Playmate of the Month October 1978 - Marcy Hanson

It happens all the time. You can't walk anywhere with Marcy Hanson without being stopped by one of her fans. This one happened to be a young girl of about nine. She sidled up to Marcy and gave her a big hi, followed by a Charo-style cuchi-cuchi bump and grind that got embarrassed halfway through and ... ended up a blush. A combination of audacious sensuality and cowgirl innocence, Honey Bee Novak - in miniature - rolls again. For those of you who are blind or who were out of the country last spring, Honey Bee Novak is, or was, the very sexy, very spaced-out coheroine of Rollergirls, an NBC miniseries that captured the hearts, minds and private parts of a large segment of America. What the Fonz was, or is, to teenage boys, Honey Bee was to young girls. Hey-yyyyy. How did Marcy become Honey Bee or, for that matter, our Miss October? It almost didn't happen. "You should have seen my contract. There was a morality clause (thank you, Marilyn Chambers) that said if you'd done nudity, you were unfit for television. It was ridiculous. They wanted me to be ashamed of my body. Every day on Rollergirls, the guy from standards and practices would pass the word to the producer, who would tell the director, who would tell the costume lady to hide my body. 'Put Band-Aids on her nipples. Make her wear a bra and a body stocking. Then a jersey.' There was no way I was going to go out like that. Those Band-Aids hurt. Between scenes, I would sneak offstage, take off the Band-Aids, bra and body stocking. Nobody noticed." We wouldn't say that. Journalists saw Marcy as the symbol of television's preoccupation with cleavage. Her personal life was as publicized as her professional life (Joe Namath and Rod Stewart had been dating her). Marcy gave good press. When a Chicago reporter interviewed her, he asked, "Do you jiggle?'" Marcy replied, "No. I'm not old enough to jiggle." Marcy tried to keep work and play separate. "I didn't want to get press just because I was in bed with someone. I wanted recognition for my own talents. I wanted to be Marcy Hanson, actress, not Marcy Hanson, girlfriend." The last episode of Rollergirls was a crisis for Marcy. For a week, she had worked on adding dimension to Honey Bee. On the day of the taping, a network executive said the comedy format had no room for emotion. "Take her back to Disneyland." "I broke down. I called my preacher back in Texas, just to get through that day. I vowed never again to let someone else choose for me, to ask me to be less than my best. From now on, I choose for myself." Shame to the man who put Band-Aids on this girl's spirit.

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