Entertainment for men, civilization for boys

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.”

— “The Playboy Philosophy,” December 1963

MADISON, Wis. — Victoria Valentino is one of the kindest and bravest people I know. We’ve never actually met. Years ago, we had a few phone dialogs about the tumult that consumed her life at the time she posed as Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in September 1963. We talked because she was the love object for a character — a teenage boy named Rasmussen — in a novel I was writing, called They Shot Kennedy. 

Since those conversations, Victoria and I have stayed erratically in touch. All our contacts are sympathetic because she’s a paragon of sympathy. One of my goals in life is to meet her in person — to thank her for affecting my outlook on many things and, most important, for teaching the characters in my novel a vital lesson about the confusing clash of illusion and reality. 

Like virtually every woman who ever undressed for Playboy’s photographers, Victoria embodies the fuzzy, air-brushed boundary between illusion and reality. I’m thinking lately about her because, at last, They Shot Kennedy is coming off the press (Last Kid Books, 2020), and because I got a postcard the other day.

It’s from Playboy. It says that, after 67 years, Playboy is going out of print. In T.S. Eliot’s formulation, it ended with a whimper. 

But the “bang” with which Hugh Hefner launched Playboy, and the pervasive impact — on America’s midcentury mores — of what many critics dismissed as a mere titty magazine deserves a little historical reflection.

Growing up, I didn’t approve of Playboy. I was a Catholic-school kid and Playboy — a near occasion of sin — was smut. However, since it was also sex, it became more interesting as I blundered toward high school. After puberty hit, Playboy haunted my psyche. Among media available to boys in the formative Fifties and Sixties, the most influential were probably Mad magazine and Playboy. 

What most boys didn’t realize — as they ogled their way through an issue of Hugh Hefner’s brainchild — was that they were subliminally absorbing civilization. We were learning— among the nude spreads, stupid Party Jokes and ponderous installments of “The Playboy Philosophy” — how to be couth. 

This was vital because, in that era, parents had little time or motivation to teach sons how to be charming or cool. Our teachers didn’t care what clothes we wore, how we smelled, how we combed our hair, whether our shoes were shined and fashionable. Most adults had no idea what books we read, which art we appreciated — if any — what music we preferred and whether we liked jazz.

Playboy cared. Playboy liked jazz. Hugh Hefner assured us that we’d always be guided by the Playboy Advisor and waited on by Bunnies. He stuffed us with tips, all seemingly directed at the seduction of the high-school girls on whom, for most of us, no amount of advice had any effect. But, even if Hef never got me into the backseat with the prom queen, he taught me how to comport myself at the prom. He instilled the need to dance as deftly as James Bond. He told us what to wear and what not to wear with evening dress (white socks? Oh my God!).

Hef taught us the word “pulchritude.” He made us want to learn baccarat.

Because Playboy glorified “coeds” and published ten-page full-color features about this year’s campus fashions, we all yearned to go to college. If we wanted to be as irresistible to coeds as the stylish BMOCs of Princeton and Yale, in their argyle crewnecks and penny loafers, we had to buckle down and take the SAT.  College, to paraphrase Connie Francis, was where the girls are.

Of course, boys are less than half the world. Cultural history will likely decide that Playboy did little for girls but turn them into sexual objects. This might be true, sort of, but it gives Hefner too much credit. Well before Hef came along, women already were sexual objects. All I needed to do to verify that truth was walk into one of the bars on Superior Avenue in Tomah (which I did a lot, because Dad was a bartender) and tune in to five rugged minutes of male discourse. 

Women were fully “objectified” before Hefner thought of stripping them down and displaying them on a glossy foldout. “Pin-up art,” whose masters included Elvgren and Vargas, and whose icons included Betty Boop, Betty Grable and Betty Page, flourished long before Playboy joined the club. What Hefner achieved, by elevating both the craft and the technology of “cheesecake” imagery, was to nudge the nudie cutie toward art. Indeed, Hef’s first centerfold — the iconic nude of Marilyn Monroe stretched on that crimson sheet —  is a composition that Matisse might have done in pen and ink, or Modigliani in oils.

Moreover, and I hesitate to credit him with too much enlightenment, Hefner lent more dignity to his nudes than any prior pin-up purveyor. After his own fluffy fashion, Hef “subjectified” his naked ladies by revealing their names (many of which are their actual names) and penning sappy profiles about their lives, hobbies, deep thoughts and dreams. For example, about Victoria Valentino, Playboy burbled that “Vicky has many irons in the creative fire: she paints (‘Mostly still lifes, and pen-and- inks’), she sings (‘My voice is technically imperfect, but I like to think it has a bluesy quality that gets a song across’), she dances (‘Purely for my own pleasure—though I did work one summer teaching ballet to little girls)” etc.

Playboy, of course, came late and haltingly to the feminist movement and was regularly— although not very effectively — ravaged by the likes of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. He responded with charm, lip service, advice columns on Lesbian love and a Playboy interview with Germaine Greer.

Ultimately, Playboy, the home of “Little Annie Fanny,” didn’t take the women’s movement — or any movement — seriously. Not should it have. Hefner was, as he stated on every magazine cover, an entertainer. His contributions to culture, although derivative and oblique, reached and altered millions of us.

Hefner was, after all, a self-indulgent hedonist whose true cause was self-indulgent hedonism — a pursuit most kids sneaking a peek into Playboy did not emulate because who could afford Hef’s rent? Politically, Hefner was the supreme liberal opportunist. He never failed to swiftly foster a socially progressive trend that tapped his youthful demographic. The gay community, for example, found an early champion in Hefner. Playboy supported civil rights, opposed McCarthyism and was a veritable crusader for the First Amendment. 

As you must recall, the standard excuse for any guy caught flipping through Playboy was that he was “only reading it for the articles.” This was rarely true but the articles were another subtle influence on the receptive young mind. It was in Playboy that most of us encountered names like Updike, Malamud, Bellow, Roth and Baldwin. It was Playboy interviews with Albert Schweitzer, Grace Kelly, Allen Ginsberg, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schlesinger, Billy Wilder, John Kenneth Galbraith, Fidel Castro, Dr. King, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver that suggested thoughts, fears and possibilities beyond the halls of our high schools. 

And it is Victoria — both in my real-life friendship and my fictional teenagers’ conversation with her — who reveals that there’s far more and far far better in a beautiful woman than meets the roving eye.