Playboy’s spine is gone. Forty years ago, when it sold seven million copies a year, the magazine used staples and its spine was a bruiser, thick enough to bulge out from the pile of magazines (Esquire, Look, Time) that my friend’s dad kept in the bookcase near his desk. Now there’s a skinny glued rectangle, the kind of thing you’d see on a fitness magazine. The old spine had authority. As a kid I didn’t understand about ad pages, but the message got through anyway: Playboy was the big time.
Which meant girls, of course, and success, money, the big world that would be at your disposal. Adulthood, one hoped, and it was represented by that fat spine. What made the magazine so fat, of course, wasn’t just the girls, or even the ad pages. Playboy hired top writers, men with safari shirts and tinted sunglasses. The magazine had the money—maybe my friend’s dad, a home-improvement writer, explained about circulation and pay rates—and it paid for top-quality articles, whatever that meant.
These were on the subjects that adults cared about (Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon, the heavyweight preoccupations of talkative scientists) and I was not likely to read any of them. The standard joke was “I just read it for the articles,” meaning the shmo really looked at it for the girls. So it was with me when, a few years on, I uncovered the collection that our neighbors’ grown-up son thought he had hidden. To me the articles and fiction were just print on pages. I thumbed past them and the pictures of stereo components and the baffling full-page illustrations that sat at the start of the feature articles (top magazine artists, of course). Yet they all had an impressive feel to them, an adult feel. The print, for example, was a special typeface that seemed to bolt the pages in place. It appeared to have knobs, and by my standards the point size was small. Dense black columns of text lined up on big white pages, and this added to the impressions that gathered in the back of my mind. As noted above, the impressions had to do with money and success and the chance that girls would come along with them.
I just bought 20 or so of the old magazines so I could do a revisit. First, the girls are still fine. I don’t laugh at the period touches, and the typical Playboy style of presentation is not worth making fun of. Yes, the girls look like they’re in a combination museum diorama and show-car display room, one that has throw cushions and is lit like an ad for breakfast cereal. Such is the way of these things. Starting in 1972 or so, the women pick up the uniformly hard-bodied, low-fat look now standard in pretty-girl pictures, and it’s interesting to see that happen. It’s also a treat to see long-lost faces and bodies staring back at you from your junior-high years. This thrill is pretty much the reason for buying an old Playboy. But it goes fast, possibly because so much attention was paid the girls first time around.
That leaves the text, the articles and fiction, and they’re something. A quote from 1970: “Hair and face are protected with Vaseline and the genitals are covered with Saran Wrap, while the nose is exposed for breathing. The casting proceeds in sections,” and so on. I find that absurd but impressive. It’s very hard to write a clear, unstilted description of a complicated physical process. The New Yorker’s editor Harold Ross tried to get sentences like that out of Brendan Gill back when the “Talk of the Town” visited spaghetti factories. So Playboy contributors and staff earned their money; we’re not talking a low level of technical skill. But what’s being described is the method used by George Segal, the movie and TV actor, to produce smutty pieces of statuary.
In fact these statues get thousands of words and pages and pages of black-background photos. The plaster nipples and thighs are lit like moon rocks or Babylonian friezes. It’s hard to take people seriously when they pretend George Segal is an artist, and this is part of the Playboy syndrome. The fellows in the Luce empire had to fight for self-respect, but at least there weren’t nipples around. I bet the men working in Hefnerland had to make a certain wry mouth as they slugged back their Scotch and reflected on life’s road. Imagine the fellow who put together “Ribald Classic” every month. What did he tell himself?
Next, from 1975, we have this sequence. “The first thing he wondered was whether it was anyone in particular they wanted to kill.” The “they” are a lean, weathered fellow and a hot little blonde in shorts, and they’re standing at a blind corner. “Derek thought that anyone who stopped for them deserved the Mack that you couldn’t see behind you, 20 tons of kick and a long twisted roll.” That’s from the grabber opening to a short story about grifters. It makes me twitch. I think about how many times the Mack sentence was re-written, the author’s thin-lipped determination to cast his fly just right. Tough guy prose becomes its own language when the word rhythms pick up: “20 tons of kick and a long twisted roll.” He’s saying the truck could get them!
At Playboy even the writers wanted to be writers. From the same issue, out of a feature article: “We—my then wife, my son, my daughter and I—picked up to go out to California on vacation a while back, to look around, having not found peace of mind in Kansas, having found cold in winter and heat in summer and commerce and small talk.” Kansas is boring so he took the family to the Coast. These are the twin revelations that have the poor man spitting poetry. (Oh, that blunt, abrupt close, the tough dying fall of “summer and commerce and small talk.”)
More Playboy articles read like this than you might think possible. The magazine had some problems with the New Journalism, in that it milked the thing to death and then kept the body hanging around into the 1980s. Playboy wanted the best, and the New Journalism was considered the best sort of journalism, top shelf. It came from creators, burning individual souls who hijacked magazine assignments so they could produce literature. The top writers chanted their sentences as insights burst through mental dams—that was the idea. They showed up at the car fair or the Pentagon march, and out of the jumble of everyday detail a monster-size, transcendent fact would stare at them and no one else could see it. This vision inspired fits that overrode the rules of magazine prose. Hence, as the supreme example, we had Norman Mailer, especially the Mailer of Armies of the Night: a node of the national anguish vibrating in front of his typewriter, fingers plunging and rising as he banged out our pain.
So the hardworking professionals who survived off features had to burst their dams a few times a year. Soon enough this turned into a pipsqueak affair. The problem is typical of its time, as is the New Journalism itself, the idea that magazine articles ought to shake and quiver and undergo a transformation into art. Playboy articles stink of an age when liberal arts graduates did too much useless worrying about selling out. They do it enough now, but I’d say the habit’s great period ran from the days of Nathanael West to Ann Beattie, the 1930s through the 1970s.
When I say “selling out,” I don’t mean selling out in the sense of helping a company do bad things. I mean suspecting that maybe your life should have been entirely different and you should be writing acclaimed plays on Broadway or well-reviewed novels about life and its philosophy-text dilemmas. I figure that once college education became widespread, it took a few decades for people to realize they were still being trained as cogs. They kept being tantalized by the thought that really, if they got their act together, they could become beacons of intellectual production. But such beacons are the exception, not the rule. Most of us aren’t called, and especially not on deadline.
The guys at Playboy provide the proof. Poor, diligent bastards—even when they’re good, they’re trivial. “Nick Nolte Hangs Tough,” from 1979, is an artful I-am-a-camera piece about life around a celebrity. It doesn’t fall into Mailer-style song-prose; instead it goes in for elaborate restraint. The piece wants you to know it’s been crafted to Hemingway standards, that its fine-grained insights will be shown and not told. This was the New Journalism’s second tendency, well represented by Joan Didion and her “Waiting for Morrison,” an article about the Doors killing time because Jim Morrison had gone missing. Didion turned a muffed chance at a celeb profile into something new, a look at the behind-the-scenes life of show business dependents. So she did manage a nice piece of art; it’s possible to do that with a magazine article. But it’s the exception. The rule would be more “Nick Nolte Hangs Tough,” where the celebrity does show up and he’s a second-rank movie star.
It’s a very gentle piece, really. Nolte turns out to be a shambling, quizzical, laconically shrewd man of understated power and wry humor, a man who shoulders his way through life, bossed by no one, bearing ill will to no one. Hollywood flunkies scurry about him, but he is free. He and his buds hang out—a leggy girl and a pal from the old days—and every second Nolte is in charge, because that falls to the lot of a cool, big-bear guy like him. Publicists love profiles like this; they’re the equivalent of the sort of album cover where a stylist chooses faded blue jeans for a singer-songwriter. But “Hangs Tough” is written in the approved shorthand that signals a high-tension display of lean, unsparing observation: the stub paragraphs, the blips of stray dialogue, the narration of small, time-filling movements. (“Nolte walked behind the desk, stood there a moment and looked at its surface.”) And the tone comes off. If you accept that you’re going to read something nice about a second-level movie star, this is a really sweet job.
But that was a good month. Look what happened the year before, in the August 1978 issue. Saturday Night Fever had come out. From “Playbill,” the magazine’s contributors page, we get: “Speaking of heat, the hottest pop group of the Seventies, the Bee Gees, let writer Mitchell Glazer hang around with them on older brother Barry Gibb’s palatial Miami estate for a week … Says Mitch, ‘Barry Gibbs is frightening. After a few days in the studio, I knew I was watching an artist at the absolute peak of his talents.’” Maybe that’s double-edged praise, or maybe there was no reason for Glazer to say anything else. Gibbs was the month’s profile and he had sold a lot of articles. Why shouldn’t he be larger than life?
Barry Gibbs in the studio: “Barry is the master here. He cocks his head, sifting imperceptibly different versions of the same line, doubling and tripling some to create a seamless living lead vocal.” The studio’s neighborhood: “Liberty City, they call it. A tough, sad and totally soulful few blocks that rock with a unique blend of,” etc. And the Bee Gees’ co-producer: “Albhy Galuten looks like he’s been stuck in an elevator for a couple of years. He’s got the half-mad, blind smile, the dilated pupils of someone who’s been trapped a very long time… His eyes and the shadows that circle them are one.” Rolling Stone had become rather droll and detached by this time, when soon enough it would be covering Adam Ant. But Playboy was still breathing hard. It wanted to make readers think reality had been torn loose and manhandled into their faces.
“Barry Gibbs leans heavily on the throttle, swallowing yards of bottle-green Biscay Bay,” Glaser writes. So the New Journalism came down to this… Barry Gibbs on his boat. If you see a pop star with a toy, how excited can you get? If you wrote for Playboy, you had to get very excited. The magazine was for men who wanted toys—the stereo components again, not to mention the girls. The articles and stories were also toys, pretend versions of the real thing. The people turning them out made good money and worked hard to earn it. But it was all masturbation.
