Hefner is dead

Hugh Hefner is dead at 91.

I remember the first time I saw a Playboy magazine. I was 11 years old tagging along on a fishing trip to Lake of the Woods with my Dad and his friends. One of them brought a Playboy. They were drinking and playing poker on one of the nights we spent at the Trail’s End Resort and I snuck a peek at the magazine. Diane Webber was the Playmate of the Month. Diane was 25 years old at the time of the photoshoot. (She died a few years ago in Santa Monica. After a few roles in movies and doing Middle Eastern dancing and instruction, Diane worked as a law librarian for Santa Monica Law Firm.) Her pictures were very innocent by today’s standards, Diane was certainly a beautiful woman and for the first time in my life I began to imagine the possibilities.

In the 50’s the covers of men’s magazines and detective magazines all seemed to be devoted to bondage shots, rape fantasy and other misogynistic themes. I remember looking at those covers at the Bike Shop’s news stand while buying comic books when I was a little kid. Widman’s Candy’s news stand carried them too. I didn’t like those covers at all. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine changed that, the Playmates were natural, girl next door types for the most part, cute, clean and All American sexy, like women you’d see on the street or in school. As strange as it may seem now, that was a big, big change.

When I was a young kid, those Playmates seemed out of reach and distant, more like my Mom’s friends than girls I knew. When I was a junior in high school that all changed with Christa Speck’s appearance as a Playmate and later as Playmate of the Year. Christa was 18, only two years older than I was. Men my age all remember Christa. (Christa later married TV Producer Marty Kroft) She was one of us.

I worked with a guy who had a long relationship with a former Playmate of the Month. She was a nice, smart, gorgeous woman. They broke up, he was an idiot and she wasn't.

I did read the articles, some of the monthly interviews were great reading. The reporting, the fiction, the music commentary and of course, the joke page were usually all good reads.

Hefner made it okay for all of us to be more open about our sexual nature. He dealt in fantasy for the most part but, he opened the conversation that it’s okay for women to be open about enjoying sexual relations. He opened men’s minds to understand that you have to give to receive and that it’s okay for women to ask a man for what they want in in an intimate relationship. He was outspoken on AIDS and Gay Marriage. He integrated Playboy early on by featuring black Playmates and Asian Playmates

I have no idea what Heffner was like in his personal relationships. I thought he was crazy not to marry Barbie Benton, I thought it was sleazy to devote damn near an entire issue to photoshoots of his fiancée, Kimberly Conrad. On the other hand, he bought the house next door to the mansion and gave it to her after their divorce, so he could be close to his children.

Hefner handed the reins of the corporation to his daughter Christie who has been the CEO for years.

The Hugh Hefner story, like the man, is complicated. The last 20 years or so he was strange in so many ways. Google Holly Madison. Read excerpts from her book for some insight.

Somebody once said, “The only reason Playboy has the articles is so guys can get them in the house.” Probably true, but the articles were almost always as good as the pictures. And the pictures were always good.

Bad Girls?

My Dad kept a diary during his service in WWII. I have it, I've read it.

My Mother kept every letter they exchanged as a young, married couple during the war. I've read the letters. They are newsy, funny, loving and lonely." They aren't particularly romantic. My Mom was a much better writer than my Dad, then again he was a much better pilot than my Mom.

In Dad's diary, he is more romantic than he is in his letters to Mom. I wonder why? He was better at expressing his longing for her to himself than he was to her. Later in life I asked Mom why? She didn't have an answer, although she was pleased to read his thoughts about her in his diary. 

Dad often wrote a line or two about his fellow pilots and their off duty adventures in London and Paris. His buddy Johnson getting drunk and crashing into the glass door of a bar in France. Getting thrown out of bed at a hotel in London during a German bombing raid when the bomb's concussion sucked the glass out of the hotel windows.

Several times in his diary Dad would write a line or two like this "C picked up a bad case of the clap" or "A is getting the last of his penicillin shots today"...

When I was 18, I ran into a 'bad girl" one night over Christmas vacation, when I got home at 4:30 in the morning Dad was standing in the kitchen in his underwear (he never wore pajamas, he said he got used to sleeping in his underwear during the war). The old man took a look at me as best he could in the dim light from the stove hood and said, "You smell like a French whorehouse." I was a rock solid smartass at that point in my life, I replied, "Of the two people in this room, only one of us would know what a French whorehouse smells like." Dad got pissed, on the other hand he didn't tell me I was wrong either. As I got older and closer to the old man, I often thought about asking him about it, but I never did.

I had a long time girlfriend at the time, both my parents really liked her and the "French whorehouse" incident was never connected to her. Then again she wasn't involved and she was a "nice" girl...little did they know. Maybe they just didn't want to think about it.

Years later, my daughter, she was about 20 at the time, asked my Mom whether or not girls "gave it up" for the boys during the war. My mother didn't respond right away, she got a small smile on her face and told my kid, "Well honey, they might not have come back."

Every generation seems to think they invented sex, mine, the 60's generation truly believed it and we have been blamed for a lot of societal changes...maybe that's true but we didn't invent sex...

I've downloaded this new book, haven't finished it yet but it sure as hell got me thinking about my parent's generation. Here's a quote from Amanda Littauer.

"Casual and diverse sexual practices on the home front stimulated a public recognition of the divergence between formal sexual standards and actual sexual behavior that outlasted the renewed conservatism of the long postwar decade and fostered the liberationist sexual ethics of the late 1960s and 1970s."

My mother and I had an informal, two person book club for years, I'd love to discuss this book with her.

Here's a link...

http://notchesblog.com/2016/04/05/sex-on-the-home-front