Meet Naughty Granny's Dad

Many PLAYBOY readers know Granny, the unabashedly sexual saggy-breasted cartoon character who relentlessly attempts to seduce men, but far fewer are familiar with the artist who invented her for PLAYBOY’s pages: Robert “Buck” Brown. It’s past time to correct that.

Like Granny herself, Brown was, in his own telling, an unlikely candidate for the aspirational world of PLAYBOY. Born in 1936 outside Morrison, Tennessee, Brown moved to Chicago as a toddler with his mother and brother, part of the Great Migration of African American families out of the South. His mother worked during the day and, lacking childcare options, sent Brown to accompany his older brothers to school. He was three or four years old when, amazed, he watched a teacher draw a truck on the blackboard.

“To me, he was making a truck,” Brown (pictured at left) recalled in a 2007 HistoryMakers interview with Larry Crowe. “I wanted to do that too.”

After finishing high school and supporting himself with odd jobs, Brown joined the Air Force at the age of 19. Serving for nearly four years, he drew satirical sketches of his unit in his free time; the positive reception helped him “learn the power of the pen.” When he received his discharge papers, he returned to Illinois and found work as a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority in the late 1950s.

It was along his route that he found the initial inspiration for his Granny character. “A bus is, you’ll pardon the pun, the perfect vehicle for a cartoonist,” Brown said in a 1981 Playboy collection devoted to his work. “I used to keep a sketchbook and cartoon the situations that would happen on the bus. That’s how I learned the art of storytelling.” Slice-of-life moments included several in which older women boarded his bus asking innuendo-laden questions such as “Do you go down?” or “Do you go all the way?”

Hoping to get a foothold in the cartooning world, in 1961 Brown sent his first batch of sketches to PLAYBOY, expecting rejection; he had already been turned down by The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. “I wanted to be a cartoonist, but I knew deep down inside I couldn’t, so I figured, if I was going to get my stuff rejected, why not get rejected by the best?”

Of the eight options Brown mailed, Hugh Hefner—himself an aspiring cartoonist, albeit in the years before PLAYBOY—accepted the eighth, a black-and-white drawing of a boy playing trumpet in the corner, his back to the room; his mother explains to his father, “No, he hasn’t been naughty, he’s just imitating Miles Davis.” The reference to the musician’s famous habit of facing away from the audience likely appealed to Hefner, a jazz devotee who would soon print the very first Playboy Interview— with Davis as the subject. The cartoon ran in a November 1961 issue of Show Business Illustrated, a short-lived title from Hefner’s HMH Publishing Co., and Brown’s relationship with the Rabbit was off and running: Across 45 years, Brown contributed nearly 600 cartoons to PLAYBOY. During his seven years as a bus driver, he was also earning an art degree. “Whenever I needed money, I would sell cartoons at PLAYBOY,” Brown told HistoryMakers. “I cartooned my way through college.” In 1965 he quit his CTA job to focus on art full-time.

By the time his naughty granny made her PLAYBOY debut, in 1966, women baring their breasts had long since been the magazine’s norm. And yet the appearance of the toothless old woman with the voracious sex drive is noteworthy. This was no young beauty photographed in soft light and airbrushed to perfection; Granny’s conventional unattractiveness, and sexual energy in spite of it, was the point.

“A young woman’s sexuality is difficult enough to handle,” wrote anthropologist Judith Posner in her 1975 paper “Dirty Old Women: Buck Brown’s Cartoons.” “Perhaps a sexy old woman is so horrendous that it is even difficult to joke about. But finally, somebody has, and [Brown’s] humor may well be viewed as an attempt to disparage and push away the fear.”

Upending norms and detoxifying off-limit topics turned out to be one of Brown’s specialties. Key to this was his deft touch. His jokes weren’t always obvious, observed comics critic and historian R.C. Harvey. “Brown’s cartoons were often like that: You had to think before you reaped your reward in laughter.”

The Granny cartoons are Brown’s most popular, but perhaps more incisive are his works that comment on politics and race. Michelle Urry, PLAYBOY’s longtime cartoon editor (and Brown’s commissioning editor), described his takes on the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s as “gentle but sophisticated.” Take, for example, his October 1967 cartoon that addresses the segregated housing then common across the country. In it, a group of black adults face a line of white ones on a suburban street; rather than protesting the new arrivals to the neighborhood, the white people smile and hold signs of welcome. Expressions of confusion appear on the black neighbors’ faces. The caption reads, “It must be a trap!”

In a 1984 interview with Brown that touched on that cartoon, Urry compliments Brown’s ability to address issues of social justice that others were afraid to go near. “You simply pulled the fangs from it and made everybody laugh at it,” she said. How did he manage to do black humor so well, she asked. In the same deadpan style that was a signature of his art, Brown responded, “Well, see, I was raised around black people.”

Brown was well aware of whom he was selling his work to: Most of the characters he created for PLAYBOY were white, and his pieces relating to civil-rights issues were a fraction of his overall output.

“It probably helped me because PLAYBOY couldn’t see my face,” Brown told Chicago journalist Ronnie Reese in an interview toward the end of his life. “It was a long time before anyone even knew I was black.”

The extent to which Brown’s race was obscured is illustrated by a June 1970 Dear Playboy letter complaining about Brown’s “blatantly racist” March 1970 cartoon, in which “Lil’ Willie’s” soul-food restaurant is “discovered” by white hipsters. “The black man in America is having a difficult enough time realizing his own prestige and identity, without some Whitey picturing him as a poverty-stricken, ignorant subhuman,” an outraged reader wrote. PLAYBOY responded in an editor’s note: The reader’s “heart may be in the right place, but not his facts: Buck Brown is black; his cartoon satirizes racism.”

Brown himself was more circumspect. “I kept saying there’s no way that a soul brother would see this and not know that a black person did it,” he told Urry, pointing to the pains he took to portray the humanity and respectability of the black character—the neighborhood is clean and safe; Willie’s restaurant is spotless. In fact, throughout his work, Brown was intentional about how he drew African Americans, if he depicted them at all. “I’ll use black people…if I can without them being the butt of it or, you know, if there’s a reason for it.”

Although it wasn’t always apparent to his audience, Brown was a black man in a deeply racist America—and this shaped not only his perspective as an artist but also his take on success. “Coming up at the particular time that I did, you had to be resilient,” he explained to Urry. “You had to be able to laugh no matter what, you know? I mean you felt like crying inside but…you always managed to make light of the situation.” He felt enclosed by barriers he couldn’t break through—“glass ceiling, glass wall, glass floor,” as he put it to Crowe. “You’re not going to make it as a black Jim Davis or a Charles Schulz.”

Brown did, however, thrive where Hefner pivoted: a successful career as a cartoonist, with his work appearing in publications including The New Yorker, Esquire, Ebony, Jet and the Chicago Sun-Times. As a freelance illustrator and cartoonist, Brown never officially retired, though in his later years his cartoons appeared less frequently in PLAYBOY. In the years before his July 2007 passing, Brown shifted his attention to painting. His cartoons and paintings have sold at auction and are held in private collections, including that of singer Johnny Mathis.

As for Granny, she became a PLAYBOY Centerfold in a 1980 humor piece. She continues to be beloved—and to tirelessly chase after sexual satisfaction.