Quotes of the Day

I remember when Playboy magazine was forbidden fruit — Eve and her apple in the Garden of Guilt. This was in the 50s, when everything priapic was prohibited, and when I was just grazing my teen years. Like a boy sidling up to the pharmacy counter to ask for, demand, his first condom, the 13-year-old Child Corliss sought out Playboy at distant drug stores, put my 50 cents in the palms of blind newsies. Before Playboy, the only magazines I had bought were comic books. Hugh M. Hefner had connived to introduced me both to the publishing industry and to public stealth at a single ... stroke.

From the unslaked lust of millions like me, Hefner built an empire. He boldly expanded and accessorizing the magazine's concept of "entertainment for men" into a multimedia conglomerate. TV: he created and hosted two syndicated TV shows, "Playboy Penthouse" and "Playboy After Dark." Books: Playboy Press published collections from the magazine and original material like Lenny Bruce's "How to Talk Dirty and Influence People." Nightclub-restaurants: Playboy Clubs soon straddled the globe and franchised his centerfold Playmates into real live (but clothed) Bunnies. Movies: Playboy Productions financed Roman Polanski's "Macbeth" and Monty Python's "And Now for Something Completely Different," and Hefner negotiated with screenwriter George Axelrod to make a movie of his life, called "Playboy."

With the January 2004 issue, Playboy has turned 50 — 15 months after the golden anniversary of Mad, eight months after TV Guide hit the half-century mark. All have fought mid-life crises so critical they could have been end-life crises. TV Guide, unable to cram 500 channels of listings into its pocket-size format, has seen its circulation (9 million) drop to less than half of its 1960s numbers. Mad, which long ago lost the monopoly on irreverent kid humor — where isn't adolescent ribaldry nowadays? — sells only about 250,000 copies, a tenth as many as it did in the early 70s. (This year will see the 50th anniversary of another Eisenhower-era magazine, Sports Illustrated, which is still doing fine.)

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.

In the 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 on their models — and devoured a huge chunk of the male market. (A PG13-rated sex magazine: I will never understand that.)

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.

I READ IT FOR THE ARTICLES

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.

The 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."

But 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 to consumers from every level of sophistication. They bought the magazine to look; often they stayed to read.

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 it.

In comic writing, The New Yorker had the edge with (to choose four names spanning seven decades) S.J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Bruce McCall and Steve Martin. But I had a fondness for Playboy's comedy stars — Jean Shepherd, Harvey Kurtzman, Jules Feiffer, Lenny Bruce, Arnold Roth, Shel Silverstein — in part because I'd followed and loved their earlier work from, respectively, WOR radio, Mad, the Village Voice, Fantasy LPs, Humbug and Look. They were the guys I'd have chosen if I were Playboy's humor editor. (In which case, I'd have dropped the designation of "humor" heading each piece; making readers guess if a story was supposed to be funny was part of the fun.) Into the 80s, Playboy kept finding smart comic writing. Bruce Fierstein's "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" appeared there first.

In one sense, Playboy was the anti-New Yorker. It was the Chicagoan. Playboy was founded at about the time the Second City was becoming the Third, after Los Angeles, in population and cultural import. But from the first, home-town boy Hef pursued Chicago writers and artists, perhaps because he could hustle them personally. Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht, Silverstein, LeRoy Neiman, and later David Mamet, gave Playboy a Midwestern voice to go with its middle-American notion of pulchritude.

I have to mention, sheepishly, one more Playboy contributor: me. When I was still in school, I submitted a gag for the Party Jokes page, and they printed it. Here it is: "The doting father came home one night and was shocked to find his daughter and his friends smoking marijuana. Pulling the stick of pot out of the girl's mouth, he exclaimed, ‘What's a joint like this doing in a nice girl like you?'" At the time I was tickled to have received $50 for 43 words. Today, I look back in chagrin, to see I was once so naive, I didn't know "joint" had a phallic meaning. More embarrassment: glancing at that page in the July 1967 issue, I see that the word "Richard's" is written next to the joke — in my mother's handwriting.

For an enjoyable survey of the magazine's prose in its first decade, get "The Bedside Playboy": all words and drawings, no Playmates. Or pick up one of the collections of The Playboy Interview. You'll see: you could read it for the articles.

But maybe you read it for the pictures — surely the most avidly studied photographs of the second half of the 20th century. So how about those?

THE MAKING OF THE PLAYMATE

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 circumstances of their purchase, was part of their appeal. In the 50s, guilty pleasures were almost obliged to convey more guilt than pleasure.

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 and prompting too many jokes about staples, achieved its goal: it undressed the all-American girl.

The 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 and Bunny Yeager. Even then, Hefner was like Columbus in the New World: he didn't exactly know what he'd discovered. Some models appeared more than once as Playmates, and — bonus points for this — the March 1955 issue had no centerfold.

Gradually, the Playmate minutiae accrued: the surrounding photos and brief biographies of the subjects, the Party Jokes page to close the section. The first star Playmate was Janet Pilgrim (July and December 55), a Playboy employee whose name stayed on the masthead for a decade or so as readers' liaison. She cued the notion of the Playmate as hometown houri: not a showgirl or call girl but the girl next door (or next-office), the succulent embodiment of ordinary Americana. The job of posing for a girlie magazine was now not a 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.

BOY TOYS

A 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 or a god to worship, the editors offer a vision of the whole man reduced to his private parts. Out of the center of this being spring the only substantial realities — sexual need and sexual deprivation."

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 and the advertising were one.

Consider that the rise of Playboy coincided with the new status of the automobile: its elevation from a vehicle of practical transportation to a fantasy symbol of male potency and freedom. Women and cars were the American man's primary sex objects: fast, shiny, glamorous and aerodynamically smooth. Madison Avenue sold the car as woman. Playboy sold the woman as erotic machine. The Playboy man could drive her as NASCAR speeds, stop when he felt like it, trade her in for a new model as the whim drove him — not once a year, as Detroit pressed him to, but every month, in the Playboy centerfold.

The connection was everywhere evident to observers of the Playboy phenomenon. Examining the infrastructure of the Bunny costume worn by waitresses at the Playboy Clubs of the 60s, Norman Mailer called it "a phallic brassiere — each breast looked like the big bullet on the front bumper of a Cadillac."

Mailer, who would write the keynote piece for the magazine's 50th anniversary issue, was no feminist; he would tangle loudly and instructively with them over the years. But he knew the drill: that staring at women for an erotic rush demeans and dehumanizes them, robs them of the equality they deserve. On the Dick Cavett Show in the 70s, feminist Susan Brownmiller told Hefner his magazine exploited sex. To which he replied, "Playboy exploits sex like Sports Illustrated exploits sports!" (Yep: It's Sex Illustrated.)

I can't defend Playboy against charges of objectifying women. In fact, the airbrushed perfection of some Playmates struck me as robotoid, threw cold water on my desires even when every voyeuristic impulse was begging to be satisfied. And putting cotton tails and bunny ears on Playboy Club hostesses made them no more alluring than Bugs Bunny in drag. But just as surely, the feminists' very sensible argument flies in the face of biology and culture. "Men look at women," John Berger famously wrote. "Women watch themselves being looked at." I believe he also said that the camera is a man looking at a woman. And for better or worse, for 50 years, Playboy has been that camera.

BODY FASHIONS

Those wishing to savor the visual delights of Hefner's world should thumb through "Playboy 50 Years: the Photographs," with text by Joe Peterson.There the amateur sociologist will be able to gauge seismic shifts in both sexual tolerance and body fashion.

In the early years the models were often redheads (as were many 50s movie actresses), but blonds quickly came to dominate the selection (as they did Hefner's choice of companion). The traces of baby fat in the 50s and 60s Playmates gave way to the buffed and sanded ladies of the workout era. They were usually, though not necessarily, busty, and almost always Caucasian. And always very American: the ideal of the middle-class Midwestern boy who ran the magazine. Even the German models Hefner added for spice in 1961 (Heidi Becker, Christa Speck) looked like red-white-and-blue farm girls.

As Hefner has tirelessly proclaimed, Playboy helped spur the sexual revolution with a wink and a nudge. But by the 70s the magazine was not pushing but being dragged. It had introduced pubic hair in the August 1969 issue, with a stroboscopic sequence of actress-dancer Paula Kelly. (Because she was African-American, the breakthrough had a tinge of National Geographic ethnographic exoticism.) The Playmates went decorously full-frontal in 1972, when Hefner felt the competition of the raunchier Penthouse. By then Playboy was a successful franchise with news dealers and big advertisers to consider, and Hefner seemed unsure of how far was too far. On October 15, 1977, Hefner was the guest host of "Saturday Night Live" and participated in a skit that imagined him, as the Playboy Philosopher, in ancient Greece, pontificating along with Plato and Socrates. At the end he stares into the camera and poses the Hamlet-like question: "To go pink, or not to go pink?"

The magazine never did stoop to Penthouse's or Hustler's gynecological avidity. Instead, it applied its techniques of photo enhancement and Vidal Sassoon-style grooming to the pubis. Air-brushed? Say Impressionist. Those unsung Playboy retouchers were Monets of the mons veneris.

But Playboy did surrender to the eroto-chemical revolution: the siliconing of women's breasts. No longer was the Playmate a triumph of good genes, a pretty smile and a light workout. Now when you looked at a Playmate you had to think of the plastic surgeon who made her that way. Bette Midler once made a joke about Bruce Springsteen in his 80s buff phase: "Nice body, Bruce. Where'd you buy it?" Same goes for many of the Playmates of the past 20 years. The 50th Anniversary Playmate, Colleen Shannon, is a Pamela Anderson clone, a pneumatic cartoon drawn by Alberto Vargas or Frank Frazetta — a sex-toy doll inflated to Macy's Thanksgiving Parade proportions.

PLAYBOY BECOMES OLDBOY

In a recent interview with Rick Bentley in the Sacramento Bee, Hefner declared that the Playmate was as young and hip as ever: "The trademark products are now more popular than ever before, and you see them on high school girls, and you see the fashions in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. There are more references to Playboy in rap songs and hip-hop songs, the music of young people, than there has ever been before. Playboy is both contemporary and retro."

I think Playboy is as much a child of 50s fantasies as I am, and Hefner as much the creator and captive of those fantasies. The 50s was the last decade when to be cool meant to be sophisticated. Back then, success and glamour included pretensions to education: not just the famous-author bylines but to racy films with subtitles; Playboy's equivalent was the Ribald Classics, translations of naughty tales by Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac. And jazz. Jazz was cool then, Hefner loved it, so he started an annual readers' poll of jazz favorites and, in 1978, a Playboy Jazz Festival. (Sorry, Hef, wrong music.)

"I was not really trying to create a sex magazine," Hefner told Bentley. "I was trying to give sex a good name in a context of a lifestyle magazine." How very true. Playboy wasn't just about the sex. It was about being accepted by the arbiters of 50s middle-browism. That brow has disappeared. Now there's a tiny high-brow culture and a vast low- or no-brow one. Playboy and Hef stayed in the center that did not hold.

You see it in the 50th anniversary issue. Naturally it has has a retro air, with photos of favorite old Playmates and actresses who undressed for the magazine. But some of the issue's contributors aren't toddlers either: Mailer (80), Hunter S. Thompson (66), Frank Gehry (74), George Plimpton (76 when he died last year). The Interview subject is Jack Nicholson (66). The main profile is of Alfred C. Kinsey, the sex researcher whose "Sexual Behavior of the Human Female" was published the year Playboy first hit the newsstands.

What Kinsey studied, Hefner exploited, in a very 50s way. It was a serious decade, and Hef was, is, a serious fellow — serious even about having fun. He always struck me as an Organization Man (as long as it was his organization). His careful conversation and tight smile reminded me of any number of Midwestern businessmen, politicians, anchormen, clergymen. Hefner was raised a Methodist and remained methodical, at heart and at head. In a second A&E special, "Inside the Playboy Mansion," he shows off his Holmby Hills estate; it's a sort of Neverland, with the wildlife preserve and the video-game rooms (but with older kids). He's proud to have organized it all, all the parties and Playmates. But it's not just his pleasure, his image. It's his job. He's America's CEO of lust.

Hefner at 77, Playboy at 50: both are aging roués, the kind Dedini used to draw in his cartoons. The iconic bunny (a rabbit in an ascot) is today as much an anachronism as the New Yorker's Eustace Tilley (a fop with a monocle). Or as Hefner, in his silk pajamas and red smoking jacket, when billionaires wear T shirts. Hef, with his interchangeable sex partners (two are twins) and his trademark pipe traded in for Diet Pepsi and Viagra, has become what we are all in danger of morphing into as we grow old: parodies of our younger selves.

On A&E he attends the unveiling of his own likeness at the Hollywood Wax Museum, and it's, no kidding, impossble to tell the man from his effigy. The magazine, too, has the waxy buildup of age — my age. In the Sacramento Bee, Syracuse University Professor Robert Thompson notes that Playboy "was so successful at communicating and advocating a new lifestyle and set of values, that by 2003 it's made itself unnecessary."

I don't want to sound as if I pity Hefner because he has sex all the time and I don't. And I don't want to knock the magazine because it doesn't fulfill the needs I had 45 years ago. But magazines, like people, mature and calcify — especially a magazine run by one man for its entire life. (When Hefner started the magazine, Stalin had just died, Castro was five years from power and rock 'n roll was still race music.) The trick of aging is not to try to sustain what we were when we were young, but to remember it, and not begrudge those adolescent or infantile dreams to the next generation.

So, lads, sneak off and buy a copy of Playboy. May it offer you the same gilded ticket to puberty that it did to me long ago.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on the Hefner legacy at 50