In the first issue of Playboy magazine, published in December 1953, Hugh Hefner wrote an essay speaking for its envisioned readers: "We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex."
On first blush, his commercial strategy here seemed straightforward: Men who make a habit of inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz and sex will have a lot of free nights for reading Playboy magazine. Empires have been built on lesser principles.
Yet the evidence presented in The New Bedside Playboy: A Half Century of Amusement, Diversion & Entertainment suggests a more ambitious grand plan. With its ribald jokes and cartoons, airbrushed "pictorials" and prose selections from America's best-paid writers — all wrapped up into a glossy connoisseurship that Hefner called the "Playboy Philosophy" — the magazine can be seen as a mad plot: to create a race of men more boring and insecure than any before. As Hefner later proposed, "Playboy exists, in part, as a motivation for men to expend greater effort in their work, develop their capabilities further and climb higher on the ladder of success."
The fix was in from the start. It held sway over American men until the arrival of a medium even more effective at replacing male curiosity with useless pudding: 24-hour sports television. Hefner introduces the current volume, which has no photographs of naked women, with the wisdom, attributed to an "anonymous sage," that "most of man's great pleasures can be found between a book's covers and beneath a bed's coverlet," setting the appropriate tone for this silken time capsule.
Who cites anonymous sages these days? And who talks of coverlets? This collection, he promises, distills 53 years worth of "visual tonics," "light fantastics," "danses macabres" and "nostalgic frolicking in the snows of yesteryear." By this he means mainly short stories, but there are also essays, reminiscences, four pages of "party jokes," 21 mostly dirty cartoons and a long interview in which Saul Bellow is asked what he thought about the O.J. Simpson trial ("in California the whole justice system is in deep trouble") and whether he has known any actors intimately (only Marilyn Monroe, and not in that sense).
Begun five years after the first Kinsey report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Playboy shifted performance anxiety into a realm guys could master, with a little help from a magazine: the right hi-fi gear, the right Bordeaux and the right literary references. It is with erotic aplomb that Hefner refers to his publication in The New Bedside Playboy as "America's most sophisticated magazine."
The mix of writers comprises a dream party guest list, albeit heavy on the Y chromosomes: Vladimir Nabokov, T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jimmy Breslin, Thom Jones, Norman Mailer, John Updike and dozens more boldface names. But if you have read any of these writers before, you have probably caught them in better form. No man who knows his way around a coverlet needs Nabokov to supply pickup lines like: "Yes, we Russians are sentimental eccentrics, but believe me, we can love with the passion of a Rasputin and the naivete of a child. You are lonely and I am lonely. You are free and I am free. Who, then, can forbid us to spend several pleasant hours in a sheltered love nest?" A sheltered love nest? Tell me there's not a plot afoot here.
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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