Over a Playboy Salad (remarkably similar to a non-Playboy salad, though rather heavy on the Thousand Island), I unwrapped my Playboy gift-pack. A dime-store garter belt for the special person in my life, two Playboy bookmatches, a blizzard of promotional offers, and a scrap of paper bearing the tremulous signature of Hugh M. Hefner. According to the new Bunny Pack bonus program, all I had to do was ‘enjoy dinner Playboy style’ 1,531 times, and I’d win a new VCR. There were other offers: ‘Easy-to-take drink prices and complimentary chili every Monday through Friday from four to seven.’ Even as I finished my steak, the $1.50 all-you-can-eat brunch was being assembled on the sideboards.
‘Playboy Style…live it!’ say the ads for the club in the parent magazine. But Playboy Style, nowadays, is something you’d have to ask your father about. In this den of innocuousness, you see that the Playboy dream has submitted to the heroic consumerism of everyday America: it has been proletarianised, kitsched, disappearing in the direction it came from, back to Chicago, the Fifties, Korea, the furtive world of Dude, Gent, Rogue, Flirt, Sir, Male, Cutie, Eyeful, Giggles, Titter, Modern Sunbathing and Hygiene. Then, suddenly, there was Kinsey, the bikini, talk of the Pill, penicillin and Playboy. In the proud dawn of the Playboy dream, Hef hung out with Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac. Now it’s Sammy Davis Jr, Jimmy Caan, John and Bo Derek, and Tom Jones.
As it fades, the dream must reach down deeper into lumpen America, searching for the bedroom fevers of someone very like Hef in 1953: the son of stalwart Methodist parents, a fried-chicken and pork-chop kind of guy, miserably married, naïve, ambitious and repressed, someone who connected sex with upward mobility, someone who knew just how expensive the best things in life could be.
3. The Playboy Playmate
My friends all asked me why I wanted to become a Playmate, and I told them I thought the women of Playboy were the epitome of beauty, class, taste and femininity. — Shannon Tweed, ex-Playmate
Overworked, it seemed, to the point of inanition or actual brain death, Hef’s PR man Don was having problems firming up the Hefner interview and Mansion tour. Where, I wondered, was Hef’s famous in-depth back-up? But then I remembered what had happened when Playboy wanted to interview its own Editor-Publisher, six years ago: ‘Hef says call back in a year’ was the message from the Mansion. ‘We have a problem,’ droned Don. And yet problem-solving is his business, as it is with all the corporation Roys and Rays and Phils and Bills. Equally ponderous and evasive, Don is one of the many middlemen hired to interpose between Hef and the outside world. Nearly everybody in LA retains one or two of these reality-softeners. What do you get at the end of every line? The smooth interceptions of answering services; the forensic clearances of security people; Hispanic incomprehension.
I drove to Don’s office in the Playboy building, up on Sunset, to meet and chat with a ‘representative Playmate’. In the sunny, genial, nude-decked PR department I was introduced to Penny Baker and provided with the relevant issue of Playboy. Miss Baker was the beneficiary of The Great Thirtieth Anniversary Playmate Search: 250,000 polaroids later, they settled on Penny: ‘And now that we’ve found her, our greatest reward is in sharing her beauty with you.’ What do they look for, exactly? ‘Great nipples’, ‘sincere bush’, ‘Is there a problem with the breasts?’ – these are the sort of concepts (I had read) that are tossed back and forth by Hef’s creative consultants. For eight pages plus centrefold, at any rate, Penny’s beauty, her charms, were glisteningly revealed. Her turn-ons were ‘Mountains and music’. Among her turn-offs were ‘big talkers and humidity’. Her ideal man? ‘Someone who knows what he wants.’ Penny is eighteen.
Monitored by Don’s ponderous presence (he lurked there with his little tape recorder — company policy, no doubt), the interview began. Within a minute, I had run out of questions. I would get nothing but company policy from Penny, and we both knew it. Yes, she now worked on the Playboy promo circuit. No, her parents didn’t object to the spread: they both thought it was neat. Yes, she belonged to the Shannon Tweed school of Playmate philosophy. ‘I have a beautiful baddy,’ explained Penny — and why should she be ashamed to share it with Playboy subscribers? ‘How do you feel about Hugh Hefner?’ I asked, and felt Don give a sluggish twitch. Penny’s young face went misty. Sweetness, sincerity, sensitivity: like a big family. ‘I saw him cry one time,’ she confessed. ‘It was his birthday. I went up and said Happy Birthday. And he, and he — well …” A very special moment, this one, a very special memory, not to be shared.