The osmotic effect of Mickey Mouse and Miss September

by David Benjamin

“…  Our morality is based, in large part, on mystical dogma, not reason, our lives are governed by superstition and prejudice rather than knowledge. Self-sacrifice is prized above self-interest and self-esteem. Society is placed above the individual. And the goal of happiness is lost in a labyrinthine maze of emotional responses, self-doubts, self-denials, inhibitions, prejudices, unthinking value judgments, superstitions and hypocrisies… ”

— Hugh Hefner, The Playboy Philosophy, December 1963)

 

MADISON, Wis.—Overwhelmed by the roar and squeal of a family gathering somewhere in wintry Wisconsin, I was stricken by a claustrophobia that escalated into panic. Everywhere I turned, in a drafty woodframe house strewn with holiday clutter and overpopulated from cellar to attic—nowhere to hide, no way out—were nattering aunts, beer-soaked uncles and raucous cousins. 

It came to me suddenly that I needed, desperately, to see the Christmas special on “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color,” which was due to air that evening on WKBT, but not here, not on the TV in this madhouse of bed-bouncing barbarians and blue-collar boozers. Teetering on the brink of hysteria, I lobbied Mom to get me back somehow to Grandma and Papa’s house on Pearl Street to watch “my show.” I knew this was preposterous. Mom was hip-deep among sisters and deaf to my distress. But I begged, I whined, I tore my hair and rended my garments, pointlessly, hopelessly. To add to my absurdity, the television in question was a ’55 Motorola, able to render Disney’s wonderful world only in black and white. But my objective wasn’t Disney. It was escape. Indeed, it was survival, for which I had no prospect—I was going to die in a puddle of my incontinent cousin Tony’s urine—until Herb peeled off from the circle of uncles and volunteered to shut me the hell up and drive back to Tomah. 

Years later, I realized that Herb was offering no favor. My most antisocial uncle, he hated these mob scenes. He seized on my hysteria, tossed me into his pickup and got me back to Pearl Street in time for Walt.

Whatever I saw on TV that evening is lost to my memory. But looking back, I realize that my premise, the desperate need for a Disney fix, was a credible appeal. By mid-century, Walt Disney was a high priest of popular culture. Mickey was a sacrosanct Mouse. Disney pervaded the minds and hearts of American kids like nothing else. Of course, the fantasies that Walt had insinuated into my psyche were counterfeit. Better than any prior impresario, he had mastered the craft of turning complicated stories and ideas into cartoon puppets and catchy jingles. 

But as I absorbed Disney’s wonderworld, I sensed that there were untold mysteries. There were clues in the songs, the talking critters and the avuncular tones of Walt himself. I latched, for example, onto the Disney version of Uncle Remus. Captivated by Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and the infamous tar baby, I looked for more. In the Tomah library, I found an entire book, written in a dialect that even today slows me down and gives me pause, thick with the adventures of the notorious rabbit, his foxy foil, the blundering bear, and a vast cast that ranged from Brer Tarrypin and Brer Bull-frog to Brer Buzzard and all “de little Rabbits.”

For safe consumption, Disney had abridged Uncle Remus and bowdlerized the prose of Joel Chandler Harris. Exposed to the original, I was disillusioned with Walt. But, were it not for Disney’s antiseptic parody, I would have never ransacked the library and found Harris’ series of extraordinary stories, foreshadowing the steady infiltration of black art, literature and music—especially music—that altered, uplifted and enlivened American culture after the Civil War.

By my teenage years, I was safe from Walt Disney but forced to cope with the allure of an even more powerful purveyor of pop fantasy. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner had become the foremost practitioner of skills developed and refined by Disney. Like Walt, Hef had begun his enterprise with media, a magazine that mimicked, in many ways, the cartoon eye-candy of Steamboat Willy and Snow White. As one critic quoted in Playboy’s November 1963 issue said, “Hefner’s philosophy appears to be that the ‘modern urban male’ likes and even needs to look at pictures of naked, suggestively posed women; that this is a very healthy and virile way to be, and that it’s practically a duty to encourage the habit…”

Like Disney, Hefner was a simplifier. While running a business that was sophisticated and diversified, he presented to the public a viscerally attractive product with characters idealized so lavishly that an impartial observer had to overcome sheer wonderment before any attempt at judgment. Hefner’s photographers depicted their nudes with a clarity, artistry and dignity that knowingly evoked Rubens and Maillol. Hefner appended bios of his Playmates that rendered them as normal and approachable as the virgin next door, and he surrounded his nudie cuties with prose from the world’ most respected writers and pundits. Hefner’s Playboy clubs were a Disneyland for adults, and his impact on the young people of mid-century Americas—especially boys—was seismic.

More brazenly than any hedonist predecessor, Hefner defied America’s Puritan roots, lending to carnal knowledge an air of glamour and prestige. He turned the typical horny guy from a peeping Tom peering up skirts beneath stairwells to a sheik reposed on a silken chaise, luring to his den of sin a harem of bejeweled and willing concubines (shown here in various states of undress).

While I was in high school, coping with the clash between my parochial education and my centerfold temptations, Hefner seized the opportunity to ally his empire with the emerging James Bond franchise, in which Sean Connery rose to a sort of priapic sainthood as the quintessence of cool. Bond was the Mickey Mouse of intrigue, savoir faire and casual, photogenic sex. He epitomized the “playboy philosophy” while modeling the products advertised in Hefner’s magazine.

Possibly, my friends and I were corrupted by exposure to Playboy. Our reverence for women might have been eroded by the sight of Miss September. But Hefner dispensed education unavailable from Mom, Dad, school or the Vatican. As we paged through Playboy in search of “The Girls of Denmark,” or skimmed the probing interview of Saul Bellow, we were learning what to wear, what to smoke and what to drink, what to eat and how to eat it without acting like hogs at the trough. I was learning how to cut my hair and keep it clean. I learned how to smell good—for girls who already smelled good. Mine was the generation that started using cologne that wasnt Old Spice, but fragrances called Brut, Hai Karate and English Leather, especially English Leather. Every prom reeked of it! Under Hef and Bond, I studied how to speak to a girl and how to win her over, not through brute force and alcohol, but with charm and patience, by asking and listening. 

True to my Disney doubts, I never swallowed Hefner whole. I skipped every word of “The Playboy Philosophy” and never mimicked James Bond in the presence of a girl, lest I get laughed out of the gym. I value Playboy in retrospect not as a guidebook but a gateway to realms otherwise inaccessible to a sixteen-year-old Dairyland doofus. It expanded my interest in art, from Art Spiegelman to Picasso. It opened my ears to jazz and taught me that Coltrane isn’t a railroad in West Virginia. Playboy led me toward Esquire, The Saturday Review and The New Yorker, unveiling the drama and difficulty of America’s great struggles, for civil rights, gay rights, even women’s rights. 

Playboy’s time passed. It had to. It deteriorated finally into glossy porn and ill-veiled misogyny. Worst of all, as he sank into Viagra-driven cradle-robbing, Hefner lost his cool. 

I never really attained cool, nor did my friends. But Hefner, indirectly and inexplicably, had done as much to civilize us as the best of our preachers, teachers, mothers and mentors.