Thy Neighbor's Wife (6 page)

So he concentrated instead on what currently mattered most to him—completing college by February 1949, marrying Mildred during the following June, and quickly establishing himself as a successful cartoonist, writer, or editor. In college he had demonstrated a talent in all three, in addition to gaining much personal self-confidence and also an awareness that young women were attracted to him. But he did not exploit this. He remained faithful to Mildred after she had left the campus, and while he had once regarded bachelorhood as an idyllic state, he now was anxiously anticipating marriage to Mildred, particularly when he began to perceive some tentativeness on her part after they had become formally engaged during their Christmas vacation in 1948.

He had no idea what was causing it, but sometimes when they were together on weekends after the holidays she seemed a bit tense, tight, and without the enthusiasm she had shown for him since they had first become sexually intimate during the previous spring. Hoping that she was just temporarily distracted by the new pressures of teaching, he attempted to conceal his own mild irritation and to show her instead much understanding and patience. When they were alone he occasionally tried to engage her in long personal conversations that might reach the source of her discomfort, but his soft probing revealed nothing and his more direct questioning elicited only denials from her that anything was wrong.

One cold weekend in Chicago, after borrowing his father’s car and picking up Mildred at her parents’ home, the couple drove downtown to see a movie called
The Accused
, starring Loretta Young. In this film Loretta Young portrays a beautiful but inhibited teacher at a university who, after one of her male students comes to her saying that he desperately needs advice and guidance, agrees to go out to dinner with him. Later in the evening, the student drives her to a secluded spot and attempts to seduce her and, failing that, to rape her. But she fights him off with a steel object, only to discover after he has stopped attacking her
that she has killed him. Panicked, she runs from the scene and stumbles to a highway, where she manages to hitchhike a ride with a truck driver. Composing herself, and revealing nothing of what has happened, she returns safely home and the next day resumes teaching. But in an attempt to alter her appearance to avoid being identified as the woman who had been with the student on the night of his death, she begins to dress more fashionably and changes her hairstyle, and soon she begins to feel more glamorous and desirable than she has ever felt before. As a result, after the criminal investigation has begun, even the truck driver who had picked her up on the highway does not recognize her, and both the homicide officer and the attorney for the deceased become enamored of her.

But eventually her own guilt prompts her to tell the truth, and at this point in the film Mildred, who had been watching with tears in her eyes, began sobbing and asked Hefner to take her home. As they got into the car, Mildred cried uncontrollably, becoming hysterical when Hefner put an arm around her and sympathetically sought an explanation.

Finally Mildred regained control and, turning toward him in the front seat, her tears reflected in the dim light of the car, she admitted that in the town where she now lived she was having an affair with a man on the faculty.

Hefner listened with disbelief. It was as if this astounding moment was too unreal to accept, was still part of the movie he had just seen. He sat behind the wheel of the parked car feeling stunned, betrayed, very alone. Mildred had suddenly become an intimate stranger, a lover he no longer knew, though she now tried in a quivering voice to explain how it had happened. She said that she had first gotten to know the man after he volunteered to drive her to the railroad station on a Friday evening when she was taking the train to Chicago. They enjoyed talking, she said, and after she had returned from the weekend in Chicago they began playing bridge together on certain weeknights in town with other teachers from their school, and one evening in
his car he responded, and they had not stopped until they made love.

They had repeated it since then, she went on, adding that she now felt unworthy of Hefner and assured him that he was under no obligation to marry her. As remorseful and embarrassed as she was in recounting this, she also felt great relief, even freedom, but when she looked into Hefner’s eyes she saw that he was beginning to cry. She reached toward him and embraced him. She said that she loved him, though she repeated that he should choose someone else for a wife.

But Hefner shook his head. No, he said, he wanted only her. Though he did not admit it, he wanted her now more than he ever had before, being very alarmed by the competitive presence of another suitor. He pleaded with her to stop seeing the other man; and Mildred, filled with confusion and guilt, agreed to do so. She wanted to believe that her brief affair was uncharacteristic of her true nature, and she was grateful to Hefner for wanting to proceed with their wedding plans.

They were married on June 15, 1949, in the Saint John Bosco Rectory in Chicago. Mildred wore a white gown, and smiled as she later posed for pictures with Hefner and their families. Their gray-haired mothers wearing orchids, their fathers in dark-suited sobriety, stood together outside the church, squinting in the sun, affecting expressions of forced familiarity.

After the ceremony, Hefner in his father’s car drove with Mildred to Hazelhurst, Wisconsin, for a brief honeymoon at Styza’s Birchwood Lodge. Then they returned to Chicago to begin a life together that would never be as romantic as it had once been.

Among their problems was Hefner’s failure, after graduation from college, to find a job that he liked. His various ideas for a cartoon series were rejected by the newspaper syndicates, and the only job that he could find was in the employment office of a carton company. When he realized that the firm would not hire
blacks, he quit in protest. Since the job market was then overcrowded with war veterans, and since Hefner preferred remaining at home working on new cartoons rather than accepting unsatisfying employment, they lived off the money that Mildred earned from various jobs, including that of teaching in a Chicago grade school that Hefner had once attended.

To minimize expenses they stayed in the house of Hefner’s parents, a move that they thought would suit them temporarily until Hugh Hefner could begin to sell his cartoons or establish himself in a suitable career. But more than two years later they were still there, occupying a bedroom next to the elder Hefners’ on the second floor of the small two-story brick house on a quiet street on the outer edge of Chicago’s Northwest Side. The house had been built for $13,000 in 1930 when Hugh Hefner was four years old, and it was the only home that he had ever known, though now as he occupied its tight quarters he felt the loss of the expansive dreams of his youth, and the loss, too, of much sexual interest in his wife.

But Mildred blamed herself for this. She rarely felt like making love to him in that house, knowing that their bed sounds could easily be heard by his parents in the adjoining room, and she also believed that her indiscretion with the other man had diminished Hefner’s romantic fervor, as well as resurrecting some of her own Catholic girlhood guilt feelings about sex and pleasure. She had enjoyed sinful sex, she reasoned sardonically, and now she was being punished. Her penance was in living a passionless married life in the claustrophobic home of her in-laws, where her husband drew cartoons in his room all day, as he had as a boy, except now she was noticing a degenerate trend in his drawing. He was producing for his own amusement pornographic cartoons of Dagwood and Blondie. He was also bringing home sex magazines and making no attempt to conceal them from her, as he undoubtedly once had, and still did, from his mother.

His mother, who was too polite to pry, was no comfort to Mildred during these years, nor would it have occurred to Mildred to discuss her marital problems with either of Hefner’s
parents. As close as they all lived physically, they remained emotionally remote. The elder Hefners each day quietly went their own way, out to their respective offices in the morning, returning in the evening to use the kitchen at a time when it was not being used by Mildred and Hugh. It was a home of tight routines and tidiness, order and control. In her years there, Mildred never saw either of Hefner’s parents lose self-control, even for an instant. She never heard them yell or cry, argue or stomp their feet; she also did not witness signs of their affection, such as a soft greeting kiss at the door, or a tender touch, or a word of endearment. Mildred did not assume from this an absence of caring, but rather a rigid resistance to showing it. Compared with her own expressive and frequently combative parents, the Hefners were extraordinary examples of restraint and repression.

While Mildred had no idea how such behavior had affected the Hefners’ second son, Keith, who was now away at college, she believed she could measure much of its influence on her husband. Like his parents, Hugh Hefner wanted tight control over his surroundings, was most comfortable with orderliness. From his pietistic Swedish mother he inherited his idealism and standards, and like his German accountant father he was precise and pragmatic. But unlike them he revealed emotion. Mildred had sensed his anger, she had seen him cry. She identified his pornographic cartoons and magazines as signs of rebellion against his upbringing, and, perceiving the depth of his depression after their marriage, she suggested that he leave home for a while, forget temporarily about a career, and perhaps return to the place where he had last been happy, the college campus, and seek a master’s degree.

He did as she suggested in 1950, registering at Northwestern as a graduate student in sociology. But his only achievement there was a lengthy term paper on American sex laws, most of which he thought should be abolished because they were antiquated and too private for government intervention, such as the law that still existed in many states against oral sex even between a husband and wife. Though Hefner received high marks for his exten
sive research, his conclusions were not enthusiastically shared by his professor, and after one semester, feeling restless, Hefner left the campus and attempted to reinterest himself in the outside world.

He found work as an advertising copywriter in a Chicago department store, then in a small advertising agency; he quit the first job and was fired from the second. He next was hired by the promotion department of Esquire, Inc., which published the men’s fashion magazine and also a sophisticated pocket-sized monthly called
Coronet
; and Hefner quickly conjured up images of himself working in a creative atmosphere surrounded by urbane editors and Varga girls. But after working there he found the setting sedate, the female employees dowdy and prim, and the men living unadventurous lives with none of the verve reflected on the illustrated pages. One afternoon when Hefner removed from his pocket a photograph of actress Carmen Miranda twirling on a dance floor with her skirts high and wearing no panties, and showed it to a
Coronet
executive, the latter turned away, seeming unamused.

In 1951 the company announced that it was moving the
Esquire-Coronet
promotion offices to New York City, but Hefner, who had just been refused a five-dollar raise, resigned and remained in Chicago. He liked Chicago, and was feeling better about himself there after he had arranged with an independent printer to publish five thousand copies of a book of drawings and cartoons he had done characterizing the city. While the book was not financially profitable, its press reviews brought Hefner local attention, and he foresaw the day when he might be able to launch a slick magazine devoted to Chicago urban life.

In the interim he found a job at eighty dollars a week, twenty more than his
Esquire-Coronet
salary, as the promotion manager for a Chicago magazine magnate named George von Rosen, a shrewd and prescient man who, having failed to gain employment on
The Christian Science Monitor
, and having worked as a circulation manager for several music magazines and one that catered to Protestant ministers, decided after World War II to be
come his own publisher and hopefully prosper in the increasingly popular market of the girlie magazine.

A fortune had already been made during the war by such New York publishers as Robert Harrison, whose many magazines—with titles like
Flirt, Titter, Wink
, and
Eyeful
—had greatly appealed to lonely servicemen at home and overseas. But Harrison, who was personally offended by nudity and would in 1952 devote himself to exposing scandal in his new publication
Confidential
, limited his sex magazines to black-and-white photographs of young women wearing bathing suits, negligees, and undergarments only slightly more immodest than might be found in the ladies’ lingerie ads of the New York
Times
Sunday magazine, which was one of the nation’s principal stroke books
sub silentio
.

Among other magazines offering masturbatory possibilities before George von Rosen entered the market were movie magazines that displayed starlets in bikinis, adventure magazines that occasionally depicted scantily clad beauties in distress, the nudist-family magazine
Sunshine & Health
, and such large circulation magazines as
Life
and
Look
, which, in beguiling ways, sometimes surpassed all other publications in presenting sexually arousing photographs.

Life
and
Look
in the late 1930s justified as photojournalism the controversial pictures they printed of actress Hedy Kiesler swimming in the nude with a nipple exposed, from a scene in a Czechoslovakian movie called
Ecstasy
. So sensational was the reaction to the film, and to the publicity surrounding it, that
Ecstasy
was later banned or cut by censors everywhere; and when Hedy Kiesler moved to Hollywood to work on other films, she sought a-new identity by changing her name to Hedy Lamarr.