During the second part of the interview Ner relaxed: that is to say, he became highly agitated, showing the wounded restlessness of a man who thinks himself persistently misunderstood. His eyes, previously as opaque as limo-glass, now glittered and fizzed. So did his Pepsi: he took such violent swigs that the bottle kept foaming to the brim. His language grew saltier. ‘That’s all bullshit,” he said repeatedly, swiping a finger through the air. You saw the Chicagoan in him then — the tight-jawed, almost ventriloquial delivery, the hard vowels, the human hardness of the windy city, the city that works.
What changed Ner’s mood? First, a discussion of Bobbie Arn-stein, the private secretary who committed suicide after involving Playboy in a drugs scandal during the mid-Seventies. Ner was able to give himself a quickfire exoneration on this ‘very scummy case’. He was far less convincing, though, when talk turned to the case of Dorothy Straiten. There is clearly something central and unshirk-able about the Straiten story; it is the other side of the Playboy dream: it is the Playboy nightmare. All set for stardom, likely to become the first Playboy-endorsed Hollywood success, Stratten was murdered by her rejected husband in circumstances of hideous squalor. The controversy has been ceaseless (and deeply unwelcome to the corporation), with the TV film Death of a Centrefold, Bob Fosse’s Star 80 and now Peter Bogdanovich’s memoir The Killing of the Unicorn. Dorothy Stratten was Playmate of the Year for 1980, but she never saw 1981.
‘Dorothy’, he said, his face briefly wistful, ‘was a very special person, very trusting, a very special — human being.’ People talked about the connections between Dorothy’s death and the mores of the Playboy world — ‘But that’s all bullshit. There is not and never has been a casting-couch thing here.’ He then went on to slander Bob Fosse (off the record: a private thing between Ner and me). ‘Recreational sex can still be moral – and that’s what I’m all about. You have responsibilities as a bachelor. Nobody has ever had an abortion because of me. Nobody. It’s like a family here. People stay with us for a very long time: my night-time secretary was a Playmate in 1960! I am a warm and caring person and so is the company. That’s the kind of guy I am.’
The interview ended with some deliberation about the photographs that would illustrate this article. A recent and idealised portrait of Ner was produced in its frame — the sort of thing a sports or nightclub personality might hang over his bed. Wouldn’t this do? ‘It’s never been used before,’ droned Don (who had, of course, been ponderously present throughout). I hesitated. Did they seriously think that any magazine other than People — or Playboy — would publish such an ‘official’ study? Was the Editor-Publisher of genius losing his grip? Should I be frank? Was now the time to start calling Hef Ner? I said nothing. We sat there admiring the photograph, all agreeing how very special it looked.
The girls are always saying they feel ‘safe’ in the Mansion, and yet the Easterner is pretty happy to take his leave — to leave the atmosphere of surveillance, corporation propaganda and PR p’s and q’s. Ner cruised out of the library and into the hall. An average evening was beginning. In the dining-room two elderly celebrities (Max Lerner and Richard Brook) were ordering complicated meals, with many doctorial vetos and provisos, while in the adjacent room the little squad of playmates and playthings, of honeys and bunnies, sat quietly around a table with their glasses (soft drinks only: Ner’ doesn’t want them sloppy). Momentarily hushed and alert, the girls seemed ornamental and yet not quite passive, on call, expected to disport themselves in a certain way, expected to do whatever is expected.
5. The Playboy Philosophy
Publishing a sophisticated men’s magazine seemed to me the best possible way of fulfilling a dream I’d been nurturing ever since I was a teenager: to get laid a lot — Hugh M. Hefner
Hefner has been inviting moral judgments for over thirty years. It shows. It takes it out of a guy. Never altogether cynical, not yet entirely deluded, he is nonetheless committed to a sanitised, an authorised version of his Jife. The tendency is common enough, especially out here in the land of the innumerate billionaire, where a game of Scrabble is a literary event, where the prevailing values are those of the pocket calculator. ‘There are times’, Gloria Steinem has said, ‘when a woman reading Playboy feels like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.’ This is a frivolous remark, and blasphemous, too. Say that about Playboy, and what’s left for Der Sturmer? If commercial pornography is imagined as a flophouse, with bestiality in the basement, then Playboy is a relatively clean and tidy attic. It is hardly pornography at all, more a kind of mawkish iconography for eternal adolescents. Playboy ‘objectifies women’ all right, in Joyce Wolfe’s quaint phrase – but let’s be objective here. According to the old Chicago axiom, there are two areas of wrongdoing: ethics and morals. Ethics is money and morals is sex. With Hefner, the line between the two is blurred or wobbly. It is a very American mix.