Posted by KRICO on October 19, 2000 at 06:06:12:
In Reply to: Re: Ethnic Playmates... posted by edgar on October 19, 2000 at 05:25:16:
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In order to understand Hef, you'd have to imagine the immediate postwar period in America and the social strictures of America in the early 1950's. Remember this was an era when male hip-movement a la Elvis Presley was censored from broadcast television (i.e., Presley was shot from the chest up on Ed Sullivan). Hefner's background was in publising. He worked for a time in the sales and promotion department of Esquire magazine and quit when his boss, Clay Felker ( another great publishing figure of the 50's, 60's and 70's) refused to give him a 5 dollar a week raise. Hefner tried his hand at publishing his own book of cartoons about Chicago and had somewhat of a minor local success. He put together the first issue of Playboy magazine on a cardtable in his apartment in Chicago in 1953. He bought the rights to a previously published calender shot of Marilyn Monrore, convinced a printer to print the first issue on credit, and the rest is history. He was 27 years old. Is Hefner a pimp? That's a rough term to use,but if one defines "pimp" as one who can offer pictures of naked woman to interested parties, then one might call Hefner a "pimp". Hefner has been very active in progressive social causes from the get-go. ( In many repsects he had to be...People who read Playboy back in the 50's and early 60's, were considered non-conformist and iconoclastic, and socially-suspect. For an interesting and polemical book on Hefner and Playboy, check out film director Peter Bogdanovich's 1984 book, "Death of the Unicorn". He blames Hefner and Playboy for the shotgun murder (at the hands of her former boyfriend) of his fiancee and "Playmate of the Year" Dorothy Stratton. It's obvious from the text that Bogdanovich despises Hefner ( although he himself was a frequenter of parties at the Holmby Hills mansion) and makes the case that Hefner is little more than a pimp. As a publishing phenomena Playboy magazine is an American success story, although what really made Hefner rich were his gambling casinos in London. He was forced to get out of the gambling business back in the early '80's because of illegal loans to high-rollers. Other magazines, like Penthouse and Hustler cut into Playboy's revenues. ( Guccione, publisher of Penthouse, used to bait Hefner publically in his magazines for Hefner's refusal to show pubic hair on his models...Imagine!That was a point of controversy back in the 70's) I can still remember my first exposure to the Playboy centerfold back when I was 8-years-old. I got so dizzy I almost fell out of my treehouse... KRICO |
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