Learning From Hugh Hefner
Celebrating 50 years of 'Playboy' for the articles and the pictures
A friend lost his job recently, so I gave him a copy of Playboy as a present. I felt a certain nostalgic need to do this because when I was a child, my mother was in the habit of buying Playboy for any man in her life who'd suffered a setback: My father's grandmother had died, an apartment manager was in the hospital, the handyman had fallen off the roof. "It's just cheesecake!" she'd say cheerfully. And really, at the time this was true.
Then one day - this must have been after they'd broken the pubic hair barrier - she bought a copy and was appalled. I think the ailing apartment manager got a bottle of Scotch instead. The Playboy I gave my friend, it should be noted, was an old 1970 issue I'd found while cleaning out the garage. The girls in their unsiliconed breasts - some of which are even covered by bikinis - now looked antiquely demure.
Playboy celebrates its 50th anniversary with the January collector's edition, and once again the pictures seem like pretty mild cheesecake. Yes, there's plenty of (rigorously styled) pubic hair - and I kind of wish filmmaker Kevin Smith's wife had refrained from revealing her own little trimmed and shaved Hitler's moustache - but I think the pendulum has begun to swing back in that department. LeRoy Neiman's famous "Femlin," the little drawing that illustrates the Playboy's Party Jokes column, is once again prepubescent down below. And if that old "I read it for the articles" line is rather less convincing than before - I'd say Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson have passed their sell-by dates - there's really nothing in Playboy now that needs to be hidden in a plain brown wrapper.
But then, I've seen what else is out there. Hustler is disgusting. The financially ailing Penthouse is back on the stands with the current holiday issue, I'm happy to say (because I write for them, and they pay well), but I'd really rather not see photos of some guy's precious bodily fluids that have exited their source. Anyone who calls Playboy pornography at this point is being willfully naïve.
The 77-year-old Hugh Hefner has a well-deserved reputation now as a dirty old man, which gets him much contemptuous ribbing from the media, and that's fair enough. But for the record, the hoi polloi think he's just great. I witnessed this a few years ago at a Warner Bros. Records party for Madonna at some grittily-located dance club, and no celebrity got nearly as big a roar of approval from fans in the bleachers as Hef did when he showed up with his gaggle of blonde girlfriends. (I think he was with Brande and the twins Sandy and Mandy at the time, but he's since made his way through a bunch more: Handy, Dandee, Randi, Glandee, and Post-Priandee ... although I may not have their names exactly right.)
When he was starting Playboy, Hef imagined a brand that was "frisky, playful, and fun," as he put it, rather than dirty. "It's a sniggering approach to sex, not a healthy approach to sex," a young Mike Wallace can be seen lecturing a young Hugh Hefner in a clip from A&E's new Playboy's 50th Anniversary documentary, which premiered last week and airs again December 31. "It's very healthy!" Hef insisted in response. He had a point.
Hefner had originally thought of calling his new magazine Stag Party, but got a cease-and-desist letter from another magazine then in existence called Stag. "I was starting to have reservations about the name anyway," he said at the A&E press conference. No wonder. Stag Party conjures up the sort of kinky '50s men's magazines featured in the new Feral House book, It's a Man's World.
"Swank published new stories by William Saroyan and Graham Greene, and God alone knows who read them," Bruce Jay Friedman recalls in the book's preface. "I assigned the late A.C. Spectorsky to do an article on girl pinching. He did one on girl bumping which I rejected. He did a second version on girl shoving; I sent it back. He countered with a third, on girl tickling. I returned it and paid him half his fee. Years later, he asked me to join him at Playboy.
"'I am making this offer,' he said, 'because of your quite proper refusal to accept anything but girl pinching.'"
But what about the distorted image Playboy gives young women about their bodies? I know from experience this can happen. When I was about 12, I asked my mother when my breasts were going to get spherically round on top, like balloons, instead of just round on the bottom. "When you get a push-up bra," she said.
"But Little Annie Fanny doesn't wear any bra at all and hers are shaped exactly like balloons!"
"Because she's a cartoon." Oh. Well, that was a disappointment, but I got over it.
Former Playmate of the Year Jenny McCarthy, who hosts the A&E special, told me a few years ago that she makes a point of saying publicly that "my boobs are not real, they airbrushed the scars, they airbrushed the stretch marks."
"I know they don't like me talking about that," she added, but she thinks it's important. Because she still remembers how furious she got when she was 16 and felt inadequate compared to the girls she saw in a Playboy she'd discovered in her boyfriend's bedroom.
And by the way, God help any man who assumes posing for Playboy means a girl will take her clothes off anytime, anywhere. Steven Seagal made that mistake with McCarthy once.
"They were casting Playmates for Under Siege 2," she recalled. "I was the last audition, dressed frumpy and plain, the way I usually go, and I walk into his office and it's only Steven. His office has a huge shag carpet - shag, I'll repeat that, shag - and a huge screaming casting couch. Casting, casting, casting, casting couch. And he says, 'Listen, I can't tell what your body looks like with what you're wearing, so why don't you stand up and take off your dress?'"
"I started crying, and I said, 'My video's for sale for $14.99, go buy it if you want to see.' And I ran out to my car, and he grabbed my arm and followed me and said, 'Don't ever tell this to anybody.' I was like, 'Dude, you are gonna regret this one day.'" (For the record, Seagal's lawyer, Marty Singer, says, "My client has said it's an absolute fabrication by Miss McCarthy.")
It's easy to make fun of Playboy. And indeed there's something faintly ridiculous about seeing Drew Carey rattle on about freedom and women's empowerment in the A&E special, as Hef strains to hear and his Playmate companions nod sagely. Except Playboy really does have something to do with freedom, and these days maybe that's worth remembering.
A society that allows Playboy - and that allows women who've posed for Playboy to tell rude men to piss off - is not a society that allows unmarried mothers to be stoned to death. Human nature being what it is, we're probably stuck with either burqas or naked balloon breasts forever. I know which I prefer.Published: 12/17/2003
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