thecoolhunter.net - PLAYBOY - Live and breathe the business

PLAYBOY - Live and breathe the business

Friday, 26 May 2006

PLAYBOY WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL BECAUSE IT SHOWED MEN PICTURES of nude girls. It was successful because it managed to legitimize pornography by placing it in the context of an urbane bachelor lifestyle that included jazz, fine wine, literature, and elegant manners. What the early Playboy really offered its readers was
schooling in a sophisticated way of life, spiced with the promise of freewheeling encounters with the opposite sex. The girlie pictures were just to get them in the door.

Its founder, Hugh Hefner, was very much a nonbachelor when he came up with the idea for his magazine in the early 1950s. His life had been pretty unremarkable until then: born in 1926 in Chicago, childhood in a Methodist Midwestern family, two years in the army at the end of World War II, and study at the University of Illinois under the GI Bill. He married his first real girlfriend, Mildred Williams, and they had two children, Christie and David. Hefner had had an interest in magazines from childhood (starting his own “newspaper” at age ten),
and had edited a college magazine called Shaft that featured a “Coed of the Month.” After working for the Chicago Carton Company and as an ad copywriter, he gravitated towards publishers for employment, landing a job as a promotions copywriter for Esquire, earning $60 a week, and then as the circulation director of a magazine called Children’s Activities. But it was hardly glamorous, and neither was married life. Hefner later recalled: “A moment came when I thought, if I don’t do something I’m going to turn into my parents.” He decided to start his own magazine. It would, Hefner decided, target the readers of his previous employer Esquire, but in a more contemporary fashion. At the time, all the other magazines for men were either aimed at the middle-aged or were obsessed with macho outdoor adventures. Hefner, who coveted life as an urban sophisticate, figured young men like himself might be more interested in such indoor pursuits as jazz, literature, and domestic competency— with an eye, of course, to using these skills as seduction techniques.
In 1952, Hefner scrounged up $8,000—$600 from a bank loan against his furniture and the rest from friends and relatives—and started putting together ideas, working at night at a card table in his apartment.

With virtually no money to spend on contributions, but some knowledge of copyright and syndication, he looked for material that was available as a cheap reprint or for free, in the public domain. He found a suitable extract from a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story and bought it for just $25 from Doyle’s estate. He reportedly convinced half of his contributors to accept payment in shares (which turned out to be the best decision they ever made). And then he heard about a nude picture of a young actress called Marilyn Monroe, which a nearby publisher had made into a calendar but had not been widely seen. Hefner drove out to the publisher
on a cold call and somehow convinced him to sell the rights to the calendar for $500. That was the hook he needed to convince distributors to preorder a magazine they had never heard of. That, and a terrific piece of salesmanship. “Dear Friend,” Hefner wrote to the distributors, “I wanted you to be one of the first to hear
the news. Stag Party—a brand-new magazine for men—will be out this fall and it will be one of the best-sellers you’ve ever handled.” He signed it Nation-Wide News Company, Hugh M. Hefner, General Manager. The Nation-Wide News Company was, of course, just Hefner and wife Millie, with Hefner variously describing himself as editor-publisher, publicity director, circulation director, and advertising director. Millie added a secretarial touch to letters by writing her initials in the lower left margin. After he sent out the letter canvassing the distributors, Hefner received a not so pleasant letter from an outdoorsy magazine called Stag Magazine, which threatened legal action over the name Stag Party. Hefner gathered his friends around and after canvassing Pan and Satyr, came up with Playboy, the name of a recently failed car company. With orders for 70,000 copies on the strength of the Marilyn picture, Hefner was able to persuade two printers to publish the newly minted Playboy on credit. Swigging Pepsi at his card table at 3:00 a.m., with a baby asleep down the hall, he knocked out an editorial that described life, Playboy-style. “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails, and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” He figured he had to sell 35,000 to break even; with a retouched free picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cover to promote the centerfold, the first issue of Playboy, on the newsstands in December 1953, sold over 50,000 copies and introduced America to an irresistible world that was purely of Hefner’s invention. Within a year circulation was up to 175,000; by 1960, it had hit one million and was overtaking Esquire. The first issue may have been an odd blend of material,
but evidently it was working. Men may have joked, “I only read Playboy for the articles,” but back in the 1960s there actually were far more articles than girlie pictures. Buyers of the December 1962 issue had to wade through 159 pages of advertisements and stories, such as an eleven-page feature on “The fine art of acquiring fine art” to reach the nudes, just ten pages of them in all. And Playboy’s pictures back then were tame, often showing nothing more than a single buttock or a hint of cleavage. What made them work was the attitude; it
was Hefner’s idea that the models be approachable, everyday women photographed in an unguarded moment, often with the suggestion of a man’s presence—a pipe on a chair, a shadow in the background. The message: the girl next door likes sex as much as you do.

For the first years of Playboy’s life, Hefner worked non-stop, putting real strain on his marriage. He wrote in his journal, “Playboy consumes seven days of every week, more than a dozen hours a day and when I knock off at 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning I often stay right there.” By the end of the 1950s, Hefner decided he had been successful enough to start living the Playboy life himself, sponsoring a jazz festival and buying the first Playboy mansion. “It was something I thought would be fun that would also work as a marketing ploy,” he said. “I started smoking a pipe and driving a 300SL Mercedes- Benz. Before long, I’d become world-famous.” The first Playboy club opened in Chicago in 1960. Hefner had made no secret of the fact he had enjoyed several affairs at the Playboy offices, which eventually contributed to the end of his marriage. Playboy was not just about good times, though. Hefner believed—or did a great impersonation of believing—that he was a liberal crusader, and to that end he spent the early years of the 1960s writing a series of editorials that came to be known as the Playboy manifesto, now available in their entirety on the Playboy website. A typical fragment: “If the human body—far and away the most remarkable, the most complicated, the most perfect, and the
most beautiful creation on this earth—can become objectionable, obscene, or abhorrent when purposely posed and photographed to capture that remarkable perfection and beauty, then the world is a far more cockeyed place than we are willing to admit.” He took amphetamines and worked around the clock, producing
200,000 words to justify free sex and nude pictures. “He did consider himself to be this deep thinker, this intellectual, this leader of the sexual revolution,” said his biographer Russell Miller, author of the highly critical Bunny: the Real Story of Playboy. Playboy’s relationship with porn was, however, always touchy. Hefner may have philosophized at great length about the beauty of the naked female form, but he was still wary of crossing the line with advertisers, who accepted risqué but were turned off by sleaze. In the early 1970s, Hefner made two decisions that were to change Playboy’s course. He took the company public in 1971, which exposed it to
nervous shareholders; and he declared the magazine “pubic”—showing full-frontal nudity for the first time—in what would become a circulation war with racier titles such as Penthouse and Hustler. Playboy had by now grown into an empire that included the chain of twenty-three Playboy clubs populated by fluffy-tailed “bunnies,” resort hotels, casinos, a modeling agency, a record label, and a limousine service. The magazine’s circulation hit an all-time high of 7,161,561 copies in November 1972. But the company’s profits were vulnerable, and Hefner’s lifestyle, particularly the mansion, was an increasingly large overhead. Hefner has admitted he was never really interested in running a vast conglomerate, and it showed as numerous ancillaries foundered.
By 1975, despite huge income from the London casinos, the company was barely turning a profit. Scandals such as the conviction of Hefner’s private secretary on drugs charges—and his subsequent suicide— and the murder of the 1980 Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten, added to the impression that Playboy was no longer risqué and glamorous, but had slipped into sleaze. The darkest hour, though, was late in 1981, when police raided the London casinos following a tip-off from a rival firm. They found enough evidence of illegal
behavior for a judge to revoke Playboy’s gambling licenses. In 1985, Hefner suffered a stroke. The era of the Playboy was apparently over. Fast forward to 2003, though, and there’s Hugh Hefner, age seventy-seven, partying at the Playboy mansion with his seven blonde girlfriends to celebrate the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary. Hefner is still the editor-in-chief, but since 1982 the company has been run by his daughter, Christie, who brought much-needed business nous and an ability to negotiate with the boss unlike anybody before her. “Hugh Hefner is still very involved in the company,” says Christie Hefner today. “Moreover, Hef’s lifestyle, legendary parties at the mansion, and public persona continue to interest the media and intrigue the public.” She persuaded Hefner to close down the loss-making clubs, the last of which closed in 1986, and to expand into adult cable television, and, subsequently, online products. “Playboy was the first national magazine to go online (in 1994) and one of the first to carry advertising and launch a subscription service,”
Christie Hefner says. The brand’s enormous recognition factor was an advantage in the transition to online, she says, but admits, “we learned to have patience”—it took five years before it started returning a profit. She believes the Playboy brand still “represents sophisticated, sexy fun” and it is leveraged into numerous licensed
products worldwide such as sunglasses, jeans, and even shower curtains. “Two newer initiatives are creating physical expressions of the brand,” she says. “In the first, we are planning to open three Playboy Concept Stores each year in major markets, via a licensing model. In the second, we are creating large-scale location based entertainment centers in major markets also via licensing.” Despite a new editorial approach designed to bring it into line with the new breed of men’s magazines such as Maxim, Playboy remains highly anachronistic, yet is still the best-selling men’s magazine in the United States. “Some might say we’re antiquated,” says Hefner. “But that’s the price you pay for being around for a long time. By Emily Ross & Angus Holland – exclusive extract from 100 Great Businesses & the minds behind them. Buy online

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