“To be seen putting a hand on his [Hefner’s] shoulder or be spotted in quiet conversation with him carries as much prestige for a status-hungry member as a spanking new Jaguar.”12
The key with the bunny’s head that makes living worthwhile would never have succeeded had the figure been the head of a cat. It would mean the girl might bite or scratch. But a bunny tail pinned above a girl’s behind verifies the promise of something that can be run down without retaliating. The girl herself makes cocktail lights burn brighter when introducing herself: “I’m your bunny for tonight.”
Caveat and don’t run your emptor—she isn’t your bunny: the field is fenced off and her night is not yours. Like the trade of the foldout nude, hers is that of being a paper doll: a third-person person for third-person people who earns between two hundred and three hundred dollars a week in tips. She gets no first-person salary.
Hefner has perceived that the American businessman’s most erotic zone is the skin of his wallet. That the excitement engendered by the proximity of the baby-faced girl waiting upon him derives from the customer’s awareness that the proximity is tax-deductible. He’d run into trouble on his tax report if he tried deducting for a strip-tease act.
The key holder need not be apprehensive that she is going to invite him to sleep with her. Floor detectives (not wearing bunny tails) turn in any waitress who extends her relationship, on or off the premises, beyond serving him a view of her breasts with the shish kebab. Hefner knows that our carte blanche bourgeois is content with shish kebab.
The basic appeal of Playboy ideology, whether conveyed by the playmate or the bunny tail is not sexuality, but simply that one is getting something for nothing.
A philosophy leaving these young women abandoned in the Land-of-Something-for-Nothing—a weightless nation suspended between earth and sky wherein they subsist by living on tips, appear well dressed, and are carefully taught how to walk self-consciously. And each, while waiting in ultimate hope of a carte blanche boy with whom to make the American dream come true, gets her beauty work done free.
But the rainbow above the split-level home is of paper. As she knows when hubby gives her a carte blanche card all her own to show he truly loves her. As she senses that he is an expressway gypsy who cannot feel at home except when alone in his car. As she herself realizes that her country is her car. What was that the gravity-zero girl assured me of in the Woo Grotto—“I can’t get foot on the ground either way”? He wanted a girl who was a third-person person and she wanted a man who was a third-person man and they both got what they wanted—where’s the beef?
So live on in midair, pressureless baby. All you need to learn now is how to be weightless.
To the personal history, the social philosophy, the personality at play and the personality at work ascribed to Hugh Hefner by daily and weekly press, financial journals, and the retarded Kilgallens of our gossip columns, psychologists rented by evening or day or flunkies from Hollywood Alley going anxiously in and coming out loaded with goodies, the present journalist can add nothing except that a plate of last week’s spinach has greater value than the total coverage to date on Playboy now stacked from basement to roof.
The coverage has been incredibly docile. It has all been upon an awestruck assumption that the editor and publisher of Playboy is a phenom, something that just happened, like a summer lightning bolt or Kim Novak.
Yet the diary that our host began in the third person in high school, his current preference in Scotch, attitudes toward women and recollections of teachers, his early ambition as a department-store clerk, and his subsequent dismissal from Esquire, what he said by long distance to Tony Curtis and what Tony said by long distance to him, whether his divorce was amicable or hostile, exactly what does it mean that he slides down a fireman’s pole from his bedroom to his swimming pool? Why should his convertible be cream-colored rather than mauve? Was it all luck or did chance play a part? Will success spoil Hef Pash or leave him unspoiled? And if I didn’t have an iron inside I’d purely spew.
Because all this has no more relevance than has the history of any other half-finished postgraduate product of no particular gift, no particular charm and less promise, nothing even remotely approaching wit and whose highest hope is to see Tony Curtis playing himself. Hefner is no more a phenom in heart, spirit, or mind than was Mr. Peepers, Wally Cox’s representation of the totally unprepossessing man.
Countless Hefner-Peepers have come and gone, but this particular Peepers-Hefner materializes at his mirror at the precise point upon which the American middle class attains such a moral and economic self-content that its sense of relationship to the rest of the world is severed in a torpor akin to funk. It vegetates in a hothouse made of reflecting windows, a chamber of mirages so self-sufficing that it mistakes its own strange growths for the reflected image of mankind.
The novelist James Baldwin depicts this blinded state (of what he terms “The Well-Meaning Square”) in one bitter glimpse: “To be a Negro in this country is really never to be looked at. What white people see when they look at you is not visible. What they do see when they do look at you is . . . all the agony, and pain, and the danger, and the passion, and the torment, sin, death and hell of which everyone in this country is terrified.”
Although Baldwin, a professional Negro, excludes any aspect of human anguish not endured primarily by Negroes, his perceptions remain of value. Because once Baldwin’s challenge is extended to include all those multitudes who live in America while sharing its horrors but not its hopes, all those whose whole lives are spent like expatriates who never left town, his phrase “If you don’t know my name you don’t know your own,” gains significance: if you don’t know your own you can’t know your own country’s name.
The American bourgeois lives in a dream world wherein he sees the representation of himself pictured in Time, film, and so on, as his actual self. Then when people pitch tomatoes at Eisenhower it seems they are throwing at him; he is hurt whether he’s hit or not.
The colossal self-deception of naming a throng of armed pyschotics out of the bars of Miami “Cuban counterrevolutionaries,” and shipping the bums into the MG fire of people quite as determined to conduct their own affairs on their own soil as we are upon ours, again leaves the middle-class American thinking he is being attacked.
Action so divorced from other people’s condition can derive only from a class whose affluence has formed into a jelly-like mass of complacency quivering with injured feelings. And is comparable to the stupefied state of the French bourgeois toward the close of the past century.
Hefner has sensed that the middle-class American he is pitching to is a frightened race more at ease with the appearance of passion than with passion itself.
A local executive recently attempted to avenge his wife’s promiscuity by offering his checkbook and pen to a friend, an attractive but unattached woman. Not to purchase the actual privilege of her bed, but for the more degrading purpose of buying the reputation of having shared it. He was willing to pay her merely for cooperation in creating an impression that he had betrayed his wife. Thus at a single stroke to redeem honor and exculpate guilt.
This is a bourgeois product who really prefers going to bed nights to staying up to play. Yet who fears he may become dated just as business takes a fresh upturn. So goes on the nod below the lights about the same time that his woman friend takes an upturn.
The PR image of an ideal Playboy is of a college-educated bachelor of twenty-eight from a suburban background. What the PR department doesn’t emphasize is that its ideal is attracted to the take-all-of-me nude because he doesn’t have to do anything about her. Since he cannot identify himself with a living woman without anxiety, identifying himself with one who lends him a sense of relief is a real bargain.
This deep-set fear of the act of love propelling him pellmell away from desire may derive from a father’s lifelong fear of economic disaster. Which is only to say that fear is pervasive.
Pe
rvading the American sanctuary in which the child is safe from beetles and sleet and such small sudden explosions as that of a match scratched on a rough surface, he comes to young manhood with a dependence upon mechanical lighters.
Until he is at last housed independently where there are no sudden flares either outward or inward, having gained the immunity afforded by a checkbook with his own name on it in gilt and a single emotion working toward women: “If you’ll let me stay a little boy I’ll let you stay a little girl.”
Yet he stays in good shape physically.
This headlong flight from living, toward make-believing that one is alive, has its fringe benefits, most of which are picked up by psychoanalysts. They know that a patient can be schooled so well against exposing himself to others that a marriage may be eventually arranged with another person just as self-contained. This can work out well for both parties so long as neither strikes a match.
Marking a progress over dreams of our hero’s bachelorhood, where he would find himself embracing a Negro girl and waken already flying to the phone to have his afternoon appointment moved to the forenoon. When life closes in, it closes in so fast one barely has time to doublelock the door. While the analyst has to rearrange his own appointment with his analyst, as he has been having a recurrent dream of finding himself in amen’s washroom in Mexico City with the strange knowledge upon him that the sign on the door reads Señoras. That’s how it goes in analysis, Men.
That’s how it really goes.
Kedzie Avenue men were divided from Kedzie Avenue boys on the basis of who wore long pants and who wore shorties. Though half a head taller than any other kid on the block, I was condemned to an everlasting six-foot childhood.
My mother was convinced that, since her brothers had not worn long pants till they were sixteen, her son had to wait two more years. There was no use complaining, “Times have changed, Ma.” I had to play junior to kids two grades behind me. In my old age men half my age would still be telling me, “Run along home and come back when your face clears up.” I was doomed to old age in shorties.
In John’s pool parlor the “No Minors Permitted” legend meant that short-pantsers could stand by, but had to step back when a long-pantser was lining up his cue. It was to here that the elders of the Kedzie Avenue Arrows retired as soon as classes let out at three o’clock. I was eld as any, yet was ungraded. I had to keep out of the way of kids younger than myself. I was a goof.
I ungoofed by buying a pair of longies with money I’d earned myself, and hanging them in the back of the joint.
I changed, in John’s washroom, into longies, selected a cue on which I’d set my heart months before, broke the triangle, and saw the fourteen ball scoot into the corner pocket. When I notched the point up on the wire overhead, with the tip of my cue, I was a man at last.
After that, all I had to do was keep my head when all about me were losing theirs and blaming it on me. And send away for a pair of dumbbells offered by Charles Atlas in Ring Magazine with the guarantee “You Can Have Muscles Like Mine in 60 Days.”
Maybe it wasn’t as easy as all that. Even Kedzie Avenue pool players who could spot you five points and still beat you had to solve the problem of what to do about girls.
But it was easier than now, when the boy who once sent for dumbbells can’t make it until he gets financing for a sports car.
I once knew a Kedzie Avenue girl who wanted to get to be a swell, so I took her to where swells used to hang, at Guyon’s Paradise Ballroom, and she thought she’d made it for certain.
To be perfectly frank I thought she had too.
Now it’s easier for a girl to go to the places where swells go today—and tougher too. A girl with the looks and the figure qualifying her for a Playmateship or a degree in bunny-tailing need now have only the figure and the looks to be a swell herself.
The tough part is that she’s only permitted entrée, through the door that opens without a touch, on the condition that she does not involve her key-holder companion emotionally. She must understand that sex is for kicks only. When it’s done, she is not to put in one of these oldfashioned claims such as “What are we going to do about us?”
There is no us to it, honey. If you want an us thing, go back to Guyon’s Paradise. An executive who would risk his emotions is as old-fashioned now as the man who would risk his life savings in starting a new business. You operate on other people’s emotions as you operate on other people’s money. Business is Business, and love is Business too.
‘“Bachelor Hefner . . . is no detached artificer,” I read on, “surveying the plebeians at their games. A ‘true-believer,’ the host boyishly bunny-hops from pool to bar to buffet table, reforming laggards by personal example.”13
Does the energy behind this gigantic intellect never flag? I marveled. How ever does he do it? Plays all night, changes his shirt, and then bunnyhops boyishly to the job of expanding a sixteen-million-dollar empire into a sixteen-million-and-twelve-fifty one—oh, the sheer romance of it all! A saga of American business at long last! Nothing like this has happened in America since the New York police were called out to control crowds trying to buy a forty-nine-cent fountain pen for seventeen dollars because it could write under water.
I picked up another journal, and read, “An Impolite Interview with Hugh Hefner.”14
Q. “As the publisher of Playboy Magazine, what would you say is your purpose?”
A. “We edit Playboy to please, entertain and inform a literate, urban, male audience. We try to edit the magazine with honesty, insight, taste and integrity, for we very much believe in what we are doing and enjoy it. Now if you set out to edit, with honesty, any magazine for adult males, you aren’t going to come up with McCall’s or the Reader’s Digest.
“If you begin listing the subjects of special interest to a male readership, you’ve got to come up with beautiful women and a rather broadminded attitude on sex fairly high on your list, or you’re figuring the list upside down. As an editorially honest book, Playboy reflects the sex attitudes of its readership—and these attitudes shock a few people for whom sex has become something either sacred or obscene.
“Playboy, of course, is not really a very sexy or shocking magazine, and the fact that some few people consider it so is a sad commentary on the sexual mores of a portion of our population. Unhappily, this rather limited segment has been often the most vocal, and it is their view of life that we find most often depicted in the family magazines, on TV and radio and, until quite recently, in most books and movies. It is really a castrated, female view of life—one example out of many of the growing womanization of America.
“But we don’t ever expect a specialized magazine like Playboy to appeal to everyone—if it did, it would no longer be especially urban or male in viewpoint—and we don’t worry about those who don’t dig us (no one is forced to buy the magazine—it costs 60¢ to get your hands on a copy) as long as they don’t attempt to stop others from enjoying it who do understand and approve.
“Of course, it is the nature of the beast to find the prude and the bigot most anxious to force his or her opinion of what is right on the rest of us. They often seem to have nothing better to do with themselves than worry about the affairs of their neighbors. So occasionally, more often in the past and only rarely now, a small group of local citizens, a P.T.A., a police chief, a district attorney with political aspirations, puts on the mantle of the censor in hia community and starts banning books, magazines and movies.
“Whenever Playboy is involved in such attempted extralegal censorship, we take the matter into court; and whenever this is necessary, we win. Playboy has never been adjudged objectionable by any court anywhere in the U.S. and is never apt to be.”
Hefner has also perceived that he is selling to a class, outwardly self-content but betrayed by inner fright, that is beating a blind retreat upon itself, declining even those risks by which it might save itself. Thus more at ease with a depiction of passion than with passion itself, i
t wishes to look longer upon pictures of passion, hear more songs about passion, and read more comments upon passion—anything to avoid feeling passion.
The businessman who keeps a mistress for prestige’s sake rather than desire’s may spend fifty dollars for a key as a prop to a personality he feels is unfinished. The spiritual void in which he encloses himself may be so lacking in person-to-person feeling that, in order to feel he is living at all, he has to feel that whatever it is he is getting, it’s costing him less than it’s worth.
Playboy is often reported to be lapping the field of men’s magazines: Cavalcade, Duke, Escapade, Gent, Gentleman’s, Male, Mr., Nugget, Rogue, Sir, Swank, and Stud (assuming there must be one to cover ridgelings and geldings alike)—but in reality Playboy is running its own racecourse with no other entry in the field.
Because while others are peddling material as close to blue as will get through the mails, Playboy, behind its foldout nude, is applying department-store technology to the most basic human relationship.
“Ever since I gave my girl a duplicate key to my apartment,” another bemused heart asks The Adviser, “she has been gradually killing me with kindness . . . she has never mentioned the subject of marriage, although it is implied in her every action. She is a beautiful, intelligent, passionate girl and highly sensitive. What can I do to curtail her activities in my behalf and still not do anything to hurt her?”
“Hire a houseman who pre-empts the duties your girl is presently undertaking,” is Playboy’s advice; “you can explain it to her as a thoughtful move on your part to take mean tasks off her hands for more uplifting pursuits.” The Adviser grows stern: “Don’t ever again give anyone but a domestic worker a duplicate of your key to your digs. For when you do, as you may already suspect, you sacrifice the freedom of bachelorhood without gaining the benefits of connubiality. And things can only get stickier, more marital, as time goes on.”
Algren at Sea Page 29