A Look Back at Burt Reynolds' Iconic Nude Photoshoot in Cosmopolitan

Burt Reynolds, the actor known as "Hollywood's outlaw," died on Thursday, Sept. 6 in Florida at 82 years old. Throughout his career, Reynolds starred in more than 100 films, won Golden Globe and Emmy Awards for his roles in gritty action movies and romance films, and was known for doing many of his own dangerous stunts.

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. 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.

"At the time, you know, men liked to look at women naked," Gurley Brown later said. "Well, nobody talked about it, but women liked to look at men naked. I did."

Reynolds stretches across two full pages of the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan. 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. His arm is strategically placed in front of his "tallywacker," as Reynolds later called it. He chose the photo that appeared in the magazine himself.

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. The next year, when Doug Lambert created Playgirl, he credited the Reynolds centerfold as a source of inspiration.

But over the years, Reynolds grew to have a complicated relationship with the photoshoot that turned him into a sex symbol. 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. 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.

"Standing ovations turned into burlesque show hoots and catcalls," he wrote. "They cared more about my pubes than they did the play."

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. Here, in an excerpt from the November 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan, more than 40 years after he posed atop the bearskin rug, Reynolds recalls the centerfold photoshoot in his own words.

One night in early 1972, after Deliverance was in the can but before it was released, I was on The Tonight Show with Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and author of the best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl. During a commercial break, she invited me to be the first male nude centerfold of the magazine.

Although no one had ever shown a naked man in a magazine before, Helen believed women have the same "visual appetites" as men, who'd been looking at naked women in Playboy since 1953. She wanted the same prerogative for women. It would be a milestone in the sexual revolution, and she said I was the one man who could pull it off. I found out later she'd asked Paul Newman first, but he turned her down.

Helen didn't have to talk me into it. I was flattered and intrigued. I wish I could say that I wanted to show my support for women's rights, but I just thought it would be fun. I said yes before we came back on the air. (I may or may not have had several cocktails in the greenroom before the show.)

On the way to the photo shoot, I stopped for two quarts of vodka and finished one before we got to the studio, which was freezing cold (bad for a naked man's self-esteem).

The famed Francesco Scavullo photographed me on a bearskin rug. He took hundreds of shots: with a hat in front of my … tallywacker, with a dog in front of it, with my hand in front of it. (If I was trying to prove something, why would I cover it up with my hand? I have very small hands.) They promised to burn the outtakes and give me the negatives.

The magazine hit the stands in April 1972, three months before Deliverance opened, and quickly sold all 1.5 million copies.

A version of this story was published as "Vintage Beefcake" in the November 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan.