While hanging out with a friend in college on some low-key weekend afternoon, I couldn't help but notice two attractive women staring up at me from the coffee table in his apartment.
I picked up the Playboy and looked at him.
“That's for the articles,” he said.
I put down the Playboy and then picked up the Penthouse.
“That's for the girls.”
Whether being ironic or not, my friend was the single guy with nudie mags cliche. There is often truth in cliches.
Playboy, unlike most men's magazines, wasn't just about women's naughty bits, but the insightful and iconic "Playboy Interview" in which prominent people could use naughty words and talk about sometimes naughty things they wouldn't — or couldn't — in other magazines. Within Playboy’s pages was top-notch journalism, short stories by accomplished authors (Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Ian Fleming, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, and Kurt Vonnegut, among many others), witty jokes, advice columns, expert reviews and trend stories, and a sense of sophistication that other men's magazines could never match, including the annual Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, which started nearly 40 years ago. Playboy was more than a magazine, it was a lifestyle propagated by progressive-minded intelligentsia.
But to its founder, Playboy was also a party.
“I grew up in a very repressive, Puritan home in the 1930s in the Depression era, and I look back when I was a kid at the images of the Roaring 20s — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby and jazz, etc. — as the party that I had missed,” Hugh Hefner, Playboy's founder longtime editor-in-chief, embodiment and and patron saint, told me in a 2003 interview for my then employer the Las Vegas Sun.
“I think that when I started Playboy I was trying to capture in the pages of the magazine and in the lifestyle projected by it, that party.”
Hefner, who died Wednesday at the age of 91, would also recreate that party through the syndicated series Playboy’s Penthouse, which ran from 1959-1960, and Playboy After Dark, which premiered in 1969 and ran through 1970. The best known of the two series, Playboy After Dark is a pop culture time capsule that perfectly captures the glorious excesses and zeitgeist of the Woodstock era. The show opens with viewers taking an elevator to the top floor of the building, the swanky Playboy Penthouse, and Hefner greeting them as they enter the room with a literal invitation to “come on in and join us” — us being Hefner, and a cadre of beautiful women, including then-girlfriend Barbi Benton, and celebrities and newsmakers for an evening of drinks and hors d'oeuvres, discussions on sofas, and spirited musical performances (and even more spirited dancing) in the “rumpus room.”
Hefner as bon vivant was cemented in our culture, and his swinging lifestyle the envy of many men. Playboy magazine and Hefner were synonymous and inseparable, and that was by his design.
“I used it in a unique way as a promotional vehicle,” he told me, “and also [laughs] to improve the quality of my life.”
After quitting his job at Esquire magazine, Hefner began Playboy in 1953 in the kitchen of his south-side Chicago apartment. He was 22 and had no money of his own to fund this dream of starting his own men’s magazine.
“It was a borrowed $600 — a total investment from friends and relatives of $8,000 and everything was built on that," he said. "By the fifth anniversary ... the magazine had passed Esquire and we had a million circulation and I felt hugely successful. But at that point, I didn’t know what lay even immediately ahead. It was 1959-1960 that I started hosting a television show called Playboy’s Penthouse, I acquired the first Playboy mansion in Chicago and we opened the first Playboy Club. And that, of course, changed everything. And then it became much more than a magazine and my life became more than that of an editor-publisher.”
Hefner and Playboy were catalysts for dramatic social-sexual change in the 1960s and 1970s.
But by the 1980s the roaring party of the sexual revolution was over, and many of us missed out on the fun.
“I think young people who grew up in the more conservative times of the 1980s and the early 1990s, that more politically correct time, they feel to some extent that they missed the party, some of which is reflected in stories and images related to Playboy and the Playboy Mansion and some other things retro: from the Rat Pack to the old days of Vegas to memories of things past,” Hefner said. “I think part of the great appeal of the brand and of the magazine is all related to that.”
When I interviewed Hefner, he was 77, had six girlfriends, and was an enthusiastic supporter of Viagra. “It definitely helps,” he said, “ ... as soon as I started using it I bought some stock. I saw the future.”
But Hefner also noted that he was “the living embodiment that age is just a number.”
That was true for many men who grew up reading Playboy. To them, Hefner was “living the dream,” as the joke goes. But for the younger generation, Playboy and its elder statesman perhaps weren’t so fashionable by the turn of the millennium. Photos of scantily and undressed women were free and easily accessible on the Internet. Male-themed magazines, like Maxim and FHM, promoted the Hefner lifestyle and trends but without the nudity, making them more palatable on coffee tables and dentist offices, and not put away on nightstands, or hidden in sock drawers and underneath beds.
Hefner, who was in Las Vegas to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Playboy — hence the interview — was still optimistic about his magazine’s future, despite the decline in sales.
“I have some new editors — Jim Kaminsky and some others — who have come aboard here in the last six months that are revitalizing the magazine and recapturing some of the vitality of its earlier years. It’s a very exciting time," he said then.
But I wondered if a half-century-old magazine retained any much less the same appeal and cultural cache. Wasn’t Playboy, by then, regarded by twentysomethings as a magazine their dads used to read?
Hefner was polite in his response and insistent that the recent interest in him through reality TV shows and documentaries [and this was two years before his hit reality show The Girls Next Door] was proof that the Playboy brand still resonated with the younger generation — including women.
“In the last four or five years, Playboy and my life at the Playboy Mansion have become hotter than at any time since the very early days,” he said. “We’re in the process of doing the same thing with the magazine. Young women are now wearing the Playboy logo. Stories of that have been featured on television and Vogue and the women’s magazines.
“The key audience runs from 18 to 45, with 30 pretty much in the middle,” he added later in the interview. “We’re a little over that now and we're looking for ways to reinvigorate the magazine in terms of the youthful connections but the qualities of the magazine in the past as well.”
Playboy continued to struggle, though, as did magazines and print media in general, to find its place in the new digital world as readership and perhaps relevancy declined.
Hefner remained on board the magazine and lifestyle empire he founded, if only as wise counsel, though he objected to Playboy dropping nudity from its printed product in March, 2016.
After Hefner stepped away from Playboy months later, his son Cooper Hefner became chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises, and was instrumental in the return of the traditional nude photos in the magazine in March, as well as the removal of “Entertainment for Men” from the cover.
Just as Playboy tries to keep up with the times, Hefner was aware if not certain of his timelessness.
When I asked him 14 years ago if, at the age of 77, he felt that Playboy’s readers still identified with him, he replied:
“Well, they seem to, they keep mentioning me in all their rock numbers. There are more references to Playboy and to me personally in rock music in the last couple of years than ever.”
Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.
First Published September 29, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
