Golden Dreams

In the Spring of 1953, I was leading the secret life of Walter Mitty: I was the mild-mannered 27-year-old circulation director for Children's Activities who imagined himself editor and publisher of a sophisticated men's magazine called Stag Party. In the office at Children's Activities, the editorial staff, mostly middle-aged women, oohed and aahed at my snapshots of baby Christie while I fantasized about sexy Sweetheart of the Month pictorials.

Wherever I earned a paycheck, my modus operandi remained the same--I put in my hours, but my real creative energy was spent in bringing my private dreams to life. While spending my days writing ad copy for the Carson Pirie Scott department store, for instance, I spent my evenings creating my cartoon book, That Toddlin' Town. Later, when my day job was churning out letters to Esquire subscribers, I devoted all my free time to promoting That Toddlin' Town. It seems I always had a project. My friend Burt Zollo and I made plans to start a Chicago magazine while I was in charge of newsstand promotion at Modern Man. And now, at Children's Activities, the longing to publish my own magazine was stronger than ever, but this time I was going to do it alone--with no partners, no prospectus, no approvals from anyone. I had conceived a way, I thought, to launch a smart new men's magazine, and I had a plan to do it without any significant financing, using a more ambitious version of the strategy I used to launch my cartoon book: I would persuade a printer to delay a portion of the printing and paper costs for a month or two, as I had done with That Toddlin' Town, and talk a few people into contributing their time and talent--even money, if they had any--in exchange for a piece of the action.

I was the ultimate double threat: broke and inexperienced. So how was I going to get all the help that I knew I would need to pull this off? The odds were stacked against me, but no matter how I figured it, I had nothing to lose. Both at home and at work, I was dying on the vine. Sometimes I would find myself in a crowded elevator or a building lobby, and I would be overwhelmed and demoralized by the notion that I was the only one who was still unplugged and disconnected. I wanted a job that I could love.

I believed there was a large, untapped market of young urban males--city-bred guys such as myself--waiting for the kind of sophisticated men's magazine Esquire had published during the Depression but had abandoned after the war, partly because of pressure from the Post Office and partly because the original editor, Arnold Gingrich, had wanted to drop the sexy cartoons and pinups and put the emphasis on fiction and fashion.

The new Esquire--and the other mass-market men's magazines of the period--ignored what I saw as the major preoccupation of most men: women. The most successful men's magazine of the time was True, an outdoor-adventure magazine with more interest in hunting than in sex. True's success had taken the men's magazines--Argosy, Cavalier, Male, Stag and the rest--in a completely different direction, where wrestling alligators was a more manly pastime than dancing with a female companion in your own apartment. A typical men's magazine story of the era began with a lead such as this one from Man's Life: "The harsh scream of a ringo bird in the chonta trees behind the tent woke me, and I lay on the cot, listening to the intense, haunting silence of the jungle." That's what I was up against.

Like True, Argosy and the others, Modern Man, where I had worked, had an outdoor-adventure orientation, with articles on guns, antique cars and how to operate a bulldozer. But in the center of the magazine was an eight-to-ten-page Modern Man Gallery containing the nudes that really sold the magazine, displayed as artistic photography, complete with the names of the photographers and technical information about lighting and lens openings. There was no reference to the identity of the models.

This impersonal approach to figure photography was perceived as essential to achieve acceptance on the newsstands of America, presumably on the theory that if it's art, it can't be obscene. But not even this pretense made these pictures acceptable to the U.S. Post Office in the early Fifties, so Modern Man accepted no subscriptions and was dependent entirely on newsstand sales.

My intention from the outset was to incorporate the sexual content of the magazine into the editorial package, not to relegate it to a sexual ghetto as Modern Man was doing. I wanted the magazine to have the same positive and sophisticated interest in sex that I felt most of my potential readers had--a revolutionary publishing notion in 1953. I thought that if the sexual contents of the magazine were handled with sufficient taste and quality, it wouldn't be necessary to masquerade my Sweetheart of the Month as art.

There was certainly nothing arty about the title I had in mind. On one of my frequent forays into the dusty stacks of the secondhand bookstores of Chicago, I happened on an obscure volume that inspired the title for my magazine. It was a collection of sexy cartoons published in 1931 called Stag at Eve. On the dust jacket was a leering stag, winking lasciviously at the reader. I knew Stag Party was a title guaranteed to get attention--and if it was perceived as rather ribald, I planned to disarm the critics with the quality of the publication's contents.

I would demand the highest possible standards from the finest and most famous writers. But with practically no money for an editorial budget, I would acquire high-quality fiction by going after reprints and material in the public domain until I could afford to pay top rates for original work. I would round out the editorial package with exciting lifestyle features--on subjects ranging from sports cars and jazz to food and fashion--that would provide young men such as myself with wish-fulfilling images of the good life that we had just begun to appreciate and pursue. And cartoons. To me, the cartoons would be a vital part of the magazine's irreverent identity--as indispensable to Stag Party as they had been to the old Esquire, but with one important distinction. Even in its most successful years, Esquire had always been edited for the middle-aged reader, as symbolized by the Esky character--the roué with bulging eyes and walrus mustache who appeared on the cover. I was going after a much younger and more modern audience, men who were growing up in a different era and beginning to break away from the rigid views and conformist values of their parents' generation.

Since I didn't have any money to promote or publicize the magazine, I cast about for a gimmick that would draw immediate attention to the first issue. In response to television's increasing competition for the mass audience, Hollywood was searching for a gimmick of its own to lure the public back into movie theaters. In the early Fifties the motion picture industry introduced Cinema Scope, Cinerama and 3-D movies, and audiences were lining up to view three-dimensional films through red and green cellophane eyeglasses that were handed out at the door. I thought that a nude pictorial in 3-D in the first issue might be just the ticket to get Stag Party off the ground.

I found a studio photographer who owned a 3-D camera. For $200 he agreed to shoot two nude models for me in the process. I planned to bind a pair of 3-D glasses into every copy of the magazine, but my enthusiasm for the idea cooled measurably when I found out how much the glasses would cost.

I was still chafing over the prohibitive cost of my 3-D idea when I noticed an article in Advertising Age about the controversial Marilyn Monroe calendar. According to the story, the John Baumgarth Co. in Melrose Park, a suburb west of Chicago, owned the rights to one of two nude pictures of the actress taken by photographer Tom Kelley in 1949. But Baumgarth wasn't giving its calendar wide distribution because, according to the Post Office, sending nude pictures through the mail was a federal offense. So while everyone had heard of the Monroe calendar, not very many people had seen it. This was an opportunity too good to be true: A full-color nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe in the first issue of my magazine would certainly be a better gimmick than 3-D pictures of a couple of unknown models.

When she had posed for the pictures, Marilyn was herself an unknown model, an aspiring actress who needed the $50 modeling fee to pay the rent. Since then, she'd become the hottest new actress around, with small but important parts in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, and her first starring role in the current release Niagara. When word of her nude modeling reached the press, Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that had her under contract, feared that the news might ruin a promising career. But Marilyn joked about it. Asked what she had on during the photo session, she reportedly replied, "Nothing but the radio."

Publicity about her nudes only heightened America's fascination with her. In a cover story in April 1952, Life published a postage-stamp-sized two-color reproduction of one of the photos. Reflecting the temper of the times, no other magazine had dared to print either of them. But if the calendar company was afraid of the Post Office, I wasn't. I had read the federal obscenity statute originally conceived by Anthony Comstock and, as far as I was concerned, the law itself was obscene. In 1945, after the Post Office had spent years trying unsuccessfully to take away Esquire's second-class mailing permit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia--in a decision written by Judge Thurman Arnold and later upheld by the Supreme Court--ordered postal authorities to spend more time delivering the mail and less time trying to censor it.

But the Post Office officials were still acting like a self-appointed censorship board, as if the Esquire case had no meaning and a tastefully posed nude photo was obscene. I wasn't really certain what obscenity was, but I knew what it wasn't. It wasn't simple nudity.

Armed with that conviction, I jumped into my beat-up Chevy coupe and drove out North Avenue to the Baumgarth plant, a couple of miles west of my old neighborhood. I arrived unannounced and asked to see John Baumgarth, president of the company. As luck would have it, he was in and willing to see me. A friendly, middle-aged man, Baumgarth was immediately responsive to the entrepreneurial spirit of a young lad who spoke so enthusiastically about plans to start his own men's magazine. As soon as I explained what I wanted, he showed me a copy of the calendar, and I was pleased to see that he had purchased the better of the two poses. In the tiny two-color picture in Life, Marilyn had been stretched out diagonally against a red drape. In the Baumgarth picture, she was posed provocatively in a sitting position with one arm curved back over her golden hair, which partially covered her face in a peekaboo fashion. Baumgarth had titled the picture Golden Dreams, and to me it looked like a golden dream come true.

Baumgarth said he would be happy to let me reproduce the picture in the first issue of my magazine for the same price he had originally paid the photographer: $500. Warming to this idea, he said that he would also throw in the color separations. This was a truly generous offer, for good litho negatives could have cost me as much as $1000. It meant that I could now afford full-process color reproduction in my first issue. I just knew that picture of Marilyn would make my magazine a collector's item.

I left that meeting walking on air. All I needed to do now was create a magazine to go with the picture--and then find someone who would print it on terms I could afford. But first I needed to whip up enthusiasm for Stag Party among the major newsstand wholesalers around the country. If I could get enough advance orders, it would be that much easier to talk a printer into extending me credit.

I set up an office in our apartment, using a card table and my trusty old L. C. Smith typewriter. I had ordered two separate sets of printed-letterhead stationery and envelopes, one for Stag Party and another for something I called Nation-Wide News Co., since I was going to distribute the magazine myself until I could get a national distributor. The return address for both organizations was 6052 S. Harper Avenue, our South Side apartment. I gave myself the title of general manager of Nation-Wide News, and I used several different titles on the Stag Party letters. I would be editor-publisher when it was appropriate, but also publicity director, circulation director, advertising director and so on, depending on the business at hand.

The letterheads hadn't arrived yet, but I was so excited about the Marilyn Monroe picture that I decided to write a promotional letter to the top 25 wholesalers in the country, most of whom I knew personally from my year at Modern Man. I had no prospectus or dummy. All I had were the reproduction rights to Marilyn's picture and a distribution list, but that was enough. I sat down and started to type. The letter read:

Dear Friend:

We haven't even printed our letterhead yet, but I wanted you to be one of the very first to hear the news. Stag Party--a brand-new magazine for men--will be out this Fall and it will be one of the best sellers you've ever handled. It's being put together by a group from Esquire who stayed here in Chicago when that magazine moved east last year--so you can imagine how good it is going to be. And it will include male-pleasing figure studies--making it a sure hit from the very start.

But here's the really Big news! The first issue of Stag Party will include the famous calendar picture of Marilyn Monroe--in full color! In fact--every issue of Stag Party will have a beautiful, full-page, male-pleasing nude study--in full, natural color!

Now you know what I mean when I say this is going to be one of the best sellers you've ever handled.

Fill out the postage-paid Air Mail reply card enclosed and get it back to me as quickly as possible. With four-color printing on the inside pages, we've got to set our distribution right away.

It will be nice doing business with you again--especially with a title as good as this one.

Cordially, Nation-Wide News Company Hugh M. Hefner, General Manager

What it really came down to was trying to create a distribution company out of correspondence, and I planned to create the magazine in much the same way. I figured I needed at least 35,000 orders to break even on that first issue. Since I had to continue my job at Children's Activities to make ends meet, my wife, Millie, pitched in and helped me with the typing. From coast to coast, there were about 800 news-dealers to contact, so the correspondence kept her busy. To avoid the telltale appearance of a mom-and-pop operation, Millie even added a secretarial touch to the letters, using the initials of her maiden name, Williams, in the lower left margin: "HMH:mw." That spring and summer, the entire office and staff of both the magazine and its distributor were me, Millie, that card table and my old L. C. Smith.

Orders were soon filling our mailbox: 25 from Birmingham, Alabama; 40 from Twin Falls, Idaho; 50 from Battle Creek, Michigan; and 100 from Little Rock, Arkansas. San Diego and Los Angeles each wanted 1500; 2000 from Washington, D.C.; 3000 from Boston; 6000 from Chicago; and the largest order, 8000 from New York. Altogether, about 200 newsdealers responded with orders. It was all I could do to contain my elation.

By the end of May, I had orders for more than 50,000 copies of the first issue--all on the promise of the Esquire connection and the Marilyn Monroe picture. Now all I needed was money to put the magazine together. I wouldn't get very far with the $300 in my checking account.

Other Voices: Eldon Sellers

Hef and I were old friends and we used to play ping-pong in the basement of his apartment building. I always felt I was a better player, but every time I relaxed, he'd beat me. He was very competitive. He managed to keep up with me out of sheer doggedness and determination. We had played more than a thousand games and we were only a couple of games apart.

One night during a match, he mentioned that he was thinking about starting a magazine. He was always talking about some idea like that, but this time he sounded serious. He had it all figured out--and the way he explained it, I got very excited and wanted to be a part of it. My enthusiasm was based primarily on Hef's confidence; and the Korean War was just ending, so a magazine devoted to good times seemed particularly appropriate.

Hef needed investors and I offered to help him find them. I had some training, having sold Rexair vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and now I was working in the sales training program for Dun & Bradstreet. But as it turned out, the first investor I found was me. In my spare time, evenings and weekends, I was first violinist and concert-master for the Evanston Symphony Orchestra, and I was dating one of the girls in the violin section, Elaine Graham. She met Hef and was very impressed with him and his ideas. She offered to lend me $2000. It was a big step for me to be obligated for two grand, but I gave him the check and took 2000 shares of stock.

After that, I went looking for other investors. But I didn't go to the people I knew through D&B who had a lot of money. I just wasn't that aggressive about it. I was thinking only in terms of friends and relatives. I don't think Hef and I ever did talk about sales strategy. He was so positive about everything. He didn't talk in terms of problems. He always gave me the impression that everything was fine and everything was going to work out.

I'd bring people over to Hef's apartment and he'd do a great job telling them about his ideas, explaining the magazine, and that would be the end of it. He was absolutely unable to close a deal. He couldn't bring himself to ask people for money.

•

Eldon wasn't any better than I was at securing investors. Much to my disappointment, the $2000 his girlfriend lent him was the only real money he brought in--and the company didn't even have the use of that for long. When he stopped dating Elaine, soon after the magazine was launched, she demanded her money back and I gave it to her to get Eldon off the hook, but I let him keep the 2000 shares that he had bought.

(continued on page 262)Golden Dreams(continued from page 122)

On June 12, 1953, I opened a bank account in the name of HMH Publishing Co. and started a simple ledger, with debits and credits. I deposited Eldon's $2000, plus the $300 I had in my checking account.

I wrote my first company check the following day: $500 to John Baumgarth for the picture of Marilyn Monroe. In the next few weeks I paid out another $1706 for various expenses--for photographs, including an overdue bill for my aborted 3-D pictorial, for the printing of stationery and envelopes and for the reply cards and postage for all the correspondence that summer on behalf of Stag Party and Nation-Wide News.

But by the end of July, we had only two outside investors. Eldon had talked one of his uncles into investing $50, and Max Hardy, a friend who played bridge with Eldon, Millie and me, also bought $50 worth of stock.

With total deposits of $2400 and an outlay of $2206, HMH Publishing was almost out of money. I realized that unless I found additional financing somewhere almost immediately, my little venture would fail before it began. I was reluctant to ask my parents for money because I knew they wouldn't approve of the publication I was planning, but I was truly desperate.

The first Sunday in August, I took Millie and Christie and drove out to my parents' house on New England Avenue, ostensibly to give them a chance to play with their granddaughter. But I cornered Dad before dinner and told him about Stag Party. He told me what I already knew, that magazines are costly to produce and slow to turn a profit, and few of the new ones survive the first year. He felt it was too risky an investment for him because he was having economic problems of his own. Unemployed in his 50s after a long career at Advance Aluminum Corp., my father had been forced to accept a job with another company at a significant reduction in salary and position. He had believed in the American dream and had been screwed by it.

Even though he was unwilling to invest in my company, Dad still wanted to help. He volunteered to take over the ledger, see to it that my corporation's books were set up properly and do the accounting until I could afford to hire a full-time bookkeeper. If my magazine were successful, I decided that night, I would hire my father to serve as the treasurer of my company--for more money than he had ever earned at Advance Aluminum.

After dinner, my mother took me aside and told me that she had a little money of her own put away and could give me $1000 as an investment. She didn't believe in a publication called Stag Party but she believed in her son, and she wrote me a check for $500 that very night and promised another just like it the following week. Thanks to Mom, HMH Publishing was back in business for another month.

My kid brother, Keith, had been discharged from the Army in February after serving in counterintelligence at Fort Holabird, Maryland and was now a television personality in Baltimore, appearing as Mr. Toby on his own children's show on WAAM, an ABC-TV affiliate. As soon as he heard about my plans for the magazine, he sent me a check for $300, with a series of additional checks for $100 each time he had money to spare, until he had invested $1000.

With almost no money in the bank, I was trying to persuade as many of the magazine's contributors as I could to accept their payments in stock rather than cash. Only one, artist Richard Loehle, agreed to that at first, taking 70 shares in July for two full-color cartoons. But in the weeks that followed, my enthusiasm and absolute conviction that I knew what I was doing were contagious enough to persuade a few others to take a gamble. Al Stine wanted a check for $25 for his first cartoon, but he accepted stock as payment for his next five. Former Esquire copywriter Bob Roderick wrote a food-and-drink piece for the first issue and I paid him with 75 shares. Clarence Schroeder, an artist who retouched a number of the photographs for the first issue, took 50 shares as payment.

But despite my best efforts, some of the contributors preferred payment in a more practical form. One of the most important initial contributors, Julien Dedman, was among those. I told him that I wanted a full-page cartoon in every issue, and probably a satirical piece as well. That was worth $125 a month. "I ought to mention money--a rather dirty word in these parts at this particular time," I wrote to Julien, explaining that I wanted certain special people to have an added incentive. "We are permitting them to take their payment in stock. That's better than it sounds. The company is being incorporated at a point several times below what best estimates indicate its worth will be in a very few months. Common stock should be worth approximately four times its par value by the end of 1954. If you prefer the cash, you are welcome to that, too--paid on acceptance." But Julien said no to my offer of stock. "I appreciate your generous stock-sharing offer and am tempted to take you up on it," he wrote back. "However, New York is a very expensive place to live and I am presently in need of extra spending money and would prefer the cash."

As it turned out, more than half of the writers, illustrators and cartoonists who contributed original work to that first issue accepted stock in payment for their efforts. It proved to be a wise decision.

For the people who purchased those shares of HMH Publishing for $1 or accepted them as payment for an article or illustration in the first issues and held on to them until 1971, when the company went public, it was the investment of a lifetime. In the 18 years the company was privately held, the stock twice split ten-to-one, and when the company went public, the stock split again, 3.5 to 1. With those splits, 100 shares of the original stock were worth about $750,000.

Other Voices: Burt Zollo

When Hef told me about his newest dream--starting a magazine called Stag Party--I thought he was nuts. I remember standing with him for a moment on a bridge over the Chicago River as he asked me if I wanted to be part of the project. By then I was doing well in the public relations business, so I was noncommittal.

But as plans heated up, he called me again, and I felt obligated to help him out financially, remembering how he had paid me $300 to promote That Toddlin Town. I sent him a check for $300 worth of stock. I had the feeling it was a long shot, and I wasn't sure I would ever see any return on it.

Then he did something that ticked me off. He asked me to write an article on what a young man should know about marriage and said he'd pay me $100 for it. When I gave it to him, he not only completely rewrote it but he also asked me to take the $100 in stock. I put the stock away until the company went public. I sold it the first day it was traded and became a millionaire.

•

Responses from newsdealers kept pouring in. By midsummer, I had orders for almost 70,000 copies. My plan was to use them as leverage to win the credit I knew we were going to need. With the orders in hand, I drove to Rochelle, Illinois to meet with Richard Sax, owner of the Rochelle Printing Company.

Sax recognized that this was a healthy response to a first-time solicitation. He had just bought a new press and needed to find additional work to keep it running. He was willing to take a gamble and agreed to print the 32-page letterpress section and the cover of the magazine for $6000, with the first half due on delivery and 90-day credit on the rest. Rochelle would also handle the binding and shipping. That made it a very sweet deal, indeed. The 90-day credit was worth more than all the money we had managed to raise.

But Rochelle's presses couldn't handle the full-color pages I was planning. For those, I went to Owl Printing, a small offset printer that I was using for some promotion mailings for Children's Activities. I wanted them to print the eight-page insert that would include the full-color, full-page picture of Marilyn Monroe. They had never done editorial printing before--let alone nudes--but they were willing to try. They agreed to accept a half payment of $1100 on delivery, and the other half in 60 days. If there was any question about how well Owl's four-color-process reproduction would turn out, it was a chance I would have to take. I was lucky just to get them to agree to those terms.

Having just persuaded two printers to print the magazine on partial credit, I had more reason than ever to believe that it might just be possible to start a national magazine on virtually no capital. And so, while still holding down a full-time job, I pushed ahead at full throttle, working every waking moment, juggling the schizophrenic demands of two magazines as different as Children's Activities and Stag Party.

At the end of my long hours on the job, I'd come home and peck Millie on the cheek, wolf down a sandwich, play with Christie for a few minutes--she was learning to walk--and then begin a hard day's night at my card table, pounding out letters to potential contributors and their representatives, reading manuscripts, writing and rewriting copy. Every surface in sight--chairs, couch, tabletops, floor--was piled high with books and papers, layouts, illustrations, cartoons and photographs. Millie kept the refrigerator stocked with Pepsi-Cola and I consumed vast quantities, with sugar and caffeine supplying energy as I worked feverishly into the wee hours, frequently dragging myself grudgingly to bed for three or four hours of sleep just as dawn was breaking.

I had never bought or sold a story, let alone edited or published a magazine, but I knew exactly what I wanted and how to go about getting it: by acquiring low-cost, top-quality reprints and material in the public domain--short, tightly plotted and preferably by a recognizable name. I personally preferred stories of suspense, mystery, fantasy, science fiction and satire, so that's what I sought for my magazine.

I had been a Sherlock Holmes fan since early adolescence, so one of my first purchases was an excerpt from a story concerning the great detective's deductive powers and his cocaine addiction. I picked it up for $25 from the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after an exchange of letters in which I pointed out that the material was now in public domain. For an additional $50, I bought two other stories, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, for subsequent issues. As a second piece of fiction in the first issue, I chose a haunting tale of the Civil War by Ambrose Bierce titled A Horseman in the Sky, in which a Confederate soldier is killed by his own son. It was so clearly in the public domain that it cost me nothing. For a taste of erotica, I planned to publish a series of ribald classics starting with tales from Boccaccio's Decameron.

Despite my attempts to convince them that we were the hottest new event in publishing, the agents and publishers for Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway refused to deal with a magazine named Stag Party, even for reprints. I wanted to publish Hemingway's Up in Michigan, but Scribner's said they would not consider it until my magazine had "demonstrated its character." Random House informed me that I could reprint a John O'Hara short story titled Days for a fee of $1000, but that was more than I could afford to pay. I hoped to have contributors of that caliber appearing soon in my magazine on a first-time basis.

Since cartoons were going to play such an important role in the magazine, I went first-class in that department, too, by feeding gag ideas to established Chicago illustrators Richard Loehle, Ben Denison and Al Stine. They would do cartoons for me that would look like slick magazine illustrations. Denison supplied our very first full-page cartoon: two shapely girls in lingerie, one writing in her diary as she asks her friend, "What's the past tense of virgin?" Besides publishing these new artists-as-cartoonists, I wanted to include reprints of the best work by well-known cartoonists long associated with the top of the market. In correspondence with Gardner Rea, he refused my offer of $25 to let me publish a cartoon from Stag at Eve, the book that had been the inspiration for the title of my magazine. He insisted on a minimum payment of $100. So I suggested that I pay him the $100 he wanted, but for the rights to reprint several of the cartoons in my early issues. That way I could afford the deal, I said, explaining, "I'm not a cheap S.O.B., and someday soon I hope to be able to pay the best rates in the business." Rea accepted with the reply, "You sound like my kind of guy."

I got Virgil Partch, Claude and Cobean to agree to let me use their cartoons on the same basis. Then I had what I considered to be an inspired notion. My childhood idol, Milton Caniff, creator of Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates, had drawn a sexy cartoon strip, Miss Lace, for Army papers during World War Two. I had read that the Army had rejected several of those strips as too sexually suggestive, so I wrote to Caniff, requesting permission to publish them. To my surprise and delight, Caniff sent me copies of the censored comic strips with his blessings and permission to print them.

The contents of the magazine were starting to take shape, but I still had to find someone to give the publication the distinctive design I wanted. I needed an Art Director. I discussed the problem with Norm Sklarewitz, a writer and a friend, and he suggested two names--one as an illustrator for my Sherlock Holmes stories, the other a free-lance artist he knew who specialized in design. I made an appointment to see the guy I thought was the illustrator. His name was Arthur Paul and his studio was on the south side of the Loop, on Van Buren Street. The building was dark and dirty, and the elevator wasn't working, so I walked up to the second floor.

The tiny studio had a great view of the elevated train tracks outside. Every time a train rumbled past, bits of plaster fell from the ceiling, dust filled the air and the noise made conversation almost impossible. But when I looked at the layout on Paul's drawing board and at other work pasted up on the walls, I realized I had confused the two names Sklarewitz had given me. "Is all this your work?" I asked. He nodded. I was overwhelmed by the diversity of the illustrative styles, typography and design. It was clean and fresh and brilliant, exactly the look I'd been searching for. I knew in that moment I had found my Art Director.

Other Voices: Arthur Paul

I was a 28-year-old free-lance designer, a graduate of the Chicago Institute of Design, with a wife and a kid on the way, a few good accounts and a studio that looked like a place Sam Spade would have as an office. I had never worked for anyone else and didn't want to.

But then Hefner arrived, uninvited, into my life. He didn't present a picture that was designed to instill confidence. Here was this guy with a growth of beard, wearing unpressed clothes, looking exhausted and in need of pocket money. He was carrying an oversized briefcase crammed with drawings and copy. He always carried everything around with him in order to help him explain his project.

He also had a stiff neck, which gave him a kind of Igor-from-the-monster-movies look. I could have been excused for thinking he was an off-the-wall eccentric, especially when he told me the magazine he was planning to start would be called Stag Party. That title, combined with his appearance, was not what I was looking for that particular day.

But the guy was intense and bright. He had an impressive sense of purpose and a definite idea of the kind of magazine he wanted to produce. He was talking about the sort of contemporary art and design that I was already doing in my own work. The whole idea was terrifically appealing, despite my reservations about the title. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do. We had a long conversation about it.

I finally decided to hedge my bets. I told him I'd help him on a free-lance basis, but I wanted to keep my other accounts. I told him, "You're going to have to do my legwork so I can get my regular work done." I just didn't have the time to run around town picking up copy or illustrations for him. He agreed. He said that was fine with him and that's how we began: He'd work at home and run back and forth to my place with all the layouts. He was in and out of my office all the time.

There were days when he should have stayed in bed. He'd have a terrible cold and it would be pouring rain, but he'd have another stop to make, another delivery, someone else he had to pitch an idea to. Nothing stopped him.

I was working by the hour, and all the work soon added up to a couple of thousand dollars. Money was very short and, to sweeten the pot, he offered me stock in partial payment. "Art," he said, "I want you to have a real stake in our future." But I still wasn't convinced the magazine would make it. Not with that name. So Hef paid me half my free-lance fees in cash and let me postpone my decision on how I wanted the other half, cash or stock, until later on. But the more I got to know Hef, the more certain I became that he was going to succeed. We started working together in August. It was a real race against time to get the first issue ready before it had to go to press in October.

One night in early September, I was drawing a little stag as a logo when Hef called and asked me what I thought about a new name for the magazine--Playboy. "That's marvelous," I said. "Why didn't we think of it before?" He said he had just received a threatening letter from a lawyer for Stag magazine.

He asked me to turn the stag in the logo into a rabbit and add a white tie for elegance. The rabbit symbol would be both playful and sophisticated, Hef said--but I always suspected it was because he had owned a bunny blanket when he was a little boy. I drew the new logo in a few minutes. If I had known how famous that trademark was to become, I would have taken more time with it--and it probably wouldn't have turned out as well as it did.

•

The registered letter from Stag magazine was a shocker. They had read a mention of our plans for a new magazine in American Cartoonist, and four weeks before we were scheduled to go to press a lawyer was informing us, in no uncertain terms, that the name Stag Party was an infringement on his client's trademark. I didn't know whether Stag had a case or not. I knew only that the claim could sink my magazine before it was even launched. But with all the reservations various people had expressed about Stag Party as a name, I considered the lawyer's letter a positive sign instead of a setback, and decided to find a better name. I spent the evening with Millie and Eldon, pacing the apartment, exchanging suggestions, Top Hat, Bachelor, Gent, Gentlemen, Satyr and Pan were all considered, and then Eldon suggested Playboy. Eldon's mother had worked briefly for a short-lived motorcar company with that name.

The Playboy Motor Car Corp. of Buffalo, New York was one of several companies that sprang up immediately after World War Two, trying to break into the booming postwar automobile market. Although the Playboy, priced at $985, was advertised as "the nation's new-car sensation," the company managed to produce fewer than 100 before going out of business. Some people might have considered that an omen, but I didn't. I liked the name and said so immediately. Millie worried that it might conjure up images of the Roaring Twenties--but that was precisely why it appealed to me, suggesting the fun and high living that I wanted to convey in the magazine.

As a symbol to replace the stag, I immediately thought of a rabbit. Esquire and The New Yorker had human symbols in Esky and Eustace Tilley, and I thought an animal would be a nice variation. The rabbit is a playboy of the animal world, noted for both its playfulness and its sexual prowess. And to add a touch of sophistication, I put him in a tuxedo.

By the time I got to Arthur's studio the next afternoon, he had already drawn up a rabbit trademark to replace it, and I thought it looked better than the stag. Like Arthur, I had no idea that at that moment I was holding in my hand a drawing that would soon become world-famous.

I also asked Arv Miller, an old friend and cartoonist, to change the stag he had drawn to illustrate my introduction to the first issue. The rabbit had considerably more personality than the stag, so I decided to use him on the cover of the second issue. He has been there--in one form or another, sometimes as a collage and sometimes as a barely visible highlight in a model's eye--on the cover of every issue since.

Millie suggested Playmate as an alternative to Sweetheart of the Month, and I changed the title on the feature with the second issue. Over the next several issues, the Playmate began to evolve. At first, the Playmates were professional models in typical calendar poses, but as time went on, I tried to add an element of erotic reality to them. Playboy moved away from traditional pinups and art studies toward the girl-next-door types. However, it wasn't until Charlaine Karalus entered the picture in 1955 that I realized how important this new direction would be.

Charlaine Karalus was a statuesque 21-year-old blonde with the face and figure of a young Betty Grable. She told me a divorced girlfriend had suggested that she apply for a job at Playboy, but Charlaine had never heard of the magazine. Her girlfriend had bought a copy at a newsstand, then had taken Charlaine into the ladies' room of a nearby restaurant, locked both of them in a stall and opened the magazine to the center spread. "Oh, my God!" Charlaine exclaimed, blushing as she slammed the magazine shut. But not long after, she showed up looking for a job.

"I'd like to work in your subscription department," she said to me. "I have experience in that kind of work and I have a feeling Playboy can be a lot of fun." What she didn't know was that we didn't yet have a subscription department--and that she would be it. I hired her for $60 a week, and before long, I began inviting her out for an occasional lunch or drink after work. Charlaine had just ended a romance with the son of Chicago's political boss, Jake Arvey, and seemed flattered by my attention. Soon, we were enjoying a casual but pleasant affair.

By that time, I knew my life with Millie was in trouble. When the magazine was two years old, I wrote in my scrap-book journal that my work "has put a real strain on my marriage. Playboy consumes seven days of every week, more than a dozen hours a day, and when I knock off at 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning, I often stay right there, sleeping in the small room behind my office, in order to be there again and ready to go at 9:00. Millie has been wonderful about it, but it can't help but make a difference. It can't and won't continue like this indefinitely, of course, and we both hope things will straighten out in the not-too-distant future."

The scrapbook, a diary-like collection of memories, drawings, photos and odds and ends that documented my life for family and friends, often substituted diplomacy for candor in describing my feelings about the marriage. I tried to get home on weekends, but I didn't always make it. But the larger truth was that even when I was at home my mind was back at the office. The magazine and the life I was starting to build around it were my all-consuming interests. I was an inept bridge burner who didn't want to hurt Millie or incur the wrath of our parents. I shared the prejudice of my generation against divorce, yet I also bridled against the obligations involved in staying married, especially in a relationship that for me was no longer romantically meaningful. Occasionally, Millie complained about not seeing me for weeks at a time, but mostly because she felt I was neglecting Christie. I had my magazine to keep me busy, but she had no diversion other than her parenting, and I knew she got bored and lonely being on her own so much.

When I did spend a night at home, we still slept together. Millie seemed to be more receptive to sex now that we were living apart. For the first time since early in our marriage, she was ardent in her lovemaking. Unfortunately, it was too late. We were friends and partners, but being her lover no longer held much interest for me.

In the fall of 1954, we had gone back to the University of Illinois campus for a football weekend, and not long after that, Millie discovered that she was pregnant. But the shaky state of our marriage made both of us ambivalent about becoming parents again. I wasn't thrilled, but she seemed resigned. It seemed to me that from the moment children were introduced into a marriage, the entire relationship was forever altered: Parenting replaced romance as the dominant theme in the relationship. In my youthful naïveté, I had envisioned marriage as the apex of romance for a couple in love, a haven for erotic and romantic bliss until death do us part. But that naïveté on my part had died a cruel death, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to honor the conventions of society rather than to follow my own convictions.

When Millie asked me if I was seeing other women, I said, "Of course." But we both knew that wasn't the whole story. I had no special lover whose charms kept me from going home at night. I was an equal-opportunity employer. I had sex with any of the female staff members who were interested, but the truth was that I mostly slept alone at the office because the women whose favors I occasionally enjoyed went home at night.

One evening after work, a group of us were sitting around discussing the constant problem of finding exciting Playmate prospects and I half-teasingly proposed Charlaine. Amid laughter and banter, she agreed to pose if I bought an Addressograph machine to help ease her subscription chores. I agreed, and right then and there I decided to feature Charlaine as a Playboy employee--and even tell the story of her posing in exchange for an Addressograph machine.

Not everyone agreed with my decision. Art Paul urged me not to reveal her occupation, which he said was too mundane and unglamourous. The Playmates, he thought, should remain romantic fantasies or they would lose their sex appeal. Exactly the opposite proved to be the case, and Charlaine--using the pseudonym I provided, Janet Pilgrim--became the most popular Playmate to appear in the magazine in the Fifties.

Janet Pilgrim was a name consistent with the nice-girl concept that I was trying to promote with our Playmates. I chose the name "Pilgrim" precisely because of its puritan connotations, which I thought would help to deliver our editorial message--that nice girls were sexual beings, too, including a puritan daughter named Pilgrim. Rather quickly I realized that I had in this Playmate feature a symbol for attacking the Madonna--whore, double-standard hypocrisy of our society. If the girl next door, a "nice girl," would pose in such an erotic context, the significance seemed clear. If the girl-next-door were sexually aware and active, as depicted in a monthly pictorial feature in the center of an increasingly popular men's magazine, traditional Christian values might be perceived as being in serious jeopardy.

"We suppose it's natural to think of the pulchritudinous Playmates as existing in a world apart," I wrote in the copy accompanying Janet's pictures showing her at work in the office. "Actually, potential Playmates are all around you: the new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found Miss July in our own circulation department, processing subscriptions, renewals and back copy orders."

Janet's Playmate pose showed her at a mirror preparing to dress for a date, while in the background her escort is shown in soft focus, leaning in the doorway in formal attire. The guy in the doorway was me. Thus was born the girl-next-door concept of pinup photography, fully realized and expressed in the copy accompanying the pictures. And from the moment her Playmate pictorial was published, Charlaine simply became, for most of us at Playboy, Janet Pilgrim.

Other Voices: Janet Pilgrim

It took guts for me to go over to PLAYBOY to see if they had any job openings. I was shy and insecure, but I was also young and ambitious, so I worked up my courage and went. Hef looked like an ordinary guy, very thin, surrounded by dozens of empty Pepsi bottles.

I got to know him more and more because everyone worked together so closely. He's magnetic, and I couldn't help becoming attracted to him. I like to think it was mutual. We were intimate rather quickly, within a month or two. I wasn't a virgin, but I was an old-fashioned kind of girl. I didn't want to go into a relationship unless it was meaningful. But I had the feeling that Hef wanted to experience everything. He once told me that he had ten years of wild oats to sow, and if I wanted to stick around until then, maybe I could become his mistress, but he would never marry again. Once was enough, he said. He made that clear. But he was very sweet and kind and I cared deeply for him. Every time I went into his office and closed the door, every other woman in the place was walking around with hankies and red, swollen eyes.

Occasionally, I would stay with Hef overnight, usually on weekends, and early one Sunday morning we were awakened by someone knocking on the front door downstairs. Hef put on a robe and went down. It was his parents! Glenn and Grace paying an unexpected visit! I panicked. Where in hell could I hide? My God, I was so scared I thought I'd have a heart attack. I grabbed my clothes and found a rear door leading into the backyard, which was entirely enclosed by other buildings. I heard hammering in the next building and pounded on the back door. Some workmen let me out. Hef couldn't believe I got away. When his folks came upstairs, he thought I was hiding in the shower.

Playboy in those days was totally informal, like a close-knit family. There was no punching a time clock. We were all young and deeply committed to Playboy and Hef. Everybody wanted to make the magazine the best. Often, after work, we'd sit around in Hef's office and talk. One night he was complaining about the quality of Playmate pictures he was buying; he wanted something new and different and special for the magazine. Suddenly, he said, "Maybe we ought to use Charlaine." He was grinning, but I could tell he had actually thought about it. It was a daring thing to do in those days, which made it kind of a turn-on. But mostly I did it to please Hef.

He went with me to a photo studio downtown, with a window facing the El so that every trainload of people that rumbled by could see me posing half naked. Hef set up the picture. I stared directly into the camera, which was supposedly a mirror. I was wearing a dressing gown with almost nothing showing but cleavage. I was modest, and I was relieved that I didn't have to take off my panties. I did my own makeup and hair.

I got $50 for doing the Playmate picture and $25 more for the cover, which I posed for that same afternoon. Since it was for the July issue, the cover showed me supposedly sunbathing, with the outline of the Rabbit Head on my sunburned back. The Rabbit Head was my natural skin tone and the rest of me was dark makeup.

I was still living at home and I figured I was going to get killed when my mother found out. Hef let me take home some color transparencies to show to her. That softened the blow a little. I was so young and naive. I was stunned by the attention when that July issue hit the stands. My picture was in all the newspapers as the employee who posed in PLAYBOY. Requests for personal appearances just flooded in, especially from college campuses. I was an instant celebrity. To celebrate, I took my mom to dinner at the Pump Room, having made the reservation in the name of Janet Pilgrim. The maître d' greeted me: "Good evening, Miss Pilgrim," and everyone in that elegant restaurant swiveled around to get a look at me. I'll never forget that moment. Mom was very proud.

•

I'd known LeRoy Neiman during my days as a copywriter for Carson Pirie Scott, where he had been doing freelance fashion illustrations. He had been dating one of my fellow copywriters, but I hadn't seen much of him since I left Carson's ad department. Then one night in 1954, as I was walking to dinner on Chicago Avenue, I ran into LeRoy and we stopped to talk. He was tall and built like a boxer, with short-cropped hair and a bushy mustache. As often as not, he had a cigar butt clenched between his teeth, and his T-shirt and khakis were splattered with paint. That day was no exception. He told me he lived right around the corner.

LeRoy took me to his apartment, where he also worked. It turned out to be a basement--the walls were brick, the floor was cement, and he shared the space with the building's big boiler. He hung his clothes on hangers from pipes overhead and his furnishings were sparse. There was a piano, too, but he used it as an easel. The paint ran down and clogged the keys, but LeRoy said what the hell, he didn't play piano anyway. This was the classic starving-artist scene and he obviously loved it.

That basement room was dominated by LeRoy's paintings. Dozens of them were leaning against the walls and against one another in disorder. He was painting on giant slabs of wallboard, using enamel house paints from half-empty leftover cans that he'd commandeered from the janitor next door after the building had been painted. Several of the brightly colored paint cans sat open on the floor in front of the painting he was working on at the moment. His work was all quite marvelous to behold, with a bold and brilliant use of color obviously inspired by Cézanne, Van Gogh and great European impressionists.

I loved LeRoy's paintings. His speciality--then and now--was capturing people engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, with a special emphasis on the glitz and glitter of nightlife, show business, sporting events and café society. Wealthy men and fashionable women enjoying their wealth. Boxers at Johnny Coulon's South Side gym. Late-night action at the strip joints along Clark Street. Gamblers, pugs, bars, high life and low life--from the Pump Room to the seediest Rush Street dive.

LeRoy's art packed enormous energy, and I was certain I had discovered a major talent who could play an important role in my new magazine. Although I had no idea of it then, from that chance encounter on the street one night, on my way to dinner, began a lifelong personal and professional relationship with a man who would become one of the most famous artists and illustrators of our time.

Other Voices: Leroy Neiman

When we met on the street, Hef told me about his magazine, which I was only vaguely aware of. I'd heard of it, but I hadn't checked it out. At that time, I had very lofty sensibilities. I was a painter, and I wasn't really keeping track of, you know, girlie magazines.

When we went down to my basement, Hef took an instant liking to my paintings. In a lot of them I had used my girlfriends as models. That was one way I'd get my place cleaned--have the girls I was painting come over to the studio. Hef thought that sounded like an enviable lifestyle. But he told me about starting this terrific new magazine and said I was exactly the right guy to paint for it. It took no coaxing to persuade me.

I used to invite Hef to parties at my place, but he was too consumed with his magazine that first year. He'd drop by occasionally, and we'd watch the Friday-night fights together on TV. He was a big fan, as I was. I started spending a lot of time over at Playboy because that's where the action was. There was a lot of action on the Near North Side in those days, with all the clubs and strip joints. With what everybody had been through in the war, people were looking for good times. Art itself was very explosive, very animated, very exciting in those days. Everything was possible.

It was just a time for a lot of action, including sex. That was the big thing. It was still a repressed era, but there was a lot of energy waiting there right beneath the surface, waiting to break out into the open. All that was required was for someone to give it an intellectual content, to serve as a catalyst. And here was Hef leading the way.

The strongest thing Hef always had going for him was that he's such a visual person, and a visual society was just then exploding. Television hadn't been with us all that long. Hef was tuned into what was happening. He had vision that was fantastic, about form and color, about flesh and tone and shadows and all that kind of stuff. When he decided what he really liked, he didn't have to discuss why. He didn't have to go into some art review. That was the way it always was. He had the vocabulary, but he didn't have to use a lot of superlatives.

The main reason I got involved, like any other talent, was for the opportunity to have my work used. The money wasn't as special as the opportunity. I don't even remember what the pay was for those first pieces. That had nothing to do with it. There was nothing else like it in my life before, nor anything else like it since. For me, it was, for want of a better word, a spiritual experience--a down-deep feeling that made Playboy completely different from all other magazines.

•

Back when I began working on Playboy in earnest, I warned my boss at Children's Activities, Clifford Schaible, that I would be leaving, and he asked me to stay through the fall promotion mailings. When they were completed in September 1953, I went in to tell him the time had come for me to move on. He asked about my plans and I told him I was starting my own magazine, but he wouldn't have to worry about me competing for his audience. He didn't seem to find that amusing. When I told him my venture would be operating on "a short shoestring," the coldness of his response surprised me. "Hefner," Schaible said sternly, "if you're not successful, you won't have even a shoestring left." His voice and manner seemed to suggest that failure was a virtual certainty and I could expect to be in debt for a very long time. Thanks for the encouragement, I thought.

I told Millie about the incident. I guess I had been anticipating some small word of support from a compatriot as I set off on my journey into the unknown. But this conservative, gray-flannel executive probably perceived me as an upstart for daring to leave an established, respectable publishing company to start my own magazine--and a "girlie" magazine at that. Logic was certainly on his side. I confessed to Millie, "If a businessman looked at our books, he'd say we're so badly underfinanced that we have about one chance in a million of making it." Millie knew as well as I did that to be a success, we needed nothing less than a publishing miracle--to become the first magazine ever to make a profit on its very first issue. But we both believed in miracles.

In the final few weeks before going to press, I seemed to be in perpetual motion, gaining momentum as I went. I hardly slept. I hardly ate. I was on a creative binge, operating at a pitch of excitement more intense than anything I'd ever experienced before. My workdays had escalated into around-the-clock bouts at my typewriter, interrupted by trips throughout the city, taking care of every detail as the final pieces of the first issue came together.

For the cover, of course, I had decided on Marilyn Monroe. Since her new film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, had just opened to great reviews and a strong box office, and her romance with Joe DiMaggio was getting major play in the newspapers, I felt the timing couldn't be better. For $15, I bought two black-and-white wire-service news photos of Marilyn from United Press. One of them showed her waving to a crowd from the top of a car. After a retoucher eliminated all of the background detail surrounding Marilyn, Art Paul managed to create a striking black-and-white cover design with a red logo. This was just the first example of how Art took ordinary pictures and, through inventive design and the addition of illustrative details, made the magazine and its covers innovative and interesting. I knew this cover would serve its purpose: getting people to pick up the magazine, open it and get a load of that sensational calendar shot. In the editorial salute I wrote for Marilyn, I described her as "the juiciest morsel to come out of the California hills since the discovery of the navel orange," promising readers a similar full-color "unpinned pinup" in every issue of Playboy. The last piece I wrote for the first issue was the introduction to the magazine that was to appear in the opening spread. I pecked out the prose in my usual two-finger fashion and, when it was finished, I read it aloud to make sure it sounded right before sending it off to the typesetter:

If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you. If you like your entertainment served up with humor, sophistication and spice, Playboy will become a very special favorite.

We want to make clear from the very start, we aren't a "family magazine." If you're somebody's sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion.

Within the pages of Playboy you will find articles, fiction, picture stories, cartoons, humor and special features culled from many sources, past and present, to form a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste.

Most of today's "magazines for men" spend all their time out-of-doors--thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast-flowing streams. We'll be out there, too, occasionally, but we don't mind telling you in advance--we plan on spending most of our time inside.

We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.

We believe, too, that we are filling a publishing need only slightly less important than the one just taken care of by the Kinsey Report. The magazines now being produced for the city-bred male (there are two--count 'em--two) have, of late, placed so much emphasis on fashion, travel and how-to-do-it features on everything from avoiding a hernia to building your own steam bath that entertainment has been all but pushed from their pages. Playboy will emphasize entertainment.

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.

I wasn't as confident of our future as this introduction sounded, of course. I didn't sign the introduction and the issue didn't include a masthead, so my name didn't appear anywhere in that first issue. Nor was there a date on the cover, since we planned to keep the magazine on the newsstands for as long as it took to turn a profit. There was no subscription blank either, not only because I didn't want to face any unnecessary hassles from the Post Office but also because there was no guarantee that we would last much more than a couple of issues.

Whatever the future held, I was proud of what we had managed to achieve in so short a time with such limited resources. It was rough around the edges, maybe, but PLAYBOY was a damned good little magazine. With luck--make that a lot of luck--I thought it might grow into something more.

Later that week, Eldon and I went to Owl Printing to watch with awe and anticipation as they turned out our full-color section, which included Marilyn, the Sherlock Holmes story, a Virgil Partch cartoon spread and a full-page Richard Loehle cartoon. When the first sheets began coming off the press, we picked one up to see how Marilyn's picture looked in the light, and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The reproduction was perfect; Marilyn was magnificent. If anything, I thought, the picture looked even more beautiful on the softer offset paper than it did on the enamel stock used by Baumgarth on his calendars.

Then Eldon noticed something we hadn't seen before. When we held the printed sheet up to the light, the cartoon feature on the other side showed through. An oversized face of one of Partch's Picasso-like men appeared in highly suggestive juxtaposition with the nude of Monroe. The cartoon caricature, eyes closed, lips puckered, seemed to be kissing Marilyn between her legs.

I panicked. In the repressive climate of America in 1953, if the self-appointed censors thought we had intentionally turned this nude pinup into an obscenity, the magazine would be confiscated and burned. I imagined my dreams of a lifetime going up in smoke along with it. We could always explain that it had been an accident, but who would believe that? "Maybe nobody will notice," I said hopefully.

"If anybody does, it'll just help to sell the magazine," one of the printers suggested, wiping the ink and the smirk off his face.

I went home that night feeling apprehensive but mostly excited by how well the color reproduction of Marilyn had turned out.

On a cold, gray October morning a few days later, Art Paul, Eldon and I piled into my beat-up 1941 Chevy and drove the 75 miles to Rochelle Printing to put the rest of the issue to bed. The Rochelle plant was a real printing establishment, with sheetfed, flatbed, letterpress presses and its own Linotype, collating and binding machines. The distinctive smell of printer's ink was in the air. Stacks of uncut press sheets of the cover, printed on heavy enamel stock, were lying on movable wooden skids. Marilyn beamed up at us enthusiastically, waving encouragement.

We spent all day and much of the night seated at a long table copyreading the last galleys and page proofs. Finally, we watched as the presses delivered the 32 pages of letterpress that, along with the cover, would wrap around the eight pages of full-color offset. At long last, finished copies of the magazine--printed, folded, cut and stapled--came out of the bindery, bundled and all ready to ship.

One of the great moments of my life was finally having a copy of my own magazine in my hands. The weeks between my purchase of the Marilyn Monroe photo in June and the first issue of Playboy coming off the presses in October were the most critical and decisive 18 weeks of my life, and now the stress and tension of the past months evaporated and I felt overwhelmed by the pure joy of accomplishment. My eyes filled with sweet tears. I had produced my own miracle--nothing more, nothing less. What had once seemed a pipe dream had become a tangible reality. I sat down in a quiet corner and thumbed slowly through the pages that were by now so familiar but which somehow looked so much better, and meant so much more, in final form.

Art and Eldon were thumbing through their own copies, savoring the turn of every page, lost in their own sense of disbelief. When Eldon finished going through his copy, he turned to me and said, "This is great, but what are you going to do for the next issue?" I laughed because I had the next several issues already planned out in my head, and I was sure that they would be better than this one. Later, Art called the first issue a sketchbook for what the magazine was really going to be. He and I were already hard at work on the second and third issues.

We had taken time off for dinner at a restaurant down the road, and on the way back to the plant we'd stopped at a roadside liquor store, where I purchased a bottle of cheap champagne. Now I popped the cork as Eldon passed out paper cups, and we toasted the historic moment with the pressmen. Then we climbed back into the Chevy coupe for the long, cold drive back to Chicago.

The magazine went on sale the first week in November. Eldon and I prowled the newsstands and magazine racks of Chicago to see how it was being displayed and whether or not it was selling. I liked the way Playboy stood out from the competition, or so it seemed to me. Often when a newsstand operator wasn't looking, I'd move our little pile of magazines into a better position. I watched guys browsing, thumbing through to grab a free peek at Marilyn. I silently cursed those who put us back and cheered those who bought us. I actually saw a couple of women buy copies, too.

After a few days, the stacks of Playboy were definitely shrinking, not just in Chicago but all across the country. Our distributor, Jerry Rosenfield, confidently predicted that we would sell better than 60 percent. He was wrong: We sold 78 percent--an impressive number for any magazine, but especially for a new one launched without any publicity or promotion. We distributed 69,500 copies and sold 54,175 at 50 cents each.

Jerry thought Marilyn's picture had done it for us, and that the real test would be issues two and three. The second issue went on sale in early December, and by the Christmas holidays we knew that it was actually outselling the first. It ended up selling 56,601 copies.

I was optimistic enough to believe that those figures indicated PLAYBOY was here to stay. With the second issue, my fear of government reprisal had vanished, along with my fear of bankruptcy. I not only included my name in the magazine but also ran a two-column ad soliciting Christmas subscriptions. That took a certain amount of chutzpah. Other magazines with nudity, such as Modern Man, never offered subscriptions because of the uncharitable attitude of the Post Office toward any form of nudity in the mails. But going into the holidays, I was simply too bullish to be deterred.

Just before Christmas, on the day after our trip to Rochelle to put the third issue to bed, my battered Chevy coupe finally gave up the ghost. It died in the middle of the street and had to be towed away for scrap. The next day, the new editor--publisher of Playboy went out and bought his family a sporty Raymond Loewy--designed Studebaker.

"What do you say when a dream comes true?" I wrote in my scrapbook for January 1954. "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 have 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.

"It's all very, very unreal. The dream has come true too quickly to be fully appreciated. I work 12, 14, 16 hours a day--seven days a week--but I've never been happier in my life. Perhaps I'll wake up in a few months and it will all be gone. But in this January of 1954, life is just a little more wonderful than I ever really believed it could be."

Other Voices: Mildred (Hefner) Gunn

Hef and I spent New Year's Eve at a friend's house in the suburbs. I remember Eldon made his special punch and we played some strip games.

Everyone was very excited because of Playboy, and our friend Bob Haugland told Hef, "You're going to be a millionaire." And Hef replied, "That's great if it happens, but the main thing is for PLAYBOY to make it." The money part really didn't mean very much to Hef. Fame interested him, but having his own magazine was what really counted.

I was so proud of him. The accomplishment was all his. Not ours. His. He worked all night while he was working his day job full-time. He had terrific instincts and was very creative. He saw the possibilities in the Marilyn Monroe picture and went for it. And his letter to the wholesalers. I mean, he got the magazine off the ground on the basis of one letter. He had absolutely no money, no prospectus, nothing. Look what he did with Rochelle--how he got them to do his printing. He was persuasive and logical, not slick. When people became aware of his determination and his ability, they really reacted positively to his personality.

He did a brilliant job putting that first issue together. That's the only reason everything fell into place. One mistake could have resulted in a disaster. But the truth is, I never had any doubt that he would make it. The thought never occurred to me that he would fail. He had a great idea, great instincts, perfect timing and he worked harder than anyone else. There was never a moment when I suddenly thought, "Oh, God, what if...."

Christie was about a year old, just learning to walk, when the first issue came out. We had nothing except a couple of rooms of furniture and about $2000 in debts. But I remember how excited Hef was the first time he saw PLAYBOY on the newsstands. I was so happy for him. The birth of the magazine didn't really affect the marriage one way or the other. We were already on borrowed time as husband and wife, even though neither of us really wanted to face that reality. We certainly weren't thinking about it in the midst of our celebration. It was a great, great Christmas holiday--and the moment it was over, Hef went right back to work.