Thy Neighbor's Wife (4 page)

H
EFNER WAS
twenty-eight years old when he first saw the pictures of Diane Webber, and his magazine was in its second year of publication. He had edited the first issue of
Playboy
in 1953 on the kitchen table of an apartment he shared with his wife and infant daughter, but now he and a staff of thirty occupied a four-story building near downtown Chicago, and he sat in his large office on the top floor behind a modern white L-shaped desk, the photos of Diane Webber before him.

As he casually examined each picture he gave no indication of how shy he had once been by any sign of nudity, or how embarrassed he had been as a teenager by the erotic dreams he had had in the boyhood bedroom of his puritanical home. Now as a prosperous publisher of a sex-oriented magazine, separated from his wife, and sleeping with two young women on his staff, Hugh Hefner’s fancied eroticism had achieved reality. The magazine that he had created had re-created him.

He virtually lived within the glossy pages, slept in a small bedroom behind his office, and worked all hours of the day and night on
Playboy’s
color and design, the cartoons and captions, the fact and fiction, reading every line as carefully as he was now examining, under a magnifying glass, the photographs of Diane Webber.

In the first picture, she was dancing bare-breasted in a ballet studio, wearing opaque black tights that revealed the strength
and grace of her thighs, her calves, her round buttocks. Her stomach was flat, her smooth, strong back was not marred by the knotty muscles that dancers often develop; and, although she was in motion, her skin did not glisten with perspiration. This impressed Hefner, who during his youth perspired freely, particularly when his hand touched a girl’s waist at school dances or when his arm was around her shoulder in movie theaters.

Slowly, he followed the line of Diane Webber’s breasts, which were large and firm, and her nipples, which were pink and erect. He marveled at their perfect size and shape and imagined how they would feel in his hands, a thought that he knew would occur to thousands of other men once these pictures had been published and circulated in his magazine.

Hefner identified strongly with the men who bought his magazine. He knew from the letters he received, and from
Playboy’s
soaring sales figures, that what appealed to him was appealing to them; and at times he saw himself as a fantasy provider, a mental matchmaker between his male readers and the females who adorned his pages. Each month, after a new issue had been completed under his personal direction, he could predictably contemplate the climactic moments of solitary men all over America who were aroused by his selections. They were road salesmen in motel bedrooms, soldiers on bivouac, college boys in dormitories, airborne executives in whose attaché cases the magazine traveled like a covert companion. They were unfulfilled married men of moderate means and aspirations who were bored with their lives, uninspired by their jobs, and sought temporary escape through sexual adventure with more women than they had the ability to get, or the time to get, or the money to get, or the power to get, or the genuine desire to get.

Hefner understood this feeling, had experienced it in the early years of his marriage when he would slip away from his sleeping wife at night to take long walks through the city. Along the lake, he would look up at the luxurious towering apartment houses and see women standing at the windows, and imagine that they were as unhappy as he was; he wanted to know all of them intimately.
During the day he would mentally undress certain women he saw walking in the street, or in parks, or getting into cars, and although nothing was said or done, not even a glance was exchanged, he nevertheless felt a quiet exhilaration, and he could revive the impression of these women weeks later in his cinematic mind, could see them as clearly as he was now seeing the photographs of the nude dancer on his desk.

Squinting through the magnifying glass, he focused on Diane Webber’s upraised chin, her sensuous lips, and her large hazel eyes which looked back at him with an expression both inviting and distant. This intrigued him, her way of looking directly at him and yet remaining remote from the response she was inspiring. It was as if she were appearing nude for the first time, was still naïve about men, which was exactly the attitude that Hefner wanted nude women to convey in his magazine, although few playmates so far had achieved this look. Beginning with Marilyn Monroe in the first issue of December 1953, all of the
Playboy
centerfolds had been professional models, and they had the look of self-assurance and experience; they were women who had been around. Still, they had lured new readers to the magazine each month to a degree that had astonished even Hefner, and it was likely that
Playboy’s
early success had less to do with the actual magazine than it did with the men who bought it.

Prior to
Playboy
, few men in America had ever seen a color photograph of a nude woman, and they were overwhelmed and embarrassed as they bought
Playboy
at the newsstand, folding the cover inward as they walked away. It was as if they were openly acknowledging a terrible need, a long-repressed secret, admitting their failure to find the real thing. Although the Kinsey report revealed that nearly all men masturbate, it was still a dark deed in the early 1950s, and there had been no indication of its association with pictures; but now the strong connection was obvious with the success of
Playboy
, a magazine that had climbed in circulation within its first two years from 60,000 copies sold per month to 400,000. Little of this interest could be attributed to the articles, which were unexceptional, or to the cartoons, the satire,
or the reprints of stories by Ambrose Bierce or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was rather that Hefner, in founding a magazine that each month presented a nude woman who appeared to be sexually approachable, had discovered a vast audience of suitors, each privately claiming her as his own.

She was their mental mistress. She stimulated them in solitude, and they often saw her picture while making love to their wives. She was an almost special species who existed within the eye and mind of the observer, and she offered everything imaginable. She was always available at bedside, was totally controllable, knew the perfect touch in personal places, and never said or did anything to disturb the mood before the moment of ecstasy.

Each month she was a new person, satisfying the male need for variety, catering to various whims and obsessions, asking nothing in return. She behaved in ways that real women did not, which was the essence of fantasy, and was the primary reason for the prominence of Hugh Hefner, the first man to become rich by openly mass marketing masturbatory love through the illusion of an available alluring woman. It was a convenient way to carry on a relationship. For the price of the magazine, Hefner gave thousands of men access to an assortment of women who in real life would not look at them. He provided old men with young women, ugly men with desirable women, black men with white women, shy men with nymphomaniacs. He was an accomplice in the imagined extramarital affairs of monogamous men, supplied the stimulus for dormant men, and was thus connected with the central nervous system of
Playboy
readers nationwide, men whose passions were preceded by the preliminary wooing that Hefner did through a magnifying glass at his desk in Chicago, the erection center of the ultimate service magazine.

For himself, Hugh Hefner had more grandiose goals. He wanted not only to have the nude pictures but also to possess the women who had posed for them. His sexual appetite, long frustrated, was now insatiable. Not content with merely presenting fantasy, he wished to experience it, connect with it, to synthesize
his strong visual sense with his physical drives, and to manufacture a mood, a love scene, that he could both feel and observe.

With him it was not so much a case of divided attention as it was his dual state of mind. He was, and had always been, visually aware of whatever he did as he did it. He was a voyeur of himself. He acted at times in order to watch. Once he allowed himself to be picked up by a homosexual in a bar, more to see than to enjoy sex with a man. During Hefner’s first extramarital affair, he made a film of himself making love to his girl friend, a 16 mm home movie that he keeps with cartons of other personal documents and mementos, photo albums, and notebooks that depict and describe his entire personal life.

From his early boyhood, though he was most unattractive and shy, he nevertheless had a high sense of self-esteem, believed he was somehow special, and regarded his existence as a potentially public event that he should scrupulously take note of. He saved his childhood drawings, kept snapshots from grade school through the Army, from college to his marriage to the founding of
Playboy
. He continues to update this material, saving letters, notes, photographs, preserving them with the care of a curator confident of their historical worth.

What Hefner did not document on film or in writing he witnessed with such attentiveness that he still remembers the texture of his surroundings and sees himself at the center. When he was thirteen, while attending a Boy Scout meeting one evening, he saw through the half-raised shade of a window next door a young girl getting undressed. It was the first time he had seen an undressed female, and he was mesmerized. Decades later, he could still recall exactly how he felt, what he had seen.

Hefner had never seen nudity at home. His mother was always fully clothed around the house, was careful to change her clothes behind closed doors. When he and his younger brother were taken to the public swimming pool in summer, his father would turn his back to them in the men’s locker room while putting on
his bathing trunks. Hugh Hefner attributes much of his own early shyness to the discomfort conveyed by his parents at the pool, where the mass display of flesh was an affront to their traditional modesty. Adding to Hefner’s self-consciousness about the pool was the fact that he could never learn to swim. He had developed an early phobia about water when, after an older boy had coaxed him to jump into the pool at a depth over his head, he nearly drowned. Although his father, a competent swimmer, had tried to help him overcome the fear, young Hefner stubbornly refused, and one day his father became so frustrated and angry that he hit him.

It was a rare and almost welcome display of emotion from his father, a remote, repressed man who seldom revealed his feelings to his family and spent most of his time working quietly as an accountant in a large Chicago firm. The elder Hefner worked six days a week, sometimes seven, and considered himself fortunate to have a job during the Depression, particularly as an accountant. Hugh and his brother Keith, who was three years younger, were reared almost entirely by their mother, Grace, a petite, soft-spoken woman of rigid propriety. Like her husband, she had been born on a Nebraska farm before the turn of the century, and was raised in an atmosphere of pious fundamentalism that she sought to preserve in twentieth-century Chicago.

In her home there was no drinking or smoking, swearing or card playing. She occasionally took her young sons to a Saturday movie, but Sunday was strictly a day of worship in the Hefner household, and even the radio was silenced. If the boys became restless indoors, they were permitted to sit at the workbench in the backyard where they could draw pictures or sculpt with the colored clay that she provided. Hugh Hefner, who was facile in drawing and sculpturing, was more than diverted by these activities—he often seemed entranced by the clay figures of his creation, relating to them with a special intimacy, and if at such times his mother called to him from the back door, he would not hear her.

In school he daydreamed and doddled, ignored the classroom
proceedings, and caused his teachers to send home complaining notes that upset and embarrassed his mother. She had been a schoolteacher herself in Nebraska before her marriage, and, while she was convinced that Hugh was intellectually capable, she was bewildered by his listlessness. She had first noticed him retreating from his surroundings when, as a four-year-old suffering from a mastoid condition, he would become absorbed in forming tiny odd shapes from the cotton he pulled out of his infected ears. Later, he became totally preoccupied with his drawings of monsters and mad scientists, spacemen and supersleuths; and when the telephone rang in the house, he seemed unaware of the sound, though he had perfect hearing. When riding in the family automobile he became carsick. He chewed his fingernails. Occasionally he stuttered. His near drowning at the swimming pool seemed to drive him more deeply into himself, and finally his mother took him to the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research to be examined by child psychologists. Following a series of tests they concluded that his problems were rather special. Hugh Hefner was a genius. His I.Q. was 152. But, the doctors added, he was emotionally deficient, was socially immature for his age, and they suggested that it might help if Mrs. Hefner displayed more warmth around the house, more love and sympathetic understanding.

For Grace Hefner, who was so sexually demure that she had never even kissed her sons on the mouth—she later explained that she feared spreading germs—the doctors’ recommendations were indeed a challenge. But encouraged by the report of Hugh’s intellectual superiority, and also being a conscientious mother, she did attempt to be more supportive and understanding at home, never dreaming that this understanding would in a few years extend to her tolerating on Hugh Hefner’s bedroom walls the sight of nude pinups.

The pinups were the highly stylized drawings by Alberto Vargas and George Petty that appeared in
Esquire
, which in the 1940s was published in Chicago and was the most risqué men’s magazine in America. Hugh Hefner had first seen
Esquire
while
visiting the home of an elementary school classmate whose father, a commercial artist, subscribed to the magazine. Everything in
Esquire
excited young Hefner—the romantic and adventurous stories by such writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the photographs of classic cars, the sophisticated cartoons, the travel articles about glamorous places, the fashion layouts, and the foldout that each month offered an exquisite color drawing of a beautiful woman.