Word: hef
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...sense, Playboy was the anti-New Yorker. It was the Chicagoan. Playboy was founded at about the time the Second City was becoming the Third, after Los Angeles, in population and cultural import. But from the first, home-town boy Hef pursued Chicago writers and artists, perhaps because he could hustle them personally. Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht, Silverstein, LeRoy Neiman, and later David Mamet, gave Playboy a Midwestern voice to go with its middle-American notion of pulchritude...
...bylines but to racy films with subtitles; Playboy?s equivalent was the Ribald Classics, translations of naughty tales by Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac. And jazz. Jazz was cool then, Hefner loved it, so he started an annual readers? poll of jazz favorites and, in 1978, a Playboy Jazz Festival. (Sorry, Hef, wrong music...
...context of a lifestyle magazine.? How very true. Playboy wasn?t just about the sex. It was about being accepted by the arbiters of 50s middle-browism. That brow has disappeared. Now there?s a tiny high-brow culture and a vast low- or no-brow one. Playboy and Hef stayed in the center that did not hold...
...What Kinsey studied, Hefner exploited, in a very 50s way. It was a serious decade, and Hef was, is, a serious fellow - serious even about having fun. He always struck me as an Organization Man (as long as it was his organization). His careful conversation and tight smile reminded me of any number of Midwestern businessmen, politicians, anchormen, clergymen. Hefner was raised a Methodist and remained methodical, at heart and at head. In a second A&E special, ?Inside the Playboy Mansion,? he shows off his Holmby Hills estate; it?s a sort of Neverland, with the wildlife preserve...
...Dedini used to draw in his cartoons. The iconic bunny (a rabbit in an ascot) is today as much an anachronism as the New Yorker?s Eustace Tilley (a fop with a monocle). Or as Hefner, in his silk pajamas and red smoking jacket, when billionaires wear T shirts. Hef, with his interchangeable sex partners (two are twins) and his trademark pipe traded in for Diet Pepsi and Viagra, has become what we are all in danger of morphing into as we grow old: parodies of our younger selves...