Needless to say, the Mansion’s scene was favoured by Donald Trump. The President’s long association with Hefner included him featuring on a Playboy cover in 1990, while in 2006 he rewarded a winning team on the Apprentice with a trip to the Mansion, where according to a female contestant he lent over and said to Hef, “It’s hard for me to tell which of these girls are yours, and which are mine.” According to Hefner’s son Cooper his dad didn’t support Trump as a political figure: “We don’t respect the guy.” It makes for an interesting hierarchy of sleaze when the pornographer denounces the politician.
When you think back to Fifties Hefner, there’s total logic to this pecking order. Anyone who espouses the concept of sexual emancipation should find something to admire in Hefner as a frontline warrior of the Sexual Revolution. He said of sex, “We should embrace it, not see it as the enemy. If you don’t encourage healthy sexual expression in public you get unhealthy sexual expression in private.” It’s clear he knew whereof he spoke, describing his conservative, religious parents (originally from Nebraska) as “Puritan Prohibitionists”.
It became Hef’s life’s mission to overturn their values. He studied psychology at the University of Illinois, while also taking courses in creative writing and art and magazine became his calling. In 1953, after a brief stint on Esquire he raised $8,000 thousand dollars and launched Playboy with headline-grabbing photos featuring Marilyn Monroe in her 1949 calendar shoot (years later he would buy the crypt next to hers in LA). That first edition sold 50,000 copies and is now a collector’s item worth thousands.
That same year, 1953, saw the publication of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, alongside the second of Alfred Kinsey’s great tomes on human sexuality Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female — which informed an astonished world that women could be just as libidinous as men and enjoyed orgasms. The forces that shaped the sexual revolution were mounting.
Hefner quickly established a style that was admired across the magazine industry: racy photo-shoots teamed with top-class writing and an influential central interview. For decades literary men would talk glowingly about the Playboy Interview, as if it had never occurred to them the mag was also full of tits‘n’arse.
I worked on GQ in the early 1990s and it struck me the formula was just the same as Playboy’s (which was when Hef’s mag started losing its USP), but with fewer world-famous writers. The roll call of people who wrote for Playboy is astonishing, including Margaret Atwood, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, Roald Dahl and Ursula le Guin, while Normal Mailer was dispatched to write about Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle. Interviewees included Mae West, Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Satre, Better Friedan, Al Pacino and, well, absolutely everyone quite frankly. Hefner established a Playboy Philosophy, was a rigorous campaigner for free speech, and espoused liberal causes including the Civil Rights movement, sending black writer Alex Haley to interview Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Haley also interviewed George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, a choice that gave Rockwell a fit of nerves, meaning he kept a handgun on the table throughout the conversation. More than that, Hefner was a leading advocate of women’s reproductive rights and a vocal supporter of legalising gay marriage, saying the struggle was “a fight for all our rights. Without it, we will turn back the sexual revolution and return to an earlier, puritanical time.”
Of course none of this white-washes the dark excesses of the Playboy Mansion. I’ve ploughed through a tonne of literature on Hefner and while I’ve never found anything that proves he himself was guilty of what a court would view as sexual assault, it’s clear the money, drugs and lure of fame were a form of coercion to the young and vulnerable. And he presided over a flesh-show that made others feel amoral behaviour was permissible.
Even so, it would be careless to dismiss the contribution Playboy and Hefner made to sexual liberation, the civil rights movement and to the cause of good writing in the mag’s first two decades. One of the curses of getting older is realising how many celebrated historical figures have feet of clay: should I cease to admire all Marie Stope’s efforts to ensure women had contraception and access to abortions because she was, at the same time, a committed eugenicist? So I won’t tell my niece to take off her sweatshirt, but I might buy her Holly Madison’s memoir and a Seventies copy of Playboy, so she knows the dual nature of what she’s buying into. As Hef would agree, informed is empowered.
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