American Playboy

September 2017. My wife and I saw the news that Hugh Hefner had died at the age of 91. We both had Hef stories, mostly about visits to the mansion or Hollywood-related events. We reminisced about having a private view of a controversial public figure. There'd be days of Hefner stories on the web, countered by attacks and a dismissive, “he was a dinosaur who outlived his times” tone in prestige media.

The magazine, which certainly changed mass attitudes towards acceptable levels of female nudity and sex in general, lived long enough to have seen its readership decimated by the internet making that type of subject matter free. In that one regard, Playboy is not much different than Time or Newsweek; it’s still a worldwide brand, but it's no longer a moneymaking magazine empire. Within mere weeks of Hugh M. Hefner’s death, #metoo would enter the culture with hurricane force; from a cynic’s or even a friend’s point of view, Hef’s exit timing was frankly lucky.

Earlier that year, Amazon aired an authorized docudrama, American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story. It's pretty good, semi-Mad Men in mood. This is a documentary with some dramatic re-creations, an awkward format at best, but the balance between the real footage and the recreations is smartly handled. Matt Whelan, playing Hefner, does fine, though the scene recreations didn’t call for great acting.

He started out as far from the world-class swinger the world would later see him as. An adolescent dream of working for Esquire hadn't worked out. Launching his own men's magazine was a bold risk for someone without money of his own. In the early Fifties, Hef was shy, cerebral and still somewhat provincial.

Episode 2 shows the last-minute change of the magazine's name and symbol from Stag Party to Playboy, and the birth of the rabbit logo that took an art director fifteen minutes to create and endures to this day as a worldwide symbol of woo-hoo commercialized sex. Buying a Marilyn Monroe nude photo, done for a calendar years before she became famous, now seems like such an obvious idea, it’s amazing that Hefner was the first. By present-day standards it's comical how little it cost, but it was the publicity gimmick that launched them. The first issue of Playboy was undated and didn't even name the publisher because nobody knew if there'd be a second one.

One subtle thing the filmmakers don’t point out: don’t be shocked, but at the beginning, other than the gatefold, the women weren't naked. They were saucily posed to not conceal very much, but the magazine hadn't quite gone as bold as we tend to remember it. Shows like this usually oversimplify the past (in the case of the unfashionable Fifties, smear it altogether) but this is a fair look at the times (1952-55 so far), delivered without much condescension.

Hefner gives a lot of credit to the behind-the-scenes people who were its first staff, including Richard Rosensweig, who I'd know decades later. A fascinating sidelight was marketing whiz Victor Lownes, who in a sense was the “real” playboy, the man who taught Hef a lot of his ring-a-ding-ding swinger's style. When the circulation manager became one of the models, it's both a quirky anecdote about how small a group it was, and a preview of the upcoming defense of Hefner against charges of sexism: Hey, women like doing this! It's empowering! Well...sometimes…maybe.

The next American Playboy was about the creation of the Playboy Clubs, for a quarter century as famous as the magazine itself, a chance to sample the world of the magazine in person. Like Henry Ford, or Steve Jobs, or Walt Disney, Hugh Marston Hefner made his mark by expertly redefining concepts he didn’t invent. There were other “key clubs” before Playboy's. There were plenty of nightclubs that dressed their waitresses, hatcheck and roving “cigarette girls” in provocative uniforms. Having no experience in running clubs or restaurants, he sensibly went into business with one of Chicago's established restauranteurs, Arnie Morton, who set up a jazz club with a sexy gimmick.

At first the waitresses would be called Playmates, and they'd wear nightgowns. There were obvious practical problems with the idea. Someone came up with bunny costume version #1, introduced on Hef's short-lived first TV show, 1959-60's Playboy Penthouse. It was close to the costume we once knew, but it was rabbit-white, to be changed later to darker shades of satin. The ears were realistically, but unattractively long, and the tuft of bunny tail too big. It’s like looking at a slightly disconcerting early rendering of a cartoon character.

Like the moment in Chaplin when Robert Downey Jr first puts on the mustache, derby, and cane; with the addition of detached cuffs, Playboy cufflinks, and a collar with bow tie, the bunny costume suddenly snaps into place and becomes the classic one we recognize.

The waitress-as-Bunny is one of the most obviously over-the-top sexist ideas that would be associated with the Playboy brand and defines it to this day, even though the clubs closed forty years ago. Despite the image, there was no nudity or sexual behavior involved in being a Bunny. Amazon’s Hef-approved story treads carefully, building its case that this was not all that different from other things young women sort-of willingly went through in those days, such as the deportment “schools” run by airlines, modeling agencies and secretarial schools.

The show is tacitly Playboy’s defense case that the “girls” were the stars and main attractions of the clubs, that they knew it, and usually enjoyed it. Black women testify that they made a lot of money and didn't feel exploited. Interviews with Jesse Jackson and Dick Gregory offer a defense. A couple of female authors concur that given the tendencies of the times, the Playboy Club wasn't so bad.

The Sixties were the zenith of Playboy’s influence. Their second shot at television, Playboy After Dark, 1969-‘71, has remarkably high production value for a syndicated, off-network program. It almost looks like it could have been recorded yesterday. Take a look at any episode on YouTube. Hef makes a good host, reading his lines with ease, and seeming to be enjoying himself. The talent was excellent; the main musical guests in this segment were Ike and Tina Turner.

Now, is the whole thing artificial? Of course. This isn't his real apartment, and this isn't a real party, but it feels too much like one to be a total fake. As you'd expect there are lots of pretty women around, but they're all dressed in mainstream miniskirts, supposedly the dates of the young men who are the less-noticed extras on the set. They aren't harem girls. Hefner's commitment to serious jazz and a smattering of serious talk was sincere and added to the perception of a quality show. In addition, it's remarkable how racially integrated the party guests are for a 1969 show.

It was at this time — the dawn of the Seventies — that Hugh Hefner bought the Playboy Mansion, moving the magazine to the West Coast as well. By now, his DC-9 jet had become a famous flying advertisement for the Playboy lifestyle. This is the Hefner-as-a-public-figure that most people remember. Hefner, at the height of respectability now, became a major patron of the arts. The city-owned Hollywood Bowl hosted the Playboy Jazz Festival every summer.

Some clouds began appearing. After more than a decade of expensive effort, Playboy’s lawyers managed to make the magazine mailable and saleable in most of the US. That had the unintended effect of encouraging imitators. The biggest was Penthouse, with less pretentious writing, but kinkier pictures than Hefner allowed. Hustler was even more down-market. Larry Flynt, its rather undiplomatic owner, said “The fundamental problem with Hugh is he will not admit that he is a pornographer.”

It all hit Playboy at a time when some of the bets they’d made at the top of the market were souring. A record label and a movie production company drained cash. The most expensive mistake may have been Great Gorge, a ski resort and luxury hotel within driving range of New York and Philadelphia. It failed within a few years due to bad planning and bad luck. As big as the magazine was, it was never part of an empire like Time-Life, Warner Bros. or NBC.

The least welcome intrusion on Hefner’s sexual revolution was one he didn’t expect. Playboy and Hefner were set up to defend themselves against people they considered puritans and anti-sex crusaders, with an attitude that ranged between righteous and gleeful. But their real enemy, the one with staying power, was feminism. For all the coy jokes and the magazine’s attempts to co-op that movement, over time it clearly hurt Playboy's progressive self-image, and cultural clout, badly. American Playboy offers Hugh Hefner’s rare, rueful acknowledgment that he underestimated what was glibly dismissed as “women’s lib.”

The Amazon docudrama loses some of its focus after this point. Some inter-business intrigue is well detailed and dramatic. The company, and Hefner, talked themselves into another risky venture: gambling. This tangled Playboy in endless trans-national fights to keep their gaming licenses. He ended up selling the jet, which he later called his worst decision. The mansion continued to prosper for decades, longer than the magazine did. It was more than just a shrewd real estate move out of freezing Chicago to booming California; it became Hef’s prime fantasy showpiece, the Cinderella’s Castle of a libertine’s five-acre theme park. It was a valuable icon to the company, a photo backdrop, and a key part of the Playboy mystique.

That’s how we became part of its orbit, for a while, 30 to 40 or so years ago. My own path to Holmby Hills started at the towering Playboy building on Sunset Boulevard. The publisher supported the arts and donated lots of money, as well as special and rare movie projectors we could never have located, let alone afforded, to Filmex, the Los Angeles film festival where I was the general manager. I used to meet with Richard Rosensweig, for decades one of HMH’s top executives, coordinating press releases. Hef must have liked us. We got top level treatment now: lavish fundraising parties at the mansion.

My wife had a separate path to 10236 Charing Cross Road (just south of Sunset Blvd, just east of UCLA). At the start of the Eighties, and for many years thereafter she was the national “print booker”—film copies controller—for Sam Goldwyn, Jr. In addition to her usual job, sending movies to theaters around the country, she was Goldwyn’s handler of the Bel Air Circuit, a term that appears in no film textbook, but is well understood within the film industry.

The Circuit was an informal group of several hundred Los Angeles-based stars and celebrities like Hefner, studio bosses, TV network execs, and top media investors who had 35mm theatrical projection equipment in their living rooms. Anyone in that charmed circle could screen the latest films at home for free. Dealing with them, being a studio’s facilitator or gatekeeper, was a coveted job within a job.

Of this privileged group of about a dozen, eight of them were women. They had regular thank-you group get-together lunches, courtesy of the Playboy mansion. That’s what went on at the Playboy mansion, day after day, evening after evening: not orgies, but sedate thank-you social events planned to gain influence, gain money, or both. Naturally, Hef’s genial hospitality was remembered when he wanted a film. How many women turned up their noses at the invitations? Few if any. People were less politically correct than we think.

In the early Nineties, at one of these luncheons, my wife did her usual thing of cutting through the vague goodwill and asking Hugh Hefner an innocent question: can we see the baby pictures of Marston? It was a lightning cue. He ran out of the room and proudly brought the album. As the women passed the album around the table, there was a natural ooh-ing and aah-ing; for 170 years baby pictures have always elicited that response. But there was also something else: a timeless joy in un-Playboy-like fatherhood that seemed almost poignant.