Why We Love the 60s

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eally? Do you actu­ally need more rea­sons or reminders on this one? Come to think of it, you prob­ably do. Of that now mys­tical and hallowed decade that masterfully taught the world to swing (or be swung at), please take this small warning: Wild-eyed zealots abound. I say (text continued on page 189)

THE '60s

(continued from page 124) avoid them. They are gasbags of the worst sort: always a little too angry or political or slick or spacey or blissed-out. Plus, such tedious ideologue rolling tends only to suck all the fun (and giddy breeze) out of giving proper due to splendiferous 1960s delirium: the sybaritic swankiness (thank you, Mr. Hef­ner), the iconic loopiness, the moony hope­fulness and also Ann-Margret.

According to fictional Sterling Cooper adman Don Draper (exactly the kind of man who read—if not silkily oozed—PIjWBOV back then), that decade's brilliant dawn rose with the shiny promise of happiness instantaneously fulfilled: "And you know what happiness is?" he waxed in the first televised episode ofMad Men, leading carrier of the current strain of 1960s retro love-in-fluenza. "Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay." Okay? (Other indelible visionaries of the era—John Lennon, Char­lie Brown and Johnny Carson—theorized, respectively, that happiness was a warm gun, a warm puppy and a dry martini.) Indeed, after the Gold War's attitudinal lockjaw, there would come (at a clip of zero to 60, 61, 62, 63 and counting) a most happy slackening and new permissiveness to live belter than okay, better dian ever, larger than dreams previously por­tended. ("I'm living like there's no tomorrow," says Draper in that same debut hour, "because there isn't one.") In their bouncily invaluable compendium Sixties People, pop authors Jane and Michael Stern write of whence they had lived: "The 1960s were a moonstruck time when people were smitten with new identities, then insouciant]) discarded them in search of the next one, always looking for the true light and the real meaning of life." Seeking was serially interchanged, both acquisitively and inquisitively, with Getting (cars, clothes, hi-fis, hairdos, promotions, products, lit, laid, lost, found, fab, fooled, stoned, serene, spiri­tual, el al.), "over and over and over again, ah-mmm"—that last refrain courtesy of the Dave Clark Five, those all-too-unsung Brit­ish Invaders whose stateside hit conquests were second only to a certain Liverpudlian quartet of the day. But let's not get ahead of ourselves—even if such forward lunging was, in fact, endemic to the 1960s thrill-ride way of life. Suffice it to say: The status quo had been uniformly infected by a fine antsiness, and amid all this itch scratching, quoth the Sterns, "original lilestyles blossomed because the 1960s were obsessed by the idea that the time had come to start fresh."

And so it did—cuckoo fresh, baby!—with a symbolic finger-snapping mandate to let free­dom ring-a-ding-ding: "The world is very different now," declared John F. Kennedy, our first bona fide playboy president—at the age of A'i the youngest ever, naturally—upon taking the oath. He arrived agleam, proudly hadess (thereby killing the men's hat indus­try) and toting his own Rat Pack pedigree complete with a Sinatra-conferred nick­name (Chicky Baby). Barely a year before, near the outset of 1960, the national tempo had been thusly rigged. Vegas-style, when

the winsome then-senator from Massachu­setts joined Frank's landmark Summit at the Sands bacchanal, as abetted by Dino, Sammy, the full cast of the real Ocean's II (they filmed by day, played by night), plus dollies, mob molls and JFK's own brother Teddy along for the ride. Kennedy's brother-in-law Peter Lawford greased the alliance between party­ing leaders: "I was Frank's pimp, and Frank was Jack's pimp," finked Brother-in-Lawford (another Sinatra handle) many years on. "It sounds terrible now, but it was really a lot of fun." Fun as an inalienable right, you see, had begun taking hold with a tenacity akin to that of aerosol hair spray—the newfan­gled perm in a can from which all bouffed beehives swarmed. (For a 1960s woman to let her hair down required a whole different kind of nuclear disarmament.) As it was, over­night. Rat Pack became Jack Pack, and Frank ran the Inaugural Gala, and they would all pass around Marilyn Monroe, more or less, even as the chicky-baby-in-chief had sworn (minutes after his swearing-in) "that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." Thus sparked a momentous trend of cultural torches being passed like hot potatoes from "now" to "next"—which would later make the lighting of Jim Morri­son's fire feel almost superfluous. (Go figure all that metaphoric flame blazing along with pyres of social unrest...in the eternal decade of cocktail cool.)

Sex, it should be noted (ahem, and hello?), had rapidly been losing its bad name (did I thank Mr. Hefner yet?) as women began losing their virginity even more extremely rapidly, and oh so freely, than ever before. ("This isn't China," lectures Joan Holloway, Mad Men's office bombshell, caught doling out voluptuary advice to a steno-pool naif. "There's no money in virginity") like nick-of-time manna, the pill fell to earth (green-lit by the FDA on May 11, 1960) and changed life as we never knew it, gratefully. The playing field for playing the field leveled out all at once, and "good girls" were suddenly inclined to get very, very good, indeed. To wit: "You can bet she's as inter­ested as he; if sex weren't 50-50 where would everybody be?" purred the theme lyrics to Sex and the Sitigle Girl, the 1964 Natalie Wood film based loosely—"loose" being die larger point anyway—on Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 best-selling manhunt handbook for timid "mouse-burgers" eager to roar, if not score. "The single woman is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times," proclaimed Mrs. Brown, slap­ping off old-maid stigmata while pushing a chaste-makes-waste platform. This eager-bea­ver mystique would be celebrated by Madison Avenue in the very year of the pill's debut with Miss Clairol's front-loaded "Does she... or doesn't she?" hair-dye campaign. ("Only her hairdresser knows for sure," winked the tagline. probably correct on either count.) To further evince the Game Girl incursion, guy consumers were legendarily suckled under by TV spots for Muriel Cigars ("Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime,' wooed the unfiltered Edie Adams) and for Noxzema shave cream (wherein Swedish hotcake Gunilla Knutson implored, "Take it off.. .take it all off!" as set to the burlesque vamp of David Rose's "The Stripper"). These sass attacks, among other catchy pop tartlets (the 1967 hit instru­mental "Music to Watch Girls By," anyone?),

were herded not long ago onto the CD com­pilation Sex and the '60s by Olympian geek-god Hal Lifson, author of Hal Ufson's 1966! The Coolest iear in Pbp Culture History, a profuse argu­ment for kitsch triumphant. "Okay, I admit I was under 10 for the entire span of the 1960s," avers Lifson, "but that put me at the perfect stage of my Freudian development cycle to appreciate all the fantasy women who were all over TV [during that] one time in our recent history where women were gladly and willingly marketed as playthings for the Big Boys."

Umm, yes, well...around here, of course, they were called Playmates—all things being equal, from get-go onward, in the company business of play—and they were (still are) willfully glad about it. But do understand, my children, that you now hold in your hands merely the preeminent Utopian ora­cle/behavioral biblc/lifestyle-supreme wish book of the 1960s (minus the old Centerfold staples). So doth decree Hugh M. Hefner— revolutionary sexual liberator numero uno (no runners-up need apply) and indomitable man for all decades but, good God, especially thai one. There wasn't a freedom-loving male alive (icon or otherwise) who didn't want to be Hef—or at least be near Hef, if just for a single long groovy night. I'm talking from Kennedys (brothers and father) to Kings— i.e., the sainted Reverend Dr. MLK Jr. (who made a historic house call) as well as His Royal Highness Elvis R (who took skyward on Hef's black-is-beautiful Big Bunny jet)—and essen­tially everyone else in-betwixt possessed of a high- or low-profile pulse. With Playboy—the magazine, the ethos (soon to become the Philosophy)—Hefner had already been on the case for seven patient years before the 1960s arrived to crash his party and then never leave it. Having reinvented himself as serious-action hero Mr. Playboy, he also reinvented the urbane party ideal to specifi­cation—his own, thus ours too—by creating the most enviable portals through which rebel libidos could pass. Which they did in droves, first on a cold February leap night, 1960, with the Bunny-hopping debut of the origi­nal flagship Chicago Playboy Club—his jet-set Valhalla "aquiver with girls dressed as rabbits" whose wee bodices boosted "majestic mezza­nines," or so blushed Time. (The miniskirts of Carnaby Street would have to play catch-up skimp in the Zeitgeist a few years later.) Next, that same year, came the sublime Hefnerian homesteading act which brought to bear (or bare?) his very perfect Playboy Mansion (Chi­cago Version 6.0), a sprawling near-Gothic phantasmagoria of polished luxe, fleshy indulgence and cool toys that only he could own. "I have come to be seen as emblematic of the 1960s," he confessed (not blushing at all) within those coveted walls, mid-decade, to Tom Wolfe, who pronounced Hef's round rotating bed "the center of the world" and crowned the editor who rode it "King of the Status Dropouts." (With all due respect to Dr. Timothy Leary, King Hef had—in his inimi­table way—turned on, tuned in and dropped out long before the great mind-bent prophet's clarion call to hippiedom.)

"What a way to go-go" was how Batman aptly put it at the windup of his inaugural caped camp crusade in January 1966—launch­ing the twice-weekly ABC series that remains the decade's defining TV thunder punch (an

average of 30 million viewers regularly turned on and tuned in). "Batman will be considered pop culture in the time conundrum of our society," predicted deadpan deity Adam West, who wore the tights mightily. "Taking it in art terms, I guess you could say that I am paint­ing a new fresco." In bold strokes of zonk! po\V! BAM! color gush, the show splashed Pop Art sensibility onto the tickled masses—even Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, those co-avatars of the movement, offered benediction at the ritzy bat premiere in real-life Gotham. Perhaps more significantly, it unleashed sheer plu-purr-fection in the slink-suit of Julie Newmar's "nefarious temptress" Catwoman. "She was the sexiest woman on TV," testi­fied a flustered West, whose off-camera Bat shields reportedly melted under La Newmar's pussified allure. (Holy claw marks!) Danger­ous curves writhed through living rooms nightly, for this was the golden age of the original small-screen dream girl—a postmod­ern breed of siren who packed lethal pluck and other warm munitions. Brit spy-eyeful nonpareil Diana Rigg of The Avengers, for instance, flouted evil and flaunted leather as the well-named Emma Peel (derived from the shorthand term m-appeal, wherein the m quite correctly stood for man). Meanwhile Get Smart's sultry undercover CONTROL operative Bar­bara Feldon, a.k.a. Agent 99, spoke whisper-

ingly and carried big shuck—much like Tina Louise as coconut-cream castaway Ginger Grant, whose waves lapped perilously on and around Cilligan's Island. (Flotation-device-of-the-gods Jayne Mansfield, by the way, refused the part not long after her notoriously buoy­ant June 1963 PIjWBOY cover pictorial got a certain pajama-wearing publisher hauled in on empty obscenity charges—although, again, what a way to go-go.)

"We were all on this ship in the 1960s, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World," John Lennon once reflected, as long as we're thinking nautical and new. "The Beat­les were in the crow's nest of that ship." And so they came ("The Beatles are coming!" blared town criers near and far)—mop-top revolution­ists numbering four, saviors squeezed eternal into one vital gasp (johnpaulgeorgeandringo)— and so they changed the world. "So this is America," said Ringo, assessing colonial frenzy upon landing, February 1964. "They all seem out of their minds." The clamoring din stayed valid and constant—"It's like working in a bell factory," shrugged Paul. "You don't hear the bells anymore." Leonard Bernstein, long­haired eminence of the classical-gas variety, would go all rhapsodic on the epiphany that was them in a Rolling Stone commemoration: "The frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation, the

utterly fresh lyrics, the Schubert-like Dow of musical invention and the Fuck-You coolness of these Four Horsemen of Our .Apocalypse." They were just that fancy and knew it—as evi­denced three years later (a lifetime per 1960s calibration) on their momentous Sgt. Rrpptr's album cover, installing themselves in a psyche­delic Rushmore overstuffed with immortals (Freud, Marx, Einstein, Jung. Laurel. Hardy, Marilyn, et al). But before profundity ever grabbed them, hordes of hysterical females had already longed just to hold their glands.

Such was the mod, mod world gone mad for all things Swinglish—wherein the Liver­pool lads had gobbled into the velvet wake of Her Majesty's chief export thuiulerball. Sir Ian Fleming's transcendent double agent James Bond. Being merely the apogee of sleek manhood—the very reason Fleming entrusted 007s sole serialization rights to this magazine from I960 onward—Bond was as thrown off as most males by the all-too-sudden infesta­tion of the four fabs. The year they threatened global supremacy, he took quick aim in (mM-fmger while lecturing a Bond girl who was lack­ing in her swank skills: "My dear girl, there are certain things that just aren't done, such as drink Dom Perignon '53 above the tempera­ture of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs." (She paid for her sins moments thereafter, indelibly basted to death naked in gold paint.) The Boys returned the volley just as quickly by turning Help! into a blatant Bond film spoof and, to grind home their moxie, Ringo took a real live Bond girl a decade and a half later as his wife.

Via brash example our pop gods gave us a loaded license to fulfill—dreams, fantasies, ide­als (i.e., "There's nothing you can do that can't be done," quoth Saints John and Paul)—or to die trying. Alas, there was way too much of the latter, senselessly flattening the fizz of just about every fresh glassful of sudden magic. "For me the lame part of the 1960s was the political part, the social part," said Grateful Dead life force Jerry Garcia, who beheld much harshing of the acid-amped mellow within his Hashbury hemp clouds. "The real part," he said, "was the spiritual pan." Hippie culture did what it could to stanch the bummer buzz-kills, pointing us toward natural wonders right under our own bare feet (the qiiepasa of Flower Power). Those not making war were making their own kind of music but also mak­ing love, free and easy and unhung-up, meant to steer the stars while peace guided the plan­ets. With that general goal, all Happenings happened accordingly—as in Love-Ins, Be-Ins, group gropes and, in mid-August 1969, the mud ruttings of Woodstock. By the time we got there (which wasn't there but in a town 43 miles away—hey, maps were establishment propaganda, man), small steps and giant leaps had already been taken a few weeks earlier on the seriously far-out moon surface—truly the nippiest trip ever. It was a spirit unstoppable until it somehow had to. "The thing the 1960s did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had," said Lennon the Wise in crystal-blue aftermath. "It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the pos­sibility." And also of Ann-Margret. Which was maybe—all things and swings considered—a majestic enough way to have gone-gone.

1. FIRST PLAYBOY CLUB

2. PLAYBOY BUNNIES WITH HEF

3. JAYNE MANSFIELD

4. HEIDI BECKER

5. THE BEATLES

6. DEDE LIND

7. JUNE WILKINSON

8. DIANA RIGG

9. THE RAT PACK

10., 11. URSULA ANDRES

12. CONNIE KRESKI

13. GOLDFINGER

14. LITTLE ANNIE FANNY

15. PLAYBOY MANSION

16. KIM NOVAK _

17. ROLLING STONE

18. ARLENE DAHL

19. DR. STRANGELOVE

20. ELKE SOMMER

21. CAMELOT

22. MARILYN MONROE

23. CONNIE MASON

24. VICTORIA VALENTINO

25. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

26. WOODSTOCK

27. FIRST MEN ON THE MOON

28. PARAMILITARY RIGH

29. JULIE NEWMAR

I

I

The CIA was the Trojan horse that brought LSD into America in the 1950s. Spies saw it as a potential Cold War weapon. But by the mid-1960s LSD had become a cultural force, a tool to open the doors of perception. Celebrities (Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson) used it in psychotherapy. Others (Tim Leary) used it to form a counterculture. For most who could tolerate its powerful effects, it was just a hell of a lot of fun. j

30. CLAUDIA JENNINGS

31. CASSIUSCLAY

32. BONNIE AND CLYDE

33. SYLVA KOSCINA

34. PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS

35. CAROL LYNLEY

36. BRIGITTE BARDOT

37. ALLISON PARKS

38. BARBARA PARKINS

39. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

40. MIDNIGHT COWBOY

41. RUDI GERNREICH'S TOPLESS BATHING SUIT

42. Gl IN VIETNAM

43. JO COLLINS

44. VIETNAM

45. MAMIE VAN DOREN

46. ANDY WARHOL

47. STELLA STEVENS

48. THE NUDE LOOK

49. BODY PAINTING

50. CYNTHIA MYERS

51. BATMAN

52. THE PILL

53. CATHERINE DENEUVE

54. RAQUEL WELCH AND JIM BROWN

55. PLAYBOY INTERVIEW

56. SOPHIA LOREN

57. SHARON TATE

58. JOAN COLLINS

59. GWEN WONG

60. CHRISTA SPECK

61. JANE FONDA

62. LENNY BRUCE

63. HAIR

64. JUNE COCHRAN

In a decade of astonishing music, the innovations of one saxophon­ist stand tall. John Coltrane tran­scended categories—he changed the nature of improvisation. Any self-respecting head had his own copy of A Love Supreme. During the first half of the decade, Trane took music to a new level. We're still catching up with him today.