Twenty-nine-year-old Donna Summer became a millionaire largely on the strength of a seventeen-minute record she cut in 1975, in which she repeats the title, "Love to Love You, Baby," in infinite variations. The song was adopted as the anthem of the newborn disco phenomenon, and Donna Summer was hailed as disco's "sex goddess."

Born LaDonna Andrea Gaines, in a conservative, churchgoing Boston family, she has a background that is an unlikely one for that role. Her father was a butcher, her mother a schoolteacher. She has five sisters and one brother. She can't remember a time in her life when she didn't want to sing. She grew up singing gospel in her local church, listening in her spare time to Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Dinah Washington, the Supremes, and Dionne Warwick. In high school she became part of a rock group, stumbled into fairly heavy drug use, and then, at eighteen, pulled herself out of it and auditioned for the Melba Moore part in the Broadway musical Hair. she won a part in the company's European touring company, dropped out of the twelfth grade, and joined the Hair cast in Munich, Germany.

She stayed in Munich after the show closed, singing in productions of the Vienna Folk Opera, where she met and married Helmut Sommer, an Austrian member of the cast. (They are now divorced.) She did German stage versions of Godspell, Porgy and Bess, Showboat, and The Me Nobody Knows. She also sang backup vocals at Musicland Studios, where musicians and producers were creating the sophisticated, synthesizer-dominated sound called "Eurodisco," which first caught on in the United States with the East Coast gay community

In Munich she met Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, owners of the Oasis label. She wrote and recorded several songs for Oasis, including, in 1975, the three-minute "Love to Love You, Baby." The Oasis label was subsequently leased to Neil Bogart's Casablanca Records, based in Los Angeles. Bogart asked for a seventeen-minute version of the song and went on to promote it by encouraging radio stations to play it after midnight. Bogart then aimed it at the discos, and Donna Summer became a winner. Within a week the album sold 40,000 copies in New York. mostly to discos. Six weeks later, 400,000 albums had been sold.

That same year Summer returned to America, after an absence of eight years, and was shocked when screaming crowds met her at the airport. She didn't know that the album Love to Love You was already number one on the charts. (It later became "gold.") The sudden, explosive fame almost precipitated a nervous breakdown. Traumatized by the frenzy and the new identity imposed on her, she went through periods of forgetting her name, developed a chronic ulcer, and occasionally checked into hospitals for a week at a time. To this day she admits that her greatest fear is of losing control of herself, mentally and emotionally.

She went on to record two gold singles- and five gold albums on the Casablanca Records label: Love Trilogy, Four Seasons of Love, I Remember Yesterday, Once upon a Time, and Live and More, which became "double platinum." Her latest album, called Bad Girls, was released in April. She made her film debut in a collaborative film venture of Motown and Casablanca Records, Thank God It's Friday. In 1978 Donna Summer collaborated with a group called the Brooklyn Dreams on a concert tour of the U.S. Summer became romantically involved with the lead singer of the group, Bruce Sudano, and has lived with him for almost two years.

She now spends most of the year touring the United States under the management of Susan Munao. Her popularity has expanded, encompassing everyone from the easy-listening Vegas crowd to the rock-oriented young. She is now at a crossroads in her career and is uncertain about its future course. She is considering doing a Broadway show-a stage version of Once upon a Time, her urban Cinderella album - and she could be lured again by a film project. But her most immediate task is to break out of what she considers her confining image as disco sex goddess- the product of the Munich disco machine.

For this exclusive, Penthouse Interview, Elliott Mintz interviewed Summer in Los Angeles during a brief respite from her touring schedule. They began by talking about her image- the myth versus the reality of Donna Summer.