WHY PLAYBOY’S GOING PRUDISH
It was the magazine that brought sex into the open. Sixty years on, it’s banning nudes – a victim of the porn culture it helped create
HOW do you explain to anyone who is young today how sexually repressed, monochrome, uptight, judgmental, narrow-minded, earnest and fundamentally furtive the Fifties were? It’s impossible. The Fifties, both here and in America, were a world in which, to a boy like me, sex was a secret. A time when Hollywood films showed married couples wearing pyjamas and sleeping in twin beds, and where the sexiest outfit a girl might wear was a floral two-piece bathing costume made of what looked like corrugated iron.
It was an era when teachers forbade girls from wearing patent leather shoes because the shiny leather toes might act as mirrors and thus reflect their knickers into a boy’s casual gaze.
But then came reports of a new magazine in America called Playboy, containing photographs of beautiful young women who were stark naked.
What? Surely that had to be a misprint. The only time any girl was naked in those days was when she was alone in the bathroom with the door firmly bolted. But, no, naked, she was! And not any girl. In an extraordinary lucky break for the magazine and its creator, the first Playboy centrefold in 1953 was none other than the famous film star Marilyn Monroe — albeit with a photograph taken before she had suddenly become famous that year.
I was 12 at the time of that first edition, so I wasn’t aware of the seeds of the sexual revolution that Playboy was pioneering.
But throughout my teenage years, the culture and lifestyle that Playboy would espouse — namely, that sex was normal and could even be fun — seemed to me to be in exciting naughty collision with everything my generation had been t aught to believe.
Hugh Hefner, then a young psychology graduate, had gambled a family loan of $600 to start a magazine that unashamedly reflected his own libertarian attitudes on sex and the burgeoning consumer society.
It was aimed, he said, at men like himself: educated, intelligent and keen on cars, wine, music, movies, books and pretty girls. And, although opprobrium and disgust immediately rained down on him from pulpits and opinion-makers in arch conservative Middle America, he caught the zeitgeist perfectly.
Fighting and winning censorship and distribution battles, he proved that an awful lot of men were interested in seeing photographs of beautiful, naked women.
Well, of course they were. Evolution hadn’t been mucking around when it had added sexual curiosity to the recipe that created humanity.
Hefner intuitively saw this, and although he was eight years ahead of the introduction of the Pill — the invention that was to change the relationship between men and women for ever — he saw that a change in attitudes was coming.
But he was clever, too. For those who knew where to look, there had always been nudie magazines, often European, passed surreptitiously between secretive readers. Hefner’s brilliance was that his magazine would not be sold at the back of seedy shops. It would be confident in itself and would not only be about naked girls; i t would also be intelligent and literate.
And for that, it hired the best writers, names such as Gore Vidal, Margaret Atwood and Norman Mailer, to give it respectability in grey print.
Nor would the models appear provocative or vulgar. The photography would usually be classy, never crude. And, like the Playboy bunnies who would people his home, the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, and the Playboy Clubs, the models would be wholesome-looking, jolly, cheerleader types.
THE mix worked brilliantly. Playboy made nudity respectable. Famous stars such as Sharon Stone, Madonna, Jane Seymour and Joan Collins were flattered to take their clothes off for it, while male stars would be thrilled to hang out with Hefner at the parties in his mansion.
As opposition dwindled, so much a part of the US establishment did Playboy become that eventually statesmen such as President Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King would agree to be interviewed for its pages.
Whether as much time was spent reading those interviews as gazing at the girls, no one can tell. But it meant that while most other magazines to include nudity would have been banned in family homes across Middle America, Playboy could sit there in the living room, by the television guide.
Within 20 years, sales reached more than seven million copies a month in the US, with several other editions around the world. Not everyone liked it, of course. Feminists hated the way the women in the magazine were simply considered homogenised sex commodities for men’s gratification, deeming the bunny outfit, with the big ears and cute little pompoms on the girls’ bottoms, in t he Playboy Clubs t o be demeaning.
Without a doubt, though, Playboy had won the battle. Sex and nudity was no big deal any more. Whether you liked it or not, the world had moved on, with women’s magazines and Sunday supplements publishing nude photographs to few howls of complaint.
The pace of change, however, didn’t stop with Playboy. Indeed, it just kept accelerating.
By the Seventies and Eighties, Hugh Hefner’s baby had rivals, such
THE WILD PARTIES
HEFNER’S infamous Playboy Mansion — a ‘Gothic Tudor’ pile in Los Angeles — is not only his home and the HQ of his magazine, but also the venue for decades of wildly debauched parties.
According to ex-Playmates, actors Charlie Sheen, Leonardo DiCaprio and Colin Farrell are among the stars who have attended parties where celebrities just needed to ‘click their fingers’ to have women make themselves available.
Insiders say the atmosphere at the mansion in its 1970s heyday was one of continual sexual indulgence.
Jennifer Saginor, the daughter of Hefner’s doctor who virtually grew up there, says: ‘I would see naked girls around the pool and people openly having sex in the games room. There were just no boundaries.’
THE PLAYBOY CURSE
WOMEN aren’t the only ones who reveal a lot in the magazine. A string of male celebrities have said more than they should have done in Playboy interviews.
Sean Connery claimed there was nothing ‘particularly wrong about hitting a woman’, while John Wayne admitted: ‘I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.’
More recently, Colin Farrell claimed ‘heroin is fine in moderation’, while British actor Gary Oldman said hypocritical Hollywood should ‘get over’ Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks because everyone has said the same privately.
JOINING THE CLUB
PLAYBOY would hardly be one of the world’s most recognisable brands if it weren’t for the Playboy Clubs, a chain of nightclubs and resorts, that first started in Chicago in 1960 and spread rapidly across the world.
A London outpost, a Playboy casino and club, was one of Hefner’s first foreign ventures after the UK legalised gambling in the Sixties.
Although the club chain went out of business in 1991, in its heyday membership was seen as the height of louche sophistication. Members had to show a metal Playboy key to gain admission and a strict dress code was usually enforced.
BUNNY MADNESS
THE waitresses were the clubs’ most memorable assets — glamorous Playboy Bunnies, some of whom had featured in the magazine.
Bunnies wore a costume called a ‘bunny suit’ that was based on the dinner jacket-wearing Playboy rabbit mascot and f eatured a strapless corset, sheer black tights, bunny ears, a collar and bowtie and a fluffy tail.
Former Bunnies include singer Debbie Harry, aka Blondie, and model Lauren Hutton.
Feminist Gloria Steinem became one to expose the exploitative working conditions in which Bunnies were pressurised to have sex with customers.