Playboy magazine

Identification: American men’s magazine

Playboy helped start the sexual revolution by supporting a positive and more liberal attitude toward sexual behavior, while also defining the American urban male as one who could enjoy “the good life.”

Key Figures

• Hugh Hefner (1926–2017), publisher

Playboy was the brainchild of its publisher, Hugh Hefner, who was born into a strict middle-class Methodist family in Chicago in 1926. After serving in World War II, Hefner entered the University of Illinois, where he focused on the student newspaper and humor magazine. After college, he married and worked briefly for Esquire magazine, in the circulation department.

When Esquire moved to New York, Hefner stayed in Chicago and found himself jobless. The experience made him determined to succeed in a business venture of his own. Unable to sell his comic strip and magazine ideas, he decided to produce his own magazine with his limited funds. His major asset was a nude photograph of film star Marilyn Monroe. The photo had been taken for a calendar company years earlier, and despite its existence being widely known, no mainstream magazine would publish it for fear of prosecution under the restrictive obscenity laws of the time.

In November 1953, the first issue of Playboy was published with Monroe’s image on the cover. The first issue had no date (there was not enough money to publish a second issue, so there was no way of knowing how long the shelf life of the magazine would be) and contained only forty-four pages. Hefner wrote in his introduction, “If we are able to give the American male a few extra laughs and a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age, we’ll feel we’ve justified our existence.”

The first issue was a huge success, beginning what would be the magazine’s decades-long tenure. Throughout the 1950s, the magazine increased in circulation and status, until the October 1959 issue sold more than one million copies.

Because the success of Playboy was hard to duplicate, the magazine created a niche for itself that lasted for decades. The magazine’s most brilliant move came in 1956 with the campaign “What is a Playboy?” The promotion defined the Playboy reader as a man who “must see life not as a vale of tears, but a happy time; he must take joy in his work, without regarding it as the end and all of living.” In this campaign, Playboy defined its readership not as it was but as it aspired to be. The magazine then provided a forum for discussion of the trappings of the sophisticated good life: literature, clothes, apartments, and beautiful women.

Formula for Success

Throughout the 1950s, Playboy followed a simple formula for its success: provocative, but not entirely explicit, photographs of beautiful women, combined with a mixture of articles on the swinging urban bachelor’s “good life.” The principal woman featured in each issue was labeled “Playmate of the Month.” The very earliest photographs published in the magazine were similar to the Marilyn Monroe picture, purchased from calendar companies or other freelance photographers. Playboy started publishing its own photographs—often in what came to be its signature artistic manner—in mid-1955. Soon after, Janet Pilgrim (born Charlaine Karalus), the magazine’s subscription manager, became the Playmate of the Month. She reappeared in December of that year and was the first of the “girl-next-door” types, rather than professional models, that the magazine heralded. Hefner believed that it was better to make the playmates seem natural and friendly rather than merely exotic or unattainable. Another of the 1950s' most famous playmates was Bettie Page, featured in January 1955, who would go on to become a cult pinup figure. Each month’s playmate was featured in a double-page spread, called a centerfold, in the middle of the magazine; in March 1956, the feature became a triple-page fold.

Hefner regarded the era as one that needed civilizing and felt his male readers needed “polish” if they were to be successful. He steered his magazine toward an intellectual emphasis on everything from fiction to fashion and ensured that his pages could boast serious criticism about art, literature, culture, and design. Readers could find Playboy articles about “Mixing the Perfect Martini” (1955), for example, or a series called “Penthouse Apartment” that featured bachelor pad accoutrements. Profiles of celebrities such as Louis Armstrong and Lenny Bruce were also a part of the magazine’s format.

Fiction proved an important aspect of the magazine and helped win critical approval. Ray Bradbury published sections of his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) in 1954 and published several short stories in the magazine’s pages throughout the decade. The magazine soon became a showcase for works by esteemed authors such as Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck, and Evelyn Waugh.

Cartoons also played a surprisingly important role in Playboy's success during this period. Two of the magazine's most important cartoonists were Shel Silverstein and Alberto Vargas. Silverstein specialized in comic drawings and poems and would continue his affiliation with Playboy until he became a successful songwriter and children’s book author; Vargas painted unique pictures of beautiful girls in a signature style until his death in 1982.

Outside the Covers

The success of Playboy soon spilled into other ventures beyond the magazine. In August 1959, Playboy sponsored a jazz festival in Chicago that featured the most outstanding talent of the era, beginning the magazine’s regular sponsorship of events and signaling that Hefner’s empire was underway. In October of that year, a nationally syndicated television program titled Playboy’s Penthouse was launched. The show featured Hefner as the host of a party in his bachelor pad, surrounded by celebrity guests and beautiful women. Guests on the show included many of the magazine’s playmates as well as entertainers and intellectuals, such as singer Ella Fitzgerald and poet Carl Sandburg . The most successful and influential venture was planned throughout the late 1950s but did not open until February 1960: the first Playboy Club, a nightclub that featured waitresses dressed as “Playboy Bunnies.”

Playboy in the Twenty-First Century

In the twenty-first century, Playboy's international editions and licensing of its brand continued to make the company money, but the domestic edition soon ceased to be profitable. In 2015, the magazine announced its decision to stop publishing nude photos; Playboy Enterprises chief executive officer (CEO) Scott Flanders stated that the advent of the internet had made buying magazines for erotic photographs "passe." This decision was part of a general overhaul of Playboy's image, which also included hiring a female sex columnist and revising its website to be safe to browse at work. The magazine, whose circulation had dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to just 800,000 in 2015, hoped to attract a younger audience. Some journalists have also pointed to the Playboy brand's popularity in countries such as China, where pornography is illegal, as a reason behind the change.

In March 2020, Playboy announced that it would cease printing the magazine for the rest of 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many critics speculate, however, that the company will cease printing Playboy indefinitely. Playboy continued to publish an online version of magazine.

Impact

The publication of the provocative Playboy proved to be one of the decade’s cultural milestones. The magazine’s impact went far beyond critics’ impression of it as an upscale “girlie” magazine with pretentious pornography and instead became a symbol of sophisticated urbanity and freethinking. Playboy represented a startling contrast to the conservative values of the 1950s. The magazine celebrated hedonism and free sexual attitudes before such views were widely accepted. It also represented a powerful marketing force by linking upward mobility to sexual freedom and by defining its audience in an epicurean manner.

Hefner died at home in the Playboy Mansion on September 27, 2017, at age ninety-one. He was survived by his most recent wife, Crystal Harris, whom he married in 2012, and his four children.

Bibliography

Alpert, Lukas I. "Playboy Magazine Shuts Down Print Edition, Citing Coronavirus." The Wall Street Journal, 18 Mar. 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/playboy-magazine-shuts-down-print-edition-citing-coronavirus-11584582245. Accessed 15 Apr. 2020.

Edgren, Gretchen. The Playboy Book: Fifty Years. Taschen, 2005.

Handy, Bruce. "A Bunny Thing Happened: An Oral History of the Playboy Clubs." Vanity Fair, 22 Apr. 2011, www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/playboy-clubs-201105. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Lee, Timothy B. "The Fascinating Economics behind Playboy's Decision to Drop Nudes from Its Magazine." Vox, 4 Jan. 2016, www.vox.com/2015/10/13/9523879/playboy-nudity-no. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Mansnerus, Laura. "Hugh Hefner, Who Built the Playboy Empire and Embodied It, Dies at 91." The New York Times, 27 Sept. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/obituaries/hugh-hefner-dead.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Pitzulo, Carrie. Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy. U of Chicago P, 2011.

Scott, Kathryn Leigh. The Bunny Years. 1998. Gallery Books, 2011.

Somaiya, Ravi. "Nudes Are Old News at Playboy." The New York Times, 12 Oct. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.