But the end of World War II quickly terminated the conquering roles that had been assumed by several thousand Americans from small towns and city tenements—young men who, no longer able to personally identify with historical headlines, slowly retreated into the relatively petty problems of peacetime and their own private battles. They stored away their uniforms as souvenirs of the sweet seductions and salutations attained overseas, and the respect accorded them on Main Street, and they returned to the classroom as overage students, or reclaimed jobs that during the war had perhaps been done only too well by women.
For these men it was a time of readjusting to a demobilizing nation applying pressure on them to settle down, obtain a home loan, raise a family. Many men adapted to this quickly and eagerly, and fortified by the do-it-yourself gadgets and status symbols of the postwar economy, they sallied into suburbia and exurbia and familiarized themselves for the first time with lawns and commuter trains and the numbing delights of a dry martini. But men like Hefner wanted something more, something different, an alternate route through civilian life away from commuter tracks and the wandering road that would be charted by Kerouac. Hefner wanted not to move ahead with the masses but back into himself, and begin life again in a style that was peculiarly his own.
He saw his life so far as a mistake. He had played by the rules and lost. Shaped by a conservative home, he had conformed in school, had become a joiner. After the Army, he had efficiently completed college in two and a half years, had married his campus sweetheart, had sired a child. Unable to succeed as a cartoonist, he had accepted a series of conventional jobs with a carton company, an advertising agency, a department store, and three magazine publishing companies. And now in 1953, at the age of twenty-seven, he had a failing marriage and a 1941 Chevrolet.
While his contemporaries seemed headed for premature grayness in quiet corporations, Hefner reread stories of the jazz age by his favorite writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and pondered the richness of life and glittering things and various women with whom he could share again and again the nectar of new love. He wanted wealth, power, and prominence without the restrictions that usually accompanied the attainment of these goals. He contemplated limitless adventure in business and romance, and during his nocturnal walks through the city, while looking up at Chicago’s tall luxurious apartment buildings along the lake, and seeing again his women in the windows, he felt himself soaring with the optimistic emotions of youth that he used to feel as a summertime usher at the Rockne Theater while engrossed in a movie and all things seemed possible.
But not even the most high-spirited moments during these walks could have suggested to him the possibility that within a little more than a decade, one of Chicago’s most magnificent skyscrapers would be his—that a Playboy bunny symbol would be perched atop a thirty-seven-story building towering over the golden cross of the nearby Holy Name Cathedral. Such thoughts were beyond his imagination because, when he designed the first layout of
Playboy
magazine during the summer of 1953, he had no idea that so many men of his generation shared his dreams and desires. He initially saw
Playboy
as having an audience of perhaps 30,000 readers, and he had estimated this after being greatly encouraged by his acquisition of the rights to publish the famous nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
This picture was one of several pinups—and three nudes—that she had posed for in 1949 when she was an impoverished actress in Hollywood. After Hefner had read in
Advertising Age
that the pictures were owned by a calendar manufacturer in suburban Chicago, he quickly drove to the plant and, without an appointment, got in to see the proprietor and to purchase for $500 the photograph he considered the most sexual It showed her stretched out on a red velvet backdrop looking immodestly up at
the camera with her mouth open, her eyes partly closed, and with nothing on, as she later recalled, “but the radio.”
While the $500 price seems in retrospect a great bargain, Hefner’s offer at the time was the only one the calendar manufacturer had received, possibly because Hefner alone was then willing to assume the risk of publishing in a magazine a full-page color photograph of a movie actress whose eroticism clearly went beyond the sedate standards of the nude models in the art-photography magazines. As it was, the purchase of the Monroe picture left Hefner with only $100 from his $600 bank loan; but it did give him a sensational focal point around which to create his magazine, and this, together with his infectious enthusiasm, quickly produced additional revenue from other investors.
One of the first investors, who bought $2,000 worth of stock in Hefner’s new corporation, was a former Air Force pilot and close friend named Eldon Sellers, who had previously collaborated with Hefner in the making of the sex movie. At the time of the film, Sellers had been separated from his wife, and was working as a credit investigator for Dun and Bradstreet; but after the stock purchase he became Hefner’s business manager, and it was Sellers who suggested that the magazine be called
Playboy
, remembering that many years ago his mother had driven a stylish automobile by that name. Hefner, who had already announced that his magazine would be called
Stag Party
—and might have held to it had he not received a threatening letter from a lawyer representing the pinup magazine
Stag
—immediately accepted Sellers’ suggestion, believing that the name
Playboy
evoked the buoyant spirit of the twenties and the Fitzgeraldian era with which he strongly identified.
Another early investor, contributing $500, was Hefner’s younger brother, Keith, who perused girlie magazines as avidly as Hugh. Their mother, though quietly appalled by the career her eldest son had chosen, nevertheless gave him $1,000, and his father would one day serve as the magazine’s accountant.
Prior to the actual publication of
Playboy
, Hefner had col
lected close to $10,000 from the stock sale, and a few writers, illustrators, and an engraver accepted stock in lieu of payment for their contributions to the magazine. After reading Hefner’s prospectus and his description of the Monroe photograph, dozens of secondary magazine wholesalers around the country, many of whom he had known while working with Von Rosen, decided to place large orders for the first issue. By the summer of 1953, these orders had exceeded the 30,000 goal that Hefner had hoped for. By the fall, the figure was close to 70,000. While all the magazines could be returned if they failed to sell on the newsstand, the impressive number of advance orders was an indication of future success, and this enabled Hefner to gain generous credit from the printing company that would produce
Playboy
at a plant about eighty miles northwest of Chicago.
The first issue, which had a picture of Marilyn Monroe wearing clothes on the cover, was forty-eight pages in length and, predictably, was edited for the urban indoor male who, like Hefner, saw bliss in bachelorhood and was skeptical of marriage. The lead article, in fact, was entitled “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953,” and it sympathized with divorced men who were forced to pay unjust amounts in alimony. There was also a reprint of a Boccaccio story on adultery; risqué illustrations inspired by the Kinsey report on women; and a photo feature showing young couples undressing in a living room while playing a game called “Strip Quiz,” which, according to Hefner’s caption, was a perfect pastime for people who were “bored and blasé.” Hefner himself had tried this game with Mildred and other couples at their apartment, but the stripping had not gone far enough to excite him. Recently he had thought of mate-swapping with Mildred and another couple, and while he had not yet proposed it to her, he knew that his willingness to share her with another man marked the end of his possessiveness of her, his jealousy and deep caring.
In addition to the color nude of Marilyn Monroe, which illuminated the centerfold, the issue contained a cartoon by Hefner; a page of party jokes; a black-and-white picture layout showing nude women sunbathing in California; an article about football,
and another article on the musical Dorsey brothers, whose great fame had first been achieved during Hefner’s days in high school. The most professional writing in the issue was that of authors long dead—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ambrose Bierce, whose stories Hefner did not have to buy because both were in the public domain, having been copyrighted before 1900.
It was not merely the tight budget that forced him to reprint the old work of well-known writers; he would have welcomed stories by more modern writers, but their agents and publishers rejected him. When seeking permission from
The New Yorker
to reprint James Thurber’s “The Greatest Man in the World,” he was rebuffed because his was not a magazine of “established reputation.” Scribner’s refused his request for Hemingway’s short story “Up in Michigan” because
Playboy
had not yet “demonstrated its character.” When he approached Random House for the reprint rights to John O’Hara’s “Days,” the publisher demanded $1,000, well beyond what Hefner could pay—although, when he later prospered, he would offer more money to writers for their work than any magazine in America, with the possible exception of
The New Yorker
.
Prior to his first issue, however, Hefner shared with the established publishers much of their uncertainty about his magazine, particularly what the legal response and public reaction to it would be; and this no doubt influenced his decision to omit his own name from the masthead of the publisher’s page, and he also deleted the date from the cover. If the magazine did not sell during the first month, he hoped it would linger on the newsstands for a second month, until most of the copies were bought.
Playboy
was ready to be printed in October 1953, and Hefner, Eldon Sellers, and Art Paul—who accepted stock in place of a salary to design the magazine—drove to the plant in Rochelle, Illinois, to make the last-minute corrections and to watch the first of the 70,000 copies roll off the presses. Hefner was in a frenzied state caused by elation and fatigue—and he was depressed: The magazine was now completely out of his control. The man in charge of distributing it around the nation, a onetime Von Rosen
employee named Jerry Rosenfield—who had also advanced money to Hefner—expressed optimism that it would sell, but he no more than Hefner knew exactly what to expect. If only 10,000 or 15,000 copies sold, and more than two-thirds were returned, it would put Hefner into immediate bankruptcy and terminate
Playboy
after one issue. Hefner would have to find a job. It would take him years to repay personal loans, and the bank would claim his furniture. Hefner returned that night trying not to think about it.
He had to assume there would be a second issue, and, in his apartment during the rest of the week, he worked on the new layout. He already had a color nude of a reasonably attractive, though obscure, model who would be the next centerfold. He also had obtained several black-and-white art nudes from Andre de Dienes. He had a wide selection of fictional stories in the public domain, a few nonfiction pieces that were competently done, and, of course, an endless supply of his own cartoons.
Mildred was very encouraging and tolerant at this time; she never complained, though the living room floor of their apartment was littered with nude pictures, and her husband’s co-workers went in and out of the kitchen each day discussing sex and women while she tried to care for the baby.
Within the month, the first issue had arrived on the Chicago newsstands, and Hefner left the apartment to drive around the city surveying the business activity at the sidewalk stalls. Parking his car, he walked from one stand to another, watching the browsers from a discreet distance. Approaching a stand, he would pick up a copy of
Playboy
, examine it as if for the first time; if the vendor was not looking, he would move his magazines to a better position, closer to the front, or next to the copies of
The New Yorker
or
Esquire
, and further from
Modern Man
. He wished that he could personally promote his magazine to the people passing, could make a sidewalk speech heralding its arrival. Occasionally he observed a man picking up a copy and thumbing through it. If the copy was bought, Hefner felt a surge of silent excitement.
After a week on the stands, it seemed to Hefner that the stacks of
Playboys
were getting lower on most of the newsstands he visited. After two weeks, he received an enthusiastic call from Jerry Rosenfield saying that the issue was selling fast around the nation and that Hefner should definitely proceed with the second issue. Hefner then learned that both
Time
and
Newsweek
had favorably commented on the first issue, and
The Saturday Review
reported that the new magazine “makes old issues of
Esquire
, in its most uninhibited days, look like trade bulletins from the W.C.T.U.” By the end of the month, with more than 50,000 copies already sold, Hefner’s old automobile collapsed; but feeling suddenly rich, he purchased a sleek new Studebaker, and when he delivered the second issue to the printer in Rochelle he inserted the date on the cover—January 1954—and printed his name on the masthead. He was
Playboy
’s editor and publisher, a fact that he now wanted everybody to know.
The meteoric rise of his magazine carried Hefner away from his marriage and into the alluring escape and challenging demands of monthly deadlines. Mildred saw him infrequently after the fourth issue was published, when he moved his staff of seven into the building across from the cathedral. He was clearly obsessed with the magazine, worked through the day and night, and slept at odd hours in the bedroom behind his office. When Mildred informed him that she was again pregnant, he seemed barely interested, although he did arrange for the rental of a large new apartment in a building near the lake. But he did not move in with her.