Playboy completes five decades

Somewhere behind the stone walls, past the strutting peacocks, beyond the hidden grotto, somewhere within the crenellated facade of the Victorian Gothic manse just off Hollywood`s Sunset Boulevard, Hugh Hefner sits in his pajamas, cross-legged on a plush carpet, summarizing his legacy for a journalist on the phone from Canada. "(Alfred) Kinsey was the researcher and we were the pamphleteer" he says. "We were spreading the news" of the sexual-science pioneer. Hef -- a single syllable that says Playboy -- doesn`t really think of himself as a rank-and-file apparatchik in the sexual revolution. His place, he presumes, is grander than that, at least as grand as the Playboy Mansion. But it`s a nice turn of phrase, and an image as apt as any the architect of Playboy`s empire of sex has affected in the past 50 years. Married twice, in love routinely, aroused almost constantly (at 77, he owes this as much to Viagra as his seven live-in girlfriends), Mr. Hefner is a pop-culture chameleon -- a recovered Puritan, a nervy publishing greenhorn, a moral philosopher, an urbane lecher, a sybaritic recluse -- whose mutability has ultimately served a magazine buffeted by the winds of change it helped to whip up. For two decades beginning in 1953, Playboy magazine was the pre-eminent carouser in a giddy post-war celebration of self-indulgence. For two decades after, Playboy was a victim of those same impulses, outflanked by more risque sexual insurgents and under siege from what Hef sees as the sexual revolution`s spoil-sport faction, "the anti-sex feminist left." Now, at the end of its fifth decade, under the stewardship of Mr. Hefner`s Brandeis University-educated, post-feminist daughter, Christie, the diversified sex business spawned by the magazine seems to be re-emerging from a financial slump. In the red since 1999, Playboy Enterprises posted modest profits in the first half of 2003, and its stock responded encouragingly. Even with a circulation less than half its seven-million-subscriber peak, Playboy is still the world`s No. 1 men`s magazine (by a healthy margin over fast-rising newcomer Maxim), and is one of top 20 magazines of any kind in the Unites States. The magazine, however, no longer drives company fortunes. The post-millennial success of the house that Hef built is based on TV, Internet and home videos with explicit content that is a far cry from the air-brushed pinups that are Playboy`s stock-in-trade. Playboy TV, along with a brace of racier domestic channels and pay-per-view operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, accounted for $32 million of Playboy Enterprise`s operating income in 2002, more than 10 times what the company`s publishing arm reported. And yet, it is an article of faith among Playboy executives that the company`s fortunes still depends on the strength of its core brand. The magazine bestows upon the entire operation the same patina of respectability that made slick, literate Playboy magazine more successful than the tawdry skin magazines that preceded it. "We really think of it as the hub of the wheel, " Christie Hefner says from Playboy`s Chicago offices. "Our television business and our online business and consumer products business only exist because of the power and cachet of the magazine to represent the Playboy lifestyle and the brand." And still it is Hef who personifies the magazine, though his role in the day-to-day business of the company has been minimal for years. Living the life Playboy espouses has proved more fun that espousing it. Hef`s latest incarnation -- the genial grandfather of sexual liberation, more to be envied than censured, still with a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his, ahem, step -- is almost wholesome. This means Playboy stockholders can blush less furiously as Hef`s daughter strives to enrich them with the home-delivery of hard-core sex. This may be his real legacy, says biographer Russell Miller, whose 1985 book Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy isn`t a favourite in the Playboy Mansion. "He did consider himself to be this deep thinker, this intellectual, this leader of the sexual revolution, the man who had revolutionized society and given man the ability to have fun again after all these years of austerity," Mr. Miller said recently from his home in Buckinghamshire, England. "He claimed credit for this, but it was nonsense, utter nonsense." Playboy`s real contribution, says Mr. Miller, was to give permission for the commodification of sex, to precipitate the flood of commercial titillation now taken as a matter of course. "Perhaps you should give Hefner credit for that," says Mr. Miller. "If credit is the right word.` - - - The Hugh Hefner the world knows may be a wistful self-invention, but the man who dreamed up Playboy in 1953 was a product of his time. At 27, Hef was a restless war vet, a frustrated husband and new father mired in a bourgeois lifestyle barely supported by low-paying jobs selling or promoting magazines. This wasn`t how he had imagined his life. Hef had read Scott Fitzgerald and was beguiled by the romance of the Jazz Age, that giddy era of release after the Great War. Where were his gin-soaked revels and loose women? "I had expected a comparable party and celebration after World War Two, and when we didn`t get it, when the 1950s turned out to be a rather conservative and repressive time... I knew we were in a lot of trouble," he says. Like many of his gender and generation, Hef was obsessed with the sex he wasn`t getting. In 1948, Kinsey, an entomologist who had switched from classifying gall wasps to fastidiously recording our preoccupation with slap and tickle, released his book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. It revealed that most men were wantonly engaged in the kind of practices that religion frowned upon and legislation banned, from "self-pollution" to oral sex and adultery. Hef, then an undergrad at the University of Illinois, embraced Kinsey`s findings with with zeal. In a college term paper, Hef wrote that Kinsey spotlighted the hypocrisy of attitudes toward sex and would help lead the way "out of this dark, emotional, taboo-ridden labyrinth and into the fresh air and light of reason." It was perhaps inevitable that, five years later, Hef began to think of Kinsey`s findings not as academic research but as a market survey. His musings suggested a route to the glamourous lifestyle he had imagined for himself, aspiration which had been sidelined by marriage and family. "A moment came when I thought, if I don`t do something, I`m going to turn into my parents," he says.

He conceived of a magazine that would be as sophisticated as Esquire, then the elite men`s magazine, but as honest about male prurience as Flirt and Wink, under-the-counter magazines that featured blowsy bottle-blondes in various stages of deshabille. It was to be called Stag Party (changed after protest from a field-and-stream monthly, Stag), and was meant to be a handbook for the literate, licentious urban male. It might have remained no more than an ambition were it not for a stroke of luck that led the Hef to infamous photos of Hollywood`s hottest new star, Marilyn Monroe. Chicago printer John Baumgarth had used the nude photos, taken four years earlier, in promotional calendars, but figured they were too erotic for any other use. Mr. Baumgarth was happy to sell what he considered worthless magazine rights for $500. He even threw in the colour separations. Largely on the promise of Miss Monroe`s charms, Hef was able to secure pre-orders for some 20,000 copies of his magazine. While the $8,000 he raised from family and friends would not stretch to cover the New Yorker-calibre prose he wanted to leaven magazine`s naughty bits, he included Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Conan Doyle stories that had recently come into public domain. The magazine, which hit newsstands in major cities in late November 1953, was nothing if not pretentious. Hef penned an editorial that defined the Playboy mystique: "We enjoy mixing up cocktails, and an hors d`oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzche, jazz, sex." Heady words for a publication assembled on a card table in a small apartment amid the soiled diapers and other detritus of middle-class life, by a man who wore white socks with black shoes, and whose gastronomical tastes ran to Pepsi and fried chicken. "Hefner liked to present himself as this incredibly louche, very suave playboy figure, but he was never that," says Mr. Miller. "He was a rather gauche, shy figure." Regardless, Playboy was an instant success. The inaugural issue -- undated in case poor sales required it be left on the market for more than a month -- flew off the shelves. Within a year, circulation would be 175,000. Within six, it would hit a million. Mr. Baumgarth`s presumption that Hef couldn`t openly peddle "figure studies" and stay out of jail proved out of step. Hef, alive to his age, had instinctively sensed that something had changed. In 1953, Simone de Beauvoir`s The Second Sex was published in the U.S., introducing the term "women`s liberation." In 1953, the first wide-circulation gay periodical in North America, One Magazine: The Homosexual Viewpoint, was launched. And in 1953, Kinsey released the blockbuster second installment of his research. Sexuality in the Human Female, based on interviews with almost 6,000 women, revealed that women born after 1900 had wide sexual experience. It sold 200,000 copies in weeks. Before long, Playboy had replaced its stock of vulgar Baumgarth pinups with more wholesome models styled as "the girls-next-door." The pictorials included fully clothed photos of workaday life. Playmates became titillating evocations of Kinsey`s sexually adventurous women, in full-colour with staples. - - - The heady success of the magazine tempted the company to diversify in the `60s, investing in Playboy clubs, hotels and casinos. But success would also draw the attention of clergymen, politicians and academics who saw the magazine as an example of moral decline. In the December 1962 edition, Hef, by then divorced and living the Playboy lifestyle in the original Chicago Playboy Mansion, began his long response. The Playboy Philosophy would be the publisher`s preoccupation for two years. It would run to 250,000 words, packed in 25 issues of the magazine. It would rail against prigs and prisses who refused to acknowledge their own sexuality, and call for changes in laws and attitudes Hef saw as repressive. It would be his most serious claim on the sexual revolution. "I think it was turgid, self-indulgent," says Mr. Miller. "It was Hefner ... writing out this stream of consciousness stuff that nobody dared to edit because it came from the publisher and was the Holy Grail. It ran at inordinate length and did nothing but add spurious gravitas to the magazine." But Hef took the philosophy seriously. It would give rise to the Playboy Foundation, a fund that would support court cases and campaigns touching on the libertarian issues the philosophy promoted. It would appeal convictions on state sex laws, underwrite cases touching on birth control, and stray into issues of civil rights and drug control.

Playboy, says Hef, has had "a positive impact on changing social and sexual values, and rather dramatically so." The foundation would even play a part in the landmark abortion case Roe vs. Wade, but it was not enough to placate a new brand of Playboy critic no more enamoured of legislative and religious patriarchy than Hef himself. Feminists had set their sights on Playboy ever since a young freelance journalist named Gloria Steinem went undercover in high-heels and Bunny tail and wrote a 1963 expose of the demeaning working conditions of corsetted Playboy Club hostesses. Later, in a leaked memo, Hef would infamously express his frustration with feminist militants: "These chicks are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with them ..." While feminists were protesting Playboy`s "objectification" of women, the magazine was loosing ground to an upstart whose objectification was even more pointed. The success of Bob Guccione`s less reserved Penthouse in the 1970s made Playboy look vulnerable, and precipitated an avalanche of men`s titles, each a little more daring than the last. Every time Playboy matched the competition, allowing glimpses of pubic hair, or adopting more frankly erotic poses, it got more flack from critics. Since the business had gone public in 1971, controversy was not welcome. Meanwhile, Playboy`s ancillary businesses were faltering. The clubs had lost their currency, liquor and gaming licenses were harder to come by, and construction costs on hotels and resorts were skyrocketing. Playboy Productions had bankrolled film flops and Playboy Records was in the red. Hugh Hefner, says his daughter, "never saw himself as, or even aspired to be, the head of a business. It was really the unforeseen phenomenal success of the magazine that led to the ability of the company to grow in other Playboy businesses and wound up putting him in the position of being the head of a company." Things were dire at Playboy in 1982 when a 29-year-old Christie, who had planned a law career, was named president by her father. The company had just reported a loss of $51 million U.S., but Ms. Hefner was undaunted. Playboy, she says, "had to re-invent itself." In the end, she rid the company of the clubs, hotels, resorts, films and records and concentrated on what made Playboy a runaway success in the first place: Sex. Playboy TV, among the first premium-cable subscription services on the air in 1982, was never intended to offer the breadth of the magazine, says Ms. Hefner. "In television, you have to cut to the chase right away," she says, "and we thought what that meant for Playboy as a television brand was that it would be quality, sexy entertainment all the time." The channel featured soft-core porn films, sex-oriented talk shows and Playmate features. Playboy TV did not have the instant success of the magazine. In Ronald Reagan`s America, sex was again a dirty word. Cable companies had mixed feelings about carrying the channel, and some state legislators put up roadblocks. An early attempt to set up a program-sharing arrangement with Canada`s First Choice network (now TMN) was scuttled after loud protest by church and women`s groups. At the urging of U.S. cable companies, the channel became a pay-per-view service in the late `80s. But Playboy TV`s competition in the pay-per-view field was more explicit -- and more successful. Since the mid-`90s, Playboy has been moving slowly but steadily into hard-core programming, buying up existing double- and triple-X movie channels like Spice, Hot and Vivid, and introducing explicit programming to once-tame Playboy TV. Ms. Hefner knows where Playboy`s bread is buttered. Cable and satellite sales of adult pay-per-view programming are forecast to rise to nearly $1 billion by 2005. And while Playboy`s online sex and gaming sites have only begun to turn a profit, the sector has similar projections for growth. How best to serve the market for in-home sex is not a moral question but a business question, Ms. Hefner says, and her father agrees. "Even the most explicit images of sexuality are not hurtful," Mr. Hefner says. "It is in repression, and the darker sides of sex that hide in the dark, where you get the kiddie porn and the real twisted deviation." - - - Managing the risk of public censure is no longer the concern of Playboy magazine. Editor Jim Kaminsky, hired last fall from Maxim, is more interested in changing the notion that Playboy is tame and old-fashioned.

His job, he says from the magazine`s New York City offices, is "to make sure we have relevance to a 25-year-old guy who`s never seen this magazine before and may be picking it up for the first time." That means more humour, a brassier attitude (a recent article told readers how to pick up women at funerals) and a new look, with lots more sidebars, illustrations and photos. "Eighteen- to 34-year-old guys are probably smarter than they were a generation ago, but they process information in a different way," he says. "They`ll read a big, ambitious piece if you make it relevant to them, both in its subject matter and its writing, but also in the manner it is presented." Mr. Kaminsky has also hired a West Coast editor whose job is to entice celebrities, like last month`s covergirl, Shannen Doherty, to pose for pictorials that are a little less revealing than Playboy`s traditional photos. Semi-nude celebrities trump the lingerie-draped starlets of a rowdy -- and remarkably successful -- new breed of magazines aimed at young men. However, Mr. Kaminsky sees Maxim, FHM, Stuff and other "lad magazines" not as competition, but as breeding grounds for Playboy readers. "What they offer is very much akin to hanging out with some good friends at a frat party, getting drunk and having a great time. But like any drunken frat party, you do have to leave at some point." And come to Playboy, he hopes. Meanwhile, Mr. Kaminsky`s boss, still the final arbiter of the magazine`s cover art, Playmate selection and cartoons, has undergone a couple of his own makeovers -- new variations on the theme of Hef -- since his daughter assumed responsibility for Playboy Enterprises. In 1989, four years after a mild stroke left him feeling vulnerable, America`s most famous bachelor married Vancouver-raised Playmate, Kimberly Conrad. "I was seeking a safe harbour," he says. The marriage lasted 10 years, during which he says he remained faithful. "When it didn`t work, I came out of it a little emotionally bruised and discovered, to my great surprise and pleasure, that a whole generation had grown up and was waiting for me to come back out and play.`` Now, Mr. Hefner says, he takes better care of himself, has given up smoking his trademark pipe, and has cut back on late-night carousing, though not on what he continues to call, endearingly, "romance." His seven girlfriends keep him young, he says. "Sometime seven women are less trouble than one. And my doctor can attest to that. My blood-pressure is in a great place now."