March 19, 2018 • 30 mins
Riding the wave of the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Hugh Hefner created a male fantasy world in the pages of his Playboy magazine, one that would have lasting consequences for American life and culture. Behind closed doors, however, Hefner's life in the celebrated Playboy Mansion was rather different than the sophisticated one portrayed in his magazine.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Why uzzy media productions. The minority of women's liberationists was
on the streets across the country. In the end, I
kind of came to understand that in many ways, women
are all bunnies. I enjoy women, I enjoy being women
(00:21):
with women very much, constantly surrounded by gorgeous girls and
beautiful belongings. Hefner's world may seem enviable to some. I'm
a very lucky fellow. With whatever problems or conflicts I've
had in my life, I've managed to pursue and fulfill
most all of my dreams. I personally would not want
(00:44):
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.
(01:05):
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,
(01:26):
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,
(01:46):
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?
(02:12):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:14):
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
(03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:18):
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.
(04:42):
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.
(05:02):
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
(05:23):
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
(05:45):
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
(06:06):
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,
(06:26):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:10):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:54):
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.
(08:15):
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
(08:38):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
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.
(10:13):
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
(10:36):
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
(11:05):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:51):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:36):
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.
(12:56):
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
(13:17):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:24):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:08):
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
(15:30):
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
(15:53):
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
(16:16):
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.
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:30):
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,
(18:51):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:39):
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
(20:00):
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
(20:20):
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
(20:43):
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
(21:06):
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
(21:28):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:08):
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
(22:30):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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
(24:20):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:45):
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
(26:09):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:50):
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.
(27:12):
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
(27:36):
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
(28:01):
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
(28:22):
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
(28:44):
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
(29:10):
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
(29:30):
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
(30:08):
right
Why uzzy media productions. The minority of women's liberationists was
on the streets across the country. In the end, I
kind of came to understand that in many ways, women
are all bunnies. I enjoy women, I enjoy being women
(00:21):
with women very much, constantly surrounded by gorgeous girls and
beautiful belongings. Hefner's world may seem enviable to some. I'm
a very lucky fellow. With whatever problems or conflicts I've
had in my life, I've managed to pursue and fulfill
most all of my dreams. I personally would not want
(00:44):
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.
(01:05):
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,
(01:26):
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,
(01:46):
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?
(02:12):
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
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:14):
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
(03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:18):
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.
(04:42):
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.
(05:02):
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
(05:23):
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
(05:45):
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
(06:06):
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,
(06:26):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:10):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:54):
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.
(08:15):
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
(08:38):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
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.
(10:13):
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
(10:36):
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
(11:05):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:51):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:36):
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.
(12:56):
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
(13:17):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:24):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:08):
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
(15:30):
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
(15:53):
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
(16:16):
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.
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:30):
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,
(18:51):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:39):
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
(20:00):
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
(20:20):
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
(20:43):
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
(21:06):
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
(21:28):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:08):
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
(22:30):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:55):
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
(24:20):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:45):
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
(26:09):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:50):
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.
(27:12):
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
(27:36):
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
(28:01):
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
(28:22):
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
(28:44):
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
(29:10):
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
(29:30):
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
(30:08):
right
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