Years of Change Unfold at Playboy Mansion
I remember hiding under a tree at the Guinn Foss Elementary School playground in Tustin in the first grade, trying to lie so low the teacher wouldn’t see me when she blew the whistle for the end of recess. Beside me was my best friend, Rick, snickering into the tallish unmowed grass around that tree. Mission accomplished, we’d have a few minutes of guilty satisfaction before Mrs. Cooley came out to bust us. During those minutes, we’d fantasize that someday, when we were grown, we’d live in a cave on a mountaintop and become photographers for Playboy magazine.
Neither of us did anything of the kind. Rick became a golf pro, and I turned out to be a writer. I can’t operate any camera more complicated than a Kodak Fiesta 35--which is made of cardboard and has the instructions printed on it--and doubt if Rick can, either. The Playboy angle, of course, meant nothing more than we wanted to consort with beautiful women, and we each were blessed to do just that.
When I was a boy growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Playboy was a forbidden item, though most boys on our block had relatively easy access to their fathers’ collections. The trick was to check them out in secret, then replace them such that Dad couldn’t tell you’d been prying into his personal library, an act almost impossible for a 10-year-old. I recall the doomed feeling with which I put away one issue that clearly bore my chocolate-loaded thumbprint on its cover.
At any rate, both Playboy magazine and I were first issued in December, 1953 (the same year the Corvette was born). Playboy’s centerfold was Marilyn Monroe; mine was a neat little innie with symmetrical spokes that still collect lint. Both the magazine and I are 40 years old now--always a handy time to take stock, look back, look ahead. I recently went to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles for the first time and looked forward to meeting Hugh Hefner.
The occasion was part of the annual American Booksellers Assn. convention, an epic publishing bazaar that took place this year in Los Angeles. Playboy’s reason for the party was to note its 40th year of publishing and to introduce its latest book, “The Playboy Book--Forty Years.” I got invited because Playboy’s West Coast editor, a fine gentleman by the name of Steve Randall, is an acquaintance.
I looked forward to the party very much. I got a haircut, rented a white dinner jacket and a car and driver and stocked my Igloo cooler with snacks and canned cocktails so my companion and I could get festive on the way up to the mansion. At the entrance the driver barked out my name to the guardians and, lo, it was on the list.
Once on the grounds, we stopped at the check-in table and got name tags. The woman working the table asked my date if she was a Playmate. My date looked down at her chest, then back at the woman and quipped, “I don’t think so.”
“Pretty cool she thought you were a Playmate, though, huh?” I queried on our way in.
“They say that to every woman, silly.”
Tagged, we walked through a rock tunnel festooned with photographs from the magazine’s four decades, then into the back yard. Emerging from the tunnel we were examined by the guests, then given drinks. I tried to remember how Mr. Hefner looked in those “Playboy After Dark” shows, the way he looked alert but prodigiously casual. I wished I smoked a pipe.
The mansion itself was built in the late 1920s by Arthur Letts Jr., whose father founded the Broadway department store chain. It sits on 5 1/2 acres in Holmby Hills. The house is large and, for the neighborhood, unassuming. The grounds are beautiful, with gardens and pools, an aviary of exotic birds, a large arboretum filled with monkeys, iguanas on the stroll and, most spectacular of all, several albino peacocks and hens that roam the green lawns and fan their stunning white feathers in the breeze.
The human zoo was of interest, too. Digby Diehl, the Playboy book critic from whom I’ve been fortunate to get favorable reviews, panned my white dinner jacket rather pointedly, noting I was the only male on the grounds--besides the albino peacocks, perhaps--wearing such a thing. Unaffected, I cornered Joyce Carol Oates and demanded to know what she thought of Tyson’s chances at the crown if he ever gets out of the slammer. She said she thought he’d champion again.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer bustled about, and I wanted to ask her if she thought of Playboy magazine, but Dr. Ruth is small and quick as a lizard and I couldn’t quite catch her. Kinky Friedman made the rounds, giving out guitar picks. Timothy Leary squatted poolside, looking a skosh spaced out. Playmates wandered about serenely, but every time I got ready to ask one about, oh, say, the weather, my companion’s grip became vice-like.
“I didn’t know you were that strong.”
“Only when I have to be. You’ve got a crush on Joyce Carol Oates, don’t you?”
“Yes. And she knows a ton about boxing!”
Waiting at the bar for my third martini, I saw clearly that this was my last chance for truly sober consideration of the event. I thought back to the social climate in the United States in the early ‘50s, the dulling strictures of the Truman and Eisenhower years that Hugh Hefner blatantly defied with publication of his first magazine. I recalled Hefner saying in interviews that he was worried that photographs of busty, naked women might not go over too well with the American public, which is why he put no date on the cover of his first issue: If it didn’t sell, he could leave it on the stands another month.
I also recalled an anecdote from an interview with Mr. Hefner some 20 years ago, in which he said that one writer sold him an article for that first issue and took his payment in stock, rather than cash. The writer, Hefner had claimed, became a millionaire off his first piece for Playboy.
It seemed clear to me that Hugh Hefner had predicted the weather of the ‘60s and ‘70s more clearly than many had given him credit for. How else to account for a Playboy circulation that had hit 26 million monthly by 1974?
I also couldn’t help but note that history is dialectic--hypothesis leads to antithesis, which leads (hopefully) to synthesis--and that our times are all but hostile to the life forms encouraged by Playboy. Permissiveness, materialism, personal and sexual liberty of the individual are low on most agendas these days, except perhaps for those of homosexual activists. Meanwhile, magazines featuring nude women are back in Dad’s sock drawer or more likely banished from the American household altogether.
When questioned, many men will tell you they read Playboy for the articles and stories, which is not an altogether evasive answer. This is what I tried to convey to Mr. Hefner when we finally met--that I respected him very much for publishing such good writers over the years. I thought of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Norman Mailer and Thomas McGuane and James Baldwin and Nadine Gordimer and John Irving and many more. If photos of pretty, naked women had underwritten such stories, the stories were none the worse for it.
Mr. Hefner smiled and thanked me for thanking him for the stories, and that was about it. A while later as we wandered the grounds we spotted his two young children out on the tennis court, driving around in a miniature Volkswagen Bug. There they were, children in the Playboy Mansion, signs of our odd, contradictory, hard-earned and hard-pressed times.
