The birth of the cool

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ttie, Aekua£ tteooJirflon. Jt afao iMjom

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First, on behalf of Big Daddy himself, let me bid you hello again, cats! Welcome back to the very place where, some half-hundred-plus years ago, the Cool [genus Originalis) began its sublime come-on, sly but confi­dent, so as to upgrade your life forever—even if you hadn't been born yet. True! From late 1953 onward, herein glowed America's chief oracle of stylistic smooth-

itude and unshackled sensibility—fraternal finesse dispenser numero uno. Not that the management around here ever dared take bows for spreading the essential seeds of the Cool, since that would've been Not So Cool. (Whereas, per them, basking somewhat in the triumphant marshaling of the sexual revolution across a hypocrisy-choked society—hey, no problem there!] Cool, you see, intrinsically defies self-congratulation, especially with regard to celebrating one's own coolness. Anyway, the larger point is, back in the middle of the last century, times were sim­pler (and duller], and nobody knew what to do or how to comport themselves enviably, although the Cool thing was to pretend you did, because the new world (full of jazzy new promise] was arriv­ing so fast, all anyone could really do was fake it to make it. And that would include one particularly ambitious fellow who in those early days wore pajamas mostly for sleeping, if you can imagine, but did his dreaming (also ambitious] around the clock anyway, since dreams and dream peddling of the swank and urbane vari­ety were to forever be his bag. Lest you doubt me, your fingers at present happen to be gripping precisely what that quixotic cat first let out of his bag, such as it swings lately, such as it has swung from come-on to get-go and beyond.

Now, if before his mission took flight—that is, if before one H.M. Hefner (Hef to you and me] made the scene—he was perceived as perhaps Not So Cool, he was not alone, in that we were all born basically square (even Miles D. and Francis

5. and Puffy C.) until we figured out a thing or two about the ways and means of Cool, which really wasn't much of a tangible con­cept or aspiration until the thick, principled dust of World War II was scattered to the wind and obtuse Atomic Age fatigue started

spooking a populace that just, oh please, wanted to think about something else, like, perchance, better living and living better (and/or, like, livin', apostrophe required, if you wish to follow the proper patois). Bombs and mushroom clouds, after all, were hot. Thus those who were prone to such sweaty panics yearned to lower their thermostats and saunter toward easy-breezmess, i.e., toward Cool, i.e., toward how one might begin to consider acquiring the pose and trappings of Cool amid the nicely timed fat flush of postwar prosperity. Of course Cool forbids ask­ing for help and never more so than when seeking Cool itself. You must appear, at the very least, to just sort of bump into it—maybe, possibly in the form of a brand-new upscale peri­odical that happened to prominently display well-bred females of the Next Door species casually undraped and intermingled with bright pages of brighter text suggesting slick methods of existential improvement (as in pads, threads, wheels, boites, liquids, solids, woofers, tweeters, gizmos, thingamabobs and, best of all, attitudes). Because, well, who would opt to look there, back then, for such unabashed, indisputable Rules of Cool, laid out monthly like serial installments of the Stone Tab­lets with staples? [This, by the way, is where a conspiratorial wink would be good, if typeface could wink.)

Cool, however, is cagey that way, the most unobvious of art forms when exhibited properly—which lately it has been, museum-style [thus with true artistic license), in an iconic,

wide-ranging retro collection of expres­sive disciplines (painting, architecture, furniture design, photography, pop cul­ture multimedia), titled Birth of the Cool (as borrowed from the landmark 1957 Miles Davis LP of the same name) and unveiled last fall at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Cali­fornia, from whence it has embarked on a selective travel circuit (dig it now in Oak­land!). While tilted toward the sly sen­sibility of "California cool"—which The New York Times, upon appraising the mixed assemblage, described as "laid-back yet cleanly articulated...strict yet

hedonistic and seri­ously playful"—there is also great evidence on display of a cer­tain Chicago-honed influence [no sur­prise!], a generous pouring of vintage 1950s Hefneria flush playboy spreads,

sleek video loops, etc.) stirred through­out the heady conflagration. Indeed, the savvy curator of it all inscribed Hef's personal copy of the elaborate accompa­nying exhibition catalog to merely "the midwife of Cool" [as in one who lov­ingly and instrumentally assists during a birthing process). And in said catalog, the instrumental one can be seen via classic photographs, coolly clenching pipe, brow furrowed lightly (.seriously playful, natch) while innately elevating

sybaritic aestheticism by way of just being a cat who wanted what most cats wanted before they ever knew they wanted it until he told them they did.

Wanting, of course, is the semisecret romantic crux of Playboy Cool. [Getting, of course, is just the gravy, and Having would equal Utopia on earth.] Per this Wanting, though, let us turn counterclockwise so as to picture the postcollegiate mid-20-something Hef Cno longer quite the buoyant Hep Hef he'd been dubbed in high school), who now suddenly found himself slightly soul deadened, trapped in colorless jobs, shackled in ill-fitting wedlock, seeking elusive moonbeams, wandering the Windy City late at night, staring up at glimmering apartment towers "and very much wanting to be part of the Good Life I thought the people in those buildings must be leading." This image, I will tell you, is the Essential Hef, the hungry

tableau set against lonely, grim pavement [think Hef noir!) that led to all things beyond groovy. In the aforementioned catalog of Cool, essayist Thomas Hine puts forth many erudite derivations of that idealized state of Being, not least that "it was a response to alienation, but it became a mark of belonging." Well, hello, Hef—and come on in! "I wanted to be where it was happening—whatever 'it' was," Hef once famously recalled of that fabled raw-pining period, adding, "When I finally found out, of course, it wasn't what I thought it would be; it was infinitely bet­ter, unbelievably more exciting than I'd ever dreamed." Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but that would be the jour­ney's intended trajectory, to put it tastefully.

"We are Taste City," he crowed to Time eight years into empire building, hav­ing built that empire on decidedly citified taste. (Hine again, from the Cool catalog: "playboy was, from its beginning, a manual on showing taste and finding pleasure in a world of mass affluence."] But he never fully understood from whence his taste came, in that his prim Methodist middle-class-neighborhood upbringing was more bringdown, aesthetics-wise—an incubator of squareness squared. (Only his elective design classes at the University of Illinois, which he aced handily, seemed to point him toward the light.) He would say, "When I came out of college my tastes were very contemporary, and that held in terms of my own apartment. It was a Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright kind of architecture and the Hans Knoll-Herman Miller style of furnishings that most appealed to me. And you will find those tastes reflected in most of the magazine's early design pieces. They were simple, clean and contemporary." (As was, most pleasurably—and I say this after thoroughly navigating the impecca­ble, newly released digital archive Playboy Cover to Cover: The 50s— the sparse but

bold modernist layouts energizing every page of the magazine from its 1953 inception to that seminal decade's end and onward, as rendered by the great art director Arthur Paul, Hef's chief co-avatar of visual Cool.]

Now, about that apartment, which was his first (a marital nest, no less] and, not coinciden-tally, the cradle from which the debut issue of this magazine sprang: The avant-garde taste he imbued in those five humble rooms was all he had to stake toward his formidable dreams, which is to say the full $600 he personally sank into the birth of playboy (abetted by a few more grand invested by chums] was borrowed against the forward-minded furniture he meticulously chose to decorate that singular pad. Besides the Hans Knoll tables and curvy Eames chairs, a joyous bohemian ethos pervaded (grass walls, bamboo shades, stippled floors, articulated lamps, Picasso reproductions, Saul Steinberg-esque cartoon wallpaper]. Significantly, too, there was the broad

crimson Eero Saarinen womb chair (his prized postcollege gift to himself!} in which he would strike an enduring snapshot pose while flaunting Volume One, Number One of the publication his deft interior stylings had helped make fiscally possible. Indeed, flushed with triumph, and taste, he quickly

took an office space to create the second issue, whereupon, per the recollection of fond business associate Eldon Sellers, "Next thing I knew, Hef was putting in Herman Miller furniture, and I was kind of worried that he was spending too much too soon to make a show, to make an impres­sion." On the other hand, how could he not? He'd already made sure the premiere issue boasted a sexy spread—20 pages past the one infamously devoted to an unclad Marilyn Monroe—heralding the progressive Herman Miller office line, with copy declaring that any business hip enough to install such would be perceived "as up-to-date as tomor­row, know where they're going and will use the most modern methods to get there." And this, you should know, was four years before Norman Mailer, in an eggheadish treatise on hipsterism for Dissent magazine, wrote, "To be cool is to be equipped, and if you are equipped it is more difficult for the next

cat who comes along to put you down." If I may say so: Well, yeah, Dad.

We are, after all, talking the Original Equip-o-torium-o-rama here—wherein mind-meld of man [editor-publisher-dreamer) and magazine brimmed with the thrill of acquisitiveness uninterruptus, pertaining as much to psychic suavity as to correctly outfitting the realm of swift move making. "The 1950s was the last decade when to be cool meant to be sophisticated," observed Time.com thinker Richard Corliss back when playboy hit its half-century mark. "Hefner promoted the religion of urbanity, or, as Newsweek tagged it, Urbunnity. And apparently many of his readers enjoyed imagining themselves as the Hefner male." Hefner males, in case you wondered, were not especially prone to the fresh-air imagin­ings of spelunking or rappelling or splashyakking as forked up by other testos­terone journals, thank you. Brawn need never apply, because smooth was all, kind of like the lacquered seat of a perfect Eames lounger. "We don't mind telling you in advance—we plan on spending most of our time inside," wrote Hef in the silken preface to issue one, promulgating a shared ownership of his civilized new frontier of languor, a.k.a. the Great Indoors. He went on, legendarily, "We like our apartment." [How about, per above, like it like crazy?) "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." As go purring Cool Cat manifestos, none shall ever measure up to that, I dare submit. (continued on page 112]

COOL

(continued from page 69) Never a snob, however, he wanted only for his striving Good Life acolytes to loosen up, chill down and groove out, but with a style all their own, as long as a dash of panache was attached (and in the end they also somehow assuredly got the girl). Thus would later come, in exemplary fashion, the instructive brass plate affixed to his Chicago Playboy Mansion ballroom door—that notorious portal to highballing nonpareil—which exhorted, in Latin, s/ xox osciUAS xou rixrixx.mt: (that is, "If you don't swing, don't ring"—like I needed to tell you). The message, for always, would be one of bona fide projected self-reflection. As early editorial deputy Ray Russell once put it, "Remember that we were young men very much like our readers—educated but not overeducated, hip, fond of money and material things like snazzy cars, plush apart­ments and dressing well. We liked that. We did not manufacture a phony image. It was sincere. We spoke the same language." The pluperfect playboy, according to 1956 promotional copy, was a facile specimen who "must see life not as a vale of tears...a man who—without acquiring the stigma of voluptuary or dilettante—can live life to the hilt." Basically, then, an upbeat, unaf­fected customer whose jazzy shrug was the envy of all other shoulders. The flip side of that platter was, as Hef later conjured it, a drone's blind compromise: "settling for job security, conformity, togetherness, anonym­ity and slow death."

Dig for a moment, if you will, a very selec­tive chiaroscuro of the Playboy Cool: In the beginning, please note, there is only existen­tial limelessness. This, at least, seems ephem-erally conveyed via the premiere issue, which carries no date (as in month or year) and thus instills no unwanted hurry. (In truth, a cautious Big Daddy was uncertain there'd be a second issue, but still—how Zen!) Fit­tingly, an ice bucket (stainless steel, coated in unborn calfskin, $58) is the very first prod­uct recommended to readers. Volume One, Number One. First food feature: Pleasures of the Oyster (wink, nudge). From the fifth issue, an enthusiast in Ames, Iowa writes to the edi­tors, "Well, Dad, if you keep up the fine job, you'll have us all flippin". It really is the most to say the least. Keep cool." Early Party Joke: "A cool friend informs us that the best way to cut off a cat's tail is to repossess his Jag­uar." Per those quiet discussions of Picasso: Picasso provides the illustration for a January 1957 Ray Bradbury short story about a guy obsessed with Picasso. Within a decade the large Picasso masterwork Femme nue endonnie ("Girl sleeping nude") adorns the Chicago Mansion fireplace. (Chicago Daily News: "It hangs just about 10 feet from the newest Hefner toy—a huge Tworkov painting that rises at the touch of a button to reveal two color TV sets.") First two personality-profile subjects, in issues seven and nine: renegade individualists Orson Welles and Frank Lloyd Wright. Per mixing up cocktails: the August 1954 feature By Juniper! A Tall Cm Drink Will

Make Her Cool and Cooperative. Artist LeRov Neiman (a Hef discover)' and forever urbane contributor who also lathered the Party Jokes page Femlin nymphet) creates an iconic image of a lean, lank, sharp-suited natty cat for the painless primer The Well-Dressed Playboy (January 1955), with tips for the reader that will prove "as dependable as his favorite bartender." (Same Neiman nattv cat becomes ubiquitous symbol in the magazine and in a promotion that states with casual aloofness, "I'm not worried about tomorrow. I'm living now.") Memorable, less-than-vague guidance from Formal Forecast: The Return to Black (January 1958): "Now we said black. Not midnight blue, not maroon, not burnt ochre. Just black. Black looks and feels right." (Black would later also look and feel right as the sleek shade with which Hef cooled his jet—i.e., the famous cavernous ebony-painted private DC-9 aircraft christened The Big Bunny, i.e., "my flying apartment," luxuri­antly festooned with seat-belted bed. shower, dance floor, wide-screen movie projection, et al.) In-house ads debut in 1956. for ceramic black-and-white Rabbit Head cufflinks ("No jewelry collection is complete without a pair," send S4), which will telegraph an unspoken bond among like-minded prowling sybarites. Ian Fleming's James Bond, agent supreme of Deadly Cool, who first made the scene the very year playboy did, becomes a regularly serialized character in the magazine starting in March 1960, begetting a near-symbiotic brand identification. "Bond's material world," writes essayist Hine, "is a height­ened version of that recommended to the playboy reader." Thus it would follow that in future 007 films, for all posterity. Bond is seen suavely paging through the magazine and brandishing membership in the Lon­don Playboy Club and Casino—where it so happened Frank Sinatra, a.k.a. the eminent Leader of the Cool (and of the emblematic Rat Pack), had also shot part of his own 1967 spy yarn. The Naked Runner, and where, upon surveying the black-tied swells at gaming tables, bestowed the ever discerning ring-a-ding benediction "Nice joint you got here!"

And so it would go (practically ad infini-tum), especially with the nice joints and the ring-a-ding—a twain that dependably met and danced to a pure-jazz soundtrack unending. Proper cribs, in pi.wboy ethos, bopped merely from wall to wall, tempo TBD. "A far-out musician friend." went one After Hours item in April 1958, "informed us that he had just moved into new digs. 'You are invited, man,' said the cat, 'to attend my housecooling party tomorrow night.'" Jazz, to be sure, would never have a belter friend or a bigger house (to blow the lid off of) than H-vvboy, which on arrival made itself the premier mecca for all professional hipsters (aspi­rants and audiophiles also real welcome). Indeed, the first genuine celebrity letter to the editor, published in May 1955, came from no less an approving Cool Jazz mas­ter than Dave "Take Five" Brubeck, who wrote a think piece of his own that ran three issues later. The annual epic Jazz Poll to elect the fantasy Playboy All-Star Jazz Band (which, for an annual stretch,

resulted in a four-sided Playboy Jazz All-Slar.s Album sampler) got up and swinging in October 1956 ("dig this ballot and vote"); for years onward all the famous nominees gratefully ate up the attention—Sammy Davis Jr. (whose pet Saint Bernard was named Playboy) started buying campaign ads in the magazine. Further, in 1959, there came quite likely the most splendif­erous gas ever staged in jivedom history, nearly insane in its celestial proportion and spread across one August weekend wherein 70,000 revelers at the Chicago Stadium beheld the first Playboy Jazz Fes­tival. The performing roster, indulgent past the brink of musical decadence: Satchmo and Ella, Duke and Basie, Dizzy and Cannonball, Bud and Pee Wee and Teagarden and Kenton and Brubeck and Rollins and Hawkins and Nina and Dakota—and, well, count up every great jazzbo you know of, then double the num­ber and keep going—and, but of course, there was the stone-sour crown prince of Cool, as in Miles Davis, who hated fests but did not miss this one (and who three years thence became the inaugural subject of what would be the magazine's weightiest institution—think of it, perchance, as the Birth of the Cool Playboy Interview—thereby conferring his frosted majesty on all such mega-inquisitions to come). Anyway, in

fest aftermath. Variety duly reported. "Yes, cats, there is a Santa Claus, and his name is Hugh Hefner."

And as for him, well, that particular anmis coolibilis of 1959 would rank stratospheri-cally on his swelling tab of Very Good Years, during which other keen benchmarks also compounded. Seismically. he purchased a Chicago property that redefined the word mansion, knocking the stuffy out of it by even­tually transforming his new 70-room austere monolith into a Playhouse Valhalla trickily rigged for state-of-the-art hedonism—i.e., rotating round bed, sliding walls, secret pas­sageways, bowling alley, fire-pole plunge to the underwater bar (which was under the pool, which was under the ballroom floor) with peekaboo trapdoors, automated ste­reophonic everything everywhere, et cetera, plus Bunny dorms. This original urban pleasure dome was in part inspired by the similarly ingenious—if strikingly modern­ist—seven-page dream design for Playboy's Weekend Hideaway, a cantilevered waterfront retreat unveiled in the April issue (now admirably cited, vis-a-vis the Birth of the Cool catalog, as comparable to the revered Art li Architecture portfolio of Case Study Houses from the period). Three years prior, the sumptuous two-part prequel, Playboy's Pent­house Apartment—"a high, handsome haven preplanned and furnished for the bachelor

in town"—had not only laid a giddv blue­print for seriously upward mobility (sky-and tech- and design-wise) but stood as the most wildly popular feature the magazine had yet published (all Playmates included). Naturally, then, on October 24. 1959. when there debuted the first Hefner-hosted syn­dicated television series, a transcendentallv hip weekly talk-variety faux cocktail party, it could only be called Platboy's Penthouse. (Hev, you go with what works.)

From the show's indelible opening sequence—white Mercedes 300SL (owned and piloted by Hef) night cruising Lake Shore Drive, camera-eyed elevator ride to imaginary 30th-floor living-room baccha­nal in progress—melodically swathed in Cy Coleman's sexy, tinkling, made-lo-order "Playboy's Theme" and then rollicking forth across 90 minutes of glib airtime. the cool medium had without doubt seen nothing quite this Cool. Here racially mixed guest performers tippled and intermingled (all but verboten on TV back then) and casu­ally burst into spontaneous song or dance or sit-down comedy, this amid the swanky-smoky-boozy (actual hard stuff!) swirl of formally draped Playmates and playboys at play. As Hef explains to Lenny Bruce on that opening installment (Ella Fitzger­ald and Nat "King" Cole would also "drop by"), he aimed to "make the thing sort of a sophisticated weekly get-together of the people that we dig and the people who dig us...and just have ourselves a kind of late-night ball." Thai same night he coaxed maestro Coleman to noodle out his most recently completed tune. "The Best Is Yet to Come," which Sinatra would later make such a hit that its title would become the epitaph carved on his tombstone. (Ring-a-ding-dong, alas.) Which kind of demon­strates yet another sublime way the eternal history of Cool can be traced, if just enough, back to one editor-soothsayer-cat who bet his taste in furniture on the craziest dream.

Not that the Cool, nor our blissful reach toward it, has ever departed the mortal swankosphere—it just evolves and trans­mogrifies and retranslates and also, for kicks, doesn't mind occasionally glancing at the rearview mirror. To that end, a half-cen­tury beyond, 1 happened to be watching our preeminent pajama-clad dreamer on his lat­est TV show (what they call reality program­ming), on which he shares the bill with three gorgeous blondes who adore him madly. Anyway, in this episode he wanders down the street to a house he keeps for visiting out-of-town Playmates, where a baby shower is under way, and suddenly he seems caught in reverie upon noticing the broad red womb-shaped perch whereon the young mother-to-be nestles. And he softly says, "I always get very sentimental when 1 see somebody sitting in that chair." And the women ask why. and he replies, "Because it's a duplicate of the chair I was sitting in, holding the very first issue of the magazine, in that photo...."

And the Cool, you can't help but realize, has never gotten too far from him espe­cially. Dig?

The magazine brimmed with the thrill of acquis­itiveness uninterruptus.