The first former People's Liberation Army member with a nude pictorial in Playboy, BAI LING has dropped her great wall and flashed her China moon while emitting alternating squeals of "Whoopee!" and "Oops!"
In a phoner last week, the cunning Ling—the co-star of Red Corner, Sky Captain . . . and the upcoming The Beautiful Country—opened up to me about her public dressing-down. "I'm nervous," the femme fatale said about the saucy spread. "For me it's a little too provocative. It's not porno, but it's . . . I'm an actress, I shouldn't be doing this!
"But we're just shooting pictures and having fun," she said, switching gears. "The human body is a gift and needs to be cherished and celebrated, so I'm honored. I always imagine Playboy is beautiful blonde girls with big boobs. Whatever I have is natural, so I'm grateful they think I'm sexy!" For eight thigh-popping pages.
The layout, she said, is beyond the wildest dreams of someone who grew up in the hormonal wasteland of mainland China. "We never talk about sex in China," she assured me in clipped, breathless tones. (And by the Bai, I've kept her perfectly charming syntaxes intact.) "Anything related to sex is forbidden. I used to think babies come from the belly button!" Silly Bai—they come from storks' buttholes.
But the slow-blooming good-time gal learned the raunchy ropes the hard way. At 14, she joined the PLA, where, craftily enough, she'd loiter around the men's quarters—wouldn't you?—trying to grab a peek or a listen. But did she actually have, you know, sexual c-o-n-g-r-e-s-s? "Of course!" she exclaimed. "Many of them! Something when it's forbidden, it's human nature that you really want to do it." (I know, Blanche, I know.)
And did the frisky little soldier get down in the trenches, as it were, with the ladies too? "Yes," she blurted. "Because we all live together! We all wash naked in front of each other. The leader's wife takes a bath first in a swimming pool. After that you can imagine how dirty that water is. I was a new soldier, so they asked me to undress first. They would tease me and push me inside the water. And then everyone jumps in. It was disgusting when I think about it." Hmm, sounds hot! Actually, I was utterly bewildered, but the bi Ling got me back on track by explaining, "We developed friendship. For us to sleep in the same bed holding hands is a normal thing."
And that wasn't the end of the fabulous debauchery, honey. "I was a little alcoholic in the army," she confessed, giggling. "It tasted like a sweet wine. I wrote an apologizing letter. I'm always apologizing."
Well, there's no need for Bai to grovel and scrape over her blissfully unselfconscious celeb behavior these days—it always makes for gorgeous copy. Half the stars in Hollywood have elbow marks from Bai working her way into arrival photos. And last week, Page Six reported that she was shattered to be cut from the new Star Wars flick and wrongly thought it may have been because of her spread (which is poignantly in Playboy's Star Wars issue). But she must have later taken some sense pills because Bai's manager now tells me, "She realizes [being axed] is sometimes part of the creative process."
His client can be comforted by the eight fashionable spirits she says are inside her—"little girls with miniskirts running around." Her take on the fame game? "The red carpet is a fantasy world. I feel like we're butterfly walking by to add one color or one music on red carpet. But in my private life, I'm shy and turn off the lights when I'm in bed with boyfriends. They say, 'Why?' I say, 'Part of me is really traditional Chinese girl.' " And the other part has her legs spread to high heaven. Bye, Bai! Brace yourself for all the people who are gonna want to be the ninth spirit inside you!
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