In the 1950s and 1960s, Cavalier, Nugget, Escapade and other euphemistically dubbed "men's magazines" published some of the most adventurous new writing in the US, jump-starting or sustaining the careers of Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, Jack Kerouac and others. The magazines could risk a little raunch, so they were in the right place for the earthier fiction emerging from the margins.
The writers collected in The New Bedside Playboy, by contrast, are established brand names, apparently selling from the back of their files. One thing about the Playboy mystique: the paychecks were real.
And it is good to know there is still a remunerative home for an Ian Fleming story that begins, "The stingray was about 6 feet from wing tip to wing tip and perhaps 10 feet long from the blunt wedge of its nose to the end of its deadly tail," or a David Mamet rant that vents, in support of both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association: "Well, then. We are not too far removed from the viciousness that follows curtailing freedom of the press; eg., the Red scare of the Fifties and its attempts at rebirth. Neither are we too far removed from the terror that can visit itself on a disarmed populace: the Czechs of Prague Spring, the Jews of Europe under the Third Reich." Without such diversions we'd have only the present.
Was there really a time when swingers imagined themselves in silk jammies chatting about Nabokov and Brubeck and the latest cognac? No doubt. Ring-a-ding-ding. The right literary reference, the right hi-fi gear, and voila: the freedom to go home alone, unswung, to a bit of light fiction, corny jokes and an airbrush that liberated the white-collar male from the uncomfortable burden of human curiosity.
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