Playboy in Popular Culture (Published 2017) (2024)

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   Appearing Nude in Playboy, and Reading Playboy for the Articles

   Hugh Hefner had been working as promotion copywriter at Esquire in Chicago when the magazine decided to move its offices to New York. He decided to stay behind and start a magazine of his own.
   

   The first Playboy appeared in December 1953 with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

   She had not posed for the magazine, but Hugh Hefner bought the famous nude photo by Tom Kelley from the John Baumgarth Calendar Company, and initially called the picture featured inside “Sweetheart of the Month.”

   Mr. Hefner has said he created the magazine with the goal of featuring “the girl next door.” For some – like Jenny McCarthy and Anna Nicole Smith – becoming a Playboy Playmate was the starting point of a celebrity career. By the 1980s, already famous actresses and entertainers including Bo Derek, Madonna and Drew Barrymore viewed appearing nude in Playboy as a way to promote, rather than hinder, their careers. Pamela Anderson has appeared in 13 different issues.

   As the joke goes, Playboy was indeed known for its interviews.

   Among the more memorable ones included a 1962 interview with Miles Davis by Alex Haley; one with Vladimir Nabokov in 1964; one with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, shortly before his death; and a 1976 chat with Jimmy Carter, then a presidential candidate, in which he said “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust.”
   

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   Mr. Hefner as a Symbol of the Sexual Revolution

   The success of Playboy magazine gave way to the rise of the Playboy lifestyle, allowing Mr. Hefner to build a vast enterprise of “private key” clubs with co*cktail waitresses decked out in Bunny outfits.

   In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Hefner relished his image of cavorting with mainly blonde women “many with names ending in a vowel and all of them with mammary tissue that appears to have been injected with helium,” as The New York Times Magazine once described.
   

   Hugh Hefner had a stroke in 1985, around the the time the book “The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980,” by Peter Bogdanovich appeared. The book took on the 1980 murder of Mr. Bogdanovich’s love, Dorothy Stratten, a Playmate of the Year who had spent time at the Playboy Mansion. Her estranged husband actually killed her, but Mr. Bogdanovich accused Mr. Hefner and the whole Playboy way of life of putting her in harm’s way.

   Mr. Hefner claimed his stroke “resulted from stress developed over the last year in reaction to the pathological book written by Peter Bogdanovich.”

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   The Christie Hefner Years

   Mr. Hefner married the former Millie Williams in 1949. Before they divorced, they had a son, David, and a daughter, Christie, who would later become a key leader in his media empire.
   

   Christiewas named chief operating officer in 1984, after having long been seen as heir apparent. She was promoted to chairwoman and chief executive in 1988 at a time when Playboy was reeling from losses.

   Ms. Hefner shut the original Playboy Clubs and helped start Playboy TV and Playboy.com. She also expanded some of the company’s hard-core p*rnography products, including the purchase of Spice TV.

   In December 2008, she announced that she was resigning from the company. The decision came as Playboy struggled to compete in an era of free p*rnography, widely available on the Internet. To the surprise of some investors, Playboy Enterprises in early 2009 indicated it would be willing to sell the company or change the direction of its flagship magazine.

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   Competitors, Imitators and the Feminist Movement

   The rise of feminism and women’s liberation led to the launching of several magazines also meant as counterpoints in culture.

   Long before she founded Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem worked undercover for 17 days as a Bunny at the New York Playboy Club to write “A Bunny’s Tale,” a two-part series that ran in 1963 in the now-defunct Show magazine to expose the grueling conditions the waitresses faced.

   The article was seen as the beginning of Ms. Steinem’s feminist activism, though she said later: “At the time I felt it was a major career error. I lost a number of serious journalistic assignments because so many people saw me as a Bunny.”

   

   In 1972, the editors of Cosmopolitan famously published a photo of Burt Reynolds as a centerfold. The debut issue of Playgirl appeared in June 1973 with the actor Lyle Waggoner as the centerfold.

   By the 1970s and 1980s, more raunchy competitors like Larry Flynt’s Hustler and Penthouse were making headlines. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the so-called lad mags — including Maxim, Stuff and FHM – claimed the mantle of championing a male lifestyle that emphasized bawdy humor and sex.

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   Playboy as a Corporate Entity

   The circulation of Playboy magazine, the bedrock of the empire, declined from a peak of around 5 million in the 1970s to 1.5 million by 2011, when Mr. Hefner succeeded in taking the company private in a deal that valued it at $207 million.

   Mr. Hefner had always retained controlling interest in the company but for several months, he fended off a rival bid from Penthouse’s parent company.

   Despite the decline in circulation, the Playboy logo of a rabbit head wearing a tuxedo bow tie remains one of the most recognized brands globally. The logo has appeared on necklaces, including the one Carrie Bradshaw wore for a while in “Sex and the City,” as well as everything from shower products and tank tops for dogs. There remains a huge and growing market for such merchandise overseas, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe.

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   Playboy’s Future Direction

   With its circulation below 500,000, the magazine is struggling to leverage the Playboy brand and stay relevant in an era where sexting is commonplace and nude photographs in magazines are almost quaint. Mr. Hefner and top editors agreed in 2015 to stop publishing images of naked women in a bid to broaden its audience. In 2017, in an about-face, the publication brought back the nudes.

   In 2016, Mr. Hefner sold the Playboy Mansion to J. Daren Metropoulos, the son of C. Dean Metropoulos, a billionaire investor who is chairman of Hostess Brands. The sale agreement for the property included a stipulation that Mr. Hefner and his wife, Crystal Harris, a former playmate, could live in the famed pleasure palace until his death.

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