Reactions to the death of 91-year-old Hugh Hefner this past week seem to waver between tributes to his pioneering role in the postwar Sexual Revolution–and horror at the consequences of his pioneering role in the Sexual Revolution. My own view of the aforementioned Revolution is that it would have come with or without Hugh Hefner–the wicked 18th century, after all, succeeded the Puritan Age without the assistance of Playboy–and that Hefner was, at best, a smart financial beneficiary of the changing moods of 1950s America. A symptom, that is, not a cause.
There is, however, another way of looking at the founder-impresario of Playboy Enterprises, and that is as a comic figure. It is true, as his various obituaries have explained, that Hefner had the bright journalistic idea, 64 years ago, of marrying what we now call soft-core porn with a semblance of sophistication: Seminude blondes mixed with Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories and interviews with Bertrand Russell. But to suppose that any of this was of cultural importance is to embrace the mythology that the early Playboy era—or the Eisenhower years, for the politically-minded—was a time of repression and intolerance, which it was not. The 1950s was a period of political, cultural, aesthetic, even sexual, ferment in the world and, once again, the success of Playboy was a symptom of larger forces playing out in literature, society, cinema, politics, and, perhaps especially, in popular culture.
Indeed, if Hef and his Playboy Philosophy—there really was such a thing, explained at laborious length in 18 monthly installments of his magazine (1963-64) —had a heyday, it was during the Kennedy, not the Eisenhower, years when “cool” supplanted dignified rectitude as a civic virtue in American life. If your idea of sophistication was the Rat Pack—tuxedoed Frank and Joey Bishop and Sammy having a blast onstage in Vegas—and your aesthetic was the slick atomic-age lines of Danish Modern design, beehive hairdos, and narrow neckties, then Hugh Hefner’s Playboy was the journal for you. If you search the archives, and look for shots of a satisfied Hef in the midst of bunnies at his popular Playboy Clubs, you will notice that nearly all the pictures date from the early or mid-1960s, and that from the shoulders up, the young women at Hefner’s elbow all seem to resemble Jackie Kennedy.
And of course, like many successful enterprises, Playboy stayed in vogue, in certain circles, beyond its time. Hefner was shrewd enough to pay famous writers enormous sums to publish in his magazine, and he had enough business sense to start mixing politics with the nudity and sports cars and NFL polls. As the Playboy era slowly became history, he was no longer the pied piper of sexual freedom but self-described pillar of the First Amendment and leering feminist.
Indeed, by the 1970s, it was all a little exhausted and retrograde—and even the world of “adult” entertainment had moved well beyond the ramparts Hef was willing to breach. The famous Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles had become a pilgrimage site for middle-aged swingers with a penchant for coke and geisha girls, and a revolving door for fun-loving capitalists and Hollywood hangers-on hungry for the company of “models,” Bill Cosby, Norman Mailer, the seventysomething Max Lerner, and other intellectuals-in-residence. When I lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Hef and Playboy were not only artifacts of an earlier epoch but had acquired a slightly sinister air. Hefner suffered the sybarite’s indignity of a stroke in the midst of the decade, and a memorable profile in the Los Angeles Times revealed a nocturnal recluse, eternally pajama-clad, addicted to gallons of Pepsi-Cola and post-adolescent girls.
The final signifier was yet to come. When, toward the end of the 1988 presidential election season, it became evident that the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis was likely to lose to George H.W. Bush, Saturday Night Live represented Dukakis figuratively throwing in the towel by abandoning the campaign and hosting a hapless, hopelessly uncool, and decidedly dull, late-night television program, Dukakis After Dark. Complete with black ties, cigarette smoke, scurrying bunnies, B-grade celebrities, cool-jazz soundtrack, and a smirking, world-weary Dukakis (Jon Lovitz), Dukakis After Dark was a near-perfect reproduction of Hefner’s own Playboy After Dark, which had run in syndication in the early 1960s.
Hugh Hefner’s slow transition from cool icon of the Silent Generation to butt of Baby Boom humor must have been humiliating, but Hef was resilient if nothing else. For TV viewers in the first decade of the present century, especially those who may never have heard of Playboy‘s first Playmate (Marilyn Monroe), there he was again on reality TV’s The Girls Next Door, a wizened, slightly deaf and sadly infirm old roue with a trio of “girlfriends” young enough to be his granddaughters. The Sexual Revolution, in Hugh Hefner’s case, had gone from tantalizing to involuntary hilarity in one lifetime.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
