Bare Nekkid Ladies

...Alex Haley, a Playboy regular, recalls that, from the start, Hefner's mansion, its blinds always drawn, took on the aura of a shrine...

...in fact, one commission member would even praise Playboy for publishing "the healthiest nude sexy pictures in America...

...Zehme shows him as a young husband "living life to the hilt" by urging his wife and neighbors to comeover for a few rounds of "strip charades" as one neighbor recalls, as well as "strip poker, strip spin the bottle," and—who knows?—strip Scrabble as well...

...Others pointed to the obvious fact that displaying sex publicly changes and degrades its nature...

...Here's Hef's "Mansion West"—"a sprawling baronial Tudor" placed atop "the greenest of slopes" set on "five green acres" near Hollywood...

...here he is poolside, brows knit, intently basting a naked beauty with baby oil...

...Not very polite...

...At school, Hefner was considered dreamy and withdrawn but precocious...

...The book has lots of pictures, too...

...Once a name on the masthead, Hefner was now large in the public eye: the bantering icon of one of the fastest-selling magazines in publishing history...

...This allusion is perhaps self-serving, since Playboy is now, ironically, heavily invested in X-rated videos...

...From the start, it emphasized the stylish and the cool: jazz, sports cars, Parisian nightlife, ice buckets covered in calf skin...

...Hefner didn't know the actress...

...It offered a strange blend of the high and mostly low: Vladimir Nabokov on one page, Linda Lovelace on the next...

...now claims to have slept with "thousands of women"—and "they still like me...

...In 1962 Hefner sought to enhance his credentials by writing "The Playboy Philosophy," a 250,000-word manifesto serialized in the magazine...

...Still, some vendors, like 7-Eleven, pulled the publication from its shelves and sales—along with advertising revenue—began to slide...

...But it was always just about the business of pornography and nothing more: the dull repetition of dirty pictures, issue after issue...

...But during the 1980s cracks appeared in Playboy's airbrushed fagade...

...Here's Hef's state-of-the-art movie theater and his fridge filled with Pepsi Cola, the Master's favorite soda...

...A pipe, he figured, would be a good place to start—a fine briar to suggest intelligence and class, not some cheap corncob Popeye would puff on...

...Skin mags like Carnival, Escapade, and Wink were available to those who knew where to find them, and a steady stream of "hygiene" films played in shady theaters across the land, combining glimpses of nudity with dark warnings of the dangers of prostitution and venereal disease, to appease local censorship boards...

...It should have a larger share of the sex picture market...

...It paid tribute to the iconoclastic and hip: Steve Allen, Orson Welles, Frank Lloyd Wright...

...Bare Nekkid Ladies Hugh Hefner and the mainstreaming of pornography By BRIAN MURRAY In 1992 Hugh Hefner authorized the film Once Upon a Time, a documentary about his long career as the founder of Playboy magazine...

...Every week a party was in progress, and Hefner, wearing a tux, invited viewers inside to meet his pals and mingle with the girls...

...On sex, Hef's observations are no less acute...

...Beyond that, "cuddling is very important...

...Americans spend around $500 million each year on X-rated pay-for-view movies alone—a figure that some in the skin trade predict will soon hit $1 billion...

...The marriage to Kimberly ended after ten years, and perhaps many in his organization were relieved, since the figure of "Hef," like Colonel Sanders, was necessary for sales as the recognizable face of an international brand...

...The Master of the Good Life—the man Esquire recently described as a "philosopher king"—has had, in fact, a surprisingly dull life, if Hef's Little Black Book is an accurate guide...

...So, he says, he retreated into the fantasies of love and adventure provided by comic books, popular songs, and movies (he's been a chronic movie-watcher all his life...

...The rabbit-head Playboy logo, indeed, now appeared on clothing, golf equipment, and countless other products...

...For "what causes all the sickness, the perversion, the rape, is a repressive soci-ety—a society that can't be open in a loving and positive way...

...So he combined Esquire's literary sophistication with the sort of artful nudes one could find in camera magazines like Popular Photography and the Figure Photography Annual...

...But he wasn't to the Mansion West born...

...Hefner's most visible critics included the "anti-sex feminist left," as he called it, and religious conservatives like Jerry Falwell...

...The commission did not link Playboy to criminality or violence...

...The key for Hefner, however, was to craft a more upscale image for Playboy...

...Zehme cheerfully calls him a "sex-junkie with an insatiable habit...

...But maybe the dullness is not so surprising...

...Playboy was no longer criticizing "Mr...

...over the years he has often pointed out that his I.Q., measured in boyhood, hit the mark at a whopping 152...

...No wonder Hefner considers himself "the happiest guy on the f—ing planet": His magazine might be sinking, but thanks to porn he's still rich...

...Repression, a bad thing, is rooted in the Puritanism that has marked this country's culture from the start...

...It also makes his transformation from shy cartoonist into the Casanova of Chicago look more clearly like an act of revenge...

...And what does he actually say, beneath the pretentious blather...

...Penthouse, not Playboy, was now leading the way...

...What kind of man reads Playboy...

...And he constructed an editorial voice that was light, clubby, and oddly earnest, as if this middle class Midwesterner—who seems to have subsisted largely on fried chicken and Wonder Bread—were very determined to come across as a man of the world...

...Hefner's coauthor, Bill Zehme, provides the lore, calling Hefner "The Master" and tracing, in awestruck prose, his long career "from the inspiration of a single idea to the emergence of a sprawling international corporation built on self-belief...

...And Roy Larson, a Methodist minister, argued that Playboy's philosophy was a set of new commandments, which included: "Thou shalt not wear double-breasted suits," "Thou shalt not swing and sway to Sammy Kaye," "Thou shalt not read the Reader's Digest," and "Thou shalt not attend the PTA...

...Hef recommends a "mirror on the ceiling"—still a must for the gentleman of taste...

...Millie strayed, so Hefner strayed, too—two thousand times, or so...

...provided the music...

...Remember, too, "Different people have different needs...

...Lenny Bruce poured the champagne...

...But the Playboy Corporation now owns "Spice," "Hot," and "Vivid," hard-core cable channels...

...Here's Hef hosting a party, passing the deviled eggs...

...In 1944 Hefner joined the army, serving as an infantry clerk...

...The first to expose the clitoris completely...

...But as sales grew, so did the list of contributors: John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Erskine Caldwell—even Bob Hope, writing about golf...

...In the beginning, he promised a publication that would provide "the directness of a good foreign film and the spice of a Broadway show...

...Day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, in the case of Hugh Hefner...

...Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten was murdered by her demented boyfriend (a story retold in Bob Fosse's 1983 film, Star 80...

...Free enterprise, a good thing, is stoked by the sort of conspicuous consumption Playboy promotes...

...He was just eight when he saw Tarzan and His Mate," Zehme records, "and his life would change forever...

...Playboy...

...In one clip from the early 1960s, Playboy model Cynthia Maddox addresses the camera...

...Nietzsche's work doesn't actually appear in the first year's issues of Playboy, but Giovanni Boccaccio's does: Hefner didn't have to pay royalties to writers who died in the fourteenth century...

...His new autobiographical volume, Hef's Little Black Book, is described by its publisher as a "treasure trove of urbane lore, wry advice, and time-honored wisdom spanning the realms of romance, hedonism, ambition, business, dreams, and, of course, sex...

...And, "some relationships improve with marriage, but a lot of them don't...

...Hefner Brian Murray teaches writing at Loyola College in Maryland...

...For a time Hefner, who suffered a stroke in 1985, withdrew from the public stage, planning to write an autobiography, still unpublished...

...Judging by the way Hefner speaks to him in Hef's Little Black Book, that reader is certainly not very bright, and he's no man of the world, either...

...asked an old ad campaign...

...That first, and soon lost, wife Millie also gets a large part in Hefner's narrative of transformation and ascent...

...He swapped his Stude-baker for a Cadillac and, most notably, bought a seventy-room mansion in Chicago's loop, three blocks from Lake Michigan...

...Penthouse magazine and other competitors challenged Playboy's circulation by offering more graphic pictorial spreads...

...The man who began Playboy is "a descendant of Pilgrim life at Plymouth Rock," as James Coburn solemnly narrates in Once Upon a Time...

...But then, "I'm a visual guy...

...On the same bill viewers might catch a more cheerful vehicle promoting the merits of sunbathing by offering fleeting shots of happy nudists square dancing or pitching horseshoes...

...after the war he enrolled at the University of Illinois, where he majored in psychology, ran a humor magazine, and sang with a dance band...

...Almost touching-ly, some of the commission's members lamented porn's focus on "uncommitted sexuality" generally...

...Hefner's parents were poor, teetotalling Methodists who worked their way up to a modest brick home on Chicago's west side...

...Mike Wallace, interviewing Hefner on his television show Night Beat, observed that Playboy offered little more than a "sniggering" and "lascivious" kind of sex...

...This event perhaps throws light on Hefner's obsession with proclaiming that "nice girls like sex, too," which he seems to equate with Newton's discovery of gravity...

...In the climate of the 1980s, the Meese Commission on Pornography, appointed by President Reagan, found links between organized crime and the growing porn industry, and a connection between certain pornographic genres and violent crime...

...Soon after leaving college, Hefner worked variously as a cartoonist and a copywriter, but he dreamed big...

...Playboy, meanwhile, sold more than seven million copies each month, and no magazine paid its contributors more...

...Outside, gaping tourists would gather, "as if they expected an orgy to spill out...

...Besides—and here's the seldom mentioned truth about Hefner— hard core was always where his heart was...

...And here's something you won't find on the menu at Denny's: "Hef's Requisite Postcoital Meal," an inviting mix of buttered toast, hash brown potatoes, and "eggs sunny side up, with bacon, crisp...

...During the 1980s, Playboy followed and responded—never quite matching the explicitness of its rivals, but becoming even more obviously lascivious and sniggering...

...Still, the early air of strenuous sophistication—bohemianism in a Brooks Brothers box—was now largely gone...

...It was like he was the president...

...Clearly, Hefner recognizes the value of keeping his swinging, retro-cool bachelor image alive for a new generation of Playboy readers—even while he and Zehme laugh up their sleeves at the millions who might actually take it seriously...

...I don't mind sitting home and not going out," Cynthia sighs, "but I expect him to do the same...

...One imagines his aides staggering out of the Chicago Public Library and back to the mansion, their arms full of such books as Social Control of Sex Expression, Love and Sex Emotions, and G. Rattray Taylor's Sex in History—all of which are cited in Hefner's discourse...

...Hef certainly swotted up for the occasion...

...Hefner claims he stopped composing his credo because he believed the cultural transformation he was demanding was well on its way...

...With his companion, the actress Barbi Benton, Hef toured the world in his DC-9, and as Benton would recall, "in every city we went, thousands of people would turn up at the airport to see Hugh Hefner walk out of this black plane with a bunny on the tail...

...He turned his Los Angeles mansion into a Xanadu, complete with a zoo of exotic animals: Peacocks strolled the grounds, and monkeys hung from trees...

...The couple had two children, a son and a daughter, Christie, who now heads the Playboy Corporation and with her father owns around 70 percent of the company's stock...

...The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley saw Hefner as the first source of "the pervasive presence of sex, whether overtly or by innuendo, in virtually every corner of our public life from sitcoms to soap operas to advertising...

...After graduating in 1949, Hefner married his first wife, Mildred Williams, a schoolteacher—the prototypical girl next door...

...We were the first to show full-frontal nudity," Guccione recently reminisced...

...In the pages of Playboy, the sweated and furtive pornography of the 1950s dressed itself up in a smoking jacket and pretended for a while to be the high life...

...Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Norman Mailer were all contributors...

...It's a fascinating movie, not least for its archival footage from the 1950s and early 1960s: Playboy's early years, when Hefner first became famous as an editor with a flair for displaying color photographs of not-quite-nude women in a publication aimed, as one early advertisement put it, at the "man of taste who—without acquiring the stigma of the voluptuary or dilettante—can live life to the hilt...

...Hefner wanted to answer his critics, who included some well-known academics, journalists, and clergymen...

...Nothing much—just a series of now largely unexamined cliches, for forty years the background noise of popular American culture...

...Although Hefner encouraged his readers to "live with zest and adventure," he seems to have spent most of his time indoors in his pajamas: eating fried chicken, watching old movies, and having sex with thousands of his closest friends...

...Selling sex was starting to become a boom industry during the 1950s, as publishers and moviemakers sought to test the limits of legality in the increasingly permissive postwar era...

...it hung from the rearview mirrors of El Caminos and Cordobas all the way from Worcester to Walla Walla...

...The publisher of Penthouse, Bob Guc-cione, is bankrupt now, but still proud of his own contribution to the slow march of Western civilization...

...He stopped wearing white socks with his sweaters...

...Poor girl, but what did she expect from a man calling himself "Mr...

...Playboy, the antidote, refuses to treat sex "with solemnity," nor will it accept "shibboleths, chains, traditions, and taboos...

...While Hefner was stuck on some army base, manning a typewriter, Millie was back home dallying with another man...

...He'd hung a plaque outside his front door that read, "If you don't swing, don't ring...

...The interviews the magazine ran, moreover, were widely admired, offering extensive conversations with Albert Schweitzer, Jean Paul Sartre, Princess Grace, and Jimmy Carter, among others—none of whom would have appeared similarly in the pages of Knave, say, or Jugs...

...Hefner himself has recently— and revealingly—stressed that "I'm really in the advertising and marketing business, not just in terms of the magazine, but everything else I've done...

...But his life has been little more than one long porn loop: He attended his first orgy in 1957 and never looked back...

...But then, according to the legend he has sustained for so long, everybody likes Hugh Hefner—and "Hugh Hefner" is the one subject, next to sex, Hefner seems never to tire of...

...She shocked Hefner by admitting that she'd had an affair during their engagement...

...This was the single most devastating experience of my life," he remembers, "and in a certain sense, I don't think I ever got over it...

...For years, Hefner not only sought to portray himself as a man more seduced than seducing—an amiable fellow who couldn't resist the temptations that came his way—but also to uphold Playboy's image as a "classy" publication...

...He registered the names of his lovers in an expanding series of "little black books...

...But other commentators, like the philosopher Roger Scruton, took time to consider the ethical and cultural implications of pornography's acceleration: Scruton's 1985 Sexual Desire is one of the decade's best books on the theme...

...Innumerable hours spent watching Hollywood movies may have given Hefner help in forming his persona (according to Zehme, "urbane swells" like Cary Grant and Fred Astaire somehow "taught Hefner how to be a romantic leading man...

...She wears a black cocktail dress, a bouffant flip, and a look of exasperation...

...By 1959 Hefner's marriage was over, and he set about reinventing himself, cultivating the image of urbane fashion-ability his magazine extolled He looked for props...

...The Playboy Philosophy" recalls the work of a smart undergraduate who has ingested too much caffeine...

...But pornography has followed the same cultural path as jazz and rock 'n' roll: Subversive once, it's mainstream now, a major American industry worth more than $15 billion annually—more than major league football, baseball, and basketball combined...

...Unlike other men's magazines of the day, Playboy didn't run crime stories or articles about fishing for trout or tracking moose...

...Its centerfold featured Marilyn Monroe reclining nude on a carpet of red satin...

...One headline in those days said it all: "Playboy—The Party's Over...

...In 1959 Hefner began a syndicated television show, Playboy's Penthouse, which was set in what was meant to look like a high-rent bachelor pad, high above the city...

...Here's his "glorious jet-black DC-9" and his legendary round, rotating bed, which "launched a thousand hips," as Zehme quips...

...Also, "a large television screen is important for your X-rated videos...

...Then in 1989, to wide surprise, he married Kimberly Conrad, a former Playmate of the Year...

...He had a happy, secure childhood, he admits, but he feared ending up like his parents, who were too "repressed" for his tastes, "with no comprehension of the possibilities of turning life into a real celebration...

...Buddy Rich, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sammy Davis Jr...

...In the 1950s Hefner ensured his respectability—and thus his profitabil-ity—by taking his magazine upscale and edging it carefully into the cultural mainstream...

...he'd bought the picture cheap from a local printer...

...Hefner was in his glory and, after the fashion of the day, sported leisure suits and loudly patterned shirts with flapping collars, projecting power now in a manner that was part Rat Pack, part Howard Hughes...

...In Once Upon a Time Hefner declares that he has come full circle "to values very similar to my own parents...

...We enjoy mixing up cocktails," he wrote in the first issue, "putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex...

...He started Playboy with a small investment and some loans, pasting up the first issue himself on a card table in his Chicago flat...

...Benjamin DeMott, for example, had described the Playboy world as "first and last an achievement in abstraction," since the many things that "presumably complicate both the inward and outward lives of human beings"—including religion, families, vanity, love—have "all been emptied from it...

...And Hef made a stag film of his own, in which he appeared masked with a "willing young woman" and a sidekick who now recalls "Hef could talk anybody into anything if he tried...

...At Hef's behest, "stag films became part of their home entertaining...

...Here's Hef on love and marriage: "The best relationships are those where both people are really trying to make it work...

...By the mid-1970s, his empire included publishing, movie production, casinos, resorts, and the international chain of private clubs where waitresses carried trays dressed as rabbits, complete with ears and tail...

...Hefner's autobiographical narratives invariably revolve around a trio of themes: repression, escape, and self-invention...

...Average American" but inviting him to the party, where the music was by Sammy Hagar, not Stan Kenton, and the talk was of the National Football League, not Friedrich Nietzsche...

...In fact, when combined with its own Playboy channel, Playboy dominates the growing cable and satellite adult movie market...

...It's not a good idea," he instructs, "to fall asleep while you're actually having intercourse...

...For a year she's been dating "Hef," faithfully, she explains— even though he insists on dating other girls...