Word: hefners
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...Hefner?s early bolt of gonadal genius was the gatefold. The center of the magazine kept opening, like the promise of erotic deliverance on a summer night, until the 24-inch Playmate photo was displayed - more than a third of her actual height, and four times the size of a shot in the cheap magazines. Foldouts were a feature of Life as well, but those were typically illustrations of the Stone Age, suitable for schoolroom use. Hefner had in mind a more tactile edification. His Playmate centerfolds, in addition to giving males the opportunity to strengthen their eye-hand coordination...
...first centerfold subject - not yet called a Playmate - was Marilyn Monroe, in the notorious though little-seen calendar nude she had posed for a few years earlier. According to Joe Goldberg?s 1967 book ?Big Bunny: The Inside History of Playboy,? Hefner had bought that photo (with its color separations) and a batch of others for $5,000. For that modest amount he got not only fabulous publicity for his first issue but the next year?s worth of centerfold photos. Only at the end of 1954 did he start assigning ?original art? from such cheesecake shutterbugs as Russ Meyer...
...shame for a young woman but a kind of honor, like being chosen Homecoming Queen. What John Skow wrote of the Playboy Club Bunny - that she was ?half geisha and half double-malted? - applied even more to the Playmate gestalt. Brilliantly, and bit by bit, Hefner had domesticated the nude...
...revolutionary, if that?s what Hefner was, has to take attacks from all sides. He got it from the puritan right and the feminist left, though both made the same point: that Playboy objectifies women. The Playmate, one clergyman fumed in the early years, is ?the symbol par excellence of Playboy sex, for she may be folded when not in use ... the Playboy girl is detachable and disposable.? Benjamin DeMott denounced Hefner in the Jewish-intellectual magazine Commentary: ?In place of the citizen with a vote to cast or a job to do or a book to study...
...Hefner would say his magazine was designed to appeal to the whole man - if the whole man was Hefner. With a zeal that led Paul Krassner to dub him ?the secular Billy Graham,? Hefner promoted the religion of urbanity, or, as Newsweek tagged it, ?Urbunnity.? And apparently, many of his readers enjoyed imagining themselves as the Hefner male: the man who wanted fine wines, chic cars and smart clothes to go with his beautiful women. All were accessories to the good life that Playboy promoted as necessities. Madison Avenue quickly saw that Playboy was the ultimate consumer magazine: the editorial...