Almost caught up on the obituaries, hopefully the famous people who had an impact on my life would stay alive for a few weeks to keep the morbidity down.
As for ‘Hef,’ lets face it, he affected many males from my generation but not in the same manner as say the Boomers who were his first young audience or the disaffected Greatest Generation settling into the Fifties. I grew up in the Seventies when publishing got really raunchy, and truthfully…gross. Playboy was facing competition from Penthouse, Hustler and publications that bordered on anatomy manuals. So his magazine sank to their level to some extent. How do I know? Every kid inevitably finds a hidden stash belonging to an older relative or teenagers hiding them in woods, sock drawer or box labeled “Christmas Decorations.” Hell, I remembered one classmate whose mother bought them for him which gave us something “to read” when it wasn’t your turn playing Atari.
One funny anecdote I think everyone, including ‘Hef’ would’ve laughed at involved my mother. In early 1982, someone signed up my brother Brian for a subscription and it was the kind in which issues would be delivered first, then you pay later, plus Playboy back then was just came a plain-brown slipcase, sealing it plastic started by the time I went to college. To this day I suspect the same “Atari Kid,” I mentioned earlier, did this as a prank. I recall being bewildered over this, thinking it wasn’t funny; my 13-year-old mind was more occupied with D&D while girls were moving from the periphery to center stage. Mom…she was freakin’ livid! I’m confident Brian got the third degree over the subscription.
After Mom was convinced of our innocence in the matter, she wasted the time and energy into writing Playboy a scathing letter about how the magazine was inappropriate for a boy my brother’s age. Even then I was rolling my eyes thinking, “Yeah Mom, ‘Hef’ is going to read it and change his ways.”
Being the era before computers and toll-free numbers sped up cancellations, Mom’s letter must not have gotten to Playboy very quickly because four issues arrived in the mail over the Spring/Summer of 1982. Our parents intercepted the first three, but when numero four showed during Summer Vacation, Dad was already in Houston with his new job, Mom was at school and we were allowed to be home unsupervised. Our friends Chet and Eric were around as well to pore over the contents as pre-teen boys are prone to do. We then realized we were dead should Mom discover our newfound “treasure.” So the four of us divided up the pictures amongst each other and burned the rest in the backyard. It could be the B story for an episode of Stranger Things in its hilarity really.
I never really encountered Playboy much again until I was an intern at WQFM where the news director Susie Austin (née Mields) teased me for actually reading an article. I remembered it well, some piece arguing against the futility in the war on drugs.
Then around 1992 I tried a subscription and it came with a videotape I gave to my roommate or somebody. The key element became pretty boring quickly and I actually read it. There was an interview with Michael Jordan that changed my opinion about him as a person; Buck Henry wrote about Bettie Page’s career/appeal and some coverage on the election. The dirty-joke page was amusing before the Internet ruined the art of joke telling; my Dad was a master of this ability. However, Playboy just didn’t hold much interest in continuing, especially after losing my job at year’s end.
It’s pretty apparent the Internet destroyed Playboy‘s fortunes yet according to the Economist‘s obituary on ‘Hef,’ he was independently wealthy and didn’t depend upon those revenues before the Web exploded in the Nineties. Much of his empire’s other elements had evaporated by the Eighties too. By my mid-Twenties, he was also an anachronism and the logo had been co-opted as a calling card for White Trash and Rappers. His cameo on The Simpsons was amusing. The episode of Bart and Milhouse finding Homer’s stash minus the naked women was funnier for they adopted the other elements of the “Playboy” lifestyle: Hi-Fis, Jazz, wearing a smoking jacket, etc.
In his final three decades, I think he had become a freakish parody of himself. No longer a champion of Libertine values in the face of Fifties conformity, ‘Hef’ had become a gross lech surrounded by peroxide-soaked skanks (e.g. Kendra Wilkinson, ugh) and the famous mansion was a sleazy relic. I’m surprised he didn’t sue the bejezus out of Harper Collins and former “girlfriend” Holly Sue Cullen for her tell-all book Down the Rabbit Hole. A book I heard about via comedian April Richardson. What April mentioned was horrifying. It sounded like the mansion had become more of a stable and/or factory than an adult playground or what most probably thought, a harem.
I know this obituary is longer than most but even his opponents can’t deny that Hefner changed the world slightly. He had an effect beyond publishing (pretty tame) pornography. He became a part of America’s cultural landscape, something innocuous everyone practically knew like Star Trek, McDonald’s and Michael Jackson songs. I think it’s going to be years before we know how History judges him. In the end, to me, Hugh Hefner and Playboy were just something representing a bygone era’s ideal lifestyle. To make my point, the last conversation I had with my Mom in 2003 entailed her condemnation of Somara and me living together before we married. Since she was always the more prurient-minded one I retaliated with, “Oh yeah, it’s Playboy After Dark every day at our house!” This story makes my fellow Generation Xers snicker because it doesn’t conjure thoughts of the Bunnies or sex, it’s more likely ‘Hef’ in a smoking-jacket introducing the evening’s programming, “Tonight, we’ll be regaled with the comedy of Dick Gregory, some cool jazz by Charles Mingus and the latest thoughts about modern ennui from Norman Mailer.” See Mom, the silly magazine didn’t turn me into Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump.
