Part 4
THE BUSINESS OF LIFE
Dreams and the World
Here then was a young fellow (twenty-seven years old!) with an idea, a dream, an impossible dream, inculcated in him, defining him, eating him alive, with nothing else to do but just to go do it, to go make it happen. Also, and this is important, he had no money with which to do it. (He bleared his eyes at jobs that mattered not at all—promotional copywriting! please!—that drove him mad, while he dreamed dreams of elsewhere.) So he borrowed against his furniture, for God’s sakes! That gave him six hundred bucks, to begin with. He culled a few grand more from friends, from acquaintances, from his own folks (nice and most puzzled folks who could not bear to think of what their boy was about to do), by way of goodwill, of sheer force of will, because his eyes burned with this dream. People had to believe, had no other choice if they paid attention, and those that did became rich. (He was always one to share his bounty.) “If a guy didn’t dream impossible dreams, life would hardly be worth living,” he depicted himself declaring in his private cartoon-paneled autobiography, illustrating the moment of Playboy’s birth (the personal cartooning did not end after high school, you see). Then he had his cartoon self add, “Especially because—sometimes—even the most impossible ones come true!”
And at that moment, he had no idea of what was truly to come.
Follow the Brightest Light You See in the Dark
When I was a boy growing up on the far West Side of Chicago, the beacon from the tallest skyscraper on Lake Shore Drive used to sweep across the sky at night. There was something mysterious and mystical about that beacon. It represented a world of sophistication and adventure that I could only dream about. That beacon was like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. The connections between F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and my own young dreams were powerful ones. I wanted to live in that world and chronicle it as Fitzgerald had done the roaring twenties.
And of course that’s exactly what I did. Later I even acquired the skyscraper with the beacon. It became the Playboy Building. And that beacon? It became the Bunny Beacon.
His would be a true-blue American story—a great one as well, Horatio Alger style (with sex, but still…)—because he quested, because he risked, because his gut told him secrets and he listened to his gut, as all humans should but all too rarely do. He was a straight arrow, born of kindly and repressed parentage, Glenn and Grace Hefner, good Methodists, simple folk and proud of it, thank you, who asked for little, who made a boy who asked for a little more. (Lights in the sky!)
The Calling
I came to a moment in time in which I realized that I did not simply want to become my parents. I did not want to simply become what someone else expected me to be. I wanted to march to a different drummer. Each of us in our own way has to find some reasonable accommodation to what other people expect of us. But first and foremost, if you don’t pursue your own dreams and become the person you want to be, it’s over in much too short a time.
And so, married too soon, bogged down, boggled with his lot, he rolled up his sleeves, sat down at a card table, stared at his L. C. Smith typewriter, and started spinning a yarn, a concoction of bluster and hope that would become pure fortune. He had wanted to call his magazine Stag Party, with a logo that featured an antlered buck swilling a cocktail, which would have been most unfortunate. More fortunately a magazine called Stag sent him a cease-and-desist order (no antlers allowed), and then he reconsidered and found his rabbit, the ever thumping, ever procreating playboy of the animal kingdom. What would come of it, besides the bestselling men’s magazine in the history of the world, in no particular order: nightclubs and hotels and casinos and resorts and women dressed as bunnies and women dressed not at all and various publications and a book imprint and merchandise bearing rabbit heads and television programs and movie productions and cable channels and video marketing and a record label and video games and a humming Website and Mansions, but certainly, and most important of all, good life, always good life, no matter what.
And so he also said: “Society may urge you to live your life for somebody else. But enlightened self-interest is for the good of everybody. If you don’t care about yourself, you’re going to find it difficult to care for other people. H. L. Mencken was the one who said: ‘A puritan is somebody who is very upset because someone, somewhere, is having a good time.’”
The Wisdom of the White Lie
I had two different letterheads—one for Stag Party and the other for my imaginary distributing company called Nationwide News Company. When I wrote a letter on the magazine’s stationery, I was the editor, publisher, or promotion, advertising, or circulation director as circumstances dictated. When I was writing to newsdealers, I was the general manager or president of Nationwide News Company. I was the entire staff of both. That’s all there was—just me, my typewriter, and that card table.
“I wanted a job that I could love,” he said. So he created one for himself, one that nobody else could ever have. He had no dough, no real experience at what he would need to do. He just let his head rumble, when he wasn’t knocking it against walls: “Sometimes I would find myself in a crowded elevator or a building lobby, and I would be overwhelmed and demoralized by the notion that I was the only one who was still unplugged and disconnected.” He would not be the first or the last one to feel such demoralization. And yet he had nothing to lose by sticking his long neck out. So he did.
If You Don’t Reach for the Sky, You’ll Never Leave the Ground Floor
You have to calculate the odds before taking risks. But if you don’t take chances on the things you really want, then you’ll never know. Rational risk is part of what life is all about. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?
As a boy, he let a girl turn him inside out. As a man, he turned himself inside out. Girls, this time, would come later. “When you talk about self-reinvention,” he said, “the extent to which I have done it and chronicled it—done it at a conscious level—is probably the most unique and remarkable thing about my life.” He decided he was not the guy living the life he was living—married, working for people he did not want to work for, bottled up, lost as lost gets—and incited a personal rebellion. He reinvented himself, and soon enough he got the girl and the girl and the girl and the girl, et cetera.
Did we say that he got the girl?
Et cetera.
The Importance of Self-Reinvention
I’m a dreamer, a crusader who wanted to change the world. There are so many things in life that force you into a box and force you to conform to values handed down by others. When you are very young, both society and family define you. There should be a time when you begin to define yourself for yourself.
* * *
Hef’s Five Lucky Breaks
When a fellow knows that he is up to something, he might well write himself an annual letter explaining exactly what had happened during said year, for the sake of history. Here is the awestruck letter Hugh M. Hefner wrote to himself upon finishing the year in which he made a new magazine for himself, a magazine called Playboy.
January 1954
What do you say when a dream comes true? What words do you use? How can a guy possibly express a thing like this?
I own a magazine—a magazine of my very own. Or more precisely, I am president of, and hold a majority of the stock in, a corporation that owns a magazine. Of course, we’ve very little money in the bank and the road ahead will be a rough one, but nevertheless, the dream has become a reality—and whether we succeed or fail in the months and years ahead, I’m getting my chance to try.
Only a series of very lucky breaks has made this fantastic thing possible. If I believed in Fate, I’d think there was some sort of predestination in it. Certainly much of my life, and especially the last three or four years, has been a preparation for this. For there is nothing on earth I would rather be doing than editing and publishing this magazine called P
layboy…
Lucky break #1. We needed a gimmick. Something special for the first issue to talk about in my promotion letter to newsdealers and attract attention to the magazine from the very start. We got a gimmick—the biggest one of the decade. The nude calendar of Marilyn Monroe had received unprecedented publicity all over the country, yet no magazine had published it calendar-size or in color. Life had reproduced one of the two poses in an inch-high two-color picture, and that was that. The calendar company that owned the better of the two shots (the one Life hadn’t reproduced) was located in a Chicago suburb. I walked in there cold and came out with permission to reproduce the picture in full color for $500—and they threw in the color separations on the deal, which are worth around $400 by themselves. We’ll never know how many thousands of dollars that picture was worth to us. It immediately classed us as big-time with the newsdealers and probably with our readers too.
Lucky break #2. With orders for 70,000 copies in our pocket, Rochelle Printing agreed to print the magazine for a half down at the time of shipment and 90 days credit on the second half. On our monthly schedule, this was eventually worth more than ten grand in credit to us. Sax at Rochelle was willing to go along because he’d just purchased a new press and needed work for it. More special timing.
Lucky break #3. Empire News took over our distribution and gave us more financial security. We got an especially good deal from them because we already had the 70,000 orders.
Lucky break #4. This one concerns Central Photo Engraving and it’s a first-rate example of how we kept ? falling in, and coming out smelling like roses. I didn’t have any contacts in the engraving field, so Johnny Mastro of Esquire suggested three good houses and El went and talked to them. The first two offered good unit rates and credit. The third Johnny suggested was Central Typesetting, a big outfit that specializes in both type and engravings. When I looked up the address in the Yellow Book, I got “Central Photo Engraving” by mistake and had El go there. The place we picked by mistake gave us six months of engravings as an investment and tossed in $600 in cash.
Lucky break #5. This one is the topper. I think the name of a magazine is extremely important, because it can greatly aid or limit a publication’s growth. I further feel that Playboy is the perfect title for our magazine and what we hope it will become—but we had to have the title forced on us. We were almost to press with the first issue and we were using the title “Stag Party.” With the aid of hindsight, I can say with certainty that it would have been an extremely limiting name—particularly considering how well the magazine has been accepted as more than a girlie book. It took a threatening letter just before print time from the lawyers of Stag magazine to make us abandon “Stag Party”—thoug we’d all had reservations about that title for some weeks. Over a weekend we selected Playboy and the terrific rabbit symbol. I often think—what if Stag hadn’t threatened us until after we’d published an issue or two under the “Stag Party” logo. Like I said, we’ve been lucky.
* * *
allow Yourself to Feel Successful, and You Will Be
It’s all relative. I thought I was hugely successful in the first year of the magazine because I managed to get enough money to publish the second issue and the third. Then the letters started coming in from people applauding the concept of the magazine when it was still being put together with very little money. But what I couldn’t possibly have imagined were the years that followed and what an empire it would become.
I felt as if I’d been born for it. I felt like Clark Kent going into that phone booth and then bursting out with that big S on his chest. When you accept that feeling, then you can believe a man can fly.
Through the Eyes of the Master: What to Look for When Looking at a Nude Photograph
It depends very much what you’re looking for. First and foremost, you look at the face. Is she beautiful in the photo? Doesn’t matter how nicely posed the rest of it is. If the face is good, then it’s a matter of body attractiveness. One assumes before you’re shooting a centerfold that she’s a beautiful girl, but has the camera captured that? Throughout most of Playboy’s history, the centerfolds were shot with an 8 x10 camera, which has a slow shutter speed, making it difficult to get spontaneity.
The best poses are the ones that don’t look too stiff, but should be able to make you stiff. That’s about as good a credo as I can share.
Bad Times Remind You to Enjoy the Good Times
So many things can get you down. Then you start feeling sorry for yourself. But the reality is, if you wake up in the morning and you’re alive and healthy and feel good about it, you’re already far ahead of the game.
I have managed to remain optimistic during troubled times—not simply in terms of romance, but in terms of business and everything else—by the recognition that you can tell how good things are only by comparing them with when they weren’t so good.
Young Dreams Will Age Well Along with You
You can give up and settle for less if that’s what you want to do. What we call maturity, in many cases, is just compromise.
For me, my eternal optimism has seen me through. Much of it has to do with staying connected to the dreams of childhood, staying in touch with the boy I once was, and loving that boy and his dreams. It makes everything all the more satisfying. I could be living exactly the same life and be getting a lot less satisfaction out of it if I wasn’t really still in touch with the innocent boy dreaming the dream.
He decided that he would forever live a boy’s life, a boy’s dream, so as to never become jaded or cynical. He would never allow himself to feel overly sophisticated. “I probably am today and will always remain a little bit of the youngster,” he said long ago and evermore. “This is something that is too soon dead in most all of us, and I’m doing my best to keep it alive in me.” He now wanders his large property and is truly touched by little things that remind him of his boyhood backyard—ants and butterflies and crickets, backyard stuff. Et cetera. And then he gets to go upstairs to his bedroom and see naked women waiting for him. He gets to see all the things his inner boy had dreamt of.
Try living such a life, and make millions while doing so, and see if the world doesn’t come after you, looking for some retribution. It does, will, and certainly did. He would become among the most censored men in history—for daring to throw sex into sunlight, for pulling it out of shadows and alleys; a simple and revolutionary (and maybe healthy?) notion, since he was the first one to think of it, only to be persecuted for doing so forthrightly, on nice paper stock, accompanied by good literature and fine illustrations and urbane life advice. He was considered to be trouble, in a Leave It to Beaver era, and eras beyond. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI started a file on him early on. Nixon later placed him on his enemies list. Meanwhile, the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, the state of New York, the state of New Jersey, all of Great Britain—at one point or another, they all came after him to levy punishments of one kind or another, as it was clear that he threatened a puritanical morality that creaked, was on its last legs, especially as compromised Bible-thumpers of the religious right kept getting caught in bed with compromised ladies.
In the mid-eighties, Ronald Reagan’s commission headed by Edwin Meese successfully managed to have his magazine banned from convenience stores. That encumbrance, as with all others before it, dissolved in short order, went away, not that the setback wasn’t felt; he experienced a minor stroke in March 1985. There were female problems in the same time frame as well, with an obstreperous Special Lady. Then he got back up and reconfigured his world. “I put down the luggage of my life,” he said. “I quit burning my candle at both ends and started savoring every day.”
and When All Is Seemingly Lost…
You just have to rise again. You have to keep getting up.
Friendships Last for a Reason
Making a friend for life is more a matter of what kind of a friend you are. You certainly in most cases can tell—you just connect on every level, es
pecially in terms of shared interests and sensibilities.
But particularly when it involves the opposite sex, everything is not always out on the table, and you’re never really sure. You may remain a friend for life, but platonic friendships tend to last longer than romantic connections.
He has often referred to those who are endlessly welcome at his home as the closely knit Family of Friends, aka The Gang. Their names are kept on the Gate List, permitting them access to the Master’s Shangri-la at any time, although lately they mostly come when expected. (They announce themselves to a speaker embedded in a boulder at the main gate—the Talking Rock!—and security staff then triggers the lowering of the drawbridge.) In the old days, there would usually be a friend or several sleeping over—Tony Curtis, Shel Silverstein, the historian Max Lerner, et cetera—living in the house, enjoying semipermanent residence, sometimes recovering from addictions (or broken loves), taking meals, taking lovers, playing games all night with him, in case he felt the need.
Hef's Little Black Book Page 6