Playboy is often its own media event. Beginning with our first issue, we seem to have something of an art of making news. That first issue--which came out in December 1953 without a cover date, because Hugh Hefner wasn't sure there would be a second issue--created an instant commotion. For more than a year, a rumor had been spreading that Marilyn Monroe had posed for a girlie calendar in 1949. Everybody knew about Marilyn--she had been a hit in The Asphalt Jungle--but few had actually seen the calendar. In April 1952, Life magazine published a miniature two-color cut of one pose, but Hefner discovered that photographer Tom Kelley had taken another, better picture, and he acquired it for the first Playboy. Not only did the issue sell an astonishing 77 percent of its copies but Hefner's coup was widely reported in newspapers as well as in Time. Playboy has seldom been out of the headlines since. The most frequently cited source of controversy is the Playboy Interview--who knew that what lurked in Jimmy Carter's heart would become a campaign issue? Many of our pictorials have had a comparable impact on the media. Many more have become etched in readers' minds--stopping their mental traffic. Our past 30 years have included riveting pictures of celebrity Playmates (Jayne Mansfield, Stella Stevens, Dorothy Stratten, Shannon Tweed); a celebrity Playmate candidate (Suzanne Somers); famous actresses (Brigitte Bardot, Elke Sommer, Jill St. John, Kim Novak, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gina Lollobrigida, Catherine Deneuve, Ann-Mar-gret, Dominique Sanda, Margot Kidder, Victoria Principal, Valerie Perrine, Susan Sarandon, Bernadette Peters, Maud Adams, Raquel Welch); as well as the previously unknown--such as the Ohio patrolwoman Barbara Schantz and the Florida stock-broker Marina Verola, whose nude portraits in the magazine got them in hot water with their edgy employers. Perhaps most memorably intolerant were the N.F.I., owners who fired cheerleaders who posed without their pompons for a December 1978 pictorial. Happily, many of the women so treated wound up with better job due to their exposure in Playboy.
We wanted to take another look at some of the moments of the past 30 years that have made news--and at some of those images that have become part of the fabric of Playboy. We've all experienced that unique pleasure of cleaning out a box filled with memorabilia and becoming absolutely engrossed in a particular souvenir and finding that it still says something to us. We found that happening to us a lot while we prepared this feature. You probably will, too. Proceed with affection.
