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HE WAS THE DEAN OF PLAYBOY PHOTOGRAPHERS,with 65 published Playmate centerfolds and 40 published Playboy covers to his credit. He traveled the world for the magazine shooting celebrities, fashion, food and cars, but most of all, beautiful women. Thousands of beautiful women. He loved beautiful women and beautiful women loved him. His greatest talent as a photographer wasn't his technical expertise with cameras and lights. It was his charm. Pompeo Posar's first contact with Playboy was rejection. He took photos, nude photos, of the wife of a friend. He brought them to Vince Tajiri, the first picture editor of Playboy magazine. Vince looked at the photos and liked them. He jotted down Pompeo's name and number and then promptly misplaced the piece of paper he had written on. When Pompeo didn't hear back from Tajiri, he assumed his work had been rejected. Pompeo was born in the city of Trieste on the border of Yugoslavia and Italy. His background gave him connections to Chicago's ethnic community. In early 1960, he took his camera to a local television station in Chicago to photograph, again for a friend, a folk dancing show. Hugh Hefner and the original Playboy's Penthouse television show were being taped on an adjacent stage. Pompeo took some photos of Hefner and his guests and later sent them to Hef, who then directed Pompeo back to Tajiri. This time Pompeo's phone number was not misplaced. 
Tajiri hired Pompeo -- he quickly emerged as Playboy's number one photographer of women, a position he retained and enjoyed for more than 30 years. In Playboy's early days, often the most difficult thing for a photographer was finding a model and convincing her to take her clothes off. No one did that better than Pompeo. A standing Playboy office joke was Pompeo's ability to quickly convince women that they were beautiful and that they should be photographed sans clothing. He found prospective Playmates on beaches, in nightclubs, walking down the street, in the elevator, at parties, at Playboy Clubs. His approach was always suave, if not subtle. His good looks, thick Italian accent and engaging smile were weapons that very few women were able to resist. Having photographed so many beautiful women, Pompeo was often
asked the question by friends and the press: "Don't you get tired of
photographing beautiful women day after day?" Pompeo's reply: Now Pompeo is gone. We'll carry on here at Playboy with the job of photographing beautiful women. (Hey, someone has to do it.) But Pompeo will not be replaced. He was one of a kind and truly the prince of Playboy photography. -- Gary Cole |
"Photographing women is like eating. You get
full, but in a few hours, you are hungry again." And yet Pompeo was
a ladies man only behind the camera. All his charm and energy were
directed to the job of taking pictures for Playboy. The women may
all have loved Pompeo, but he had only one love outside of taking
pictures for the magazine -- his lovely wife, Melita, who he met in
Trieste as a teenager and soon married. If a model proved
challenging (and sometimes they did), Pompeo would say, "But I only
have to photograph her. Tonight I will go home to Melita."