The Playboy Mystique

most all of my dreams. I personally would not want to go down in history as who happening On the night of March, two major social movements in America collided on live television. It wasn't on the news, It was on a late night talk show. But it's nineteen seventy. Almost everyone on stage whereas bell bottomed trousers and some shade of brown or orange, the set is adorned with

red upholstered chairs and walls. Dick Cavitt, the sandy haired host with bushy sideburns, announces his final two guests of the evening. There are a lot of women in this country who feel like they're being pushed around, and they become very vocal. They call themselves the Women's Liberation movement, and we have two representatives in that movement here tonight. There, Cavot invites Susan Brown Miller and Sally Kimpton out on stage.

The two prominent feminists sit down just a few feet from the show's previous guest, another man with sideburns, one who is smoking his trademark pipe and grinning like a cheshire cat. That man is Hugh Hefner or hef as Cavit, and most of America calls him. The founder of Playboy magazine. Is the walking, talking embodiment of the sexual revolution, or at least the red blooded male side of it. Cabot sets things off when he asked brown Miller a pointed question,

what do you think men are doing wrong? They oppress us as women, they won't let us be and Hugh Hefner is my enemy? Who really set you up today? I'm more in sympathy than perhaps you know. The girls realized with I'm sorry, Then the ladies realize I am used. Girls referring to women of roll agents should suddenly the man responsible for dressing young women up as playboy bunnies and his clubs is getting dressed down on national television by a woman. It's the kind of confrontation that happens

all the time on talk shows today. But Cabot's audience doesn't know what to make of it, and Brown Miller is just getting warmed up. Don't know what to do. You make them look like animals. Yes, women aren't buddies, they're not rabbits, they're human beings. It's Hefner now, who resembles an animal one frozen in the headlights, went oncoming train and then the knockout blow the day that you are willing to come out here with a cotton tail attached to your rear end. Heffner is visibly flustered by

the assault and sits back in his chair. He pulls out a match and lights his pipe. The audience revels in the drama and his discomfort, And there were some feminists in the audience who sort of rushed the stage during the broadcast, and Dick Cavitt had to sort of, you know, restore order. This is Heffner biographer Stephen Watts. People were brought in to calm everybody down. Then it was quite the big deal. Cabot would later apologize for

the charged encounter to Heffner. This turned into a roast Haffner evening, I have a sorry today on the Thread Hugh Heffner, Playboy icon enemy. This is the Thread a podcast from Aussie media where we explore the interconnecting lives and events of history. I'm Sean braswell. This season we pull the thread on the feminist leader Gloria Steinham. One of the turning points in Steinham's career, as we heard an episode one, was her assignment as a young reporter

to go undercover as a Playboy Bunny. The experience opened her eyes to the realization that all women could be considered playboy bunnies. The man behind the Playboy Club and its bunnies was another legendary magazine founder and a very different sort of American icon, Hugh Heffner. In this episode, we trace Steinham's story back to the exclusive universe that Hefner created, to its early days, and to the Hollywood legend who inadvertently helped Heffner launch Playboy in the first place.

Hugh Heffner's death last year marked the end of an era. Hugh Heffner, the publisher of Playboy, has died at the age of ninety one, and Hugh there was a Playboy till the very end, borrowing lavish parties well into his eighties. Heffner's extravagant lifestyle and outspoken views on sex were controversial while he is alive, and no less so after his death. Hefner considered himself to be a rebel an activist and

to progress it. What Heffner was was a man on a mission to alter society's conservative views on sex, politics and social equality. Many had a far different conception of Heffner by the end of his life. One New York Times calumnist wrote after his death that the Playboy founder was a lecherous, low brow Peter Payne ice cream for breakfast, pajamas all day while bodyguards shoot male celebrities away from

his paid harem. Or, as Gloria Steinham puts it, if I had made him up and put him in a novel, I would be hung from the highest tree because he was such a parody of himself. He was pathetic. Hugh Heffner changed the world, but the world also changed on Hugh Hefner. Heffner saw himself at the vanguard of the sexual revolution occurring in the mid twentieth century, not only

as a participant but also a catalyst Stephen Watts. Again, Heffner was convinced, I think, probably with some justification, that he had played a very large role in the sexual revolution and in sort of loosening the sexual mores and values of American society. And he grew more bitter as the years went by when others did not recognize his handiwork. This is Russell Miller, a journalist and author of Bunny,

The Real Story of Playboy. He did have a strong sense of resentment that he wasn't being sufficiently lauded for what he'd done. That he eventually said that it was Playboy that liberated America, but which part of America. Playboy was no different from any other pop culture fixture of the nineteen fifties and sixties. It reinforced the primacy of men in American society. Hefner was selling something that advertisers

were willing to support. Gloria Steinham again, he would never publish of an article or a story, even a fictional story, in which women want quote unquote, Heffner said, we think it's a man's world, or should be. And yet he was surprised when his relationship with America's growing women's movement became contentious. And I think he was genuinely stunned in the late sixties and early seventies when modern feminists begin to paint him as being an oppressor, an oppressor of

women uh. And Heffner frankly didn't quite know what to make of this. He had always sort of viewed himself as liberating uh women as well as men for sexual experience. Heffner, to his dismay, found himself the whipping boy of the women's movement, and not just on the Dick Cabot Show. Well, I think he served Hefner as a kind of foil for the feminist revolution in that I think because of the magazine and the images and his personal prominence, ah, he became some one who was a very convenient and

easy target as a kind of boogeyman. Hefner fought back. Not long after the encounter on the Dick Cabott Show. Hefner responded by taking the war to the pages of Playboy. He assigned an article to a male reporter to write about the women's movement, and uh when it came in and it was at all accurate, he wrote a memo, which then one of the women there leaked out. Hefner spelled out in the memo the kind of story he

was looking for. These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. Gloria Steinhum, who first exposed the Playboy clubs as an undercover reporter, when after Heffner again she released the leak memo to the media. She hoped it would prompt a backlash and show Heffner's true colors. The memo fell on deaf ears even laughter. Hefner and his feminist critics were not in fact total enemies. They had more

in common than either cared to admit. They're on the same side when it came to big issues like free speech, civil rights, and reproductive freedom. Playboy was the first major U S magazine to advocate for the right to legal abortions on demand. It published letters from women describing the emotional and physical trauma they had experienced from seeking illegal abortions, but Hefner remained opposed to the women he called militant feminists for a long time. So feminism I think was

something that was a sore point with Hefner. I think in the seventies and eighties and nineties, says he got older. Um, I think he reconciled himself to this a lot more, and I think by the end of his life he considered himself to be a feminist. Most today would not think of Hefner as a feminist. His record is a bit complicated, says his biographer Stephen Watts. Honest, I think you Hefner's impact on on women in modern America. It's

something of a mixed record. On the one hand, Hefner supported feminism in terms of equality before the law says what. On the other hand, he made no effort to conceal how he made women into sex objects. But actually I talked to Hefner about this, because he said, of course women are sexual objects for men in the same way that men are sexual objects for women. He said, The problem is is if you only objectify women, if you only see them as sex objects, and that's the rub.

And I think that's the rub for Playboy too. How did Heffner wind up the enemy of so many women? Up next, we go back to the early days of Playboy, when Hefner transformed his controversial magazine into a global empire and transformed himself in the process. Playboy Magazine was an instant success when it launched in nineteen fifty three. The very fierce issue of the magazine was was very popular and it sold out pretty quickly. From what I gather, it was one of the most successful launches of a

magazine in modern American history. The nineteen fifties were a time of abundance in America and the currents of the sexual revolution were just beginning to stir. I think Hefner and in his notion of Playboy, really fell into the culture at precisely the time when the culture was sort of ready to receive it. So right guy, right idea of right time. The majority of the magazine's readers were

men between the ages of twenty and thirty four. In the primary attraction, the nude centerfold known as the playmate of the month. This is Russell Miller again the playmates in in um Playboy was always the wholesome girl next door, the kind of girl that you could take out and not worry about. You wouldn't mind introducing to your Mom. The humorous Mortzol once equipped that an entire generation of American men grew up thinking that women came with a

staple in their midsection. Others were not as amused. Television host Mike Wallace interviewed Heffner in nineteen fifty six and suggested that he was selling quote, high class dirty book. Hefner responded, there's nothing dirty in sex unless we make it dirty. Within a few years of Playboy's launch, Hugh Hefner was a different man. Well. Playbook magazine changed Hefner's life dramatically when it became very, very successful, and he

just sort of blasted off into the cultural stratosphere. Hefner threw himself into his work. He really did begin to live at the office. He had a separate bedroom suite sort of built off his office, and he stayed there. He rarely went home. Hefner used his office bedroom or other activities as well. He began to spend a lot of time around rather fetching young women. Uh He began to have liaisons and affairs with a number of them, and his marriage slowly began to crumble, and so Hugh

Hefner decided to reinvent himself. He made a very conscious decision that he would become Mr. Playboy. He would become the guy that was being idealized in Playboy magazine. Heffner started to smoke a pipe, he dressed better. He surrounded himself with beautiful women, and he made no effort to hide it. I enjoy women. I enjoy being women with women very much. Most of the girls that I date are several years younger than I am eighteen to probably a good many of them, of course, are girls that,

in one way or another, work for the magazine. Soon there was no real divide between Offner's work and play Hefner was more than a brand ambassador for Playboy, he was the brand itself. Constantly surrounded by gorgeous girls and beautiful belongings. Hefner's world may seem enviable to some. At forty four, he's unquestionably King Rabbit, and certainly he takes every opportunity to enjoy his dough. He moved into a

new home. He called it the Playboy Mansion. It became the most famous party house on the planet, first in Chicago and later in Beverly Hills. What happened if Playboy mansion in a kind of typical day, was that it was the site for Hefner's uh sort of equally intense bouts of work and play. The one million dollar home became an exclusive playground, one where fantasies became reality among celebrities and scantily clad women, or so it seemed to

many who did not journey inside the mansion's walls. It was I crowded. There were lots of men, there quite a lot of girls. Russell Miller again, he wentness firsthand the typical evenings at the Playboy Mansion. They weren't sort of big celebrities. They were be team actors and second

class footballers and hairdressers. And they'll just be hanging around all a bit bored, drinking wine and beer and stuffing his sandwiches until about eleven o'clock when a secretary suddenly emerged from his room on the top floor and came down, running down the stairs a quick, quick, He's gonna come down, make like there's a party. Stephen Watts says it was like something out of the pages of The Great Gatsby. After was sort of like Jay Gatsby in that he

always had one foot in and one foot out. Partly of participant, partly an observer. Hefner was also a creature of habit. He was a very wretched, vented man. He was addicted to routine. The movie nights, for example, were set on the set schedule of nights, the same kinds of movies on the same days of the week, with the same groups of people. He ate the same meals the same day of the week, and the same recipes and everything. Heffner's routine was often at odds with the

Playboy image. The reality of life in the Los Angeles mansion was very, very different from that that the magazine constantly portrayed. And I have to tell you that Hefner played Monopoly three times a week with the same four friends. That's right, Monopoly games, Fried Chicken, old movies, and old men. It was like Hooters had opened a retirement home. But for Heffner, it was perfect. He didn't like to leave

the mansion. He was sort of charming and and and and funny and pleasant, you know, and a very amiable in individual. Except and I thought I had a strong feeling he was just cut off from from reality. And I said to him once they said, why didn't you ever go out, and he seemed quite shocked. Why should What on earth would I want to go out? What's the point? I got everything I need from here. And part of what Heffner needed and got was a steady

supply of young women. Hundreds lived at the Playboy mansion over the years, constantly replenishing here and large the women recognized that they were um second class citizens. A lot of the girls um quickly became disillusioned, and they recognized that they were just there as decoration, as for sexual playthings,

and would would would leave and not come back. Hugh Lefner managed to create a mystique around his own Playboy image, whatever the reality of mansion life may have been, and it wasn't long until Heffner and Playboy had another idea.

Take the fantasies from the pages of the magazine to Playboy clubs with male members only, and what they're created was a place for readers of the magazine to come to these places and experience in real life the Playboy lifestyle with good food and good liquor and sophisticated jazz music, all the kinds of things they were talking about in the magazine, and of course very attractive young women. A job as a playboy bunny was also very attractive to

many young women. Most bunnies were college students or aspiring actresses or models. They were drawn to the flexible schedule and a chance to earn more than their fathers. The Playboy clubs would become a worldwide phenomenon during the nineteen sixties. It seemed that playboy could do no wrong. You know. Hefly began to talk about the whole Playboy world where um, you would stay your your entertainment would be provided by Playboy club, your reading would be provided by Playboy magazines.

You would stay in play By hotel, used Playboy money. I mean just he got carried away with them with the notion that that playboy could take over the world. Up next, we find out what really launched Playboy. Heffner's fantasy powered rocket ship might have crashed and burned on the launch pad without the star power of the playmate, who Hefner admired above all others. Hugh Heffner grew up in Chicago during the Great Depression. Here's biographer Steven once again.

His parents, Glenn Hefner ran Grace Heffner, were transplanted Nebraskans from a very traditional background, and Heffner grew up. He had a very happy childhood, but one that he felt was a bit restrictive on the religious and moral front. They were sort of middle class folk, m very good fearing, very respectable Russell Miller. Again, they didn't drink, they didn't smoke um. They there was no high living. Hefner himself admitted at the age of eighteen that he was still

a virgin. Heffner was a gangly teenager five ft ten one fifteen pounds. He was shy and awkward around girls. He was something of a loner, and he spent a lot of time in his bedroom. He was a cartoonist, a fledgling cartoonist even as a young boy, and he had a very vivit imagination. I guess I would say Heffner loved movies and pop culture, and he immersed himself in fantasy worlds of his own creation. In the eighth grade, he discovered Esquire magazine and he hung its modest pin

up girls on his bedroom walls. The movies and the magazines inspired the young Heffner to reinvent himself for the first time. By high school, he had transformed himself into the life of the party, and then in high school he was enormously popular. He always looked back on his life uh in high school as being a kind of golden ero. Hefner entered the army in World War Two after high school. Then he went to the University of Illinois on the g I Bill, where he studied journalism

and writing. After college, he moved to the suburbs and married his college sweetheart, Millie. But like many college grads, Hefner struggled to bridge the gap between his aspirations and his employment options. He gave up on his dream of being a cartoonist and took a series of copyrighting jobs or advertising agencies. Hefner soon grew unhappy at work, unhappy with Millie, now pregnant, and daunted by the prospect of becoming a parent. He longed for a better life and

a more sophisticated and more glamorous life. He used to walk along sort of fancy streets in Chicago and look up at the windows of apartments of people who had high fives and fancy cars and thought they look in the windows and think about that's what I want to be. One day that's what I want to have one day. Hafner's discontent came to a head after he attended a high school reunion in nineteen fifty two and was reminded of that golden era again. And he came home actually

from this gathering sort of deeply depressed. And he told the story later in life that he was in downtown Chicago and he was standing on one of the bridges, kind of looking out over the water, just wondering about his life. And as he was standing on the bridge looking out of the water, thinking about his high school days, he decided he had to do something to change his life.

And what he did was to go home, and over the next several days he began to put into action a plan that had been kind of percolating in the back of his mind, and that was to create a magazine for young men like himself. And that magazine, of course, turned out to be Playboy. Hafner bristled at the restrict demorality of his Midwestern upbringing, not to mention the growing conformity of nineteen fifties suburbia, and he was convinced that there were a lot of young guys out there just

like him. This post war period was one where the economy was booming and young men like him, we're getting decent jobs with, you know, pretty decent salaries, and I think having been in the war, they were looking for broader experience, deeper, more authentic kind of experience, and a lot of them were feeling pressure to be family men and to have a lot of kids, and to move

to the suburbs and that kind of thing. Heffner wanted to create a magazine that would serve as a pathway to a richer kind of experience for these men, an entertainment magazine for the upwardly mobile urban mail, something breezy and sophisticated that included original writing and tips on fashion and style, and of course, the all important centerfold. Hefner worked hard to gather up around eight thousand dollars to

launch Playboy. He called on all his friends and indeed his family to put in a small amount of money, and he raised enough money to make the first edition feasible. That first issue, which Heffner had assembled on his kitchen table, hit newsstands in December nineteen well. Haffner was extremely nervous about the first issue of Playboy because he borrowed money from his family. He actually sold some of his furniture and his card to raise money. He just gambled everything

on it. It was an all or nothing venture for Heffner, and everything hinged on that first issue. He wasn't sure if people would buy it. He was so unsure that he didn't put actually a date on the first issue, nor his name. Actually, when the magazine first came out from the distributor, he went down into Chicago and sort of a walk from newsstand to newsstand and hid behind a tree or behind a card to watch to see if guys who came by the news stand were buying

his magazine, and they did in the thousands. Playboy quickly sold out, thanks in large part to one unforgettable centerfold. Hugh Hefner was never shy about his admiration for the screen legend Marilyn Monroe. Do you think you would have dated her? I would have loved to. This is eighty six year old Hugh Heffner talking about Monroe in a two thousand and thirteen interview. You know, I'm a sucker for blond, and she's the ultimate blond. Monroe also had

an oversized impact on Hefner's life. She was the launching key to the beginning of Playboy. Heffner knew that he needed to make the first issue of Playboy extraordinary, and that meant he needed the perfect centerfold, the ideal woman to anchor his new magazine. He combed through nude photographs and models and pin up girls from across the nation, and then he found what he was looking for. That year,

Marril Monroe was Hollywood's biggest news star. The twenty seven year old blonde bombshell had wowed audiences in films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire The year before, America was shocked to learn that Monroe post nude as a young struggling model, but many Americans still had not seen the actual evidence, and so it happened that Hugh Hefner, in desperate need of the perfect centerfold for his new men's magazine, learned that a local Chicago

calendar company owned the rights to Monroe's nude images. Hefner persuaded the owner to sell him one of the nude photos, which featured Monroe against a red velvet backdrop, and so he was able to buy the by that the rights to that picture for five hundred dollars um, which was a huge amount of money at that time and pretty much cleaned him out. But Hefner was convinced that he had in his possession the most valuable photograph in the world.

When play Boy hit newsstands, a clothed Marilyn Monroe appeared on its front cover. Inside was the red velvet image Monroe. Heffner wrote in that first issue is natural Sex Personified. She became the magazine's first centerfold, the first Playboy playmate. He launches the first issue of Playboy with Marilyn Monroe as the first playmate, and it's really the start of everything that happens thereafter. The first edition was extraordinarily successful.

The centerfold picture of Maridon Monroe was a sensation. Monroe put Playboy and Heffner on the map, and he launched his empire on these nude photos of Maryland, having never gotten her permission, having never met her um, and he didn't offer her dime. This has Monroe biographer Sarah church Well, we will hear more from her and about Monroe's response

to the nude photographs in the next episode. And Hugh Hefner literally became a millionaire thanks to these photographs, and with them, Hugh Hefner began his remarkable run as the nation's leading playboy, converting his own dream into a collective fantasy for millions of American men. Ten years later, a young reporter named Lauria Steinham went undercover in one of Heffner's Playboy clubs and entered into the crosshairs of that fantasy. What she learned there would change her life, and, via

her efforts, the lives of countless women. And what about Marilyn Monroe, the woman whose image helped launch Playboy in the first place. Monroe's path to fame and fortune was hard, even tragic, and very different from Hugh Hefner's. Hefner and Monroe were contemporaries, both born in nineteen six, but they never met. Today, they lie next to each other for eternity and a mausoleum in Los Angeles. This was Heffner's wish,

not Monroe's. Even in death, Monroe was not safe from the men who exploited her, from the men she liked to call the wolves. Writing and the Thread is produced by Libby Coleman and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks to Cindy Carpian, Tracy Moran, and James Watkins. This episode features music by Accelerated Readers with a song called Bunny Song and the Magnetic Fields with

a song called Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits. To learn more about the thread, visit ausy dot com, slash the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple Podcasts. Check us out at aussi dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising and engaging stories from history, look no further than the flashback section of ausy dot com. That's o Z e y dot com in the end where always by right