Farewell to the Hef! Hugh Hefner, R.I.P.

[OSJ]

Hugh Hefner R.I.P.

[RIPPA]

John is only in it for the articles

(aka Mark posted about it already over in the Movies/TV Thread like 10 hours ago)

[OSJ]

It occurs to me that my being a few years older than many of you means that I lived through the golden years of Playboy, whereas  most of you (thankfully) didn't have to. For those who recall the Hef as a doddering old fool surrounded by women young enough to be his great-grand-daughters there was actually a time when he meant something...  Starting in the 1950s and taking advantage of horny returning GIs from Korea, Hef began selling a lifestyle that existed nowhere except in his own head (and ultimately at the Playboy Mansion that the aforementioned target audience wound up paying for). If you read Playboy, why you were 90% on your way to being James Bond! Bartenders would know at a glance that you wanted your martini shaken, not stirred, beautiful women would throw themselves at you, you would be shown to the best and most exclusive baccarat tables in Monte Carlo, (assuming of course that you could afford to get to Monte Carlo after wasting money on all the over-priced shit advertised in Playboy). 

It was a phenomenon like nothing ever seen before in the magazine industry. To be sure, there was some serious quality to the thing, Hef wanted good writing so in the 1960s he was paying top writers FIFTY CENTS A WORD. Do you have any idea what that meant? I would kill and eat a baby in the middle of Times Square if someone were to pay me fifty cents a word to write about it now. Interviews? Oh yeah, an interview in Playboy meant more than an Academy Award. You almost didn't mind that you were being charged twice the price of any other periodical. How did Hefner accomplish all this? Simple, he provided something that vaunted photographers of Life and Look couldn't, something that the New Yorker was woefully lacking in, and something that only National Geographic had gotten away with previously... Pictures of NEKKID WIMMEN!!!! Well, to be fair, for many, many years merely topless, but it was a different world then. It was marketing genius, your grandfathers and my father could justify their stashes of the magazine to angry wives by loftily proclaiming, " I read it for the articles!"  And how are you going to argue when the contents page has names like Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, and an interview with the lovable Bill Cosby (remember what I said about it was a different world then)? 

The magazine's tag-line, accompanied by a jut-jawed young man in a Savile Row suit that none of the readership could afford on a bet, cried out: "What sort of man reads Playboy?" implying that if you subscribed, you would join a fraternity of chaps like James Bond, Napoleon Solo, Joe Namath, Mickey Mantle, etc. (please note at least two of those four are fictitious characters and I'm not fully sold on Namath).  Certainly that conveyed a more positive image than the truth of the matter which was, "Horny white dudes without the balls to go to a legit dirty bookstore to buy porn."  That Hef sold this snake oil for almost half a century before becoming a joke, is really pretty amazing.

[OSJ]

1 minute ago, RIPPA said:

John is only in it for the articles

(aka Mark posted about it already over in the Movies/TV Thread like 10 hours ago)

Sorry, I was arranging my flight to play baccarat at Monte Carlo and having my eighth martini.

[BrianS81177]

[OSJ]

How big of an asshole does one have to be in order to be scolded by Hugh Hefner for making sexist comments? The mind boggles.

[J.T.]

I actually read Playboy for the articles, or at least the fiction.

The first two chapters of Slaughterhouse 5 debuted in the magazine as well as two or three of Stephen King's short stories.

And yeah, naked women.  First black Playmate of the Month was Jennifer Jackson (1965).  First black Playmate of the Year was Renee Tenison (1990).

[OSJ]

3 minutes ago, J.T. said:

I actually read Playboy for the articles, or at least the fiction.

The first two chapters of Slaughterhouse 5 debuted in the magazine as well as two or three of Stephen King's short stories.

Lots of folk sleep on the fact that from the late 1950s-1980s the men's magazines were a solid market for horror and fantasy fiction. I probably have close to fifty issues of Playboy, Gallery. Knight, Adam, & Rouge with fiction by Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison. Dennis Etchison, and other such luminaries, to say nothing of Gahan Wilson having at least one full-page cartoon (if not more) in every issue of Playboy for at least a twenty-year run. As I mentioned, when you're the best-paying market in the English-speaking world, you're gonna get the big dogs, and with only two stories per issue (24 a year), lots of top-notch fiction filtered down to the imitators (who also paid a damn sight better than any of the genre magazines. For example 1960s Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine: three to five cents a word. Knight (a real bargain-basement Playboy knock-off): ten cents a word. This was pretty standard, the noteworthy higher-paying markets were the aforementioned Playboy and (strangely enough) Boy's Life, which at twenty cents a word out-paid The New Yorker and many other more "prestigious" markets.

If you ever wondered why so much Heinlein sf showed up in Boy's Life, now you know.

[J.T.]

6 minutes ago, OSJ said:

Stephen King

Yep.  I still have the December 2006 edition featuring King's love story from beyond the grave, Willa.

[OSJ]

22 minutes ago, J.T. said:

Yep.  I still have the December 2006 edition featuring King's love story from beyond the grave, Willa.

Would that I had the two issues of Gallery with the King booklets ("The Raft" and "The Jaunt" IIRC) and the two issues of Startling Mystery with his first two short stories. I have a complete run of the all the other Health Knowledge digests, Magazine of Horror, Bizarre Fantasy, etc. but I'm missing those two issues and I'll be damned if I pay $200 each for them (the other issues run about ten bucks each).

[J.T.]

20 minutes ago, OSJ said:

Would that I had the two issues of Gallery with the King booklets ("The Raft" and "The Jaunt" IIRC)

You are correct about The Raft (November, 1982). 

The other booklet King published in Gallery was The Monkey (November, 1980).

I know because a friend of mine bought signed mint copies of the magazines from King's website like seven or eight years ago.

I used to have the 1986 edition of Twilight Zone Magazine that featured The Jaunt but it is probably tucked away in my mom's attic and is in God Knows what awful condition by now.

I think my dad's stash of Playboys got thrown out years ago.  I should've saved the ones with the interviews from Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Siskel / Ebert.  Sadly, Pop's stash did not have Hef's chilling 1965 interview with MLK Jr..

Playboy's interview with Ayn Rand is the most in-Ayn Rand thing she ever did in her entire life.

 

[OSJ]

Just now, J.T. said:

You are correct about The Raft (November, 1982). 

The other booklet King published in Gallery was The Monkey (November, 1980).

I used to have the 1986 edition of Twilight Zone Magazine that featured The Jaunt but it is probably tucked away in my mom's attic and is in God Knows what awful condition by now.

 

Doh! Now I can picture the damned thing, (even though I've never owned a copy). I have one of the worst Stephen King collections in the world. People assume that I have all of his stuff in 1st editions, nothing could be further from the truth. I have Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Everything's Eventual, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, The Regulators. Desperation, The Stand* and Bag of Bones. And of course, Blockade Billy and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (I am a baseball guy, after all) . Oh yeah, and I have The Talisman (which I've never been able to finish) .

*Yes, both versions. WTF was I thinking of?

[Dolfan in NYC]

 

[Cliff Hanger]

I've been thinking a lot about Hefner's legacy this week. The weird mix of "actual sexual liberation for women" and "objectification disguised as sexual liberation" complicates both Hef's general legacy and his effect on me a lot.  I had a long, interesting conversation with my GF last year when they dropped the nudes about Playboy's effect on Hollywood, the actresses who gushed later about getting to be a pinup for a day and getting paid enough to defuse criticism vs the objectification-disguised-as-liberation visited upon a lot of models who weren't already famous, the illusion of legitimacy PB promised vs the reality, and other things.  At 40, I am a better person because Hef paid insane money for authors I would go on to love to write, and because we're a less hung-up culture than we might have been.  But in my lifetime, he himself was the archetype of the gross rich old white man who bought off young women and treated them like ass until they left and he found someone new to buy off and mistreat, and by the time I was actually buying Playboys of my own in the mid to late 90s the quality of fiction had taken a hard hit most months, it really was just 30 pages of naked women and 100 pages of ads for fancy-arsed stereos.  But the illusion was incredibly powerful, and OSJ's comment about "naked women for men too embarrassed to visit a porn shop" kind of resonates--if nothing else, it made it okay for 'legitimate' bookstores to sell nudie magazines, to the benefit of Penthouse et al. later.

[Brian Fowler]

The thing about the "I read it for the articles" joke is that the articles were actually really top notch. The fiction and the interview have produced legitimately legendary content. 

Nobody makes that joke about Juggs or Penthouse, you know?

[odessasteps]

1 hour ago, Brian Fowler said:

The thing about the "I read it for the articles" joke is that the articles were actually really top notch. The fiction and the interview have produced legitimately legendary content. 

Also the cartoonists.