(2 of 3)
Why the Pinch? The other publisher accused of crossing the line is Playboy's Hugh M. Hefner, 37, who was asleep in his humble 40-room pad on Chicago's North Side one afternoon earlier this month when four men from the vice squad came calling. A brass plaque on the front door carries the Latin legend "Si non oscillas noli tintinnare"—"If you don't swing, don't ring"—but the cops rang anyway and swung Hefner off to be booked on charges of publishing and selling an obscene magazine.
What got Chicago's vice squad into the act was an eight-page exposure in the June Playboy (circ. 1,250,000) of overripe Actress Jayne Mansfield. In bed and bubblebath, Jayne revealed everything except what an un-Sanforized G string might conceal. But there was nothing particularly unusual about that, for scores of equally nude "playmates" have appeared in the magazine in its 9½-year history. Why the pinch now? "Jayne has more than most," says Hefner by way of explanation. "She makes people nervous."
There is more to the case than that. Some of the pictures show a man on the bed too—fully clothed, but a man. One caption tells how Jayne "writhes about seductively," another how she is "gyrating." "The real issue," said Chicago's American in an editorial, "is how far a magazine can go. Hefner's philosophy appears to be that the modern, urban male likes and even needs to look at pictures of naked, suggestively posed women—that it is practically a duty to encourage the habit."
Hefner certainly does little to discourage it. In half a dozen rabbit hutches known as Playboy Clubs, he keeps on display 421 Bunnies, who are wired and cinched into tight, brief costumes with padded balconies and wiggly little cottontails. "We total over 24.5 tons of bunnies," says Hefner, nibbling reflectively on a chicken. "Their collective chest measurement is 15,156 in., which is about one-quarter of a mile. The waistlines total 9,4721 in. and their hip circumference is 14,777 in."
In his magazine he offers full-color, fold-out nudes sandwiched between big-name fiction and big-deal nonfiction. He seems convinced that what Playboy really needs is more sex, not less. "If the secret psyche of the typical young male adult could be probed," wrote Hefner in an apparently endless editorial on "The Playboy Philosophy" that has already been running in serial form for eight months, "we suspect that we probably err in the direction of less emphasis on sex than the average, rather than more."
Rambling Bunny Hop. Hefner's editorial is a rambling bunny hop through the fields of Puritanism and Prohibition, Freud and Free Love, Capitalism and Communism. But deep in his turgid rhetoric, he actually does take a crack at answering the charge of obscenity. "Who can define the word?" he asks. Lest anyone can, he adds the thought that "a serious school of scientific opinion believes that obscenity actually makes a valuable contribution to the mental health of society."