Page Three girls – the naked truth
By Mary Braid BBC News Online
Page Three girls have been central to the success of the soaraway Sun, becoming a peculiarly British tradition in the process. But their introduction was risky, and their survival never completely assured. Sun editor Larry Lamb made his big gamble on 17 November 1970, when his proprietor Rupert Murdoch was safely out of the country.
It was a year since Murdoch’s second relaunch of a title that was already attacked by its critics for being obsessed with sex.
Up until then, the Sun’s new Page Three girls had kept their clothes on. But with Murdoch away, Lamb decided to boost the Sun’s sexual content further and Stephanie Rahn, a 20-year-old German, became the first of its models to take her top off.
Lamb had no idea how women readers or the newspaper’s distributors would react.
Legend has it that Murdoch was incandescent with rage when he saw the first bare breasts to grace his title. But the subsequent rise in paper sales – 1.5 million to 2.1 million in a year – rather soothed him.
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