Word: hefners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Playboy is surely the most robust of these golden-age magazines, its legacy the longest-lasting. Not only did the Bunny Book make a fortune and an empire for its founder and true mascot, Hugh M. Hefner, but it left a smudged thumbprint on American society. That?s because Hefner had more than a business model; he had a Philosophy, which he expounded in his magazine each month for more than a decade. He may have been after something more enlightened than an empire. A republic. Playboy?s Republic...
...past three decades Playboy has faced a raft of problems. The Clubs suffered financial embarrassments, lost their gaming licenses in some venues and are now closed. Playboy Productions never became the alternative movie studio Hefner hoped for; it produces softcore videos for pay cable. The 80s saddled Playboy with the challenge of home video, which made sex with moving bodies available on television. The 90s unleashed the Internet, which made sex accessible, nearly unavoidable, on the computer. Then there are the ?lad books,? including Maxim and FHM, which have taken the Playboy format with one exception - they keep some clothes...
...Hefner, with the help of his business-savvy daughter Christine, faced those dragons and survived. The magazine still sells 3.2 million copies a month; it still makes money, while Penthouse files for bankruptcy. But looking at the 50th anniversary issue, on newsstands now, and looking back at some of its 600 issues, I think of Playboy as I think of myself: a child of the 50s. The magazine?s dreams of smart clothes and fantasy babes are as much a part of that complicated decade as Ike, Marilyn, the H-bomb, the Edsel and Barbie...
...magazine?s roster of contributors was as distinguished as any in English-language journalism. Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, John Updike, Irwin Shaw, William Styron, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and such cartoonists as Dedini, Barsotti, Kliban: they could be the front table at a New Yorker banquet. Skeptics suspected that Hefner got the second-best from the best, or work the New Yorker had rejected, and that Playboy settled for B material from the A team in order to appropriate their literary celebrity. Some folks in publishing had a dismissive term for Playboy fiction: ?shit from names...
...Lenny Bruce called the pre-Hefner girlie magazines ?stroke books? - instruments of onanism, marital aids for those far short of marriageable age and barely on the cusp of puberty. The typical girlie mag was tatty, printed on coarse paper, with only a few pages of runny color; they were the Ace paperbacks of voyeurism. Their meager, TV Guide-size dimensions meant that any model on display in their cramped surroundings had no acuter definition than a woman undressing across the courtyard, behind a screen, in the dark. I suppose that the dingy quality of the girlie pix, like the furtive...