5 Feet of Fury

A Centerfold’s Guide to Suicide: My NEW Taki’s column

Super-“JOOOOOO!!!”-y comments this week, sorry…

In reports on Bill Cosby’s alleged assaults on over a dozen complainants, the Daily Mail noticed that a long-dead centerfold named Paige Young (Playmate of the Month, November 1968) figured in some accounts.

Now the Mail claims that Cosby and Young carried on a brief yet intense (and drug-addled) relationship around 1970, after the pair met at the Playboy Club. (Cosby was also a regular at Hefner’s Mansion, site of the infamous “grotto,” where orgies were said to prevail.)

Then came the day when Young realized she was no longer young.

“Passed around by dozens of Hollywood leading men over a decade,” says the Mail, the model “had become damaged goods. When she turned 30 in 1974 her star had faded and she felt used, abused and unwanted by the Hollywood establishment.”

That’s when Young took her own life, but in a way she “thought would send a powerful message to the men who she believed had tormented her for so long.”

So on Palm Sunday of that year, Young shot herself in the head with a .38. Except she supposedly did it lying on a bed draped in an American flag, with a pentagram drawn on the floor.