"Show me any guy, of any age, anywhere in the world, at any time in history, today or tomorrow, that wouldn't give his left nut to be Hugh Hefner at 20... at 50... at 80... living the lifestyle he lives," "with beautiful women who adore him, happy beyond what any human being has a right to be happy." "(Cheering)" "I think people can have all different types of colours, and when people want to put people into certain slots of..." ""Well, he does humanitarian work, but he's also into, you know, naked girls." "I'm confused." "How can he be working for the Devil and God at the same time?"" "Guess what?" "We can." "It's not evil, nor is it good." "It's just right." "(Cheering)" "I create fantasies, Hef creates fantasies." "Half of the fantasies we create already exist in people's minds, and all we do is help draw them out." "*" "The deeds that men are being moved to by Playboy, and the general thrust of our move towards a less repressive society is a healthier attitude towards sex." "I grew up with an interest in trying to find out why people hurt one another as they do, or why we are not able to love one another as we should." "And I think it is the reason why" "I majored in psychology in college, to understand" "Try to understand-- why we are the way we are, and maybe make a difference." "My puritan roots run deep, and I think I understood that puritan repression at a very early age, and I also related it very much to the fact that I was in a home in which I was not getting hugged" "and there was no real show of affection." "So, I escaped into, I think, the dreams and fantasies that came in childhood, in the movies and in the music." "And in that darkened theatre, you could escape into anything anywhere." "The happiest time prior to Playboy for me was my teenage years, particularly in the last two years of high school." "It was a very creative time." "I was the best jitterbug-er in the class and... and wrote editorials for the school paper, making a case for swing music instead of the more traditional, conservative music." "Instead of writing a diary, he put everything in the form of a cartoon, and made scrapbooks of those." "The captions he had for the cartoons were wonderful." "HUGH:" "I was very much aware of, and concerned about, the sexual taboos and repression that exists in America." "And in a post-graduate course at Northwestern," "I wrote a paper called Sex Behaviour and the U.S. Law, in which I compared the sex statutes with the then 48 states." "The conclusion was that if those laws were effectively applied, most men would be serving some prison time." "And I made a case for the irrational nature of those laws." "The '50s were really rigid, and people were not ready for nudity even in the '50s." "Nudity was fairly risqué." "HUGH:" "It was conservative in terms of The White House," "It was conservative in terms of the post office, it was conservative in terms of movies, it was conservative in terms of lifestyles." "I'd just taken a job as the circulation manager for a children's magazine, and what I thought about was," ""Is my life simply going to be" ""a playing out of a variation on my parents?" "Is there nothing more?"" "In December of 1952, there was a high school reunion show, and my best buddy Jim Brophy and I wrote and emceed the show." "And I sang a couple of songs in it." "And we did a some goofy comedy routines." "We were kind of the Hope and Crosby of our high school class." "That brought back all the memories of... the dreams put aside, the dreams lost." "I was in a failed marriage and I really felt lost." "What's the matter, honey?" "I'm feeling kind of blue." "Is it your job?" "Umm, partly." "I thought you liked the work." "I do, it's just..." "It's just that I'm standing still." "I was going to create, write, cartoon." "Maybe I'll never succeed at anything, but if I don't try, I'll never know." "HUGH:" "There was a moment a few days after that where I stood on the Michigan Avenue Bridge and looked out at the lake and wondered if, "Is that all there is?" "Is this what my life is going to be?"" "And it was then the days and weeks immediately after that that I started making plans for a men's magazine, and doing it in the living room of my South Side apartment." "He thought big and creatively and wonderfully, and just created wherever he was." "He was a creator." "HUGH:" "I went to the local bank and then to a local loan company and managed to borrow from the two of them $600." "I then went to friends and relatives, everybody I could think of, and got them to invest a total of $8,000 from which I was able to put together the first issue." "In 1953, it was an incredible summer and fall because I was working for a children's magazine during the day, and then every night sending off countless letters, signed sometimes by "Hugh Hefner, editor in chief,"" "and sometimes as "Hugh Hefner, advertising director,"" "and "Hugh Hefner, circulation director,"" "because it was quite literally a one-man band." "I was looking for some kind of gimmick, so I learned that the already famous nude of Marilyn Monroe, which everybody had heard about but nobody had seen" "And nobody had seen it because the post office took the position that nudity was obscenity and therefore you couldn't send it through the mail." "I discovered that a local calendar company, the John Baumgarth company, right out on the west side of Chicago, owned the picture." "So, I drove out there in my beat-up Chevy and talked John Baumgarth into letting me publish that photograph." "To begin with, I was not going to call the magazine Playboy." "I was going to call it "Stag Party,"" "and at the very last minute, I received a letter, a cease and desist letter, from a lawyer from Stag magazine saying they thought that "Stag Party"" "was an infringement on their trademark." "This letter may be a blessing in disguise, since it forces us to look for a different, better title." "How about "Gentleman"?" "Too close to "Gentry."" "What about "Sir"?" "Good, but it's already being used." ""Satyr"?" "Yeah, "Satyr." How's that for a title?" "Good, I think "Satire" comes from the same root." "How about "Pan"?" "I think he was a satyr." "Trouble is, we'd have to explain it." "The word isn't common enough." "How about "Playboy"?" "There's a sport car called The Playboy." ""Playboy," hmm." "Playboy, I like that." "I think this is it." "If it clears for copyright, this is it, Playboy." "And when the name was changed, Hef decided it would be very suitable with this particular thrust of the magazine that the animal be a rabbit." "So, at the very last minute, I changed the stag to a rabbit." "And if I'd not done that, of course, we would not be here." "It's very difficult to imagine clubs all over the country with girls with antlers on their heads." "The first issue was so well received, we printed, I think 70,000, sold about 52,000." "I remember we were sitting," "I think it was Chicago, Michigan, in a restaurant there where there was a newsstand." "And we were watching the people come up to look at it, and buy it." "And Hef said, "See?" "It's exactly what I told you they would do."" "HUGH:" "The nude picture in Playboy appeared at the very same time as she was doing some of her very early, very popular movies." "How about the first issue having Marilyn Monroe on the cover?" "I mean, unbelievable." "I mean, we're all haunted by it to this day." "Everybody wanted to see what..." ""Have you seen that picture?"" "So, like any other red-blooded American male, yeah, sure." "And then I wanted subsequent issues because I was drawn into the seduction of it." "*" "HUGH:" "In the first few issues, the Playmate of the Month was simply a calendar picture that we purchased from a local calendar company." "Once we started shooting our own Playmate of the Month, what I looked for was something not simply shot in the studio in an impersonal way, and tried to find young women, across the country, who were not necessarily even in modeling." "I wanted to make the statement that beauty was everywhere." "So, the very notion of the Playmate of the Month was that she was the girl next door." "That began then with a photo session that we did with Charlaine Karalus, who we renamed Janet Pilgrim." "And she literally worked in the subscription department of the magazine, a young lady that I was actually dating at the time." "And I talked her into posing for the magazine." "In those photos, I tried to introduce the suggestion of the presence of a man, something to suggest that what we were really looking at was a sexual situation of some kind." "Because what I was trying to say, quite frankly, was that sex was a natural part of life and that nice girls like sex too." "Now, in the middle 1950s, that was a revolutionary idea." "Hugh Hefner was a very clever fellow and, I think, also a very dangerous fellow." "But in that brief time that he had worked at Esquire, he understood that a little bit of sex goes a long way." "But he added a little more." "And he had a concept early on, that the girl next door really is a wild thing." ""And in our pages, she'll take off her clothes for you."" "If I would have gone into that Playboy office in 1993-- groomed, I'm going to call it" "Groomed as a model, groomed as a stripper, groomed as anything other than the little girl working at the Polish grocery store," "I wouldn't have been picked." "LINDA GORDON:" "It certainly escalated the idea that there was one perfect body that you had to emulate, and that was very difficult." "Not all of us have those perfect bodies." "It has given the men for whom a woman must meet the physical criteria of a Playboy centrefold, or a bunny..." "That's harmful." "Because they don't meet those criteria, those women themselves." "LINDA GORDON:" "Magazines like Playboy-- And it wasn't just Playboy-- also began increasingly to create images that really treated women's bodies as commodities." "God, I just remembered something I'd utterly forgotten:" "a friend of mine, trying to hold up one page of the magazine to the light to see if he could see something through it that you couldn't see looking at it." "It was really not until Playboy came along, after World War II and in the '50s, that everything started to shift and people started to look outside the old way of doing things and look to a new way of doing things." "Mm-hmm, mm-hmm." "That's where they belong." "The response to the magazine was overwhelming." "If you took..." "If you stood back and looked at that magazine," "Hef was giving you a profile of a guy that, from his point of view, was like what he thought was the cool guy." "You know, I thought..." "I could be that kind of guy." "Right around the time I was 13 is right around the time that Playboy was really hitting its stride." "And all young guys my age read Playboy, only for the articles, of course." "In North America, especially in America, we are remnants of the puritan ethic, and puritans were uptight." "They didn't engage in sex outside of marriage, so on and so forth." "And men have never had a problem having sex outside of marriage, during marriage, after marriage." "Men just want to have sex." "Imagine your most sensitive part rubbing against your pants leg every time you take a step." "And women wonder why we think about sex every eight seconds." "Women, on the other hand, have their most sensitive part sort of hidden." "It's in jail." "You have to break into the jail to..." ""Bing, third floor, I'm coming," to have that moment happen." "So, women are much more disconnected from their sexuality from men." "Men are completely clear about it." "*" "A young man named Hugh Hefner was trying to start a magazine, and he had no material and no money." "And he approached me, and I had this novel which nobody wanted." "(Crowd laughing)" "And I sold it to him for $400." "And it appeared in the second, third and fourth issues of Playboy, and of course the magazine has changed the world." "It's done more for 14-year-old boys than... (Crowd laughing)" "HUGH:" "Fahrenheit 451 is the story of book burning in the future." "If ever there was a writer and a magazine that were made for one another, it was Ray Bradbury and Playboy and that particular story." "Charles Beaumont was a young writer in California, the first important new writer to appear in the pages of Playboy." "He wrote a very controversial story called The Crooked Man, about a future society in which homosexuality was the way of things and heterosexuality was considered the perversion." "And that was a story that was turned down by Esquire as being too controversial." "And we published it, with a powerful illustration by LeRoy Neiman." "And it was misunderstood in some quarters." "Some people felt that it was homophobic." "From our point of view, the message of the story was that if it inappropriate to persecute a heterosexual in a homosexual society, than it is equally inappropriate to persecute a homosexual in our society." "And that was back in about 1955, when that kind of thing was unthinkable." "TONY BENNETT:" "He gave us some the best literature of our time." "It will go down in history, the quality of writers that wrote for Playboy magazine, the very best, read straight through." "And when they got past masturbating, they should have read more." "What always troubled me was that he was clever about getting male journalists to give their work to Playboy, which, you know, made the magazine a little tonier." "HUGH:" "In the 1950s, I wanted to create, for the very early issues, I wanted to create a stable of cartoonists, the equal of what The New Yorker had done in the 1930s and 1940s." "Here we have, because it is the October issue, a double page spread of classic cartoons by Gahan Wilson, the very cartoonist that you asked me about, and continues to be one of my absolute favourites." "GAHAN WILSON:" "I felt a presence in back of me and this person said," ""Hello, I'm Art Paul and Hef would like to see you."" "And I didn't know, frankly, who or what a "Hef" was." "But I said, "All right."" "And behind the desk was this thin man, and he looked at me, smiled, and he stood up and he reached over and shook my hand and he said," ""I've been waiting for you."" "(Chuckling)" "And I was." "And that's how we got together." "HUGH:" "And he appeared in the middle '50s and had appeared in every issue of Playboy since." "In the early 1950s, when the magazine was still relatively new, and somebody on the east coast cut out the rabbit from the magazine and simply pasted it on the envelope, the post office, to its credit," "delivered it without writing anything on it." "Then we knew we'd arrived." "GENE SIMMONS:" "Hugh Hefner probably single-handedly, more than any other man perhaps in history, made it okay for women to also like sex, the notion that even good girls enjoyed sex." "Playboy did not speak to women." "Women were used in Playboy for men's masturbatory fantasies." "I don't see how any women would be liberated." "I courted controversy, obviously." "You know, I wouldn't have started Playboy if I was afraid of controversy." "I think that controversy is the way you change things." "So, when I started publishing Playboy, we applied for a second-class mailing permit and were turned down." "And when we were turned down a second time, we went to Washington and filed a complaint against the post office and were successful in overturning, not only our ban, but overturning the entire premise." "So, there are some clippings here in my forever scrapbook." "This is volume 56 from June to December of 1955." "Here's a little piece in Writer's Digest about that decision." ""Playboy has just won in a wrestle with the post office." ""Publisher Hugh Hefner said, quote," ""'Henceforth, we will continue to be edited in Chicago, not Washington.'"" "And that's the way it's been ever since." "Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace." "The show is Night Beat." "HUGH:" "The Mike Wallace interview was the first, I think, network interview that I did after starting the magazine." "And this person appears in the studio." "Who is he?" "He certainly was not a formidable-looking individual." "No one had really ever heard of him." "I was doing him a favour by talking to him at that time." "Our first story is Hugh Hefner, and we'll try to find out why he really did start Playboy, and whether or not it's just a smutty story." "Hugh, we checked this month's issue and found 20 pictures of girls in various stages of undress." "Do you think that really what you're selling is kind of high class dirty book?" "No, I don't think so at all." "There's an important distinction here." "Sex always will be an important part of the book because sex is probably the single thing that men are most interested in." "I'm still a prude, at that time, so I was very sceptical." "I didn't particularly like him." "Well, with this, I think that you'll agree it's sniggering kind of sex, it's a lascivious kind of sex." "It certainly isn't a healthy approach to sex, Hugh, and you wouldn't suggest that it is." "I would not only suggest, I would say rather strongly, we consider it a pretty healthy attitude." "But I was not persuaded." "He said to me, after the interview was over, he said, "In five years, you'll be doing something else."" "I think he was simply reflecting the conservative nature of the times." "You know, how dare a young man write a magazine that attempted to produce some decent literature with name writers and also put naked or semi-naked ladies in the book?" "How dare me?" "LINDA GORDON:" "The response to Playboy from mainstream society was extreme anger and extreme suspicion." "So, they were absolutely enraged and they believe, first of all, that it had to be stopped, and second of all, that it was creating enormous damage to what you might call the civil texture of the society." "PAT BOONE:" "I think, beyond any question, Playboy magazine and that whole mindset, that whole philosophy, that whole attitude of no restraint whatsoever-- moral, spiritual, any other way-- has contributed, more than any other single ingredient," "to the breaking of the moral compass, because, if anything goes, then you can distill the Playboy philosophy into Jerry Rubin's famous little phrase," ""If it feels good, do it."" "I think Playboy is among the more dangerous publications that are available today, the same as I would consider, for example, socialism dangerous." "Charles Keating, in the 1950s, formed something called The Citizens for Decent Literature." "And it was really simply a Catholic-inspired censorship group." "He was a major opponent of Playboy." "We have a culture based upon firm principles found in Judeo-Christian standards." "Playboy opposes this diametrically." "It openly advocates the overthrow." "When somebody tells me the church criticized you, well, what does that mean?" "I mean, the most vicious wars in the history of the planet was caused by the church, you know?" "And I don't ever remember where the mafia got busted for ripping off little boys, the Catholic Church did." "So, that's almost like a badge of honour when the church criticize you." "Men who would stand by and see their women degraded and debased as they are with the breast and the buttock presentation by Playboy, the status and the role of an animal, are not men at all." "(Crowd applauding)" "HUGH:" "In the '80s, they caught up with him and put him in prison for fraud." "Everybody has a sexual self." "Everybody enjoys the pleasures of life." "And you can pretend otherwise, but as we have known from the past, most of those people are the most problematic." "HUGH:" "I thought that the magazine, in terms of circulation, would top somewhere around 700,000 because that's what Esquire was selling." "By our 5th anniversary, the magazine had reached a million." "We had passed Esquire." "And we felt, at that point, successful beyond my wildest dreams." "Luck does come to all of us at different times." "The key is to be ready for that luck, to be prepared for that luck, to be able to take it and run with it and use it." "*" "HUGH:" "There was something remarkable about Chicago and comedy in the 1950s." "And most of my friends were nightclub performers." "Don Adams, Buddy Rich, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr." "would come over day and night to the Playboy offices." "I was sitting with Bill Cosby and Hugh Hefner one night, very late, and I, you know..." "They were kicking around ideas, excited about different things that were happening." "I said, "You know what," I said," ""Hugh, why don't you have jazz festivals?" "It's big."" "HUGH:" "At the end of the 1950s, we were successful enough so we put together what turned out to be the most historic, unforgettable jazz festival in the history of the music." "Leonard Feather called it," ""The greatest weekend in the 60-year history of jazz."" "And it was, because everybody was there." "*" "KEITH HEFNER:" "It was just two days of the most phenomenal music in the world." "If you liked jazz, and we did, it was just two days of bliss." "(Clapping)" "HUGH:" "The jazz festival had really broken through in terms of turning Playboy into a mainstream brand." "I came out from behind the desk and literally reinvented myself and started living the life that I was espousing in the pages of the magazine, and became, in effect, Mr. Playboy." "The notion of doing a television show as a way of promoting the magazine seemed natural to me." "I started taping the show in October of 1959." "It was intended for late night." "It was a variety show." "What set it apart was the concept." "It was a penthouse apartment in which the subjective camera came up the elevator and then into the apartment and actually felt as if it was a guest there and watched the comedy and the conversation and the musical numbers in an apartment." "Hello there and welcome to Playboy's Penthouse." "I didn't see you come in." "We were kind of involved in dancing." "This is Peggy Lord." "I'm Hugh Hefner, your host, and I think we're going to have a fun evening tonight so I'm glad you got here early." "(Clapping)" "Tony Bennett's here, and while we take care of garments and get him a drink, we'll take a very brief, brief break for a commercial." "He selected the most magnificent young artists that all became so big." "*" "Great, great artists, great comedians, great actors." "They all showed up." "* Let her go, let her go, God bless her *" "* Wherever she may be *" "* She can search this whole wide world over *" "* She'll never find another man like me *" "And the guests there, and the performers, were of every race." "There was no particular concern in terms of racial taboos because there were no concerns in terms of racial taboos in my life." "But that was very controversial in 1959 and 1960." "And because of that, the show got no distribution in the south." "It's very difficult for people to really remember what it was like back then, the racial bigotry, the separation that existed." "* This little light of mine *" "* I'm gonna let it shine *" "* Everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday *" "* Gonna let my little light shine *" "I just learned this evening that, surprisingly, this is the first national television show that apparently you've played because it's a mixed racial group." "Well, apparently that seems to be the problem." "At first, we didn't think it was." "Well, we really never think about it, you know?" "Were a great, talented act." "That was during the time of redneck nirvana, when people see a black man with white women, it's like, "Ah!" You know?" "It's pretty exciting, and of course you're not doing things in the tradition of The Pied Pipers or Four Freshmen, or this kind of thing." "TIM HAUSER:" "But he had on Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, which was a mixed vocal group." "* Everybody knows I'm honest *" "* Yes, Lord *" "* Lord, I spent plenty of days and nights alone with my grief *" "* Alone with my grief *" "* Lord, I pray, really and truly pray *" "* Somebody will come and bring me relief *" "It was like, you didn't see them on any other shows, and they were singing jazz and who knew what the hell they were singing?" "That was another thing." "I mean, he promoted this kind of music that was esoteric to a lot of people." "* Shooby dooby *" "* Shooby dooby means that I love you *" "* You, you *" "*" "(Clapping)" "DICK GREGORY:" "Many of us black folks saw black folks were never seen before." "The dizzy Mr. Ebullient." "(Laughing)" "I beg your pardon." "Where would you see all of those great jazz folks that he brought on?" "Or hear them, other than their music, you know?" "So, he brought them alive." "He saw another human side of them." "* Give me the playboy in Chicago *" "* Now this is my home town *" "(Clapping)" "HUGH:" "Sammy Davis Jr., he was very anxious to appear." "He actually arrived in Chicago and we did an entire show around him." "Come on, you, buy me a drink, will you?" "Before you go, I got something for you." "You been such a sweet and wonderful guy to come up and entertain us." "Well, you stay here." "Okay." "If he brings me the centrefold of a Playboy, that'd be the sweetest gift he could give me." "With fur." "(Laughing)" "Oh my goodness gracious." "His name isPlayboy." "A St. Bernard." "And in a year, he's going to be bigger than you are." "Hello, Playboy." "Hugh, this is beautiful." "This is what I really wanted and this is the God's honest truth." "Look at that little face." "You belong to me." "I'm your daddy now." "(Laughing)" "I've had many people call me a dog." "Now I can prove it." "You got a cold nose?" "You love me?" "Give me a little kiss." "Give me a little kiss." "There we go." "Well, listen, if you're going to give me this, then there's only one way I know how to exit with you, and that is..." "* We got a great street called State Street *" "* I just want to say, allow me to say *" "* That we do things that they wouldn't do on Broadway *" "* Hey, why you'll have the time, the time of your life *" "* I'm so glad that I brought my wife *" "* Chicago *" "* Beats Las Vegas *" "* Give me Chicago *" "* That's my hometown *" "(Clapping)" "Hef's a person of substance, and these other things are superficial." "He's not a superficial person." "So, he's colour-blind." "He believes in equality, the equal enforcement of the law." "Meeting will come to order." "The question is, have you ever been a member of The Communist Party?" "I don't believe you have the right to ask that question of anybody." "Well, the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating people that they considered un-American." "And the very notion of defining who your neighbour was by their politics was abhorrent to me." "Neighbours were spying on neighbours." "People lost their jobs." "And I felt that we had fought a second world war to put an end to all of that." "And to some extent, I felt that we were becoming the very people that we had defeated." "It really broke show business in half." "Hef took the approach that McCarthyism was bad, that blacklisting was bad." "And in his magazine, he allowed blacklisted writers, he had blacklisted celebrities, any opportunity that he could to push that envelope, he did." "I exchanged letters in 1960 with Ronald Reagan, long before he became President, because he objected to the fact that I was running pieces by Dalton Trumbo, who had been one of the unfriendly witnesses in the House Un-American Activities Committee," "and ran a profile on Charlie Chaplin at a time when he was considered the most hated man in America just because of what some people thought his politics were." "And his politics actually were very American." "What I didn't know at the time, of course, was that Reagan himself had been working behind the scenes with, and actually giving names to, the FBI." "And he wrote me a letter and I responded, telling him, quite frankly, that, obviously, those of a different point of view, who were more liberal than he was, were certainly just as American as he was." "And it certainly included Adler and Pete Seeger and Josh White." "And those performers were welcome on Playboy's Penthouse." "Well, it gives us a very real pleasure to introduce you to our next guest, Larry Adler, a gentleman who probably is more responsible for turning the harmonica into a really respected instrument than any other man alive." "I've made an album, on audio fidelity." "I think we may as well bring in all the facts." "But I wrote the liner notes myself and I begin by saying" "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a jazz musician." "(Laughing)" "You may remember that phrase in a different text." "*" "HUGH:" "So, there were other kinds of performers who literally were on a blacklist that everybody denied existed." "Pete Seeger was on that list." "He was considered a revolutionary." "This is Pete Seeger, who probably deserves the title of the daddy of a new school of folk singers." "I could see he was an honest man, and taking advantage of the situation." "He now had money and could put on his own syndicated show without anybody telling him what he could do with it." "Sing a chorus with me." "I'm serious." "Folk music doesn't belong in the hands of professionals." "If it was, it would die a quick death." "But where it lives is when a lot of people have fun with it." "See if you can just sing a chorus with me." "* Irene, goodnight *" "* Irene, goodnight *" "* Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene *" "* I'll see you in my dreams *" "The man who taught it to me was a wonderful man." "Hefner liked to be independent in more ways than one." "So, he had me on his show with all his bosomy young women, my family's been kidding me about it ever since." "There was no network that told me I couldn't do this or that." "I created the show that I felt the audience would enjoy." "And it's because of this tattoo," "I never can be buried in a Jewish cemetery." "That's the truth, that's the orthodox scene." "You have to go out of the world the way you came in, with no marks or no changes." "So, when I got back from Walter," "I was over at my Aunt's house in Jamaica, Long Island, and she's very orthodox." "So, I'm in her kitchen and washing with the soap there, so she pins the tattoo and she flips, you know?" "She goes, "Ah!"" "She's a real Jewish miner bird." ""You ruined your arm!" "You can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery!"" "I said, "What do you nudge me for?" "They'll cut this off and bury this in a gentile cemetery."" "HUGH:" "They began to arrest him for obscenity in clubs across the country." "He was appearing at the Gate of Horn, just off Rush Street, and I was working on my first instalments ofthe Playboy Philosophy." "And Shel Silverstein, a magnificent cartoonist and friend, who was living at the mansion at the time, came back from that show and said Lenny had just been arrested and was taken off the stage by the cops." "And one of the cops said, was quoted in Variety magazine, that he was offended by it as a Catholic." "And Chicago was a very Catholic town in those days." "I got him a lawyer, my lawyer, and then I started writing about the injustice of it inthe Playboy Philosophy, and in the process, commented on the inappropriate relationship between the Catholic church and the city government in Chicago." "So, to openly embrace Lenny Bruce, cultural suicide at that time." "HUGH:" "In June, the cops came and arrested and me." "And the supposed reason for the arrest was we were running a pictorial on Jayne Mansfield from her movie Promises!" "Promises!" "that we published in the June issue." "Well, there was nothing in that pictorial that was any different than things we'd published in the past." "And there was no doubt in my mind that the real reason for the arrest was because of what we wrote in the editorials about Lenny Bruce." "We actually went to court." "They held a trial, with 11 housewives and 1 lone, urban male as my jury." "There were a number of people from a religious organization on the jury, so the jury was stacked." "But it turned out to be a hung jury and the city did not carry it any further." "HUGH:" "And that issue, the June issue, with Jayne Mansfield in it, was our biggest seller up to that point." "But there was a long list of those kind of conflicts with Chicago." "Once I got the Chicago mansion in 1960, the original reason for the mansion was to give me a place to escape from the work." "But of course, very quickly," "I brought the work to the mansion." "And from that point on, from the early '60s on, you know, I was working out of the house." "And it's a way that works very well for me because, you know," "I historically have, you know, worked often at night." "*" "JAMES CAAN:" "It was just amazing." "It was like, you know, a little Disneyland." "I come upstairs and by the fireplace, there's like 20 girls." "I guess they all got off work or something." "And I just looked at the scene:" "20 girls and Hef, and I just yelled, "Boring, this is so boring!"" "NAT LEHRMAN:" "There's a big living room there when you come in, and after everybody sat down, you come in, sat down like a king, surrounded by a couple of girls maybe, and we'd watch a movie." "And this is an irony about Hef that I don't often talk about." "He had the best wines you can imagine." "He didn't drink wine." "He had the best food you could imagine." "He didn't care about food." "He used to eat pork chops and fried chicken." "He had a closet full of beautiful clothes." "He never wore anything but his pyjamas." "He had a swimming pool." "He didn't swim." "And it goes on and on and on like that." "I was at the Playboy mansion at a party, and I was very impressed." "I came late from a television shoot, and he put on his housecoat and came out to greet me, even though he had already retired." "I don't with how many women he had retired." "However, so I've known him for many years and I like very much that he does something that I like... he stays active." "He is not retired." "Well, it looks like we're back again and while we were away for a commercial, a very good friend, Tony Curtis, came in." "Hi." "TONY CURTIS:" "I was in the movies by then and we'd come into town and we'd go to his place." "And he'd give you a room and there you were, these beautiful girls roaming around." "And if you were clever and if you had a flair and if you weren't a ding dong and you didn't make anybody feel unhappy, you could have a relationship with a girl, for the weekend or for a week." "About the oddest fortnight of my life was spent in the Playboy mansion in Chicago." "I couldn't wait to see one part of it." "They said there's the fabulous underwater bar, and in the underwater bar, you could see through the glass wall, with people doing whatever they did in the pool." "And you slid down a brass pole to get there, like in the storybook story." "And I went down the brass pole without any trouble, and couldn't wait and I saw the window and I saw a bare leg." "And I thought, "Wait till I get home with the stories I'm going to have starting today."" "The leg belonged to Norman Mailer." "Some folks would say, "Just my luck."" "I described it once in my act as sort of you get Isaac Bashevis Singer and breasts at Hefner's." "NAT LEHRMAN:" "Well, people see Hef, because he lives this unusual lifestyle, they think he's crazy." "He's not crazy." "He's crazy like a fox, as they say." "When I finally got to meet him and work with him," "I saw he's a brilliant man." "He always said in Chicago, the mansion, that the front door was a screen, and people were projecting their own fantasies on the screen." "And this is indisputably true." "So, he was a director behind the scenes, directing the scene." "TONY BENNETT:" "He was very gregarious, and yet, at that time, he would spend all of his time on every page of Playboy magazine." "He would work on every page, everything that went into each magazine." "HUGH:" "In the early '60s, we introduced what became the hugely influential interviews." "Alex Haley did the very first Playboy interview, and it was on Miles Davis." "And Miles Davis talked more about race than about music." "A black person like me, when I walk into a nightclub," "I always..." "It's built in, that I want to see I can get out." "And I don't think it's fair because I'm making so many people feel good with my music." "HUGH:" "The interview became the definitive in-depth interview." "It set the standard." "And it is interesting that you ask about this particular look because I have just gotten a recommendation from my editors on some revisions in the magazine, and one of the things that they want to change is the interview page." "And I'm not going to let 'em." "There are some things in the magazine, like the centrefold and the interview, that are so iconic that one does not want to change them." "At least, I don't want to change them." "Alex Haley went on to do a great many classic interviews for Playboy:" "Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and finally wrote Roots." "Well, here we are." "And Roots itself, though few people know that, grew out of the connection with Playboy and doing the Playboy interviews." "And I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Alex Haley." "But it created a whole different way of thinking, for that particular generation." "HUGH:" "The most extraordinary interview that Alex Haley did was with the neo-Nazi Rockwell." "And he didn't expect the interviewer to be black." "His face was mottled with anger." "And he said, "I'm going to tell you right now, be truthful with you, we call your kind 'Niggers' and we think you should all be shipped to Africa."" "And I'll never forget how, somehow, a calm descended on me, right at that moment, you know?" "I just said to him very calmly, "Well, commander," "I've been called 'Nigger' before, and this time," "I'm being paid very well for it, so now you go ahead and tell me whatever you got against us."" "JIM BROWN:" "There is a truth of the Ku Klux Klan, there is a truth of a racist." "They have a truth that they live by." "And if we allow them to, in the right form, to express themselves, it's better for the country." "The most controversial interview that we ever did was with Jimmy Carter before he was elected President." "And the Republicans used it as the major source of controversy during the election period." "And despite it all, Jimmy Carter got elected." "It certainly raised the stature of Playboy." "So, it was very clever of Hefner and his literary editors, who were often described as the other side of the schizophrenia of Playboy," "Spectorsky and Kretchmer." "They worked hard to get big names in and big interviews into the magazine." "WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.:" "Mr. Hefner's magazine is most widely known for its total exposure of the human female." "Though, of course, other things happen in its pages." "But Mr. Hefner insists that it is a great deal more." "There is such a thing as a Playboy philosophy, of which he is the prophet, and that that philosophy is destined to liberate us all from what he variously calls superstition, purity, tyranny, moral absolutism, that kind of thing." "I wrote the first instalment of Playboy philosophy in the fall of 1962 for the December 1962 issue with a notion of simply doing it for one issue." "And it was really just an editorial in response to our critics because if I was going to be damned," "I wanted to be damned for what I really believed, not what they pretended I believed." "It is, I think, important for the record to establish that you are seeking, in effect, to annul the traditional code about what is proper sexual behaviour." "Let me ask you this." "I'm suggesting that you re-examine, suggested that two or three times." "It's not true that I'm..." "by any sense." "Because the end that I'm seeking is really very similar." "I think that we are more apt to have a truly monogamous society if we do more realistically come to grips with some of these problems." "I think that we've avoided the problems with some of these old rules that have simply been there and ignored." "Should the individual be allowed to do whatever he wants to do as long as it doesn't impede on your choices for your happiness?" "Hugh Hefner's point of view is "Yes."" "A lot of America didn't want that to be the case." "There are things within that magazine that I might say also are, quote, "Going too far."" "Where we separate is, you want to suppress and eliminate the things in society that you think, in terms of ideas and the exchange of ideas, that are going too far." "I want to live in a society in which people can voice unpopular opinions, because I know that as a result of that, a society grows and matures." "And in a typically obsessive way," "I then continued to write the Playboy philosophy every issue for the next 2 ½, 3 years." "All of us hated it, all the editors hated it, because we were trying to put out an entertainment magazine." "That's what we were told we were doing." "And this was not entertainment." "This was him talking about his thoughts in one chapter, one instalment." "Well, the readers loved it." "EMCEE:" "On my left is Miss Darryl Farrington, the Assistant Dean of Women." "On my right... (Clapping)" "On my right is Mr. Hugh Hefner, the editor/publisher of Playboy magazine." "(Clapping)" "This is fine up to a certain point, but I feel that somehow, there is a complete lack of responsibility to any other person in this kind of relationship, particularly involving sex." "And I think that this is an important consideration, particularly for people who are trying to find out who they are." "Well, I think you raised a couple of good points, so it may be a little difficult to..." "I may have to take them in chunks." "We've been accused of being..." "In fact, this was the phrase:" "dictatorial tastemakers." "I confess that I think that these taste considerations are not entirely objective, and I would rather have it come from us maybe than the Reader's Digest." "PAT BOONE:" "The cartoons used to be funny and creative and they got more and more filthy, the articles more and more reflecting the whole Playboy philosophy, which is almost "seditionary,"" "I think, to the American way of life, and abusing freedom of expression and freedom of speech till it loses all its meaning." "I think that we are relatively free today, in terms of our sexual behaviour." "The kinds of laws that existed back then were most onerous, and people don't really even remember." "*" "My original concern with the first Playboy Club was," ""How could we create the fantasy that we reflected in the pages of the magazine?"" "We put it all together and they brought the fantasy with them." "The real notion behind it was also to create a private club, a key club, and instead of simply having an act or two, we tried to have what became a platform for new talent." "The popularity of it was overwhelming." "And then we started making thoughts in terms of other clubs." "Other people came to us and we began to franchise the club concept." "And the first two franchises that opened, soon after Chicago, were Miami and New Orleans." "Well, there was no colour line in terms of the membership of Playboy Club." "So, when the black key members went to New Orleans or Miami, they were turned away at the clubs." "We told them very quickly that if you were going to run a Playboy Club, you're going to have to accept our members, and our members are both black and white." "In New Orleans, the manager said," ""We can't do that." "It's against the law in Louisiana." ""You can't have black and white patrons" ""sitting in the same club together." ""There is segregation here in the south and it is a matter of law."" "On that basis, we didn't believe the laws." "We believed the laws were unconstitutional, so we repurchased the franchises and ran them ourselves and opened them up to all of our members, both black and white." "RICHARD ROSENZWEIG:" "We took a beating by having to buy back the licenses on these clubs." "This exclusion of blacks from the entertainment world, or from anything, any kind of segregation, was outrageous." "So, he was one of many human beings during that era that fought against injustice, and fought to change to bring about a truth in this country." "On one particular evening," "Irwin Corey was supposed to appear, and we needed a substitute." "Dick Gregory was a black comedian who worked out on the south side of Chicago, part time, and we put him in." "Now, what I don't know..." "Hefner didn't know that that room had been sold out to a private convention, a group of southern white men that was in the frozen food business." "So, when they found out that it was a private, they didn't need me, you know." "So, Victor Lownes was standing on the stairway." "Now, this is how close I come to not making it," "I mean, later in life." "Victor Lownes was standing there to tell me" "I didn't have to work, but I'd be paid." "Well, $50 for nothing?" "Give me that every day." "But the fact that I got off at the wrong spot, and the fact that this is the great Playboy," "I can't be late." "So, I never knew Victor." "I see a white man standing in the middle of the stairwell." "I don't know he's waiting to tell me." "I'm trying to get up there so I can hit that stage." "I'm not even going to have time to change my clothes." "I pushed him out the way." "And he's trying to talk to me." "And I hit that second floor and turn and jump up on the stage." "8:00... 11:00, I'm still on the stage talking." "There was a racial bias related to stand-up comics, for reasons I do not comprehend, but those were strange times." "This was now in the early 1960s." "It was appropriate for a black musician to play jazz, or a black singer, but for a stand-up comic to be black was not acceptable in those days." "And here come Hefner come through."