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    Lke all kids, I more than once made the claim that when I finally entered into adulthood the first thing I was going to do was eat ice cream for breakfast. This defiant act of liberation, to my young self, seemed like one of the few benefits of growing old. Yes, one might have to go off to college, get a job, buy a house, and actually take some responsibility for his actions, but the freedom to eat vanilla fudge for breakfast even overshadowed the possibility of being drafted and shipped off to Vietnam; later, in my teen years, I would make the same claim about Playboy magazine. 

     Back in the 70s, someone’s father always had a stash of bachelorhood memories hidden in a garage, and though my friends and I sneaked after-school cigarettes (amongst mildewed cartons and half-open paint pots), we were less afraid of being nabbed with the smokes than we were of being caught red-handed with those bouffant nudes of yore. Nervously, we would listen for the sound of an approaching motor ('Quick, someone's home,' one would shout, and there would be a mad dash to dispose of the evidence) but I averred that all that would change on my eighteenth birthday when, with impunity, I would first eat ice cream for breakfast and then get myself over to the nearest newsstand to legally purchase a copy of Playboy; to this day I have never done the former, and not till last week, the latter. My journal has always been like that: pages and pages of brilliant plans that remain unrealized.

     My impetus for finally and after all these years plunking down that $5.99 for the February 2008 issue of Playboy was a literary one. Okay, it wasn’t to ‘read the articles’ but to develop this one, for back in November of 2007, Playboy announced it would be offering a limited reprint of its coveted premiere issue – the one with Marilyn Monroe – and the idea of comparing the magazine then and now immediately intrigued me. Just as quickly, however, I realized that such an article could be construed as nothing but a cheap shot; I had heard that in order to compete with Maxim and FHM, Playboy, itself, had ‘gone laddie’ in the last few years and my comparing it to its former glory would be like comparing the original Casablanca to the 1983 David Soul vehicle. Though I decided it would be nearly impossible not to forge into the review without some predisposed opinion, I’d be sure to refrain from the current trend of sarcastic critique. All that I really wanted to answer, though (and even it was for my own benefit), was that age-old question: Is Playboy relevant?

     Thus, Volume I Issue I of Playboy magazine arrived on my doorstep in mid-December, exactly fifty-four years after its initial publication, and despite the great sexual awakening that had occurred in the interim, it still came in a plain brown wrapper. Whether this was to protect the magazine from the elements or my honor from the neighbors, I don’t know, but I did appreciate the care Playboy Enterprises had taken to secure the item. After removing the magazine from its cardboard shell, I poured myself a bourbon and got into my reading chair. On the cover, Marilyn was young, smiling, and alive; above her head, the slogan Entertainment for Men.

     With the turn of the page, the reader is directly propelled back in time. Illustrator Arv Miller’s smoking-jacketed rabbit hoists a drink in a mid-century apartment (replete with butterfly chair and amoeba table), and on the page opposite is Hef’s (oddly unsigned) welcome letter.

     ‘IF YOU’RE A MAN between the ages of 18 and 80,’ it begins, ‘PLAYBOY is meant for you.’

     The infamous Kinsey Report is referenced, as there is little doubt that the bestseller status of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (published 1948) and his follow up …In the Human Female (published just three month’s prior to the Playboy launch) supported Hef’s belief that the country was ready for an open discussion about sex. Writer Bob Norman, however, provides a warning in the issue's lead article, Miss Gold-Digger of 1953.

     The gold-digger in this case is the ex-wife. Norman, writing as though he knows the country is on the dawn of this sexual awakening, provides some jarring facts about alimony to his readers. Given the comparatively miniscule divorce rate of the 1950s, the average man was apparently in the dark on the subject and Norman fully explains the, now, common-knowledge facts such as the difference between alimony and child support. He then goes on to cite cases where women were awarded alimony based on the accustomed style of living and how they have drained the poor husbands of their bank accounts, and, reading into the tone of his article, I sensed he was almost trying to tell this to his brothers atomic: ‘You’re going to envy everything about the lifestyle presented in the following pages. If you're married, continue at your own risk.’

     What does follow is the basic framework that Playboy employed for years. There’s a cartoon, a short fiction, a nude, a cartoon. With only an $8,000 to $12,600 budget (reports vary; Hef now says it was eight, but a 1955 Newsweek article quotes him at the latter) new material was generally unaffordable, and most of the content is reprinted from other sources, the most famous being the Marilyn photo. Having always heard it referred to as the Marilyn pictorial, I had believed there were a few au naturel photographs of the actress in the magazine, but there is only the color shot Hef purchased for $500 from a Chicago calendar company. Of the three pieces of short fiction in the issue, not one of them was previously unpublished: there’s the ‘ribald classic’, a tale taken from Boccaccio’s Decameron, an excerpted passage from the Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four, and an Ambrose Bierce tale, A Horseman in the Sky. The issue is rounded out by an article on football’s all-purpose back, a cooking column (at the time, a truly novel idea for a men’s magazine), and a pictorial on Herman Miller office furniture. Sports, décor, humor, women: the winning combination sold just under 54,000 copies and the twenty-seven year old Hef started his empire.

     Well-documented and examined is the history of that empire but, apart from demographic data, not so the history of its readership. From the beginning, Hef knew he wanted to appeal to young, single, sophisticated men and, perhaps more importantly, those that wanted to be sophisticated men. Magazines like Gentlemen’s Quarterly and Esquire, where Hef worked just before founding Playboy, were geared toward the man who had already made his way in the world. Generally, their readerships of bankers and lawyers could afford the suits, accessories, and automobiles advertised within its covers, but what Hef did, wittingly or not, was to add the yearn factor. ‘This is the life you could lead,’ he seemed to say to his young target audience, ‘just as soon as you become a success,’ and today we can but wonder how many college men of the late 50s and early 60s were driven to that success by the desire to lead the Playboy lifestyle. It is true that by the early 60s college fashion spreads were routinely featured in the magazine, and a fund of advertisers had copy pushing ‘the campus look’, but despite the swelling of collegiate readership during the era, the magazine never chased or catered to its audience. Instead, it continued to bring the young readers up to its level of sophistication. After graduation, the collegiate reader packed a grip and headed out into Hef’s world. They moved to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. They became copywriters, junior executives, artists, musicians. They became independent men. Then the cult of youth came along and it all began to fall apart.

     It is in the late 60s that we begin to see articles that reflect either an aging readership in search of its second wind or a collegiate readership that no longer wants to be a sophisticate. The October ’67 issue, for example, features a photo spread of unclad, cavorting hippies at be-ins staged from New York’s Tompkins Square Park to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury: beads, body-painting, the whole nine yards. The accompanying text is certainly an introduction to the movement, too, as it explains some of the hippie basics such as communal living and l.s.d. Over the next few years, Playboy flirts with the idea of saying to its older readers, ‘You know all that stuff we’ve been telling you about women being attracted to good grooming and success? Well, forget all that because we were wrong,’ but because it never quite lets go of its atomic past, the magazine reeks of middle-aged desperation. The resultant and embarrassing comicality of this clash reaches its pinnacle in the '68 to '70 television show Playboy After Dark.

     Hef’s first outing on television had occurred a decade earlier. Playboy Penthouse aired from 1959 to 1960, and the set, along with the guests, was the embodiment of mid-century swank. Gowned playmates recline on Danish Modern sofas while dinner-jacketed men pour cocktails. At the grand piano, Cy Coleman entertains with his new song The Best is Yet to Come and Lenny Bruce is on hand, doing his best to exercise comedic self-restraint. Others who just happen to drop by are Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy David, Jr. There are few innuendoes - and even Hef seems a bit red-faced by them - but as every bit the series is sophisticated, 1968’s Playboy After Dark is as every bit sleazy.

     At forty-two, Hef’s attempt to be psychedelically ‘now’ and ‘with it’ plays like a lost segment from Love American Style. True, in a 1969 episode he does seem comfortable with the eighteen-year-old Barbi Benton on his arm (we imagine he’d had enough practice by then), but the longish hair and his oddly arrhythmic dance maneuvers to such acts as Joe Cocker and Canned Heat ultimately expels any last traces of sophistication the man might have had. The middle-aged friends he invites over only exacerbate the situation. Sammy Davis, Jr. gives a great performance, though he's no longer in a tux but in a spangly hippie African affair (‘I gave up on ties two years ago,’ he proudly announces), and comedian Louis Nye's stroking of a playmate's hand is...well, let's just say there was an awful lot of pawing going on in the room, as though the provided entertainment, the show itself, was nothing but an inconvenient delay to an orgy that would follow.

     Did this concerted effort to remain young, to retain or gain young readers, work? In 1971, sales of the magazine sprung to seven million and it was reported that roughly a quarter of all U.S. male college students were reading Playboy. The collective campus philosphy at that time was allegedly liberal (news coverage went to protestors, not to the studious) and it's no surpise that even the pictorials began to reflect the preferences of its long-haired readership. The playmates, previously snapped in bourgeois bachelor pads, were now routinely photographed in natural settings: forests, barns, log cabins - (To Continue, click here to go to the top. Then Click 'Page 2')

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anywhere hippies could conceivably congregate. On the next page, however, there’d be a typically middle-class article on how to stock a wine cellar. With Playboy in a state of flux, the advertisers were apparently confused by the mixed demographics as well. In a 1972 issue, Honda promotes its new $1,735 Coupe by extolling the virtues of ‘One Downmanship,’ (for, evidently, the sports car was nothing but status symbols and status symbols were for The Man), yet, it is in the same issue that Ford runs an advertisement for its Pantera, a sports car that sold for the, then, astronomical sum of $10,000. Obviously, Playboy was doing well at playing both sides of the fence: on one side, it had a readership of compact-driving freethinkers, and on the other, one of closed-minded gas-guzzlers. Though disparate, the two factions were on the same road to sexual revolution - both in fourth gear and both about to shift into overdrive.

     Released in 1969, Paul Mazursky’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice is a comedically frank examination of an open marriage. At its end, the title foursome realize their folly (a pitiable attempt at an orgy), but middle-class America didn’t seem to heed the filmmaker’s warning and callously forged on with the great experiment of the 1970s. Sex, as historically documented, was everywhere, it becoming porno chic for couples to attend screenings of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. Sex clubs were suddenly frequented by the couple next door, and in a game of push/pull, Playboy eggs on or keeps up with the revolution. Either way, the magazine does take a decidedly raunchy turn in the 70s, and what’s noticeably dropped is any last pretense of sophistication. Perhaps when he founded Playboy, Hef did offer a package deal – the cars, the clothes, the traveling, the sex - but once 'average' America started embracing the ‘let it all hang out’ lifestyle, it was as though he were given permission to take off his mask and unbutton his fly. Formerly, for example, sexual depiction of men in Playboy had been only through cartoons, but through the use of comedic photo-essays and stills from foreign films, Swinging 1970’s Hef managed to work an awful lot of real pairings into the publication. During that era, the amount of sex within the covers seems to have quadrupled, too. That old format of cartoon, short fiction, nude, cartoon had become cartoon, sex, short fiction, sex, sex cartoon, sex, nude, in-depth article about sex, sex interview, sex review, sex cartoon, and, just for the hell of it, sex and more sex. And if that weren’t enough, between all that sex there were the advertisements now liberally running from sexually suggestive to sexually explicit. Holding a copy of 1970s Playboy, one should but wonder how all the oils, unguents, balms, gels, and fluids don’t come dripping off the pages.

     With the advent of the AIDS crisis in the early 80s, there finally came the first murmurings of Playboy's irrelevance, because, without warning, free love and swinging became downright dangerous. Added to its woes was Reagan’s America: Jerry Falwell, Edwin Meese. Playboy was classified as pornography and sales fluctuated. The VCR porn industry was seen as a threat but then embraced. Christie Hefner, named President in 1982, started the Playboy Channel. The magazine managed to hold steady through the nineties, but then came the lads.

     Maxim, Stuff, FHM : the first of the lad publications emerged in 1995 and with its instant appeal to the video game generation (college-age boys with limited attention span) the imitators quickly followed. By electing not to have nude pictorials, the magazines are able to attract actresses and models unwilling to bare all for Playboy, so in a very real sense, these modern magazines have come full circle: in 1953, Hef had taken the idea of the Hollywood pin-up one step farther, and the lad magazines brought it right back round to Betty Grable in a swimsuit. As vacuous as we may find the content of these magazines, it must be said that it was a pretty brilliant idea, and it didn’t take Playboy long to respond.

     In 2002, executive James Kaminsky was hired away from Maxim to give Playboy a facelift; it must have been a touch and go operation because it seems he and Hef struggled over the knife. Along with the celebrity model, the appeal of the lad magazine to today’s reader is that there’s not a lot of reading involved; indeed, in order not to appear lascivious, the Maxim reader could even make the claim, ‘I read it for the blurbs.’ Hef, on the other hand, insisted the long proud history of literary Playboy would not come to an end. The battle went on for two years and by summer of 2004, Kaminsky was removed from the editorial director’s spot, Hef going on to say that the direction was ‘intentionally dumb.’ New director Christopher Napolitano was left a completely botched operation and by the look of the February 2008 issue, we can but wonder if the patient’s going to survive.

     Sitting down with that issue - again in my reading chair, again with a bourbon in my hand - I was prepared to have my expectations filled. Content, I was sure, would center on pop stars I knew nor cared anything about, and the writing would be...passable. I wish I could report that those expectations remained unfulfilled, but the truth is they were and by more than half. Since the 50s, the opening departments of the magazine have been Dear Playboy, Playboy After Hours, and The Playboy Advisor, and the 60s brought Forum, originally ‘an interchange of ideas between reader an editor’, but then exapanded to include 'news related to the Playboy philosophy.' Now packed into the first third of the magazine is also Raw Data and Mantrack, two departments that cover reviews of the arts and gadgetry. As with the bulk of entertainment magazines nowadays, it’s difficult to tell where one department ends and the next begins, and, thus, the first forty-five pages of Playboy are nothing but a mishmash of editorials, rebuttals, three-line dissertations, and random thoughts. The one article I found of any interest in Forum was My Apostasy by Irish writer John Banville (it’s a reflection on his Irish Catholic upbringing in the 1950s) but just as soon as I got into the rhythm of the piece, it abruptly ends, as though the editor fired off a missive to lose a thousand words because room was needed for yet another game review.

     The magazine still does try to be ‘smart’ and keeps true by continuing to offer fiction (reportedly, this was a feature Kaminsky was going to toss) and the lengthy informative articles that Hef wouldn’t yield, but if the jokes page is a reflection of the ‘hipper and smarter’ readership that Kaminsky tried to reach, it misses the mark with the inclusion of stale material such as ‘What’s more romantic than roses on a piano?’ (A: Tulips on an organ. Seriously, this joke was ancient when I was sneaking peaks at Playboy in the 70s.) Worse, is the pictorial of The Women of Hooters that entirely brings the magazine down to a rather common level. Hef’s novel idea for the 50s was to present men with ‘the girl next door.’ As for the Hooters’ girls, yes, it can be said they do appear ‘the girl next door,’ provided one resides in a trailer park. (Okay, please don’t deny me just a little cruelty.)

     At the back of the magazine I found another two sections of blurbs, Grapevine and Potpourri, focusing on celebrity nonsense and product reviews (why not just throw them in with the others?), and it was with a sigh that I finished my bourbon and tossed the sad little edition onto the coffee table. Really, I felt bad, and for two reasons. One) I had hoped the new Playboy would not force me to write an article with an obvious outcome, and, two) revisiting the magazine after all this time was like watching a once-great actor resort to grade-z films - like Ray Milland in The Thing with Two Heads.

     Pouring yet another bourbon (I needed it) I thought hard about the decline of Playboy – not in regard to the numbers, for its readership is back to its 1960s level of about three and a half million, and not even about the content – but about the decline of its purpose. From the beginning, Hef wanted it to be a lifestyle magazine, and he quickly achieved that goal, but this current manifestation seems impossibly devoid of any life at all. True, I didn’t expect the magazine to cater to my lifestyle, but I can’t even say that it does a good job of catering to the frat-boy/lad crowd it’s trying to capture. At best, it’s a general interest publication that happens to feature nude women - no more of a lifestyle magazine than, say, People.

     Days later I was flipping through the copy once more, trying to pinpoint the exact facet that had been effaced over the years, and I can't say I was successful. Again, I dropped the magazine, and I was considering dropping the article as well, but after yet another day, I rerturned to it, read a few more blurbs, and then the answer finally came to me.

     Advertising.  Or rather the lack of it.

     What made Playboy a lifestyle magazine back in its heyday was not only Hef’s firm vision of that lifestyle but that nearly every page of every issue carried a reaffirming advertisement for that lifestyle. Back then, the Playboy life was not only one of women but it was also one of jazz albums, hi-fis, sports cars, motorbikes, colognes, tape recorders, hide-a-bars, slippers, slacks, snifters, cigarettes, pipes, Mantovani records, silk socks, silk cravats, luxury vacations, and everything else that Hef's projected man of the world could possibly covet. Names such as Lord West, London Records, and Van Heusen crammed its pages, their illustrations and copy seemingly produced to the exact specifications of the Playboy life. It is for this reason that I can look back on those 50s and 60s issues with awe and envy, but as for the new Playboy? Not including the advertising for Playboy’s own line of product, there are exactly nine ads for liquor, one for a fuzzbuster, one for a styling gel, three for exercise and weight control, one for BlueRay discs, one for a car magazine, a coupon for cigarettes, one ad for some sort of sex pillow, and three (which kind of belies the entire idea of a priapic lifestyle) to cure erectile dysfunction. That’s it. No car ads. No camera ads. No ads to entice you to beautiful Tahiti. Whether it was the decision of Playboy to scale back the amount of advertising space it offers or that advertisers have simply abandoned the magazine (more likely) is not the point. The point is that Playboy was one of the few magazines that had more than a financially symbiotic relationships with its advertisers; it had a philosophically symbiotic relationship as well. Hef sold the life; advertisers supplied the means. The first issue of Playboy gets away with no advertising because it was presenting the life for the first time, but the Playboy of today doesn’t have that luxury. It needs the return of the yearn factor, from content, from advertisers, because without it, we are back to the question that has been continually asked for the last quarter century: Is Playboy relevant?

     After all this research, I have to say in all honesty, yes. For some. Because if relevance means being a mirror of public taste, then the mutable Playboy has been a spotless reflector for the last fifty-four years. It started out as an apolitical publication (‘Affairs of the state will be out of our province,’ Hef wrote in that first issue.) and with the turbulent 60s came essays on war. The readership sought nature, and the models found waterfalls. The 70s were sexual and Playboy got steamy. And today's pitch is for the lads and frat-boys, and though the magazine is currently in another state of flux, we can tell it's still trying to figure out ways to please that witless crowd. The one market to which it is no longer relevant, however, is the one it first courted, the worldly sophisticate, and perhaps, in that regard, the detractors were right along. Being witness to all the sideline pawing in those Playboy After Dark shows, after reviewing the 70s issues and feeling like I needed a decontaminant shower, after reading the last issue that comprised too-little life and too-much silicone, I can’t help but think young Hugh M. Hefner started his career with no other intention than of someday dropping the burden of sophistication and ending up a dirty old man. What else can I say? Congratulations, Hef. You made it.

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