Babes, breasts and bunny ears Playboy magazine Media Man Australia

Babes, breasts and bunny ears, by Peter Carlson - 8th September 2003
(Credit: Fairfax - The Age)

Playboy magazine’s timing was perfect. Its message of sex for fun made it the unofficial bible of the sexual revolution. In America, it still sells 3 million magazines a month, writes Peter Carlson.

The morning sun shines through soft yellow curtains, illuminating a farmhouse kitchen with an ancient icebox and a Formica table dusted with flour, where two fresh pies are cooling.

It’s a scene right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Except that the kitchen is in a Playboy photo studio. And the sun is really a klieg light. And the icebox was rented. And the pies are store-bought. And there’s a busty blonde sprawled across the table wearing nothing except pink high heels and a coat of make-up that took nearly two hours to apply.

“Crawl,” says photographer Stephen Wayda. The busty blonde pretends to crawl across the table, taking care not to kneel on the pies.

“Give me some more,” Wayda says. She leans toward him. “Give me a smile,” he says. She smiles.

It’s been a long, tough summer at Playboy’s Studio West. This year is the magazine’s 50th anniversary, and the crack Playboy babe-finding team has been searching this great nation to find a babe who is sufficiently babelicious to become the official 50th Anniversary Playmate of the Month, for the January issue.

Playboy’s babe-finding team — which doubles as Playboy’s publicity-generating team — has held try-outs in 20 cities. They’ve sent candidates to Studio West to pose for photos, which are sent to Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s 77- year-old founder, who will pick the winner.

They’ve been working like dogs, forced to photograph an unending stream of beautiful naked women. There was a pair of beautiful naked twins. And a trio of beautiful naked triplets. And lots and lots of beautiful naked women who arrived unaccompanied by sisters.

Today’s beautiful naked woman — on the table with the pies — is Sandra Hubby. She’s 24, a model from Norton, Ohio. For years, she has done bikini modelling for a line of tanning products, and decided to try out when the Playmate search came to Cleveland.

“I saw how a lot of Playmates went on to bigger and better things,” she says, “so I thought, `Why not try it?’ Not just to be a Playmate but take it further than that, like get into acting. You look at Pamela Anderson and Carmen Electra and all them. If they could do it, why can’t I?”

When Hubby came to Los Angeles, she was driven right over to the Playboy Mansion, where Hefner lives with his seven girlfriends.

“I was really nervous,” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘What are the other girls gonna be like? Are they gonna be nice?’ And actually, everybody was super-nice.”

She arrived on a Sunday, “Sun and Fun Day” at the Mansion, so everybody was outside, hanging around the pool and the trampoline and the world-famous grotto. She was introduced to Hefner and he shook her hand.

They talked for only about 30 seconds, but she did come away with one lasting impression of Playboy’s legendary founder.

“He has really soft hands,” she says. “They’re softer than mine.”

Those soft hands changed America.

In 1953, Hugh Hefner, then 27, created the first issue of Playboy at a card table in his Chicago apartment. He’d borrowed $US 8000 to finance the magazine, and he spent $500 to buy the rights to nude photos of Marilyn Monroe, published in the first issue.

Within five years, Playboy was selling a million copies a month. Within 10 years, it was an international empire that included a chain of Playboy Clubs where members were served by women wearing bunny ears and fluffy tails.

Playboy’s success was based on a simple but brilliant idea: Respectable men would buy a skin magazine if the nude pictures were surrounded by writing of such high quality that they could plausibly — or at least semi-plausibly — claim they bought it for the articles. So Hefner surrounded his nudes with short stories by John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov and interviews with Bertrand Russell and Albert Schweitzer.

Writer Tom Wolfe joked that Playboy’s highbrow articles were the “magazine’s monthly 10 cc. of literary penicillin.”

Playboy’s message — sex is for recreation, not just procreation — arrived at the same historical moment as the birth control pill, and the magazine became the unofficial house organ, so to speak, of the sexual revolution.

Hefner became a symbol of the swinging single, hosting wild parties at his Playboy mansions, first in Chicago, then in L.A.

Of course Playboy was attacked by religious conservatives, who said it was immoral, and by feminists, who said it objectified women. And it spawned countless imitators. Today, Playboy sells 3.1 million copies a month, America’s best-selling men’s magazine.

But that’s less than half of what it sold at its peak, back in the 1970s. Ad revenues have also declined. Playboy’s parent company — which derives most of its income from its TV and online divisions, not the magazine — has lost money since 1999, although it turned a small profit in the first quarter of 2003.

Last year, Hefner hired a new editorial director with orders to attract younger readers. (The average reader is now 33.) But not everybody is optimistic.

“I don’t think the magazine will attract younger readers until Hefner retires,” says Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi who writes extensively on the magazine industry. “My students tell me, ‘That’s my grandfather’s magazine.’”

Since 1998, when he separated from his wife — ex-Playmate Kimberley Conrad Hefner, 40 — after nine years of marriage, the former recluse has been more visible than ever, partying with his many girlfriends at Los Angeles nightclubs and touting Viagra’s rejuvenating powers.

Hef gave his daughter Christie, 48, financial control 20 years ago, and he no longer spends much time editing stories. But he still has an intense, hands-on interest in the photos.

“Hefner’s tough,” says Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy’s West Coast photography editor, who has been designing Playboy centrefolds for 39 years. When it comes to the centrefolds, Hef wants what he wants and won’t settle for anything else.

The process goes like this: Playmate candidates are photographed and the pictures sent to Hefner. He selects a Playmate, who then spends days, sometimes weeks, posing for hundreds more pictures. Those photos go to Hef, who chooses those that will appear in the magazine. Hef also insists that the centrefold photo have a suggestion of a story, a plot. Sometimes it’s simply a visual hint that the Playmate has just had a romantic encounter.

“If a guy’s shoes are under the bed or a guy’s hat or pipe or accoutrements are there, Hef likes that,” Grabowski says.

She picks up last January’s centrefold, set in a movie projection room with a poster of Humphrey Bogart.

“I had a different poster in there but Hef didn’t think it was appropriate,” she says. “It was from the old German director Josef von Sternberg. Hefner didn’t like that. He wanted something that would evoke romance. He sees the whole world through his own brand of romance.” What is Hugh Hefner’s brand of romance?

“How can I put it,” she says. “His idea of romance never changes — it’s the participants that change. When he was with Kimberley Hefner, that was a very solid affair. But now he’s got seven girlfriends. You’ll see them flitting around the house. Do you know how you recognise them? They all look alike. They’re all blonde. They all have long hair. It’s a look. Perhaps Hef, in a seminal period in his life, had a blonde girlfriend, and they all kind of duplicate that.”

Grabowski has seen thousands of women begging for a chance to appear naked in Playboy. Nearly 10,000 applied to become the 50th-Anniversary Playmate. College professors have published elaborate academic studies of the evolution of the Playmate — changes in height, weight, hair colour, skin colour. But Grabowski says they haven’t changed much at all, except for the breast implants.

“Even girls from small towns have breast implants now,” she says. “Is there a doctor with a wandering caravan who goes around performing breast implants in small towns?” She laughs. “I never encourage a girl to do it. Some do, some don’t. But in Los Angeles, if you run into a girl with natural breasts, you think, ‘She must be just passing through.’”

That is, of course, one of the legacies of Playboy, the house that breasts built.

The Playboy Mansion is a three-story, 30-room mock Tudor in ritzy Holmby Hills. Like many American homes, its lawn is decorated with pink flamingos. But these flamingos aren’t plastic. They’re real. Sometimes they bite visitors.

Peacocks stroll near the cages where Hef’s monkeys and parrots play. A waterfall flows into a stream that feeds the pool, which is really a small lake, complete with island.

Another stream flows into the fabled grotto, a man-made cave housing a jacuzzi and a bed-sized flat area that is reputed to be the scene of more amour than the Place Pigalle.

Inside the house, there’s a nude painting by Picasso and a nude painting by Dali and a nude painting by Matisse that is marred with a brown spot where a drunken John Lennon put out his cigarette. In one temperature-controlled room, archivists catalogue Hef’s personal scrapbooks — 1400 leather-bound volumes that chronicle his life in news clippings and photographs that he personally captions.

A huge movie screen hangs in the living room. On Sunday nights, Hef and his pals watch first-run movies here. On Monday nights, Hef and his pals watch vintage movie serials. On Friday nights, Hef and his pals watch movies from the ’30s and ’40s.

On Tuesday nights, Hef spends time with Kimberley and their two sons, now 13 and 11. On Wednesday nights, he plays gin rummy. On Thursday and Saturday nights, he goes dancing with his seven girlfriends.

“Hef is a creature of habit,” says Bill Farley, Playboy’s PR man.

A few minutes later, Hefner appears, wearing his famous black silk pyjamas, with a burgundy smoking jacket, black slippers and white socks. He’s still slim but his hair is grey now and he walks a bit stiffly.

These modest signs of ageing make the pyjamas seem less like a charming protest against the tyranny of the business suit and more like the uniform of a geezer who spends most of his time hanging around the house.

He smiles broadly, shakes hands. He sits on a couch and ponders why his magazine has lasted 50 years. “It’s a very good magazine, first and foremost,” he says. “It hit a nerve and became very quickly something much more than a magazine. It connects with its core audience not just as readers — it’s an extension of who they perceive themselves to be.

“My father was a direct descendant — and therefore I am — of William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So my puritan roots run deep. To break that chain is part of what my life is all about. The whole party notion — the Mansion as party — is a response to puritanism.”

Hefner and his writers once crusaded against puritanism, but that spirit is largely gone now because, he says, the crusade was victorious.

“We will never recapture the importance of Playboy in the ‘60s and ‘70s because we changed the world,” he says. “We live in a Playboy world now, for good or ill.”

Playboy once ran interviews with such luminaries as Marshall McLuhan, Martin Luther King jnr. and Allen Ginsberg. Now it runs interviews with Lisa Marie Presley, Jimmy Kimmel and Tobey Maguire. Hefner blames this editorial devolution on the times.

“There has been a certain dumbing down of society,” he says “What do you do when you’re trying to create a contemporary magazine for young people? Well, you try to make it as good as you can, but you have to stay in touch with what’s going on.”

Hefner scoffs at the suggestion by Husni, the journalism professor, that young people don’t want to hear about him anymore. “There are more mentions of Playboy, the Playboy Mansion and me in rock lyrics in the last two years than ever before,” he says. “Playboy and me and the lifestyle are iconic for young men and women and that’s pretty exciting.”

Perhaps he’s exaggerating, but who can claim he’s lost touch with young people? He is, after all, dating seven of them.

“It’s not dating one girl on Wednesday and one on Thursday — the usual sequential way of an unmar-ried guy,” he says. “I date them all at the same time. It works for me.”

Does he ever consider dating some beautiful woman of, say, 40, with some experience in life?

“Maybe experience in life is not what is appealing to me,” he says, smiling. “Maybe it’s the unsophisticated enthusiasm that comes with youth.”

He dates the young, he says, because he is young. “Chronologically, I’m 77, but in reality I’m a very young man,” he says.

“A lot of us feel that way. We say, ‘I may be wearing this old face and body but I’m still the same guy.’ Well, I am still the same guy ... Power has not corrupted me. I have not become jaded. I wake up every day well aware of my good fortune, loving the work I do, loving my life, realising that life is a crapshoot and I’m on a roll second to none.”

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