Word: playboy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hefner has also experienced some commercial failures, including Show Business Illustrated, which folded after nine issues with an estimated loss of $2,000,000, and Trump, a Mad-like humor magazine. On the other hand, the newly formed Playboy Press is thriving; last year, it sold $1,000,000 worth of books, most of them containing reprints from the magazine. At present, Playboy's staff is moving into larger quarters in Chicago's venerable Palmolive Building, leased for 63 years for $2,700,000. Thanks to eager press-agents, the building's famed beacon, whose beam can be seen...
...Revelation. "The whole thing," says London Observer Columnist Katharine Whitehorn, "is a midwestern Methodist's vision of sin." She is absolutely right. Hefner's parents, Glenn and Grace, had been childhood sweethearts in Nebraska before they married and moved to Chicago. Glenn, an accountant who is now treasurer of Playboy, was and is a regular Methodist churchgoer; so is Grace. In his early years, Hefner was the kid across the aisle in school who was always scribbling sketches. He liked to write up the doings of local kids for a neighborhood newspaper, and drew 70 cartoon strips about ornery Western...
...outdoors, so he shrewdly decided to take up where Esquire had left off in catering to indoor tastes. Hefner first wanted to call his magazine Stag Party, but a sheet with a similar name protested. Then Eldon Sellers, now an executive vice president with the company, suggested Playboy...
From then on, he aimed Playboy straight at the libido. Since sex is part of the whole man, he reasoned, why not devote part of a whole magazine to it? "Would you put together a human being that is just a heart and toenails?" he asks. So he put together a magazine that was largely bosom and thigh and not especially distinguishable from other girlie slicks. But he added more substantial content as he went along; today's Playboy is a well-stuffed product, bulging with intellectual ambitions and self-confidence. It even includes some tips from John Paul Getty...
...Playboy was spicy but hardly shocking ?long-forgotten efforts by John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Somerset Maugham, Robert Ruark. Playboy also dipped into the ribald classics; despite constant mining, the Boccaccio and De Maupassant vein is still running strong. In the early days, name writers shunned Playboy. Today, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, Herbert Gold, Ray Bradbury and Ken Purdy regularly provide respectable material. This upgrading of fiction is largely due to Auguste Comte Spectorsky,* 56, who was hired from NBC by Hefner to bring some New York know-how and sophistication (a favorite Playboy word) to the magazine...