Fifties (93 page)

Her life eventually became so troubled that it began to have a serious impact on her career. Unsure of her abilities, needing reassurance, she moved to New York to be near Arthur Miller, with whom she had begun a burgeoning romance, and to be a part of the Actors Studio. She longed to be respected as a serious actress, but her work habits were becoming shakier and shakier. Miller was both father figure and intellectual legitimizer. But it wasn’t long before he found that he too was failing her. In July 1956, she married Miller, but there was no peace or respite. “Nobody cares,” she told her maid as her marriage to Miller was coming apart. “Nobody even knows me anymore. What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman.... Oh why do things have to work out so rotten?” By 1957, her mental health was deteriorating ever more quickly: She was using even more sleeping pills and starting the day with a Bloody Mary.

More than most actors and actresses, she was exploited by the studios and was significantly underpaid at the height of her career. The studio heads always seemed to resent her success and continued to see her as essentially the dumb blonde. When she shot
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
the studio executives thought she was being too demanding and one of them angrily told her, “You’re not a star.” “Well, gentlemen,” she answered. “Whatever I am, the name of the picture is
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and whatever I am, I
am
the blonde.”

In February 1952, just as her career was taking off, there was an anonymous phone call to Twentieth Century-Fox. The naked girl in a nude calendar, said the male caller, was its newest star, Marilyn Monroe. The caller demanded ten thousand dollars. Otherwise, he said, he would take his proof to the newspapers. The studio people were terrified by the call but decided not to pay, which, they decided, would only lead to more blackmail. But they did pressure her to deny that she was the girl. It was a terrible moment for her: She was sure that her career was over. But she also decided to tell the truth and to take the initiative by leaking the story herself to a friendly writer. It
was
her on the calendar, she said, and there was no sense lying about it. “Sure, I posed,” she said. “I was hungry.” The public rallied to support her.

The photo Tom Kelley had shot was soon hanging on the walls of thousands of barbershops, bars, and gas stations. It also helped launch a sexual empire. For in the fall of 1953 a young man named Hugh Hefner, anxious to start his own magazine, read in an advertising trade magazine that a local Midwestern company had the rights
to the photo. Hefner drove out to suburban Chicago and bought the rights for five hundred dollars (along with a number of photos of other nudes). It was a brilliant purchase for a magazine just being born—America’s newest star caught lushly in the nude, posing coyly on a red velvet drape. Her body was angled to hide her pubic area; her breasts were fully exposed.

Fittingly, given the relationships between men and women in those days, Miss Monroe got nothing additional for the use of the photograph. There was no small irony here—that Hefner’s multimillion-dollar kingdom was launched by this photo. In time, Hefner the grandson of Midwestern puritans would become a committed convert to more open sexuality, and a crusader for greater sexual freedom and honesty. He took up this cause humorlessly, with the passion of the old-time religious zealot. There was, thought some of those who knew him well, a certain grimness to his pursuit of both truth and pleasure. By contrast, Miss Monroe, the object of so much unwanted admiration, treated all the fuss with a pleasant self-deprecating humor. She seemed to be puzzled that men made such a big deal out of her body and was therefore willing to go along, more to keep them from being cranky than anything else. Asked whether she had anything on during the Tom Kelley shoot, she answered yes, the radio.

Hefner was only twenty-seven when he started his magazine on a shoestring in the fall of 1953. He had been so uncertain of his chances of success that he did not even bother to put his name on the masthead; nor for that matter did he bother to put a date on the first issue—he hoped that if the initial sale was not high enough, he might be able to keep it on the newsstand for another month. All of his limited savings were tied up in the magazine, and he was extremely nervous about the possibility of failure and bankruptcy. If the magazine failed, he would owe several thousand dollars to close friends and his family. The new magazine was to be called
Playboy,
which was not Hefner’s original choice; he had wanted to give it the much cruder title of
Stag Party.
Others had tried to dissuade him, with little success, but what
had
finally changed his mind was a letter from the lawyers of a hunting magazine in New York called
Stag,
suggesting that he look elsewhere and threatening legal action if he did not.

Hefner printed 70,000 copies of the first issue, hoping it would sell at least 30,000 copies, at 50 cents an issue. Instead, bolstered in no small part by the word of mouth on the Monroe photos, it sold 53,000, a huge success. Still, in the early weeks of its appearance Hefner was like a nervous parent, casing newsstands and checking
sales, making sure that his magazine got proper display, covertly rearranging it in front of the other magazines. He did, it should be noted, know something about the magazine business as he put out his first issue. For the last few years he had worked on the promotional side of magazines, and he knew a good deal about magazine distribution. He had become expert in the kind of hearty exaggerated promotional letters that magazines then favored.

With the success of the first issue he was in business. Confident as he prepared his second issue, he went out and bought himself a new Studebaker, and he also put his name on the masthead as editor and publisher. Within a year, by December 1954,
Playboy
’s circulation had reached 100,000. By early 1955, less than a year and a half after the first issue was so timidly cast forth,
Playboy
had $250,000 in the bank and Hefner turned down an offer of $1 million from a group in Chicago for the magazine. Some of its stunning initial success was in part due to Hefner’s native shrewdness, his perfect pitch for what his readers—often sexually insecure young men—wanted. His instinct to package ever more glossy photos and use what he considered upscale writing would make the magazine ever more legitimate.

Hefner had come from a financially comfortable, if emotionally arid, family. His home was largely devoid of warmth and openness, and it was against that Calvinist ethic that he would fight in the pages of
Playboy.
Their Christianity seemed to him a cold, emotionally sterile one, separated from all pleasures of life. His grandparents were pious Nebraska farmers, and theirs remained a God-fearing home: There was no drinking, no swearing, no smoking. Sunday was for church. Hefner’s first wife, Millie, later noted that she never saw any sign of affection or anger displayed by either of his parents.

Hefner was a bright, somewhat dreamy child: In terms of social skills and popularity he was always on the outside looking in. He graduated from high school in 1944, went into the army and caught the last months of the war, although he saw no combat. When he came home he drifted for a time, unsure of his future, drawing 52–20 from the government—twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks. He entered the University of Illinois to be with his high school girlfriend, Millie Williams. He had been dating Millie for several years, but they still had not consummated their relationship. After they were married in 1949, Hefner continued to drift, supported by Millie, who was teaching school.

The one thing he loved was cartooning, at which he was, unfortunately, not particularly gifted; for the next two or three years he went back and forth between jobs, usually in the promotion department
of different magazines. For much of the time, he and Millie lived with his parents in order to save money. At one point in his drive to become a cartoonist, he quit work and stayed at home to draw. The results tended to be pornographic reworkings of then-popular comic strips. Millie Hefner was convinced that his erotic sketching was a rebellion of sorts against his family’s Calvinist roots and the emotional and sexual coldness of that household.

As a convert to the cause of more open sexuality, he crusaded for it with the passion his puritanical grandparents had espoused in their religion; it was as if one crusade had simply replaced another. The Calvinists, Hefner believed, thought sex was dark and furtive, and the other girlie magazines of the period were so cheap and crude they seemed to confirm that judgment. It was Hefner’s particular genius to know that it was now, in this new era, going to be permissible to have an upscale, slick magazine of male sexual fantasies that customers might not be embarrassed to be seen buying—or even to leave out on their coffee tables.

As far as Hefner was concerned, he was a direct lineal descendant of Alfred Kinsey, whom he regarded as a hero, the man who had more than anyone else pointed out the hypocrisy in daily American life, the differences between what Americans said about sex and what they actually did. As a student he had quite favorably reviewed the Kinsey study for the University of Illinois humor magazine, and in truth the Kinsey studies were critically important for him. Before they appeared, he had felt himself essentially alone in his belief that sex was important and that society was duplicitous and punitive in its attitude toward sex. Kinsey had showed him that he was not alone, that there were millions of others who felt much the same way he did. Kinsey, as far as he was concerned, had opened the debate on sexual attitudes. Soon, in his own mind, at least, he was the person who took up Kinsey’s banner. He also believed that he could become a role model for young men of his generation, not just in his sexual practices but for his life-style, as well.

In his first issue, Hefner wrote, “We like our apartment. 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 for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” There it was, the
Playboy
ethic: sex as not only legitimate but as a sophisticated life-style. By the end of 1956, still operating with a skeleton staff,
Playboy
was a phenomenon. Circulation was 600,000. “A lot of it,” said Ray Russell, a writer and editor who was one of Hefner’s first hires, “was good luck, random choice, being carried on the tides of the times
rather than the leader of the times. It was a matter of being the right magazine able to take advantage of a rising economy, more than any degree of conscious planning.”

Perhaps Hefner’s great strength was his lack of sophistication. If he was square, he still longed to share the better world, which was now increasingly available around him; in that he mirrored the longings of millions of other young men of similar background, more affluent than their parents, wanting a better and freer life. His connection to his readers was immediate. It was not by chance that
Playboy
was born in the Midwest, not New York, like most magazines. Its most successful editors were sons of the Midwest, not Easterners and not graduates of Ivy League schools. Hefner understood his readers’ lives; his squareness was their squareness; his magazine answered the right questions because they were his questions. “That magazine,” said Jack Kessie, an early editor, “was written and edited for Hugh M. Hefner.”

As the magazine became enormously successful, he was to all intents and purposes living in his offices. He became increasingly distant and remote, a kind of latter-day Gatsby, who opened his increasingly plush residences to an endless stream of people whom he did not know (and who did not know him). In some ways he was still an outsider looking in, partaking of the new sybaritic life-style but detached from it. “Hefner,” said Don Gold, an editor at
Playboy
in the early days, “is not a very complicated man. He thinks Poe is the best writer in the world. When he buys a pipe, he buys two dozen of the same pipe. He likes his mashed potatoes to have a dimple of gravy on them. He is mid-America personified. The Marquis de Sade would have told him to wait in a corner, though he is, in a healthy way, by sex possessed.” Some saw Hefner not so much liberator as exploiter of American puritanism. Frank Gibney, a former
Time
magazine writer and editor who worked briefly and unhappily for him, once compared him to the Methodist missionaries who traded firewater to the Indians. To Gibney, the more he tried to be hip, the more he failed.

In June 1957, Hefner wrote of himself for that month’s issue: “His dress is conservative and casual. He always wears loafers.... There is an electronic entertainment wall in his office, very much like the one featured in
Playboy
’s Penthouse apartment, that includes hi-fi, AM-FM radio, tape, and television, and will store up to 2000 LPs. Brubeck, Kenton or Sinatra is usually on the turntable when Hefner is working. He is essentially an indoors man, though he discovered the pleasures of the ski slope last winter. He likes jazz
foreign films, Ivy League clothes, gin and tonic and pretty girls—the same sort of things that
Playboy
readers like—and his approach to life is as fresh, sophisticated, and yet admittedly sentimental as is the magazine.”

Not everyone who knew Hugh Hefner in those days, would have accepted his own self-portrait. He was, they might agree, smart, albeit more shrewd than cerebral, an easy man for his more sophisticated Eastern colleagues to underestimate, but he was not exactly hip or cool, no matter how hard he worked at it. It didn’t matter. For
Playboy
would play a critical role in the coming sexual revolution; it helped, among other things, to sell the idea that sex was pleasure, to be enjoyed, not something dark to be sought illicitly and clandestinely.

The women his magazine came to feature, seminude (and then, with the more relaxed censorship laws, completely nude) were young, preferably innocent-looking girls, more fresh-faced and bubbly than erotic or sophisticated. They seemed to have stopped off to do a
Playboy
shoot on their way to cheerleading practice or to the sorority house. That was deliberate policy, for over the years Hefner often seemed uninterested in much of the magazine’s verbiage, but he monitored carefully the choices of the Playmates who would grace the magazine’s centerfold; he was confident that what stirred his fantasies would stir the fantasies of his readers. This, thought those who knew him well, was when he was most alive and most engaged—when he sat in his bedroom, armed with the photographer’s loops with which he could magnify thousands of contact sheets of film of beautiful, nude women, as the ultimate arbiter of American sexual fantasy. Nor did his interest in these young women extend merely to displaying explicit photos of them to millions of the opposite sex. Rather, they were the kind of women whom he sought for companionship. In the late sixties, Hefner, by then in his forties, met a young woman named Barbie Benton, who was to be one of his longest-running girlfriends. Ms. Benton, then only eighteen, was pleased but a little uneasy with the attention of this older man. “You’re a nice person, but I’ve never dated anyone over twenty-four.” “That’s okay,” he answered. “Neither have I.”