Word: playboy
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...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...
...That?s what men said, in a defensive, defiant or ironic voice. The magazine had text too, though it wasn?t likely to be thumb-tacked to a fraternity wall. ?You can?t see the forest for the tease,? Ray Bradbury said on ?Playboy?s 50th Anniversary Party,? a self-celebrating special on A&E. Forget about the naked ladies. Let?s talk about Playboy: The Words...
...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...
...that depends on your definition of shit. In the 60s and 70s, much New Yorker fiction had a sere, affectless style - embodied (or disembodied) by the stories of Donald Barthelme - that spoke to a narrow band of Manhattan intelligentsia. Playboy spread its net to include all forms of fiction, from Styron and Ken Kesey to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. Further, The New Yorker could intimidate readers into accepting its crabby tone, because the magazine knew best; it really was written for a certain kind of New Yorker. Playboy had to sell each story...
...They did so because the prose was a seamless part of the glamour package. Playboy ran an Ian Fleming story in 1960, before Sean Connery and Jack Kennedy made James Bond (and themselves) the most famous man of action and passion - the model for the man who read Playboy, and the man who published...