Think Clean
MAGAZINES The buzz of cocktail chatter and the clink of ice cubes shrink the vast room with its monumental fireplace, paneled walls, beamed 22-ft. ceiling and two suits of medieval armor. Soft, round girls curl up with boy friends on couches beneath immense paintings by Franz Kline and Larry Rivers. The men are relaxed, confident, plainly well off. A scene straight out of Playboy magazine? Precisely. The men are mostly magazine employees, and the girls are some of the 24 bunnies who room upstairs. A couple of centerfold "Playmates," disarmingly pretty and ingenuous-looking in party dresses, sip Pepsi-Cola.
Then stillness and a turning of heads. Down a few steps from a doorway in the corner of the room walk a man and a woman--he, casual in slacks and cardigan sweater; she, sleek in blonde hair and black dress. Simultaneously, a full-sized movie screen begins a silent descent down a side wall. Playboy Editor-Publisher Hugh Marston Hefner, 40, sinks into a love seat that has been saved for him beside the 15-ft.-long stereo console. His girl friend, Playboy Cover Girl Mary Warren, 23, slips alongside him, puts her head on his shoulder. A butler brings a bowl of hot buttered popcorn and bottles of Pepsi; the lights dim; the movie begins. Last week it was Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, the week before Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman.
After the movie, buffet supper is served in the bunny dining room. "Hef" (nicknames abound) and Mary chat for awhile, then stroll off to his private quarters. These include a duplex of offices, living room, bedroom (an adjoining room serves as a TV taping studio), all ankle-deep in white carpet. Once Hef has retired, his guests may amuse themselves as they see fit. The top floor of the house, used as a bunny dormitory by the Chicago Playboy club, is off limits. Very much available, however, is the heated, kidney-shaped first-floor swimming pool (bathing suits, if desired, are supplied by the house). If guests want seclusion, they may swim through a gentle waterfall to a hidden grotto furnished with soft cushions and background music. Privacy is not complete, however; the grotto can be observed through a trap door on the main hall above. The way to a nightcap is a brisk slide down a brass firehouse pole leading to a bar, where a glass wall gives an underwater view of the pool.
Spectator Sex. To some visitors, the trap door and the glass wall are the real symbols of Hugh Hefner's achievement. Bacchanalia with Pepsi. Orgies with popcorn. And 24 girls--count 'em, 24--living right overhead! Not to mention all those mechanical reassurances, like TV and hifi. It is all so familiar and domestic. Don Juan? Casanova? That was in another country and, besides, the guys are dead. Hugh Hefner is alive, American, modern, trustworthy, clean, respectful, and the country's leading impresario of spectator sex.
Hefner's pad on Chicago's North State Parkway has become a considerable tourist attraction, with guided tours available to anyone who has a minimum of pull. It is also the monument to a major American business success story. Unlike other Chicago businesses, the enterprise is not founded on steel, grain or transportation, but on a magazine. One of the great publishing successes since World War II, Playboy was started in 1953 with a 70,000 press run, now has a 4,000,000 circulation.
The magazine has many things to offer, but the basis of success is the nude or seminude photograph that Hugh Hefner has made respectable in the U.S. prints. America was undoubtedly ready for it anyway, but Hefner seized the moment. He was the first publisher to see that the sky would not fall and mothers would not march if he published bare bosoms; he realized that the old taboos were going, that, so to speak, the empress need wear no clothes. He took the oldfashioned, shame-thumbed girlie magazine, stripped off the plain wrapper, added gloss, class and culture. It proved to be a surefire formula, which more sophisticated and experienced competitors somehow had never dared contemplate.
The Ultimate Life. Apart from the nudes, Playboy offers fiction, reportage and interviews, reasonably amusing and bawdy cartoons, some dirty jokes, and discussions by sociologists and theologians. Above all, in vivid color and enthusiastic text, the ultimate life of material and sensual pleasure is abundantly demonstrated for some imaginary man about town. Latest male fashions are on display; so are sleek cars, sumptuous stereo sets and fine wines and foods, with instruction on when, how and to whom to serve them. There is always the suggestion that sex is part of the successful life, that good-looking women are status symbols. Says Paul Gebhard, executive director of Indiana University's Kinsey-founded Institute for Sex Research: "Hefner's genius is that he has linked sex with upward mobility."
Not content just to picture all these pleasures, Hefner has brought many of them to life, sort of. He operates 16 Playboy Clubs. He has opened a Caribbean Playboy resort in Jamaica and has started construction of a $9,000,000 year-round resort near Lake Geneva, Wis. Last year "HMH" enterprises sold $2,400,000 worth of products, ranging from tie clasps bearing the bunny insigne to bunny tail wall plaques.
Hefner has also experienced some commercial failures, including Show Business Illustrated, which folded after nine issues with an estimated loss of $2,000,000, and Trump, a Mad-like humor magazine. On the other hand, the newly formed Playboy Press is thriving; last year, it sold $1,000,000 worth of books, most of them containing reprints from the magazine. At present, Playboy's staff is moving into larger quarters in Chicago's venerable Palmolive Building, leased for 63 years for $2,700,000. Thanks to eager press-agents, the building's famed beacon, whose beam can be seen 500 miles away, has been renamed the Bunny Beacon.
Just Accessories. In both his magazine and its allied enterprises, Hugh Hefner is a prophet of pop hedonism. He instinctively realized what sociologists had been saying for years--that the puritan ethic was dying, that pleasure and leisure were becoming positive and universally adored values in American society. As Psychiatrist Rollo May has pointed out, a new puritanism has developed, a feeling that enjoyment is imperative, that to live the full, uninhibited life (in sex as in other areas) is everyone's duty.
Hefner is clearly a new-style puritan, but in many ways he is an old-style one as well. He works to spread the gospel of pleasure with a dogged devotion that would do credit to any God-driven missionary or work-driven millionaire. How much real pleasure his Chicago pleasure dome holds for Hefner is a question his friends and associates sometimes wonder about. There is even something slightly puritanical about the magazine itself. Says Harvard Theologian Harvey Cox: "Playboy is basically antisexual. Like the sports car, liquor and hifi, girls are just another Playboy accessory."
Unlike the other accessories, Playboy's girls are out of reach--real in the imagination only. Shapes in the pictures all have an implausible gloss, achieved by lights that flatter and airbrushes that remove blemishes, but most of all by a mind convinced that to be real would not be ideal--and probably obscene. In their creamy perfection, their lack of any natural disorder, their stilted poses and expressionless faces, they recall nothing so much as the ivory-skinned, perfectionist nudes of Victorian and classical painters, of Ingres, Boucher, and David--the paintings that Grandfather used to steal a glance at on his first trip to Europe.
Beyond Parody. The magazine girls have their living counterparts in the Playboy Club bunnies--700 round little girls in glorified corsets that push their bosoms out, cinch their waists in, run to a sharp V in front and feature a cottontail in the rear. The bunnies also seem unreal (one cynic suggested they are made of plastic), but they are provocative enough for the management to pass a rule against dating the customers. The rule might not be necessary. As the manager of the London Playboy Club, who obviously knows his customers, says: "The basic conventioneer doesn't want to go to bed. He just wants to gawk."
In designing and running the Playboy Clubs, Hugh Hefner has effortlessly soared beyond parody or spoof. No satirist could improve on the thick bunny manual, which commands her, among other things, to remember "your proudest possession is your bunny tail. You must make sure it is always white and fluffy." If it is not, she gets five demerits.
Kinseyan Revelation. "The whole thing," says London Observer Columnist Katharine Whitehorn, "is a midwestern Methodist's vision of sin." She is absolutely right. Hefner's parents, Glenn and Grace, had been childhood sweethearts in Nebraska before they married and moved to Chicago. Glenn, an accountant who is now treasurer of Playboy, was and is a regular Methodist churchgoer; so is Grace. In his early years, Hefner was the kid across the aisle in school who was always scribbling sketches. He liked to write up the doings of local kids for a neighborhood newspaper, and drew 70 cartoon strips about ornery Western outlaws, an interplanetary space traveler and a diabolical villain named Skull.
After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Army for an uneventful two years. Discharged, he enrolled in the University of Illinois, largely because of another student there named Millie Gunn. While at Illinois, Hefner read Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. It came as a revelation, and he wrote an indignant review in the campus humor magazine. "Our moral pretenses," he said, "our hypocrisy on matters of sex, have led to incalculable frustration, delinquency and unhappiness. One of these days," he promised, "I'm going to do an editorial on the subject."
Aim for the Libido. After 2 1/2 years, Hef graduated from college, married Millie and, with his cartoons tucked underneath his arm, canvassed the Chicago publishing world for a job. Nothing doing, so he took a job with a Chicago firm that produced and printed cardboard cartons. It was, says Hefner, the closest thing to journalism he could get. Eventually he landed a job with the subscription department of Esquire magazine. But when, after several months, he asked for a $5-a-week raise, he was turned down. He went to work briefly for a publication called Children's Activities, but he decided it was time to start his own magazine--and not for kids. In 1953 he hocked his furniture for $600, scraped together $10,000. He later persuaded a talented designer, Art Paul, to become his art director. Most other magazines for men concentrated on the outdoors, so he shrewdly decided to take up where Esquire had left off in catering to indoor tastes. Hefner first wanted to call his magazine Stag Party, but a sheet with a similar name protested. Then Eldon Sellers, now an executive vice president with the company, suggested Playboy.
Inspired by Esquire's popeyed little man about town, "Esky," Hefner picked a bunny to symbolize the new enterprise--because rabbits are the playboys of the animal world. The first issue in December 1953 told readers that "we plan to spend most of our time inside. We like our apartment." Hefner also bought rights to the famed nude calendar pictures of Marilyn Monroe, then at the height of her career, and published them for the first time off a calendar. The 48-page issue sold 53,991 copies; even Hef was surprised.
From then on, he aimed Playboy straight at the libido. Since sex is part of the whole man, he reasoned, why not devote part of a whole magazine to it? "Would you put together a human being that is just a heart and toenails?" he asks. So he put together a magazine that was largely bosom and thigh and not especially distinguishable from other girlie slicks. But he added more substantial content as he went along; today's Playboy is a well-stuffed product, bulging with intellectual ambitions and self-confidence. It even includes some tips from John Paul Getty on how to succeed in business. The humor, however, remains on a fairly primitive level. A typical cartoon shows a playboy in bed with a bunnyesque girl, asking: "Why talk about love at a time like this?"
To begin with, fiction published in
Playboy was spicy but hardly shocking --long-forgotten efforts by John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Somerset Maugham, Robert Ruark. Playboy also dipped into the ribald classics; despite constant mining, the Boccaccio and De Maupassant vein is still running strong. In the early days, name writers shunned Playboy. Today, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, Herbert Gold, Ray Bradbury and Ken Purdy regularly provide respectable material. This upgrading of fiction is largely due to Auguste Comte Spectorsky,* 56, who was hired from NBC by Hefner to bring some New York know-how and sophistication (a favorite Playboy word) to the magazine. "Spec" has done that and more. Last summer he hired as fiction editor Robie Macauley, who had been running the distinguished Kenyon Review. "I was familiar with Playboy," says Macauley. "The students at Kenyon read it--so did the clergy. Besides, a magazine like this matures as it goes along."
Dream World. Maturing or not, Playboy still exists in a rather special world. Partly it can be seen in the ads, some of them for Hefner products. A four-color promotion for the 1967 Playboy calendar reads: "Make a date with these twelve Playmates. You won't want to miss a day with this delicious dozen . . . Provocative ... in captivating new poses. SHARE THE JOY!" Perhaps nostalgic older readers can hear an echo in these lines of the candy butcher during intermission at the burlesque show, peddling the latest "pictures direct from Paris with each and every luscious pose guaranteed the way you gentlemen like it."
In general, though, Playboy ads are discreet--no stag movies, no sex manuals. "Playboy takes the reader into a kind of dream world," explains Advertising Director Howard Lederer. "We create a euphoria and we want nothing to spoil it. We don't want a reader to come suddenly on an ad that says he has bad breath. We don't want him to be reminded of the fact, though it may be true, that he is going bald."
The dream extends to the magazine's editorial content, but there reality does intrude. Viet Nam has hardly ever been mentioned in its columns, but there have been eloquent pleas for abolishing the draft and capital punishment, and a defense of the right to privacy by Senator Edward Long. Long, long question-and-answer interviews, some of them aggressive and stimulating, lately recorded the views of Fidel Castro, Mark Lane and Norman Thomas--just the thing to read aloud to a date in front of the fire, he wearing a Playboy sweater, she wearing Playmate perfume.
The magazine also has its own special crusades. It recently brought enough pressure to win a parole for a West Virginia disk jockey who was serving a one-to-ten-year sentence for a morals offense with a consenting teen-age girl. Another notable success involved a campaign against entrapment tactics practiced by--no, not the CIA but, of all agencies, the Post Office. Seems that postal inspectors were in the habit of placing an ad in a newspaper to the effect that one "swinger" would like to meet another. When letters were exchanged, the unsuspecting hedonist might include a nude photograph or two--whereupon the police arrived and arrested him.* Bowing to a Playboy-organized protest movement, as well as complaints from Congress, the Post Office promised to quit the practice.
Playboy has good reason to keep the mails safe for swingers, although the magazine itself has had little trouble with obscenity laws. Hefner was once arrested by the Chicago police after he ran some nude photos of Jayne Mansfield, but the case ended in a hung jury.
Girls con Brio. "Every issue of Playboy ," Hefner has said, "must be paced like a symphony." While there may be a scherzo of cartoons, a largo of literature, a rondo of reportage, the allegro in each addition is still the girls, and molto con brio. Although girl pictures take up less than 10% of the pages, they remain the main motif. The style for the centerfold Playmate was set by the maestro himself. He chose a rather average though well-endowed girl named Charlene Drain who worked in his subscription department. She said the department needed an Addressograph machine. Sure, said Hef, provided she would pose in the nude. She agreed, became "Janet Pilgrim" and appeared in the July 1955 issue. The circulation department got its machine, and "Janet" became, for a while, head of Playboy's readers' service department. She has since married and left for Texas, though she is still listed on the masthead.
Ever since, the magazine has tried hard to make its girls look ordinary in a wholesome sort of way--just like the Nude Next Door. The illusion is heightened by the fact that the girls are presented not only nude and in color but also in numerous black and white pictures in their natural habitat, whipping up a batch of muffins or playing the guitar. Suggestive poses are out, as are the accouterments of fetishism. None of the nudes ever looks as if she had just indulged in sex, or were about to.
Hefner may have run the Marilyn Monroe shots without her consent, but now he has no problem finding big-name actresses eager to appear in the magazine. The album so far includes Carroll Baker, Arlene Dahl, Ursula Andress, Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg, Elsa Martinelli and Susannah York. Nor is there any trouble getting unknown girls to pose; hundreds apply. Sometimes, though, there is a problem in making the copy that goes with them interesting enough. For instance, the latest Miss January, Playboy said, would love to be a nurse. She was "Albert Schweitzer's fairest disciple. She has read each of the doctor's books at least twice."
The magazine also finds potential Playmates through a network of freelance photographers. A particularly rewarding field is wedding parties; a photographer covering the reception will often spot a comely bridesmaid. If under 21, she must get her parents' written consent. Photographing her is another matter. Getting a nonprofessional model, who has never before posed, in the right mood can take a photographer one whole day, or several. And all the while the photographer must keep in mind Art Director Paul's concept of the Playboy nude. "The idea," he says, "is to think clean."
Zero Garbo. The selection of the right nude from among hundreds of transparencies is taken at least as seriously by the Playboy staff as, say, choosing the proper tribal dance for a lead page in the National Geographic. Dialogue between Art Director Paul and Editor Hefner when choosing pictures for the Playmates-of-the-year feature:
Paul: This is the best shot of her face.
Hef: That shot makes the girl look too Hollywoodish. She doesn't look natural.
Paul: Don't her breasts look somewhat distorted? ... It looks as if the shots were made on a foggy day. We don't want to mix the reader up. You can't really be sure that this is the same girl.
Hef (viewing new layout): There is something wrong with the angle of that shot. Her thighs and hips look awkward. This doesn't do her justice . . . There must be other aspects to her personality.
Hefner knows exactly what he wants. He likes the young, pouty type without complications or excessive intelligence. Riper beauties he summarily dismisses. "Jeanne Moreau is a fine actress," he once said. "But as a woman she tells me zero. And zero to Greta Garbo. I think that when Sophia Loren was 20 she had a fantastic body. But that is all." To Gershon Legman, a Paris-based writer on sexuality, "Playboy is for the subvirile man who just wants to look. Basically, he's afraid of the girls." Says the Rev. William
Hamilton of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School: "Hefner rightly affirms the goodness of the body, but he misses the beauty and mystery of sexuality."
Bundle of Insecurities. Who reads Playboy? Since 85% of its circulation comes from newsstand sales, readership surveys are difficult. But certain clues can be found in a sampling of questions asked of the feature, "Playboy Advisor." Mostly, they deal with insecurities about clothes, food and sex. A Fayetteville, Ark., reader wants to know whether the gas from his CO2 cork extractor will harm the wine (no). A Bahamas-bound Louisville bachelor wants to know what clothes to take along; a fellow in Elgin, Ill., wonders whether blue or striped shirts are all right after dark (no).
A San Francisco playboy seems to have become involved with a lesbian; the "Advisor" tells him: "Next time she calls, tell her you've lots of authentically male friends for those evenings you wish to spend going out with the guys." An Akron gentleman of 57 pronounces himself "hopelessly in love" with a lovely 49-year-old neighbor. Trouble is, she won't go out with him Saturday nights; she's got a standing date with some other fellow. "Your Saturday nights must indeed be hell," agrees Playboy, "but if you insist on your so-called 'rights,' you may force the lady to make a decision that will cause all your evenings to be hell."
Despite the occasional appearance in the "Playboy Advisor" of such senior citizens, the magazine is in large measure addressed to the young who worry about the right socks as well as the right line with girls and the right pleasures. In short, it appeals to the undergraduate who wants to act like a sophisticate --or, for that matter, to the high school graduate who wants to act like a college sophomore. And why not? After all, half the magazine's title plainly emphasizes boy. Yet this does not do full justice to the range of Playboy's readers. Playboy estimates that half have attended college, 70% are between the ages of 18 and 34. Women make up about 25% of its audience, and their reactions are mixed. Says Social Commentator Marya Mannes: There is "the implicit premise that woman is an Object. She has no other function than to be lusted after and lurched at." Other female readers, who apparently don't mind being lurched at, enjoy Playboy for its inside view of a man's world and its notion of the latest styles in feminine sex appeal.
The Last Frontier. One of the more surprising facts is that Playboy's readers include quite a number of ministers. Hefner offered the clergy a 25% subscription discount, found that seminarians demanded similar privileges. In some quarters, it is considered the mark of the cool, contemporary minister to mention Playboy casually in conversation, quote it in sermons, or even to write for it. In one issue, William Hamilton expounded on God-is-dead theology; shortly after, Bishop James Pike wrote in to argue with him. Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School did an article in praise of the clergy's new grass-roots involvement with social ills and maladjustments; a group of ministers debated the pros and cons of liberalized abortion. "The last frontier is the sexual one," says Allen Moore of the Claremont School of Theology. "Because of Hefner, many in the church have begun to confront this barrier for the first time. Discussion is more open."
To supervise communications between the last frontier and the cloth, Hefner chose onetime Zoologist Anson Mount, the magazine's football editor, appointed him six months ago to head a new religion department. People who saw this move as a rather amusing put-on overestimate Hefner's sense of humor. It was all very serious, and frivolous staffers were discouraged from making jokes involving "sermon" and "Mount." Recalls the new religion editor: "I found myself over my head with things like personhood, demythologizing, Bonhoeffer. So I went to Hefner and said, 'Man, I've got to go off to school and learn some of this.' " Hef sent him to the University of the South at Sewanee, where he studied hard for one summer and entertained lavishly, as befits an emissary from Playboy. The theologians grew so used to stopping by his house at cocktail hour that eventually they even ventured as far as Hefs Chicago mansion for discussions. "At first, they entered the house as if it were Dante's inferno," says Mount. "But now those cats are used to it."
Enlightenment Simplified. Ministerial interest was greatly stimulated by Hefner's earnest, marathon attempt to spell out the "Playboy philosophy." It took 25 installments and a quarter of a million words. Hefner's thesis was that U.S. society had too long and too rigorously suppressed good, healthy heterosexuality. Since its growth had been stunted, Hefner argued, all sorts of perversions flourished in its place. "You get healthy sex not by ignoring it but by emphasizing it," he maintains. And the villain at the bottom of all this? Organized religion, announced Hefner with an unabashed air of discovery. Hefner revived puritanism long enough to condemn it for being as "stultifying to the mind of man as Communism or any other totalitarian concept."
As it poured through the magazine's columns, the Playboy philosophy was often pretentious and relatively conventional. Hefner is a kind of oversimplified Enlightenment thinker with what comes out as an almost touching faith in the individual's capacity for goodness. Release a man from repression, thinks Hef, and he will instinclively pursue a "healthy" life in business and sex alike. Hefner also exhibits a tendency to "situation ethics," which calls for judging acts within their special context rather than by a more fixed morality. Some use this formula to justify homosexuality, but Hefner firmly draws a heterosexual line. He does not endorse extramarital sex, though he approves of the premarital variety.
No one has ever accused Hugh Hefner of being lyrical, but he can grow almost eloquent about sex, sounding approximately like D. H. Lawrence as rewritten by Alfred Kinsey. Sex, he is on record as saying, "can become, at its best, a means of expressing the innermost, deepest-felt longings, desires and emotions. And it is when sex serves those ends--in addition to, and apart from, reproduction--that it is lifted above the animal level and becomes most human."
Bedwork. With many more endorsements like that, Hefner might just possibly make sex go out of style. Whatever his philosophy may amount to, he does not belong to the peripatetic school. Is he out bunny-hugging every night in his sports car or carousing through his clubs with Playmates on either arm? Not at all. His Mercedes-Benz sits forlornly in the garage; his clubs never see him. Lean, rather gaunt, with piercing dark eyes, he has succumbed to the work ethic. He explains that he does not want to face all the outside world's trivia--small talk, party joining--that might distract him from his work. Nor does he have the distractions of a family. Hefner was divorced from Millie eight years ago. Their two children live with his exwife, who has remarried.
He does a lot of that work in bed--a round bed, 8 1/2 ft. in diameter, which revolves or vibrates at the touch of a button. By rotating the bed toward the fireplace or the bar or the television, Hefner has the feeling that he is moving from one room to another. A life-sized epoxy sculpture of a seated nude girl by Frank Gallo crouches beside the fireplace, and a TV camera can be trained on the bed.
He does visit the office, but mostly he uses dictating machines to communicate with his staff, sometimes producing recorded memos 30 pages long. Two secretaries, one on day shift, the other on night shift, transcribe the flow. The complete man of electronics, he avoids face-to-face contact and gets his information on the outside world from newspapers, magazines and eight television monitors. He rarely watches a TV show when it is on the air, has it taped for later viewing, and also keeps a stock of several hundred taped movies.
No Daylight. Within his sealed capsule, Hefner loses all sense of time and season. He loves the night. By keeping his shades always drawn, he has effectively banished daylight from his life. He eats when he pleases--a kitchen staff is on duty 24 hours a day. But then he subsists largely on Pepsi-Colas, which are stocked in small refrigerators scattered throughout his quarters, including one in the headboard of his bed. Often he doesn't even know what day it is. A friend suggested giving him a set of seven pajamas with the day embroidered on each--in reverse writing so that he would just have to look in the mirror while shaving to see where he was in the week.
There is evidence that he might be looking in new directions. He sometimes sounds as if he thought the sexual revolution were over, thanks to Playboy, and that it is now time to move on to other social and economic challenges. Even the country's gross national product seems to interest him. "A publication," he wrote, "that helps motivate a part of society to work harder, to accomplish more, to earn more in order to enjoy more of the material benefits described--to that extent, the publication is contributing to the economic growth of the nation."
Like sex, G.N.P. has three letters. But for a real hedonist, it's hardly the same thing.
*Named for the 19th century French Positivist philosopher who added the word "sociology" to the language. * Playboy has itself practiced entrapment at times by hiring private investigators who pretend to be eager Johns and ask club bunnies for a date. If the bunnies are dumb enough to accept, they may get fired.
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