When Playboy was hot

Once upon a time, magazines were meant to be read, not just eyeballed. Today's readers lust for that kind of literary excitement.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 9, 2002 | It's December 1968 and you grab a mag at the local newsstand. The table of contents includes the following: A quartet of short stories by Alberto Moravia; a symposium on creativity with contributions from Truman Capote, Lawrence Durrell, James T. Farrell, Allen Ginsberg, Le Roi Jones, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Norman Podhoretz, Georges Simenon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Styron and John Updike; humor pieces from Jean Shepherd and Robert Morley; an article on pacifism in America by Norman Thomas; a piece on how machines will change our lives by Arthur C. Clarke; an essay on "the overheated image" by Marshall McLuhan; contributions from Eric Hoffer and Alan Watts; an article in defense of academic irresponsibility by Leslie Fiedler; a memoir of Hemingway by his son Patrick; Eldridge Cleaver interviewed by Nat Hentoff; a travel piece by the espionage novelist Len Deighton; and the first English translation of a poem by Goethe.

Yes, folks, that was Playboy. And lest you think that issue was a fluke, an overstuffed Christmas goodie, the ad for the January 1969 issue promises a story from P.G. Wodehouse, an article by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, fiction from Robert Coover and Sean O'Faolain, and a never before published tale by Lytton Strachey.

Sure, the reason most of us started reading Playboy was for the girls. But when the history of American magazines is written, people who said "I read it for the articles" will have the last laugh. As will Hugh Hefner, who told a reunion of Playmates in 1979, "Without you, I'd be the publisher of a literary magazine." With new editor James Kaminsky starting this week, and even Hefner saying the magazine needs to recapture its distinction, Playboy has the opportunity to be a catalyst for change in the magazine world. It can do what it did in the '60s and be a magazine with balls (and boobs), leading the moribund magazine world into a new era of editorial rebirth. A pipe dream, I know, but not a complete fantasy.

In its heyday, from roughly the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s, Playboy was one of the great American magazines in an era of great American magazines, like Esquire under Harold Hayes and the New Yorker under William Shawn. The big cliché about Playboy has long been that it benefited from "the Sexual Revolution." Duh. But the reasons it flourished went well beyond that. Playboy was lucky enough to be around when the confluence of New Journalism (practiced by, among others, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Norman Mailer) and a literate, adventurous readership ready for in-depth articles rich with the writer's voice allowed editors and publishers to assume the intelligence of their readers and take all sorts of chances.

That amazing lineup of writers in Playboy's Christmas 1968 issue was not unusual for magazines in the '60s. Remembering some of what was published in that decade should bring shame to editors today. This was an era when Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" was excerpted in the New Yorker, when 90,000 words of Norman Mailer's "Armies of the Night" appeared in Harper's, when "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" appeared in Rolling Stone. It was a time when fiction writers, or writers who brought a novelist's eye for character and detail to nonfiction, were routinely dispatched to cover political campaigns and conventions.

And those dispatches became Mailer's two great books on the 1968 and 1972 conventions, and Hunter S. Thompson's coruscating "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972." Esquire's correspondents at the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago were William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern and Jean Genet. (The only recent book to equal Mailer's and Thompson's work is Steve Erickson's book of the 1992 campaign, "American Nomad," and Rolling Stone fired him after he had turned in just two installments.) Some of the best writing to come out of Watergate were the pieces Mary McCarthy did for the New York Review of Books (later collected as "The Mask of State").

The '60s and '70s gave forth a wealth of amazing journalism, pieces like Mailer's "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," Stanley Booth's "A Hound Dog to the Manor Born" (an awful title that Booth removed when the piece was collected in his book "Rhythm Oil"), Terry Southern's "Twirling at Ole Miss," Tom Wolfe's "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!," the criticism of Pauline Kael, Kenneth Tynan's profiles and essays, and on and on. The culture was springing fresh astonishments and outrages on us daily, and these writers and many others hit the ground running, determined to keep up.

Luckily, they were abetted by editors who, unlike so many editors today, had the power to tell the advertising department to go chase itself if they tried to interfere with editorial content. Editors like Shawn, Hayes and Hefner had visions of what they wanted their magazines to be and stuck to them. I'm guessing it was a mixture of guts, confidence, arrogance and a deep loathing of mediocrity that fired these men, as well as a sense that journalistic ethics required you to be something of a segregationist: the advertisers may pay the fare but they sit in the back of the bus.

And readers stuck with these men and their magazines. The letters in that December 1968 Playboy are striking. One, from a gentleman in Wilmington, Ohio, came in response to a Nat Hentoff piece about police organizations' keeping "subversive" groups under surveillance. The man writes: "I ... am grateful that so many sane, thinking people have awakened to the fact that S.D.S., the A.C.L.U., etc., are as much an enemy as the U.S.S.R." In response to a piece against premarital sex, a woman from Seattle writes: "God intended intercourse to be an act of love between a husband and a wife. Outside marriage, it is sinful and dirty." Both correspondents are obviously conservative. But they're still reading Playboy and are eager to join in the debate the articles kicked up.

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