The Women of Playboy

Playboy enterprises has a new President. And wouldn't you know that male-chauvinist Chairman of the Board Hugh M. Hefner would throw his critics a curve by picking a woman? Not just any woman, mind you, but his own bright, beautiful feminist daughter, Christie. You've probably seen our new Ms. President prominently pictured in a recent issue of Life or Fortune, on the cover of New York or in your own daily newspaper--and that got us to thinking: Why not do a pictorial tribute to the rest of the distaff staffers here at Playboy? Not the beautiful Bunnies or the Playmates who are regularly featured on these pages but the nine-to-five women who work in the Playboy Building in Chicago and their counterparts in our offices in New York and L.A.

And why not? You never know until you ask, and when we did, Playboy women responded with enthusiasm.

Assistant Photo Editor Patty Beaudet, who spends part of each week inviting celebrities to pose for Playboy, confided, "I wanted to put myself on the opposite side for once." Joanie Schwabe, a publicist who frequently accompanies the stars of our pictorials on promotional tours, wanted "a souvenir issue that I was directly involved in."

"I was waiting for this," said Playboy Clubs International Customer Service Representative Fawn Hughes. "We should do our women. At least the women who do this pictorial won't be fired, the way some flight attendants were!"

Production Assistant Jody Jurgeto did it for the cold, hard cash, "to support my expensive ski habit." (Jurgeto is an award-winning skier.)

Art apprentice Elizabeth (text continued on page 145) Michaels saw the photo sessions as much-needed relief from the nude-figure drawing she's done for years. "I've always had nudes sit for me," she explained. "It's a real ego boost for me to be the subject for once. And my husband's been chasing me around the house ever since!"

How many women does it take to run a monthly men's magazine, the Playboy Guides, Games, a chain of Clubs and now a home-video complex? Literally, (continued on page 292) The Women of Playboy (continued from page 145) 802. Predictably, they are not cut from the same cloth. One of them studies Latin--as a hobby. Another is currently shopping for a Honda Super Hawk. Then there's the receptionist who likes drag racing. Trying to characterize these people makes one appreciate the problems Marco Polo faced describing the wonders of the Orient.

Working for Playboy is probably not something a woman--unlike some of the men here--decides to do early on. (Art Director Tom Staebler, for example, revealed in his high school yearbook that he planned to become Art Director of Playboy.) Those women who do come aboard tend to have traits in common: tolerance, individualism and liberalism.

"Here's a company that sticks its neck out publicly. It stands for something besides its latest budget figures," said Associate Editor Kate Nolan, who admitted that she admires Playboy for making no bones about its appreciation of beautiful women and its endorsement of recreational sex, knowing that at the same time, it supports abortion rights, Planned Parenthood and the Equal Rights Amendment. "When I was in high school in the Sixties, it was still considered naughty for the boys to read Playboy--and positively daring for the girls. I'm sure it never occurred to me then that any women worked here."

Nolan may be speaking for many, but it's a fact that a female Photo Editor supervises almost all Playmate photography; that the text accompanying all nude pictorials is edited by a woman; that one of the Clubs' Vice-Presidents is a woman; and that our Copy and Cartoon editors are female. In recent years, women, in escalating numbers, have leaped into significant roles at the magazine, the Clubs and, now, Playboy's video world. There are still men here to tidy up things a bit, make coffee, run the day-care center, but there's a woman's touch in nearly every Playboy product. In fact, a woman wrote this text.

Of course, there have been women behind Playboy's scenes from the beginning, albeit not always in top management. Playboy was always a place where a woman could work her way up. You'll recall that its founding year, 1953, was not exactly a boom time for career women. The domestically inclined Mamie Eisenhower was one of the most admired women in America, and men just back from Korea were making the workplace a little crowded. The few women who worked did not have great expectations.

Cut to a party on the North Side of Chicago. Among those present is young Hugh Hefner, who operates a new magazine on a shoestring, having moved from the kitchen table to a modest office across from Holy Name Cathedral. Another guest is Patricia Papangelis, an associate editor at Art Photography magazine who knows something about publishing. What Hefner needs, though, is a secretary. He offers her a job. She says no, but a few weeks later, intrigued by the magazine's potential, she gives Hef a call and takes the job as his private secretary. Her duties include all the usual secretarial chores, plus proofreading and pasting up ads. Soon she's promoted to Editorial Assistant. (Others who worked their way up from secretarial jobs: Cartoon Editor Michelle Urry, West Coast Photo Editor Marilyn Grabowski, Associate Photo Editor Janice Moses.)

Papangelis was among the first ten employees hired, and she's been here most of the time since, in a variety of posts. As she sees it, "Playboy has positively provided on-the-job training. I was able to better my position in a relatively short period of time. The fact that women stay here for many years is an indication of that kind of good treatment. Hef has always recognized individual rights, and those rights extend to women as well as to men."

When Papangelis decided to have a family, she was able to leave her job and return to work part time for ten years. Now her job title is Senior Editor (Administration). She's a boss.

"In my opinion, women here are treated as well as or better than in any other employment situation I've heard of. We're treated like adults; there are flexible hours and no dress codes," Papangelis pointed out.

"It's a first-name company," Senior Editor Gretchen McNeese noted, "from Christie on down. There are no Mr.s or Ms.s." Executive Secretary Trish Miller observed that plenty of work gets done but that "people work smart as opposed to hard." In other words, there's not a lot of wheel spinning and tail dragging.

When Playboy's women describe the workplace, there's an easy good humor. They say it's casual, pressure-free, comfortable. A sign on a bathroom door in Editorial confirms Phyllis Schlafly's worst fears: Men and/or Women.

Perhaps it's just as well that Playboy's women do have a sense of humor. It seems to be expected of them. When they look out the windows of Chicago's Playboy Building, they may see male guests in the adjacent Westin and Drake hotels waving to attract their attention. Occasionally, the most enthusiastic fans write their room numbers in soap on the windows. One woman of Playboy felt that such enthusiasm deserved a celebration. She called the hotel's room service and ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon for that room.

It's true that working for a world-famous corporation brings some advantages and some disadvantages. There's something about Playboy. We doubt that IBM's workers are regularly quizzed about their president or their board chairman or even about what's new in Selectrics. But for those who work here, life sometimes becomes an E. F. Hutton ad: When a Playboy woman speaks, people listen. A secretary claims that one of her friends won't go to parties with her because, sooner or later, the guests congregate around her to talk about Playboy. Rights and Permissions Manager Paulette Gaudet told a woman sitting next to her on a plane where she worked and the woman asked for her autograph. Another worker remembers attending a telethon and being tapped as a celebrity host, her celebrity status being based on her working for Playboy.

When Trish Miller posed for this pictorial in front of Chicago's Buckingham Fountain, a crowd gathered and she had to sign dozens of autographs before she could escape.

No wonder people like to work here.

In the midst of the merriment, however, an occasional sidewalk fundamentalist will invite an employee to confess her Satanism before heading for the office in the morning. But there are some things a Playboy woman won't do before her first cup of coffee.

There has been serious media interest in feminist criticism of Playboy; we asked women here whether it is sometimes rough on their private lives to work in the ostensible belly of the beast. Publicist Schwabe remembers a ballet class at which another dancer sidled up to the bar and asked, "What's it like to work for a magazine that makes men rape women?" Joanie politely informed the budding ballerina that she didn't know, not having worked for such a magazine.

"In the beginning, a few of my feminist friends accused me of betraying my sisters," said Associate New York Editor Susan Margolis-Winter about her first few months on the job. "They thought Playboy nudity was demeaning. I told them that if I thought so, I wouldn't work here. Taking your clothes off doesn't mean surrender--it can be a sign of strength. I admire a woman with the balls to bare her breasts."

Fiction Editor Alice Turner's excitement at being hired by Playboy nearly three years ago was slightly tempered by apprehension that the members of her professional-women's media group, especially her Ms.-magazine friends, wouldn't approve. When she told them, however, the universal reaction was "Good for you."

"Everybody knew it was a good job," said Turner, "Playboy has a reputation in publishing as being a good place to work. I know firsthand.

"When I'm speaking publicly, I'm sometimes asked the stock question: How can you, as a woman, work for a magazine that has made millions of dollars exploiting women? I insist on answering. I explain that before I took this job, I did some research. I obtained a stack of all the men's magazines and I read them. Many offended me, but Playboy didn't. I tell the critic to do the same thing, and if he or she still thinks after that that Playboy exploits women, then I'll listen to that opinion. The problem is that most critics haven't even looked at the magazine. I have loyalty and affection for Playboy, but I try never to be defensive."

"Defensive? Are you kidding?" asked a receptionist. "It's gotten to where I don't like to tell people where I work, because they're too interested. I'm so tired of answering all the questions: Are you a Bunny? Have you ever been in the magazine? Can you get me a subscription? How's Christie? How's Hef--or Hugh, as the real nerds say. I tell people I'm a supermarket checker or that I work in a medical library. Once, I told someone on an airplane that I worked for Bell Telephone, but that didn't work, because the guy gave me a rant against Ma Bell for half of the flight."

A secretary says that she always tells the truth but she figures, "Give the people what they want," so she embroiders her tales with a cross-stitch of Warren Beatty, a snippet of a famous rock group and a bald reference or two to a fine meal that she's had at Ma Maison. Sometimes it's not easy being a celebrity.

One woman remembers experiencing one of the clicks--those little epiphanies that alert a woman to latent sexism--that author Jane O'Reilly once described. She was zipping through traffic and was stopped by a traffic cop. Automatically, she reached for her new issue of Playboy with the hope of avoiding an ugly confrontation by presenting it to the patrolman. Who should saunter up to the window but a policewoman? I'm doomed, she thought, and then--click!--she offered the magazine to the officer anyway. What ensued was an animated discussion of their jobs and mutual congratulations for having made it in what was once a man's world.

"A sign on a bathroom door in Editorial confirms Phyllis Schlafly's worst fears: Men and/or Women."