I was perusing the pages of the September 1969 edition of SWANK and ran into a somewhat confusing anomaly in the “A Woman For All Seasons” spread, which begins with:
Linda Boyce believes city living breeds miseries. She’s a country girl and wants always to live close to the trees and fields.
Linda Boyce is of course the famed NYC underground actress who starred in scores of early adult films. But the thing is, THIS ISN’T LINDA BOYCE! See for yourself, here’s the spread, and afterwards a couple of picture of the “real” Linda Boyce (I didn’t just go on my own impression, I ran this through my standard Facial Recognition engine and it after considering the pictures for a minute it had a good laugh and rebooted itself).
Now, keep in mind that men’s magazine, especially from this era, rarely used the model’s real names, unless they were already “names”, which I’d suggest Linda Boyce would qualify as at this point. And why, if the editors did intend to use a “fake” name for whoever this lady was, did they go with “Linda Boyce”? The Linda part is of course common enough, but “Boyce”? Could this have been some kind on in-joke? Or was it a mistake? Or perhaps just an amazing coincidence (while Boyce isn’t a very common name, in 1962 and ’64 there were 35 and 22 “Boyce” births respectively in NYC). Which I could maybe buy, except later in that same mag we meet “Sheila” (who also is NOT Linda Boyce btw):
The interesting thing about this spread, which a few of you may have caught already, is that while still not Linda Boyce, it was shot in the exact same room, and on the exact same couch, where a large portion of RETURN OF THE SECRET SOCIETY was filmed, which WAS a Linda Boyce film! See for yourself:
So what the hell’s going on? OK, I guess the NYC underground exploitation scene was pretty small so reuse of locations was going to happen. But perhaps this isn’t such a coincidence after-all…
Returning to that tiger-print wall, it turns out that this places the location of these shoots and the filming of RotSS to 301 West 45th Street in NYC, which is the Camelot Building, and more precisely it places it to the apartment of…wait for it…Linda Boyce herself! This is confirmed by a Laura Cannon photo shoot shown on the Rialto Report here (the section in question is roughly 1/3 of the page down) which RR indicates occurred at Boyce’s apartment, and the presence of Boyce’s dog in some photos tends to confirm this.
In addition to acting Linda was also an agent, supplying talent for underground films and photo-sessions. She also, obviously, allowed some of those activities to occur in her apartment as well (for a fee I’m sure). And I’d wager at least the latter, if not both models were probably provided through Boyce’s agency. And as icing on the cake, thanks to a photoshoot which appeared in the 1970 MR. Annual magazine, and was uploaded to the SWV FB page back in 2015, we even have Boyce herself on that couch in front of that tiger-print wall (see inset).
So now we have a magazine which has a photo shoot claiming to be Linda Boyce but isn’t, and another photo shoot in the same magazine which actually took place in Linda Boyce’s apartment, and both models more than likely came from Boyce’s agency. That makes everything clear as mud, right?
