The March 1990 issue of Playboy magazine featured an interview with the man who now sits and sleeps and signs executive orders in the White House. There are a number of these Donald Trump issues available online, one for $3,999 on eBay, and others, some carrying his autograph, at lower and higher prices.
I mention this because Playboy magazine has been reborn after a five-year absence. Though that may elicit little more than a shrug or “I didn’t even know it was gone,” it’s worth noting because of the durability of the Playboy brand, how it changed the city’s, and yes, the planet’s cultural history, and also how quickly it can evoke memories in a couple of generations.
I am told that the cover model of this new Playboy is 28-year-old Lori Harvey and that the Playmate of the Year is 27-year-old Gillian Nation, raised on a “remote Montana farm, surrounded by horses and far from the bustle of city life.” She lives in Los Angeles, has been a model for various companies and likes to play the piano.
The new Playboy comes almost 72 years after the first. That was the creation of a Chicago copywriter/cartoonist named Hugh Hefner. It appeared in December 1953 — Marilyn Monroe on the cover — and sold some 54,000 copies. It quickly reached a circulation of 1 million, topping out at nearly 8 million by the early 1960s.
There were TV shows, resorts, casinos, a record label, music festivals, merchandise, resorts, clubs and events. The magazine published intense, headline-making interviews and some of the best writers of its time such as James Baldwin, John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood and Saul Bellow.
It was a gallery for such artists as Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, LeRoy Neiman, Ed Paschke, Shel Silverstein, Roger Brown and Ellen Lanyon. (Its bunny logo came in the second issue and every issue since. Created by Chicago’s Art Paul in less than an hour, it would become as recognizable as any logo of the 20th century, alongside McDonald’s golden arches, Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Apple’s apple or Nike’s swoosh. Paul was the first Playboy staff member).
Oh, yes, it published photos of nude women, courting in some quarters anger and outrage.
Paul had some thoughts on that, telling me, “The many awards that came our way were not for the sexy pictorials and certainly in the early years, there was less nudity, more intimacy: Sex is about more than nudity. We saw our competitors then as more magazines like Esquire, not Penthouse. Come to think of it, there was even, back in the day, a pictorial about a reverse striptease: putting clothes back on.”
I have watched this company go through all sorts of corporate chaos, the closing of the clubs and competition from the internet’s astonishing variety and easy accessibility of sexual content.
In 2016, the magazine experimented with no longer publishing full frontal nudity, believing that a tamer magazine might appeal to advertisers who displayed on newsstands, if you could find a newsstand. That was a failure, and a few years later, the print edition was also gone, dying in the spring of 2020. Playboy Enterprises CEO Ben Kohn said it was due in part to COVID-19 and also “changing media consumption habits,” prompting a “move to a digital-first publishing schedule for all of our content.”
But Cohn added that there could be such “special editions, partnerships with the most provocative creators, timely collections and much more. … Print is how we began and print will always be a part of who we are.”
I look at this new print issue and think of Hugh Hefner and Art Paul, of their bygone world and their voices echo.
Hefner: “I really wanted to focus on the good-life concept. A lifestyle. A point of view we were trying to express. And we hit a nerve.”
Paul: “The message was loud and clear: Enjoy yourself… I know that you, or most of you, know what that meant: the cool apartment, the great stereo, the hip clothing and… to borrow a couple of lines from ‘Lolita’ novelist Vladimir Nabokov, Playboy was for many a young fellow, ‘Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.’”
I always enjoyed sitting with Hefner (who died in 2017) and Paul (gone in 2018) as they told stories of the old days. Hefner told me that his first cover girl, Marilyn Monroe, (dead since 1962) was buried in a drawer at the mausoleum in Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. He told me that he bought the drawer next to hers, to be his final resting place, for eternity.)
What would they make of their dream now? Don’t know what you might think of the new Playboy. Maybe it will in some ways evoke a bygone, younger you.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com