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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In the '90s, Hef borders on kitsch; in the '50s, he was deeply radical. Looking back from an age of Jerry Springer and Hairy Butts magazine, it's hard to imagine a historical moment when two exposed breasts could ignite a revolution. America has quietly rewritten an entire era of dangerously repressive Puritanism into the occasional parody of Donna Reed suburbia and a few movies about McCarthyism.
In retrospect, the '50s seem to have been begging for an outlet like Playboy -- either to focus its repressive prescripts, or to have a little fun. And Hefner answered the call: He worked all hours, dutifully attending photo shoots with beautiful naked women and gradually mining the unexplored realm of swinging life.
If there's anything unfortunate about Playboy's naked ladies -- besides (depending on your point of view) their objectification or their idealization -- it's the way they obscure the authentically revolutionary impact of the publication: Playboy brought men indoors. It made it OK for boys to stay inside and play. Where other men's magazines -- Argosy, Field & Stream, True -- affirmed their readers' places in duck blinds and trout streams, Hef's took men inside to mix drinks, sit by the fire and play backgammon or neck with a girlfriend. In what would later become an ironic collusion with feminists such as Betty Friedan, Playboy critiqued the staid institutions of marriage, domesticity and suburban family life.
Suddenly bachelorhood was a choice, one decorated with intelligent drinks, hi-fis and an urbane apartment that put white picket fences to shame. Sophistication had become a viable option for men: The Playboy universe encouraged appreciation of "the finer things" -- literature, a good pipe, a cashmere pullover, a beautiful lady. America was seeing the advent of the urban single male who, lest his subversive departure from domestic norms suggest homosexuality, was now enjoying new photos of nude women every month.
The popular new male pastime came with an equally startling new wardrobe. If, as his own legend has it, Hefner liberated the human body, he did so in part by fitting it with nicer duds. Men once confined to drab grays and browns could now luxuriate in bold new styles. Appreciation for fashion, Hefner decreed, need not reside strictly in the female. The men's style magazines that now clutter newsstands have Playboy to thank for making elegant threads suitably masculine. Sensual fabrics and the body-accentuating designs that are now commonplace in even the most middlebrow of men's stores were virtually unheard of when Playboy first hit newsstands.
Not surprisingly, Playboy attracted more and more attention and controversy -- and Hefner happily stepped into the lightning-rod position. For the camp that considered him a pervert, it was impossible not to speculate about the roots of his perversion. Much was said -- and continues to be said -- about his strict upbringing. Hefner himself, well-versed in the art of biography-
Indeed, Hefner seems to have belonged to that segment of the population raised down the street at the movie theater. But this does not account for Playboy magazine. Perhaps more revealing is a story that got less airtime: Despite the family's rigid values, Grace Hefner once gave her young son an educational and rather forthright book about sex. "Gave" is misleading: she left it within reach and never said a word about it. In the 1930s, even this level of openness about sex in a middle-class home was rare. It's hard not to find something telling in the gesture. At once progressive and strangely conservative, it suggests the relationship Hefner would later develop with sex itself: He became a radical reformer who never quite lost his old-fashioned romantic values.
The romantic values were sometimes hard-won. At 16, Hefner suffered a crushing, if somewhat propitious, indignity. Already a misfit in his staid Chicago high school, the artistic, ambitious and bright student now found himself rejected by the girl he adored. He considered his ennui one last time and reinvented himself head to toe: Hef, he would be called from that day on, and as Hef, he would never again have to know failure.
The reborn Hefner spent his last two years of high school in a whirl of charisma, charm and popularity. During the day, he devoted himself to friends and at night, to his passion for cartooning. If it happened to Hef, it happened to "Hef," the cartoon character whose every adventure he chronicled with zeal, if not skill, in a strip, which was occasionally published in the school paper, other times simply handed around to friends. By the end of high school, 1944, he'd fallen in love again -- this time reciprocated -- and rushed off to the Army to serve as an infantry clerk.
Army life was miserable for Hefner, as he told his love Millie Williams in frequent letters. When he was discharged two years later -- he'd been stationed at a typewriter stateside for the duration of his service -- he returned to Williams with only the vaguest plans of cartooning for a living.
Hefner enrolled at the University of Illinois. As editor of the school's humor magazine, he started a feature called Coed of the Month. In 1949, he graduated, -- he'd doubled up on classes and finished in two and a half years -- took a job at Esquire magazine and married Millie (mother of Christie, Playboy's CEO).
