The Illustrated History of Playboy

Good for us: We're 25 years old. We've never felt better and we couldn't be happier.

Best is that more often than not, it's been fun--which has been the idea of it all since we began. But which in 1953 was a slightly dangerous notion for a new magazine to be celebrating. It's even difficult for people who lived through them to remember how grim the very early Fifties were--and how rigidly conformist. When Korea was just grinding down to an empty, meaningless impasse; our first dry-fuck war. When number one on Your Hit Parade was Doggie in the Window by the Rage, Miss Patti Page. And Joseph McCarthy, the Honorable Mad Senator from Wisconsin, began seeing Commies instead of pink elephants, spreading the illness across the country before his own grew to fever before live TV cameras--our first nationally televised real-life soap opera. Kids in grade school twice a week practiced crouching in basement hallways and kissing their asses goodbye, in preparation for the bright day when the mushroom cloud melted downtown; many were issued dog tags, so their charbroiled young remains could be identified by any survivors.

Fun was definitely not "in."

Nor was nonconformity.

In 1952, General Eisenhower, while campaigning for President, stated the national goal as he saw it: "The great problem of America today is to take that straight road down the middle." His crashing landslide over witty "egghead" Adlai Stevenson proved we were already well on our way. Fit in, go along with the team, don't rock the boat.

Stevenson lost so badly in part because he seemed too brainy, wasn't "regular" like Ike, who grinned and waved his wedgie and cheerfully mangled the English language. Most liberal-to-left politicians and journalists--especially while McCarthy was still careening around, waving his hallucinatory lists--chose ducking and hiding in the storm cellars until it blew over. Local patriots were busy ridding their public-library shelves of such Commie trash as Huckleberry Finn. It was the flannel-fingered dawn of the age of the Organization Man.

A great time to be alive.

In January 1954, at least one person thought so--27-year-old Hugh M. Hefner, who with not much experience and less money had somehow managed to pull off the impossible. In the midst of this dreariness and repression, he'd become Editor and Publisher of the most daring, talked-about new magazine in recent memory--and it looked like he wouldn't have to turn all his furniture over to the bank, after all.

He wrote in the graphic autobiography he's kept scrupulously since high school:

What do you say when a dream comes true? What words do you use? How can a guy possibly express a thing like this?

I own a magazine--a magazine of my very own. Or, more precisely, I am president of, and hold a majority of the stock in a corporation that owns a magazine. Of course, we've very little money in the bank, and the road ahead will be a rough one, but, nevertheless, the dream has become a reality--and whether we succeed or fail in the months and years ahead, I'm getting my chance to try.

Several factors combined to give him the chance, and one was terrific timing. Prevailing values bland and boring as those of the early Fifties virtually demanded rebellion against them--mostly, as always, among young people. By 1954, it was beginning to show itself. Playboy came out of aspects of the same energy that created the beat crowd, the first rock-'n'-rollers, Holden Caulfield, James Dean, Mad magazine--and anything else that was interesting by virtue of not eating the prevailing bullshit and being therefore slightly dangerous.

Unlike some of the stories that circulate about its beginning, Playboy didn't just drop out of the sky into Hefner's lap the moment after Esquire failed to come up with the legendary five-dollar-per-week raise. He'd been working on it a long time, without really knowing it. He had the disease at least since the age of nine, when he'd hand-typed a neighborhood newspaper and hawked it about for a penny a copy. In high school during the early Forties, he wrote and drew cartoons for the paper. Strangely enough, Hefner is in a certain sense a failed cartoonist. What has become his graphic autobiography began in high school as a cartoon series about himself and his friends called School Daze. While in the Army, he contributed cartoons to various Service papers, and afterward, at the University of Illinois, edited Shaft, the humor magazine--which, naturally, published plenty of cartoons signed "Hef." When he got out into what passes for the real world, his only immediate ambition was to make it as a professional cartoonist--but he couldn't sell a strip or comic-book idea to save his life.

Given his vast energy, it must have been a miserable period for him. He tried--very briefly--graduate school at Northwestern. Then, in 1950, came a job in the personnel department of the Chicago Carton Company, boring, but it paid the bills. He still wanted to be a cartoonist, but no one wanted him. He wrote in the autobiography: "Just when I come out with a good old blood-xand-thunder, psychological thriller, vice committees are clamping down on crime comics all over the country. Such is life! But just as comic chances are cooling down, I'm getting hot over an idea for a magazine titled Chi--a picture publication for and about the people of Chicago."

Luckily for everyone, he never got that one started.

In 1951, he was instead working at the famous low-paying job in the circulation department of Esquire. It's impossible to tell how important that was to the creation two years later of Playboy. Probably less than has often been claimed, at least in terms of shaping Hefner's ideas about what his magazine should be, but it was crucial in one respect: It taught him how to write good promotional letters. The job that followed at Publisher's Development Corporation had considerably more influence on what Playboy was to be and on how it could come to life on one tenth the money everyone told him he'd need to pull it off.

P.D.C. published a handful of small-circulation specialty magazines. One was called Modern Man. This was, it is useful to remember, back in the Cro-Magnon period of so-called girlie magazines. The magazines for men were of the outdoorsy, hairy-chested, Raw Guts and Sex Stories Illustrated variety, grizzlies for breakfast and guns for lunch. Most of the girlie magazines featured tame calendar-style pinups, with nothing else in them. Raciest were the anonymous airbrushed honeys cavorting at volleyball in nudist camps, their pudenda elusive gray smears. Modern Man was a modest move beyond these. To the pinups were added a few "men's" articles, in a formula the publisher described as "girls, guns and gears." Hefner had other ideas.

In the graphic autobiography, then still in cartoon-panel form, hand-inked and colored, a long series of panels shows a cheery Hef expounding his ideas in balloons to a friend:

I'd like to produce an entertainment magazine for the city-bred guy--breezy, sophisticated! The girlie features would guarantee the initial sale--but the magazine would have quality, too. Give the reader reprint stories by big-name writers--top art by local artists--cartoons--humor--maybe some pages in full color to give it a really class look.

So he did just that.

Hefner then performed some publishing sleight of hand that involved an infamous bit of calendar art featuring Marilyn Monroe curled nude on red satin, peeking out over her delicious right armpit. Nearly everyone in America had heard of it, but so far most people had only seen a stamp-sized replica in Life magazine that you had to be a jeweler to enjoy. The owner of the rights was an outfit on Chicago's West Side that did sexy calendars for the barber-shop trade. But it hadn't had the nerve or the enterprise to reprint it. To Hefner's slight astonishment, he talked them into letting him have it for his first issue, for just $500--and they threw in the expensive color separations for free.

The value of that single page proved incalculable. It drew national attention to a thin new 44-page magazine that might otherwise have gone straight down the tubes. So uncertain was Hefner about his chances that he wisely neglected to date the first issue, so it could ride the newsstands as long as possible.

But Marilyn turned that first issue--which looked a lot more like a nervy college humor magazine with nudes than like what you're presently reading--into hot news. The 70,000 copies sold out easily and now fetch as much as $400 apiece among collectors.

Hefner was, as they say, blown away. He couldn't quite believe it, and even today there's a piece of him that still can't. In January 1954, he wrote in the autobiography: "It is all very, very unreal. The dream has come true too quickly to be fully appreciated."

He was riding the express train and it just kept rolling. Eighteen months later, in the summer of 1955, Playboy's circulation had gone up by bounds to 400,000, nearly six times the initial press run, and was effortlessly zooming past half a million by year's end. By then he could say accurately in the autobiography:

I'm beginning to realize, for the first time, how spectacularly successful this venture has become. Playboy is, I believe, without precedent in the magazine publishing world. It shouldn't have succeeded, but it has. It was started without any real financial backing; had it failed, I would have been in debt for, almost certainly, years. Instead, it appears that I will be able to spend a lifetime doing the work I love best and, in the process, become a very wealthy man. When I dreamed this dream of my own magazine just two short years ago, I didn't realize that it would make me rich, but that's what it's doing. I certainly never thought that it would make me famous, but it's doing that, too.

Almost immediately, Playboy proved to be wired to an undiscovered chunk of the culture that multiplied, ahem, like rabbits. By geometrical increases, the magazine quickly became part of that culture. Just as the younger kids pounced on Mad when it first came out, their older brothers couldn't get enough of Playboy. It had tapped a brand-new main vein.

For all his belief in the Uncommon Man, Hefner down deep was normal--at least in terms of the interests and fantasies he presented to his readers in the magazine. He's said often that Playboy is a straight-ahead extension of his personality and, as it happened, young men all over the country shared his interests and fantasies--even though many of them were reluctant to admit it to Mom or Sweetie. Like successful editors since Addison and Steele, Hefner had the nerve to say out loud what a lot of people were already thinking privately. No accident that a couple of years into it, a market-research report showed that the readership was the Editor-Publisher--the average reader being, like Hefner himself, a 29-year-old college graduate working in some sort of profession.

What had he done?

One thing was to evolve the idea of the girl next door, which was one small step for mankind made by the early Playboy. It was the first time a magazine had ever presented a pinup as something other than a porno postcard, the rougenippled top of a calendar or those honeys playing volleyball.

For the first year, Playboy's "Unpinned Pinups"--as they were called at first--were standard calendar shots provided by the owners of Marilyn's picture. In the first issue, she was Sweetheart of the Month, but had become the Playmate by the second. The only other change in the first year was to expand the Playmate picture to two pages. At the time, Hefner couldn't afford to do anything else.

But in December 1954, he ran a photo story preceding the actual Playmate shot that was called Photographing a Playmate--and the response was considerably greater than to anyone since Marilyn.

It was the July 1955 appearance of Janet Pilgrim, of our own Subscription Department, that really did it: The mail simply would not quit.

After the fact, it was easy to figure out: The shots of a regular-looking, regularly dressed male photographer touching up the back of a smiling and buck-naked Terry Ryan; and the shots of Janet Pilgrim, an engaging blonde who fulfilled subscriptions and bowled on the office team, shown first at work slaving beautifully over her typewriter, and then sitting two pages later wearing mostly diamonds at a fancy dressing table, as if we the lucky viewers are the mirror, while a fuzzy male in a tux leans against a background doorway. The fuzzy male is Hefner.

Janet Pilgrim as Playmate was an instinctive move on Hefner's part toward making the girls in his magazine more human. And the readers loved it. This is still the tight-assed early Fifties we're talking about, when most young men had been taught, as some still are, that sex is dirty and to be avoided, and that only cheap tramps engage in "it" before marriage. At the time, the idea that a "nice" girl would appear in the four-color altogether was shocking! ... outrageous! And incredibly reassuring to men who hoped sex didn't have to be as sordid or as guilt-ridden as they had been told.

Suddenly, here were girls, a girl, Janet Pilgrim, who looked like a good, decent human being and worked in an actual office--as the Playmate of the Month. Revolutionary. What a great leap it allowed our fantasies to take: not some distant bored bimbo with her clothes off but, perhaps, if God were in a good mood, she might one month be that girl you see on the bus every day who's making your heart melt.

Easily as important to Playboy's success was its editorial attitude, which has remained pretty much true to its school. In the introduction to issue number one, Hefner made it clear that Playboy wasn't going to be a magazine for Aunt Effie or Junior, and that in spite of the gray Cold War skies all around, it was going to emphasize entertainment--fun, on several levels. He wrote in the number-one intro: "Affairs of state will be out of our province. We don't expect to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths. If we are able to give the American male a few extra laughs and a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age, we'll feel we've justified our existence."

But Hefner also has his serious side, abundantly documented a few years later in the epic Playboy Philosophy. He was a better publisher than prophet, and the lingering psychology major in him must have prompted him to run as the first-ever article in his magazine one titled Miss Golddigger of 1953, a head-on attack on the inequities of divorce, particularly alimony. Not exactly World War Three, but not exactly escapist fluff, either.

In issue number four--a year after a national book purge, provoked by a State Department directive regarding Commie filth in our libraries--Playboy began serializing Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a powerful sci-fi indictment of censorship set in a dark future where all books are rabidly put to the torch. Prelude to a long series of heavyweight censorship bouts Playboy would fight in its first 25 years, it also revealed where the magazine stood. Playboy made a lot of people nervous--something we think has always been one of the best things about it. It has consistently kept naming names that weren't supposed to be there, from The Pious Pornographers to All the President's Men to its award-winning revelations about the Hughes empire.

Such a stance has naturally given the magazine its share of flak--legal, religious, economic, you name it. One early antagonist was the Post Office--which instead of simply delivering the mail, tried to deny Playboy second-class mailing privileges, on the grounds that the lights at the P.O. found it too racy for their taste. Rather than back down and clean up the act to suit them, as other magazines, including Esquire, had done, Hefner late in 1955 took the P.O. to court--and came away with second-class privileges as well as an injunction restraining the P.O. from further interference with the magazine.

Advertisers in the Fifties, even more than now, were a cautious, high-strung bunch. Didn't want their name associated with anything that smelled even remotely controversial. Despite its circulation success, Playboy had to do without advertising for almost two years, and then the first were only small record-rack and jodhpur and auto-seat-cover ads trickling into the back. All along there had been offers to advertise from an array of greasy sleazoid entrepreneurs, but Hefner's policy was to do without rather than let them into his pages--and he was selling enough copies to do so, with a press run that just kept jumping.

You could measure the growth in buildings: From Hefner's small apartment in Hyde Park to one floor of a narrow old building at 11 East Superior (smack across the street from Holy Name Cathedral, a face-off that was harbinger of things to come); then all four floors of that one, plus a few offices scattered nearby; to signing a $500,000 lease on a building at 232 East Ohio Street, a huge loft area completely redone to suit the magazine's needs and tastes, including a lavish on-the-premises apartment for the boss. All in three years.

Or you could measure it using a favorite unit of Hefner's in those days: the size of the office Christmas party. He wrote in the autobiography at the end of 1955: "Nothing illustrated the growth of the company more clearly than the Christmas Dinner. A year ago, we were able to group our half-dozen employees around a small table in a local sandwich shop; this December, the more than 30 working for the HMH Publishing Company filled two giant banquet tables at Younkers Restaurant." A year later, he wrote: "On this, our Third Anniversary, the growth is still more phenomenal: The company has over 100 employees and Christmas parties are planned at both the new Playboy building here in Chicago and our advertising and editorial offices in New York."

One significant addition in 1956 was A. C. Spectorsky as Assistant to the Publisher. His arrival marked a visible upward turn in the quality of the magazine. Ray Russell, the first editor Hefner hired in 1954, has said with some accuracy that until the arrival of Spec, the magazine had been put out by "a bunch of amateurs." Hefner's experience had been spotty in many areas, Art Director Arthur Paul (the other half of the staff at first) had been a free-lance artist, not a magazine designer; and Russell was an aspiring novelist writing ad brochures for Walgreen's when he was hired. Given their credentials, they were doing all right, but as Russell remembers it, Spec heralded the magazine's entry into the big leagues.

Spec brought with him the elán of New York, a precious commodity then. He was author of a recent, bitingly witty best seller, The Exurbanites, had an extensive and tasteful background in magazines and newspapers and was senior editor on NBC-TV's Home show when Hefner lured him away. Much more than Hefner ever could or would want to be, Spec was the embodiment of the sophisticated urbane male Playboy was aiming for. Also, he had terrific connections.

In 1956, Playboy stopped publishing reprints and began buying original work from the best writers and artists around, paying $2000 and up for a lead story. By the end of the year, the magazine had bought fiction from Ray Bradbury, Budd Schulberg, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Wylie, Wolcott Gibbs, John Steinbeck, Max Shulman, P. G. Wodehouse and Alberto Moravia. At 800,000 and rising, Playboy passed Esquire as the best-selling men's magazine (duly noted in the autobiography), and some genuine big-time advertisers had begun to nibble; among them, Winston, Budweiser, Marlboro and Hiram Walker.

Everything was coming up money, in a continuing gusher, or so it seemed. And Hefner had never gotten over his love affair with cartooning and humor. Playboy was already making cartoonists such as Shel Silverstein and Jack Cole famous; and a thematic thread among the articles was the developing of a "new humor," in reviews and profiles of comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Shelly Berman, Don Adams, Bob Newhart, et al. Because of Hefner's abiding fascination with humor, Playboy was right there on the crest of that new wave.

•

It is an axiom of guerrilla warfare that when you begin to feel comfortable, you're about to be dead. Nineteen fifty-seven was to be that kind of year.

Circulation figures showed that Playboy's fall newsstand sales had slumped badly; in the spring of 1957, internal upheaval among magazine distributors sent all newsstand sales into chaos, and the May Playboy got creamed by it, dropping below the level guaranteed to advertisers. During the first months of 1957, HMH was losing approximately $50,000 per.

All sorts of cuts were instituted. Hefner quit taking a salary and chopped one quarter off the top from his executives. It wasn't enough. By July, it was clear he'd need a $250,000 loan if he wanted to keep Playboy afloat until the profitable autumn months. And to get it, he (continued on page 288)Illustrated History(continued from page 284) finally had to do something that must have made him crazy: hand over 25 percent of Playboy's stock to Empire News in exchange for the money.

In July 1957, Hefner observed in the autobiography: "I have learned a lesson I hope will never leave me: When things are brightest and all is at its very best, that's the time to be thinking about tomorrow, and making sure that enough is being put away to cover the days when all may not be quite as it should be. It wasn't easy--giving up a part of what I've worked so hard for--but more important, I haven't lost control of the publication--and so the dream remains intact."

The following year began with its own kind of storm.

Enter pretty Elizabeth Ann Roberts, the January 1958 Playmate. At sweet 16, according to Illinois law, she appeared to be just two years too young to pose seminude. Hefner, who took the picture, had been told by her mother that she was 18, and you'd never guess otherwise from looking at the Playmate shot, which was, incidentally, innocent and healthy--almost tame--even by 1958 standards: Elizabeth Ann being a developed brunette, almost zaftig, who's standing naked in heels, turned three quarters away from the camera, so she's mostly flank and firm derrière, not a breast or a pubis in sight. But a local columnist ran a tsk-tsk item on it--despite the fact that Elizabeth Ann was an honor student who planned to become a model and that she had her mother's full approval--and the indignant citizens were off. Soon Hefner and the girl's mother had a warrant issued against them for leading to the delinquency of a minor.

The trial was jurisprudence at its finest. Everyone was in court because of a law designed to protect minors. The judge ended up dismissing charges against Hefner and the girl's mother, while slapping Elizabeth Ann, who was the theoretical protectee, with a 15-day sentence for refusing to testify. Then, a few days later, he issued a second verdict. Charges were dropped against Elizabeth Ann, and Hefner and her mother were now not guilty.

By the end of 1958, Playboy had scrambled out of the financial hole of the previous year. Circulation was moving inexorably toward and beyond the magic 1,000,000 mark, and the advertising dam was broken, prestige accounts came flowing in. At year's end, Hefner wrote:

This labor of love has turned into the most spectacular magazine success of our generation, has brought me in five years more recognition and wealth and purpose than I ever dreamed of having in an entire lifetime. I am--I think--one of the luckiest men in all the world. If life ended tomorrow, I would have had more of a real taste of it than most can ever hope to have. I am supremely happy. Happy beyond words to express it.

One casualty in this high flight was his marriage, which early in 1959 ended in divorce after prolonged separation. Ever since moving into the office on Superior Street, Hefner had essentially lived and breathed the magazine. He turned part of that tiny first office into an apartment, and it would sometimes be two weeks between visits to his other apartment and family on the South Side--about six miles away. From the first, Playboy consumed him and, truth be told, try as he might, he could never bring himself to be Dagwood. He has since remarked that the divorce left him free for the first time, that until then he'd always been trying, often without success, to behave in ways pleasing to someone else. You can feel the conviction in the section of The Playboy Philosophy in which he advises young men to strenuously avoid such foreign entanglements until at least ten years after they've left school, that it's a time for goofing and checking things out, not raising babies. Hefner is a loving father to his daughter, Christie, and son, David, but there's a real wistfulness when he writes about what he missed. It also suggests part of why Hefner has so vigorously been making up for lost time ever since.

The Big Event in Playboy's life during 1959 was a three-day bash and Jazz Festival sponsored by the magazine early in August. Hefner's devotion to jazz and big-band swing goes back almost as far as his fascination with publishing. In high school, he reviewed current Sinatra and Artie Shaw platters for the paper; and from then intermittently through college, he fronted his own band, at times called Hef and the Hep Cats. Sinatra was god and model and, according to some reports, the Editor-Publisher wasn't bad. But jazz crooner is another of Hefner's failed careers, like cartooning, and thus in 1959, Playboy's bash emerged as the biggest and best jazz festival to date. Critic Leonard Feather called it "the greatest weekend in the 60-year history of jazz!"

But because Playboy was still regarded as dangerous in some circles, it almost didn't come off. Originally to be part of the Pan-American Games celebration in Chicago that summer, it had been slated for three days in the south bowl of Soldier Field. After sinking almost $70,000 into the project, and booking nearly every jazz great you could think of, Playboy was informed by the city that it couldn't have Soldier Field, after all--something about possible damage to an expensive new cinder track, which would presumably remain pristine during the All-Star football game and the Chicago-land Music Festival that were still scheduled there. Closer to the truth was that there had been heavy pressure from Chicago's powerful Catholic machine, speaking through the editor of the Roman Catholic New World, who wrote to the park district questioning Playboy's fitness to participate in the Pan-American Games celebration.

The Jazz Festival was out on the streets.

But not for long. Luckily, Chicago Stadium was open for those dates, and Playboy quickly signed up. The stadium held 22,000 people, several thousand fewer than Soldier Field, but it was air-conditioned, which never hurts in Chicago in August.

With Count Basie, Big Joe Williams, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald as headliners, it was the biggest one-time event jazz lovers had seen in the Fifties. At the end, a beaming Hefner stood on the stage and said to the cheering sea of people, "This is certainly the greatest moment in my young life!" In the autobiography, he describes it like the fan he is:

Every performance was emotion charged, topped by the moment near the Festival's end, when Miss Ella Fitzgerald, the first lady of jazz, came into view on the turning stage. The roar was greater, the Chicago Stadium managers swore, than any they'd ever heard at a championship fight or any of the other great sports events for which the Stadium is famous. More than 18,000 jazz fans packed each of the three performances, but far from the unruly rock 'n' rollers expected by police, these were serious music buffs who quieted down to theater-style stillness to catch the careful phrasing of Ahmad Jamal and Miles Davis.

Another dream come true. The music freak's fantasy of bringing together every band and performer who sends chills up your spine, and then sitting there digging it all in bliss. It is characteristic that Hefner had the focus and energy to make it happen. To stand there with people who'd been icons in your high school pantheon, to be accepted as a peer by people who created part of you: What a rush.

As you may have noticed by now, Hefner doesn't mind a challenge. Most people would have been happy to have started what by 1959 was the biggest men's magazine ever--and which on a per-issue basis was outselling Life and Look as well. Not Hefner. In retrospect, there's a hint of regret in his reaction to Playboy's swift initial success, quoted earlier: "The dream has come true too quickly to be fully appreciated."

While he's never abandoned his interest in the magazine, as soon as it was again sailing along on its own, all sorts of other things started popping. He needed something to do. This in under two years:

• Not one week after the Jazz Festival, a television show called Playboy's Penthouse was announced and it went on the air in late October.

• About the same time, Playboy bought a classic late-Victorian brick mansion at 1340 North State Parkway and began an extensive renovation that included an indoor pool, an underwater bar and a duplex suite. Hefner himself supervised the plans.

• On February 29, 1960, the first Playboy Club opened for business to key-holders only in Chicago. Two of the largest attractions belonged to Bunny June "The Bosom" Wilkinson, who merited her nickname if ever anyone did, the very same who made television history on Playboy's Penthouse by balancing two champagne glasses above the neckline of her low-cut dress while an extra posing as a waiter poured. The Club was such an immediate hit that plans were made to open 50 around the country. And in December 1960, a fourth floor--the Penthouse--was added to the Chicago Club as a showcase for top talent, a night club for keyholders inside the Club.

• In December 1960, too, Hefner announced that a new magazine called Show Business Illustrated would be forth coming.

• And by early 1961, Playboy Tours and the Playboy Model Agency were about to be added; at least they were being worked on.

Ray Russell, who left to write novels about that time, has called Hefner a "battery pack," a seemingly endless energy source, and that seems pretty accurate. While there's always too much to do, there's never enough, either.

He could spend so much time on other projects because Playboy's circulation and ad revenue just kept climbing. By late 1960, circulation had hit 1,300,000 and was going up so fast that Playboy found itself in the odd position of getting too far ahead of the competition. So it did something interesting: raised the cover price. Hefner says in the autobiography:

With the September issue, Playboy increased its cover price from 50 cents to 60 cents per copy, not because we needed the additional revenue but because we are climbing too quickly away from our advertising competition (Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Holiday), all with circulations below the 1,000,000 mark. The new price will give us the same or greater revenue while holding the circulation somewhat in check and presumably increasing its quality by eliminating borderline readers.

In this same year-end wrap-up, he quoted a fat significant statistic: The postwar baby boom would begin actually to boom during the Sixties and Playboy's potential audience was due to increase by 72 percent in the next ten years. We were all into a new game.

The Cold War hit a record-low chill factor as the Sixties arrived. In a black international chess game, Castro had taken Cuba, the U. S. bungled into the Bay of Pigs and Khrushchev's ships full of missiles, bound for Cuba, put the world briefly on Doomsday Alert. In that respect, the dread Fifties were still very much with us, and getting worse. We soon began sending "advisors" to Vietnam.

But also in 1960, in London, Mary Quant introduced the miniskirt. At Harvard, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were messing around with psychedelic Mexican mushrooms, Sandoz LSD-25 and other mind-expanding goodies. In a smoky basement club in Hamburg, a teenage rock group then known as the Silver Beatles was working on the act. Change was blowin' in the wind.

Handsome prime symbol of the coming shift was John F. Kennedy in the White House--not to mention pretty Jackie, with her great toothy smile and pillbox hats. You can be sure that if Nixon had won in 1960, he never would have invited Hefner to the Inauguration. Kennedy did, and Hefner went, taking Playmate and longtime sometime girlfriend Joyce Nizzari as his date. A big moment among many for Hefner, certainly, but, better, a Playmate at the Inauguration.

The invitation said much about what a part of the culture Playboy had become since 1953, but it suggested as well how much the culture had changed in that time. Many of the ideas and values that Playboy had taken so much shit for in the Fifties were on their way to becoming mainstream. Camelot had arrived, and it looked as if the young were going to inherit the earth.

Among those out in the water first to catch that changing wave, Playboy was riding it right in the pipeline. And, as a result, experienced in those first years of the Sixties an initially subtle but profound shift of its own: By fits and starts, it was changing from a magazine to an empire.

The most obvious indicators were the Playboy Clubs. Late in 1961, Hefner wrote in the autobiography:

With just three Playboy Clubs in operation, Playboy Clubs International will earn about as big a profit this year as the publishing side of the Playboy empire, and it will very soon be a matter of the tail wagging the dog, as far as profits from this latest Playboy offshoot are concerned.

Beyond the novelty of a chain of private night clubs offering food, entertainment and pretty waitresses wearing stylized rabbit ears and cleavage, the Clubs were and are a tangible physical extension of the magazine. That made them a focusing point for an increasing fascination in America with Playboy. The opening of a new saloon isn't usually thought of as hot news, but when a Baltimore Club was announced as in the works, every newspaper in town went into a tizzy of front-page coverage. The Clubs set off a surge of national and international publicity about Playboy that even Hefner himself hadn't expected.

In 1961, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation did an hourlong radio documentary on the Playboy empire; in its "Show Business" section, Time ran a major story on Hefner called "Boss of Taste City"; Paul Krassner interviewed him in The Realist; on the day the New Orleans Club opened, Hefner was greeted at the airport by officialdom and given a key to the city; The Saturday Evening Post prepared a long profile; and more. In the present jargon, Playboy was happening.

Confident and yet in continuing wonder at the path of his life, Hefner wrote at the end of the year:

We've received more publicity overall in the last 12 months than in the first seven years combined and, like a snowball, this is probably just the beginning, too. ... The Playboy empire and its prexy have grown in fame and stature over the last 12 months to a degree that could never have been imagined a year or so ago. ... It's difficult to bring into perspective and fully appreciate, but we are truly becoming, in our own time, a legend. And what does it feel like, being a living legend? Well, it feels just great!

One thing wasn't so great: Show Business Illustrated. From the first issue in September 1961, Hefner had been unhappy about the editorial product, created initially by a sleek fleet of editors imported from New York. Practically everyone involved has a different version of what went wrong, but what came out was just another magazine, lacking real personality, and it mainly sat there on the newsstands. A few issues into it, Hefner replaced the sleek fleet with his ace Playboy troops--chiefly Spectorsky and Paul--and began pouring more and more time into it himself. The figures began to turn around and head upward, but not at a rate that justified the effort or the investment--$2,000,000 as of January 1962. Hefner reluctantly sold it to Huntington Hartford for $250,000 and SBI was devoured by Hartford's Show magazine, which he'd started, apparently, as a hobby--about the same time SBI came out. Show--at least that version of it--didn't last much longer.

Playboy's progress through 1962 was such that the red ink from SBI was almost completely eradicated by the end of the year. It was a big year inside the magazine. In September, partly as an outgrowth of the Candid Conversations that had been running in SBI, the first Playboy Interview, featuring Miles Davis (and conducted by a free-lance writer named Alex Haley), was published. Mainly through the efforts and strong hand of Editor Murray Fisher, Playboy raised the art of the magazine interview several levels. In October, Little Annie Fanny--a creation of Hef's in collaboration with former Mad cartoon wizards Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder--put in her first appearance, grinning and blinking and jiggling. And in December commenced the first installment of a series that would finally stretch to 25 parts: The Playboy Philosophy.

It, too, was a result of the tremendous publicity rush Playboy had experienced in the past year or so. All the attention and hoopla meant that Hefner was being constantly asked all sorts of questions about his magazine and budding empire--many of them regarding its values, or supposed lack of them. Since the beginning, he'd tried his best to show people that Playboy wasn't intended as just another girlie magazine, that it was more, a way of life. The TV show, Playboy's Penthouse, had been an early attempt to reach nonreaders (who were usually those with the lowest opinion of Playboy) and let them see this; in regular segments, it featured serious discussions among Hefner, Spectorsky and various current intellectual heavyweights regarding the meaning and impact of Playboy in American society. But except for a single short editorial against nuclear proliferation, the magazine had never run a straight-ahead statement of policy. The idea until then had been more indirect, to let the contents represent its values. By 1962, however, it seemed time to lay it out.

The original plan was to do the Philosophy in two modest parts for the holiday issues, blam blam. Several things happened to change that. One was that the first installment in December 1962 created an inundation of mail and response, much of it of the go go go variety. But equally important, Hefner really got into writing it. He remarked frequently while working on it that it was by far the most satisfying project he'd taken on in a long time, maybe since beginning the magazine. The ideas just came pouring out.

Hefner readily acknowledges that it isn't a philosophy in the strictest sense, since it's not a systematic body of thought and doesn't entirely hang together in that respect. It was written on Dickensian deadlines, often only a few jumps ahead of a printer whose overtime meter was running--which didn't permit graceful order. Several times he announced that at the end it would be unscrambled and put into more structurally coherent form, but other projects apparently intervened and it never happened.

The Philosophy is really more what it was called in the subhead: a credo, a statement of Hefner's beliefs. Sometimes repetitious, sometimes given to long elliptical excursions away from the ostensible main path, it is, nevertheless, a fascinating document. Elsewhere in this issue, you'll find The Playboy Philosophy, a sampler of the ideas Hefner has brought home. Just as interesting in the original are the flashes of real life scattered through it, especially Hefner's passionate defense of Lenny Bruce during his sad, pointless troubles with Chicago's bluenoses and men in blue. In doing so, Hefner took on some very big guys, indeed--particularly his old friendly enemies, Chicago's Catholic establishment.

The Lenny Bruce installments of the Philosophy were published in the April and May 1963 issues. By some strange coincidence, the June issue was declared obscene by the office in charge of enforcing Chicago's obscenity laws. Four cops and a CBS-TV crew showed up at the Chicago Mansion at night to roust Hefner and take him down to South State Street to book and fingerprint and mug-shot him. The charge, after all the smoke cleared away, was violation of a Chicago city ordinance.

A bust for a bust: The alleged obscenity occurred in an eight-page pictorial featuring Jayne Mansfield on the set of her latest movie, Promises, Promises. The particular offending sequence showed Jayne re-creating a scene from the movie. Lying nude not nearly beneath sheets on a bed, she tries without success to seduce her husband (played by Tommy Noonan), who's sitting in a suit on the edge of the bed, reading a book, indifferent to her. Or, as one also offending caption put it, "Alas, poor Jayne. As she writhes about seductively, the best she can draw from Noonan are some funny lines." Hot stuff, eh?

Never mind that Supreme Court decisions then and now don't require pictures to be "art" to avoid being obscene; or that just two weeks earlier at a Loop theater, a French film starring newcomer Elke Sommer had been shown that included a scene--passed by the Chicago Censor Board--in which she's lying as nude as Jayne on the deck of a boat, but additionally in the passionate embrace of a man. Didn't matter.

With the trial set for November, Hefner devoted large chunks of two upcoming Philosophy installments to the brouhaha, demonstrating in detail that by no present, definition of the word was the June issue obscene. Better, as a service to Lenny Bruce fans everywhere, and a fine editorial thumb in the nose at all the Bruce baiters in Chicago and elsewhere, Playboy began in the October issue to serialize Bruce's autobiography--edited, incidentally, by Paul Krassner.

The trial had its moments. Star prosecution witness was one Dr. Busby, a psychiatrist from Des Plaines, Illinois. He testified, according to the Sun-Times, "that the content constituted an attack on society's values and that the nude photos of movie queen Jayne Mansfield were sexually stimulating." He added that the June installment of the Philosophy revealed Hefner to be "beset by feelings of inferiority and guilt."

Under cross-examination, Dr. Busby admitted that he had no psychoanalytic training.

Asked if he had ever read Freud's essay on Wild Psychoanalysis, he responded that he hadn't.

The defense lawyer, wrote the Sun-Times, "read to the court excerpts from the essay in which the founder of psychoanalysis touched on the dangers of laymen and even physicians making psychoanalytic judgments without thorough training. ... The psychiatrist was asked how he personally reacted to the spread on Miss Mansfield. 'As a person, I was stimulated, but as a doctor who is used to these things, I was not,' he replied."

The defense lawyer remarked that making such fine distinctions must be difficult.

It went on like that, ending two weeks later in a mistrial. A hung jury, seven for acquittal, five for conviction, deadlocked. (continued on page 298)Illustrated History(continued from page 293) There were newspaper stories afterward about a new trial, but evidently no one had the energy for it, because there never was one.

In January 1964, Playboy turned ten years old. Circulation was up to 2,000,000; nine Clubs were in operation; Playboy Products of all sorts--including Bunny Chocolate--were selling like, well, Rabbit-embossed ankle bracelets; a major real-estate empire was beginning to accumulate; and the number of employees had grown from the original seven to nearly 2000.

This period also marked for Hefner the beginning in earnest of The Years Indoors. They were prefigured by the statement in the very first issue that "we plan to spend most of our time inside. We like our apartment." Now that the apartment had become the Playboy Mansion, there was no reason to leave. As Tom Wolfe exclaimed: "Hugh Hefner is at the center of the world. He is deep down inside his house--at the center of his bed. The center of the world!"

And as Norman Mailer described the Mansion during a party there: "Timeless, spaceless, it was outward bound. One was in an ocean liner which traveled at the bottom of the sea, or on a spaceship wandering down the galaxy along a night whose duration was a year."

Judging from the numbers, Hefner really didn't have to step out too often. Between January 1964 and January 1968, Playboy's circulation went from 2,000,000, which was remarkable already, to over 5,000,000, which was a genuine magazine-business miracle. During that time, the Clubs also expanded in new, ambitious directions, with a Resort Hotel in Jamaica, a year-round Resort at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and a ten-story Club with a casino in London's posh Park Lane. As a service to keyholders, VIP magazine began in 1964; and in the same year, the old Surf Theater on Chicago's Near North Side became the Playboy Theater.

As always, new projects abounded. One from that time that would have increasing significance was the establishment of the Playboy Foundation. The very first grant was $1000 toward court costs for a man involved in a Florida heterosexual-sodomy case. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court. The second grant, for $6000, went toward legal help for a West Virginia ex-disc jockey doing one to ten for "submitting to a crime against nature"--heterosexual fellatio. Just as the Forum section in the magazine had grown naturally out of the considerable response to the Philosophy, the Foundation quickly became the action arm of the Forum, taking sides on the issues discussed there in the form of cold cash.

Also in 1965, Hefner did something from the depths of his fur-lined submarine that must have been yet another great kick. Playboy had outgrown the offices on Ohio Street, sprawling once more into several other buildings around the neighborhood. At the time and still, the deco jewel of North Michigan Avenue was indisputably the Palmolive Building. Its 37 floors then towered above everything nearby on the so-called Magnificent Mile. The soaring black crossed girders of the Hancock Building, the world's first high-rise oil rig, hadn't yet put it in shadow, nor put a blink in the famous Lindbergh Beacon rising from the top. The Palmolive Building was and remains a Chicago landmark. Better, it was the very same in which Hefner had toiled in a cubicle for Esquire. And, you guessed it, sweet revenge on a super scale, he bought the building. For all practical purposes, anyway, since the lease doesn't terminate until 2028. He renamed it Playboy and put the magazine's name across the top.

Hefner had leased the building without setting foot inside it again, signed away his money without even seeing for himself if the basement leaked. By early 1967, when architect Ron Dirsmith was completing the lavish futurist renovations (much white stucco in organic shapes and forms, executive desks with travertine-marble tops, carpeted fire stairs) and the first departments were moving from Ohio Street, Hefner had become such a celebrated recluse that it made "Kup's Column" one morning when he actually went outside, to a party in the suburbs for Arnie Morton, then head of the Clubs and an old friend.

But that period was coming to an end. One sleek black signal was announced in July 1967: the purchase at $4,500,000 of an airplane, a DC-9. It was to be done over in typical Playboy fashion (there would be a shower in the boss's suite, etc.), painted shiny black and christened the Big Bunny. Evidently, Hefner was getting ready to leave heaven on occasion.

Several factors prompted it, personal and otherwise.

Until 1968, Hefner couldn't bring himself to delegate one tenth the authority he should have, given the startling growth and increased complexity the corporation had experienced. He stayed home all the time because he worked all the time, except for regular therapeutic parties. His weight dropped from 175 to 135; in news pictures, he looked gaunt and burned. But not burned out. Bright enough to see the end of that path, he realized that he'd better change quickly. By the summer of 1968, he was working out and eating, building his weight back up.

Beyond staying alive, there was a secondary reason to let up, get in shape and get out more. It was an intriguing image, the young recluse Howard Hughes with a harem, but it was hardly accurate and had begun to bother Hefner, who dislikes being misunderstood. He decided to revive the television show in a new, improved format. It would be called Playboy After Dark and he would be host. Scheduled for a January premiere, the show began taping in Los Angeles in late July 1968. Hefner had gotten healthy again and traded his terrycloth bathrobe and slippers in on $15,000 worth of snappy Edwardian suits.

Two much-publicized things happened to Hefner in August.

First and more pleasant was meeting, on the set of P.A.D., an 18-year-old extra named Barbara Klein, an ex-Miss Teenage Sacramento. Within a year, she'd become Barbi Benton and Hefner was flat-out in love.

The second was less fun and more sign of the times. One night during the Democratic Convention, Hefner and friends, including Max Lerner, went out for a walk, to see what was happening in Lincoln Park. They wandered by accident into a police riot against protesters near the park: bloody long-hairs ducking and running, polished oak night sticks flashing, thin gray clouds of tear gas dappling the grass like ground fog. As Lerner described it in his newspaper column, "We got tangled in a group of spectators and stragglers from an earlier 'hippie' demonstration, were chased down a side street by a police car, were threatened by a small phalanx of guns held by cops who jumped out of the car, and barely managed to get away without serious trouble except for an injury to Hefner by a police club."

Some of the subsequent press made more of the incident than it merited, coming up with a cartoon version that went: The whack on the ass had radicalized Hefner and his magazine. It was, in fact, neither so sudden nor quite radical, but the image brought focus on something that was very definitely going on in the pages of Playboy--and had been for some time. The bloody Chicago (continued on page 392)Illustrated History(continued from page 298) convention was a cusp of the Sixties, when sweet peace and love were first souring and turning bitter, and it's more symbolic than significant that Hefner was touched physically by the change, and changing mood, because his magazine had been on the case very early, and would continue to be so.

Playboy was the first mass magazine to chronicle the emerging drug culture--to take one aspect of times changing--in a straightforward way. Dan Wakefield's Prodigal Powers of Pot was years ahead when it came out in August 1962, and it remains as complete and fair an appraisal as you can find. Playboy has never advocated drugs but has, rather, tried regularly to present accurate information about them, believing that with drugs, ignorance isn't bliss for long. In November 1963, a three-part package of articles ran under the general title Hallucinogens. Alan Harrington wrote A Novelist's Personal Experience; Dan Wakefield, A Reporter's Objective View; and Aldous Huxley, A Philosopher's Visionary Prediction. The September 1966 Playboy Interview was with the acid guru himself, Dr. Timothy Leary.

Playboy had also not been afraid to provide an early and continuing mass forum for the strong new voices of civil rights. In the very first Interview back in 1962, Miles Davis had spoken searingly about the ugly inequalities he encountered in life on the road. The interviewer was, as we noted, Alex Haley. Not long after that, Haley did another for the magazine, that one with Malcolm X. For the January 1965 issue, he talked with Martin Luther King, Jr., and in 1966, he crossed the street into a rough neighborhood to talk with George Lincoln Rockwell, who sat wearing a Nazi arm band and had a pistol on a table before him, saying by way of greeting, "It's nothing personal, I just hate niggers." Especially in interviews but also in articles, Playboy has been host to a formidable group who have used the guest soapbox one by one to give their views on race. Among many, Jesse Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Eldridge Cleaver, Norman Thomas, Sammy Davis Jr., Marshall McLuhan, Bill Cosby, Julian Bond, Ray Charles, Hank Aaron--the list goes on.

Its belief in individual rights also made Playboy a forum for women's rights early on. In the March 1964 Interview, Ayn Rand articulated basic feminist issues, such as equal pay for equal work. The December 1965 issue carried the magazine's first statement favoring legalized abortion. By the early Seventies, the Foundation was giving regular grants to various women's-rights projects, and in January 1973, the magazine published Seduction Is a Four-Letter Word, an article by Germaine Greer about the small rapes women experience, which antedated Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will by about three years.

But what spilled the blood in Chicago was the black hole of Vietnam, inexorably sucking lives, spirit and money from the country, into nowhere. Most of those doing the actual fighting had been Playboy readers before they were so rudely interrupted, and they continued to be in Vietnam. As one correspondent put it, "If Stars and Stripes was the magazine for World War One, Playboy was the magazine for Vietnam." Another said that like counting rings on a tree, you could go into any encampment and tell how long they'd been there by finding the oldest Playmate gatefold on the wall.

Only superficially was it a contradiction that by 1968 Playboy was, by weight of the opinions published in interviews and articles, coming out with greater and greater intensity against the war. Somehow, on balance, the magazine was clearly for the soldiers who were there, the actual bodies, while heatedly opposing the policies that put them there. Most of the grunts understood. In the late Sixties, a few on leave "borrowed" the flag of the St. Louis Club, sending it back months later rent from a cluster of bullet holes--having served as the unofficial flag for a Special Forces camp somewhere in the north. In 1966, when Playboy was offering a visit from a Bunny to deliver the first issue of a lifetime subscription, a unit in Vietnam signed up for a collective one--for $150--and Playboy responded by having Playmate of the Year Jo Collins be the first-class mail carrier. The Huey chopper that took her around was renamed in whitewash the Playboy Special, complete with dual Rabbit heads. Betty Grable and Minnie Mouse of World War Two gave way to Little Annie Fanny as the cheery boobs-a-lot mascot painted on the noses of many B-52s flying bombing runs on Hanoi.

As always, Playboy at once reflected and influenced common feeling in subtle swirling countercurrents that defied measurement but were there. By 1970, it was a major voice against the war, giving space to thoughtful dissenters of all stripes, including Norman Thomas, John Kenneth Galbraith, Senators William Fulbright, George McGovern and Charles Percy, Arnold Toynbee, William Sloane Coffin and, in two separate blue-burning essays--The Americanization of Vietnam and The Vietnamization of America--David Halberstam.

Those pieces didn't always go into the magazine without a struggle and considerable shouting among the staff beforehand. The younger editors hired in the late Sixties were generally of a Get-the-Pigfuckers cast of mind, whether it was racism, Vietnam, pollution, the IRS--you name it. Spectorsky, who ran the magazine on a day-to-day basis, at first fought strenuously against such dark subjects' intruding on his light domain, believing that Playboy should be entertainment exclusively. But, like the younger editors and Hefner, who realized that Playboy was virtually required to be a spokesman on these issues if it were to continue to serve its readership, Spectorsky was at last convinced.

Spectorsky suffered a heart attack in April 1970 and went on extended leave. Although his health remained uncertain, and he was failing by slow degrees, he couldn't manage to keep himself away from the office entirely. He died in January 1972 at one of his favorite pursuits, yachting in the Caribbean. His body was buried at sea in U. S. waters.

In that context, the Playboy Writers' Convocation of October 1971 had, beyond being the biggest such bash ever, also been a week-long tribute to Spectorsky, who had lured the first name writers to Playboy back in 1956. The assembled were another list that wouldn't quit: John Cheever, James Dickey, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Jay Friedman, Tom Wicker, John Clellon Holmes, Larry King, Art Buchwald, David Halberstam, Garry Wills, John Skow, Sean O'Faolain, Stanley Booth, V. S. Pritchett, Dan Greenburg, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Alan Watts, Ken Purdy, Donn Pearce, Ray Bradbury, Brock Yates, Shel Silverstein, Robert Sherrill, Jean Shepherd, John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Crichton, Studs Terkel ... sex experts Dr. Mary Calderone, Morton Hunt, Masters and Johnson, Joel Fort, William Simon ... plus film maker Roman Polanski, artist LeRoy Neiman, others, most of the Playboy editorial staff, wives, girlfriends, writer groupies of all genders. ...

There were panel discussions and formal dinners all week, but it was, in fact, a blowout on the grand scale. Writers who actually write spend so much time alone that when they gather in groups, they are almost pathologically gregarious. The Writers' Convocation was a party, just as it should have been. It's not every day you can get drunk with Arthur C. Clarke and ask him what 2001 really meant. Or have elevator doors open to reveal this Mutt-'n'-Jeff combination of red-haired bean pole and shrimp hippie, only to realize in double take that it's Michael Crichton and Roman Polanski. Or witness a Pulitzer Prize winner (no names, please) two sheets to the wind, bopping out of a reception with a handful of cold green Heinekens and a girl from Reader's Service on his arm. Or listen to a discussion about prize fighting between Donn (Cool Hand Luke) Pearce and poet James Dickey hover on the hairline between theory and practice. A good time was had.

Spectorsky's death pulled Hefner out of a much-needed semiretirement, or at least what passed for one with him. He was still paying attention, but in February 1970, the Big Bunny had been delivered and he and Barbi were soon traveling all over the world--Mexico, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Europe, Africa. Then, in 1971, Playboy had acquired the Mansion West and Hef moved in immediately on a part-time basis, ten days there, ten days in Chicago. Who could blame him? The Mansion West is yet a newer version of heaven, a stately piece of baronial old England set on seven acres of hills and tropical gardens, alongside a dark towering stand of virgin redwoods that, at one quarter acre, is the largest remaining in the Los Angeles area. It's right off the hot Mercedes track of Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, but once inside the gate, you'd never know: You have plunged into a green peaceful dream with an elegant Tudor mansion at its center.

Back in the real world, Hefner had to choose a successor to Spectorsky. After endless long meetings and discussions, he settled on splitting the job, naming Richard Koff as Assistant Publisher and former Articles Editor Arthur Kretchmer as Executive Editor.

On the surface, everything looked peachy in September 1972. Playboy's circulation hit a phenomenal 7,200,000 and Oui magazine, introduced that month, sold out its entire 800,000 press run in a matter of days.

But there were hard times ahead.

For one thing, the economy was staggering along even more uncertainly than usual, lurching in 1973 toward recession and Mach-three inflation. It was creaming everybody but was a special kick in the stomach to the leisure business. Some days our Miami hotel was a ghost town of empty rooms, and it was sold in 1974.

About that time, too, Playboy came up against competition of a new sort on the newsstands. Ever since 1955 or so, the world had not lacked in imitations (and parodies) of Playboy. One such started in 1965, Penthouse, was one of the more slavish and humorless imitators; but by the early Seventies, it was changing the game somewhat by, simply, being a lot raunchier than Playboy had ever been--or wanted to be. And then along came Larry Flynt with Hustler, who went way down the line from Penthouse, in the direction of animal-husbandry films and color instruction manuals for butcher's school.

Apparently. Mencken was still right, you still couldn't go broke underestimating the taste of the American people: Both Penthouse and Hustler were beginning to sell in the millions, Playboy's circulation was affected and dropped gradually. The decline was real, but not drastic, and Playboy remained, as it does today, among the country's top ten magazines in terms of revenue. Still, among other problems, circulation was down. Accustomed to nonstop growth and success, Playboy, with difficulty, reported its first losing quarter in recent memory.

And in 1974, in the midst of those business hassles, along came the DEA, in the imposing form of U. S. Attorney James Thompson, presently governor of Illinois. Taking on Playboy has never been the worst way for a politician to get his name in the headlines, and Thompson used it well. It didn't matter that there was less drug use at the Chicago Mansion than in any reasonably well-heeled fraternity house at the University of Chicago, nor that Hefner's drug of choice really is Pepsi. For some time, the DEA had been looking for an excuse to get inside and look under Playboy's rugs, and it found the handle with Bobbie Arnstein, Hefner's Executive Secretary for 11 years. Her story is too long and sad and complex to tell here, but it let her drift onto the edge of a cocaine deal because she wanted desperately to please and hold on to a young man involved in it. The DEA pounced. Bobbie--a slight, hip, smart, funny woman who was fragile and easily hurt emotionally--felt enormous guilt about opening the door for the DEA. She had attempted suicide more than once. On January 12, 1975, she died in Chicago of a self-inflicted drug overdose. Her suicide came three months after she was convicted and conditionally sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy to transport and distribute cocaine. Bobbie passionately maintained her innocence on those charges, and she was appealing her conviction at the time of her death.

Hefner flew immediately to Chicago and called a press conference. Shocked, shaken, angry, holding back tears, he charged that Bobbie's death had occurred because he had become the target of a "politically motivated" drug investigation stemming from Playboy's advocacy of liberal causes such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Comparing the tactics used in the investigation to those of the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages, Hefner blamed Bobbie's death on the "incredible pressure" she had had to endure. "Narcotics agents frequently use our severe drug laws in an arbitrary and capricious manner to elicit the desired testimony for trial. ... And when these laws are as serious as some of our drug laws are, the results can be horrendous."

Less than a year later, the DEA dropped the investigation, for lack of evidence. But Bobbie Arnstein was still dead.

In December 1975, Hefner told those gathered at the annual shareholders' meeting, "This has not been an easy year for the company."

But sometimes it is darkest, etc. In what the newsweeklies were calling The Raunch Wars and The Pubic Wars, Playboy took a chance and did it right. After brief indecision, it decided to not follow the trend toward intrauterine photographic expeditions and beavers so split and close up they might as well be steak tartare.

As Hefner explained at the 1975 shareholders' meeting: "We are moving in new directions aimed at disassociation from imitators. We will present sexuality without vulgarity. Sex will continue to be an important part of the editorial package, but we are not going to take the magazine out the window."

By 1976, the decision began to pay off. What had been lost in circulation was being regained in record advertising revenue, as advertisers increasingly fled in flocks from the competition as it got nittier and grittier. Hefner was able to say accurately in January, "I think we've turned the corner."

The October 1975 Sappho pictorial pointed the way: hot stuff, ten pages of sisterly love ... but photographed as in a vivid dream, more sensuous and romantic than sexually explicit, and more of a turn-on for being so. Also in 1975, Playboy ran a pictorial of Brigitte Bardot on the occasion of her turning 40 that was, for all its relative innocence, magnificently sexy. When it came out, one editor, who'd never done so in ten years of working there, ripped out the page of the magazine where she's standing nude by a stream and stuck it up on his wall, to stare at for inspiration. In 1976, Playboy revisited another regular in Incomparably Ursula, discovered sex in the great outdoors in a 1977 Grand Canyon pictorial and in 1978 pushed to yet new frontiers with Sex in Outer Space.

Like the pictorials, other areas of the magazine were changing, also in ways that remained true to Playboy. In fiction, the Names were still there in abundance: In 1974, Playboy previewed Humboldt's Gift, which won a Pulitzer for Saul Bellow; in 1976, John Cheever's best-selling Falconer and Alex Haley's blockbuster Roots; in 1977, The Honourable Schoolboy, the latest John le Carré; and in 1978, Irwin Shaw's sequel to Rich Man, Poor Man, as well as new stories by Arthur C. Clarke,' Paul Theroux, John Updike, Günter Grass, V. S. Pritchett, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Kingsley Amis--another of those lists. But the Fiction Department under Victoria Chen Haider is also actively looking for--and publishing--good younger writers, as evidenced by Arthur Rosch's Sex and the Triple Znar-Fichi in the September 1978 issue and William Hjortsberg's two-part Falling Angel in October and November 1978.

The most dramatic change in Playboy during the Seventies may be in the area of nonfiction. Arthur Kretchmer, now Editorial Director, said recently that he probably never got over being Articles Editor. Certainly, during his tenure, Playboy has hung in at the top of the big leagues, replacing the celebrity outrage of the late Sixties and early Seventies increasingly with tough, probing investigative journalism. Since 1973, there have been two exhaustive nonfiction series, the History of Organized Crime and the History of Assassination in America. In 1974, Playboy previewed Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men. For their revelations about the inner Hughes empire in the September 1976 issue (The Puppet and the Puppet masters), Articles Editor Laurence Gonzales and free-lancer Larry DuBois won the Sigma Delta Chi Award, about as close as journalists get to an Oscar. And if not precisely probing but just as tough, Playboy sent former Staff Writer Craig Vetter out to kill himself in a variety of flamboyant ways (including ice climbing and wing walking), which became a series of reports in 1978 called Pushed to the Edge.

The Interviews, now the satrapy of Executive Editor G. Barry Golson, haven't been slouches, either. Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden sat down to talk in 1974, which for her was a little remarkable, since a few years earlier she'd sued Playboy for umpteen million dollars. Like an increasing number of significant voices, Fonda and Hayden realized that, like it or not, Playboy has what one writer has called "tremendous reach." Given the statistics of pass-along readership, each issue of the magazine is seen by approximately 20,000,000 people. That's reach. Far enough that the April 1976 Interview with Jerry Brown established him as a national contender for the Presidency--at least in the eyes of Jimmy Carter's advisors, who decided because of it and the reaction to it to let Jimmy be interviewed for the November issue. He was, and it became the interview heard round the world. Playboy has also published the last known interview with Jimmy Hoffa, talked with Gary Gilmore days before he was shot by the state and with James Earl Ray in jail. In 1978, the Interview gave embattled orange queen Anita Bryant enough space to tell her story, and last month went inside John Travolta's brain to see how things looked from there.

We remain on the case.

And, as we said at the beginning, we feel fine.

In 1977, the boss fulfilled yet another lifelong ambition as guest host on Saturday Night Live--no, not to meet John Belushi but to sing on a network television show. The rumors were true: He wasn't bad. And it must have seemed like old times last August when he saw the goggling front-page headlines in the Chicago Tribune:

Hefner and Playboy Accused of Obscenity

A zealous prosecutor in Atlanta was accusing Hefner of "distributing obscene materials." It was a misdemeanor under Georgia law, but, nevertheless, was front-page news to Hefner's old friend, the Trib. Apparently, it did not matter to the prosecutor that a Federal judge in the Atlanta district court had ruled that recent issues of Playboy and Oui were definitely not obscene; nor that Playboy had never lost such a case in a court of final appeal. He thought it was dirty, and that was that. As of this writing, he still does, and may continue to do so for some time.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In 25 years, Playboy has become an international empire, with foreign editions of the magazine in Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Brazil, Latin America, Spain and, as of February, Australia; the Clubs and Resort Hotels have also expanded world-wide--a new Club in Manila, a casino in Nassau, a planned hotel on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. The Playboy Rabbit is certainly among the most universally recognized symbols in the world.

And some zealot still wants to put Hefner in jail.

It seems like a portent of 25 more lively years.

Have fun. We will.

For a quarter century, one of the most popular games among readers of this magazine has been trying to find the Rabbit on the Playboy cover. He has been there, in one guise or another, since our second issue. Occasionally, he has appeared as a nattily dressed fur-and-fabric collage. But he has also been elusively presented as the knot on a bikini, the sparkle in a girl's eye and a feather floating through the air. He has shared billing with such stars as Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, Jayne Mansfield and the only male ever to appear on a Playboy cover, actor Peter Sellers. The original Rabbit symbol was designed in only a few hours by Playboy Art Director Arthur Paul in 1953. Since then, he has become one of the most widely recognized corporate symbols in the world. His major use, however, has been on our covers, which over the years have become prime examples of the best of the cover designer's art. Says Paul, "We strive for a masculine look in keeping with the magazine's purpose. We try for boldness, fun and elegance above all and shoot for consistency with surprise over the long haul rather than a sensational look for any one cover." Obviously, those criteria have been met; we think that with Playboy, you can judge a book by its cover.

Playboy's Playmates

On the facing foldout are all the Playmates we've ever published, starting with "Sweetheart of the Month" Marilyn Monroe and continuing all the way through to this month's 25th-Anniversary Playmate, Candy Loving. To pinpoint your all-time favorite, just locate thecorresponding letter and number on the foldout.

1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

1958

1959

1960

1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

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1971

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1979

Playboy's 1971 Writers' Convocation

1. Gay Talese

2. A. C. Spectorsky

3. Hugh M. Hefner

4. Arthur C. Clarke

5. Art Buchwald

6. Shel Silverstein

7. Marvin Kitman

8. John Cheever

9. Arthur Schlesinger. Jr.

10. Kenneth Tynan

11. SaulBraun

12. Richard Warren Lewis

13. Ken W. Purdy

14. John Kenneth Galbraith

15. Dan Greenburg

16. Herbert Gold

17. Sean O'Faolain

18. Nicholas Von Hoffman

19. Hal Bennett

20. George Axelrod

21. Mary Calderone

22. Joel Fort

23. Jean Shepherd

24. Calvin Trillin

25. Morton Hunt

26. Larry L. King

27. Larry DuBois

28. Garry Wills

29. William Simon

30. Carl B. Stokes

31. Stanley Booth

32. Warner Law

33. John Clellon Holmes

34. Jules Feiffer

35. V. S. Pritchett

36. David Halberstam

37. Michael Arlen

38. LeRoy Meiman

39. Harvey Kurtzman

40. Bruce Jay Friedman

41. Hollis Alpert

42. Arthur Knight

43. Brock Yates

44. Stephen Yafa

45. Robert Sheckley

46. Alan Watts

47. Michael Crichton

48. Donn Pearce

"The Big Event in Playboy's life during 1959 was a three-day Jazz Festival in early August."

"Playboy had outgrown its offices on Ohio Street, sprawling into several other buildings."

"George Lincoln Rockwell sat wearing a Nazi arm band and had a pistol on the table."