the honesty that followed
In 1996, Kidder's struggles became public in the worst possible way, after a manic episode left her wandering the streets of Los Angeles for several days before she was found hiding in a stranger's garden in Glendale, dishevelled and in crisis. She was later diagnosed as bipolar, and unlike many public figures of that era she talked about it openly rather than retreating from view. Speaking to People magazine not long after, she was blunt about what she could and couldn't promise: "I'm not saying it's all over. I'm saying this is the pattern of my life." Years later, in an interview with TV Guide, she spoke about having gone a full decade without a manic or depressive episode, calling it "such a miracle." It's hard not to notice the throughline back to 1975: the same willingness to describe her own struggles in plain, unflattering language rather than manage the story for public consumption.
How she died, and getting that right too
Kidder died at her home in Livingston, Montana, on May 13, 2018, at the age of sixty nine. It was three months later, in August 2018, that the Park County coroner's office publicly ruled her death a suicide, a gap that's led some retellings to muddle the date of her death with the date of the ruling. The coroner described the cause as a self-inflicted overdose involving a combination of drugs and alcohol but did not name specific substances, and no mainstream outlet has since reported any more detail than that.
What the essay still says
The piece has no obvious afterlife in film or television criticism, and there's no sign it got much attention from the press at the time either. What's kept it alive is simpler: people who stumble across a scanned copy or a transcription tend to pass it on, because it doesn't read like anything else a magazine like that published in 1975. It ends, more or less, by telling any teenage girl reading it that she probably looks better than she thinks, and that nobody actually looks like the women in the magazine, not even the women in the magazine. Fifty years on, that's still the part worth remembering.
Further reading on the site
Kidder wasn't the only person to walk into a 1970s Playboy shoot and walk out with more control than the magazine usually gave up. Two years earlier, Salvador Dalí did something similar in The Day Salvador Dalí Took Over Playboy, and Playmate turned nudism advocate Diane Webber built an entire second career out of the exposure in Diane Webber: The Playboy Model Who Became a Mermaid, a Nudist, and a Belly Dancing Pioneer. For another Hollywood actress whose private struggles became painfully public, there's The Tragic Downfall of Frances Farmer.
Sources
4. Douglas Kirkland, Canadian Artist Who Famously Photographed Marilyn Monroe, Dead at 88 – CBC News
