Although Capitol’s merchandise was transported as cautiously as was bootleg whiskey in an earlier era, and was perhaps driven by some of the same drivers, not all of the cartons handled in the Capitol warehouse contained sexual publications. Capitol also distributed a few academic and literary magazines, such as
The Partisan Review
, that did not sell well enough in Chicago to interest the primary distributor. Also in the Capitol warehouse were certain political publications that were offensive to Chicago’s municipal and religious leaders, such as the Communist
Daily Worker
. And Capitol handled all the black publications—
Ebony
magazine,
The Negro Digest, Tan
, as well as the newspaper the Chicago
Daily Defender
.
The Capitol News Agency was founded in the mid-1930s by a Chicago horseplayer named Henry Steinborn, who in the beginning circulated mostly tip sheets, but he also included in his truck a few magazines then considered indecorous or obscene—
Sunshine & Health, The Police Gazette, The Hobo News
, film fan
magazines featuring “starlets” in swimsuits, and certain women’s confessional magazines. Although no erotic photographs appeared in the confessional magazines, many priests in Chicago and around the country believed that their sin-centered content and private disclosures aroused lustful thoughts, and parishioners were urged to avoid reading these magazines. (Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity—known among lawyers as the
Hicklin
decision—evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women’s confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional.)
With the popularity of the girlie magazines during World War II, Capitol’s business, along with that of other secondaries around the country, greatly increased. Capitol circulated within Chicago the Robert Harrison publications (
Wink, Flirt, Whisper, Eyefull
) and also those of another New York publisher named Adrian Lopez (
Cutie, Giggles, Sir, Hit
). After the war, when paper rationing was lifted, there were newer magazines like
Night and Day, Gala
, and
Focus
, all of which featured a tall, blond California bathing beauty named Irish McCalla and an attractive somewhat devilish, dominant high-heeled brunet from Florida named Bettie Page. These two women, more than any other photo models, were the masturbatory mistresses for many thousands of men during the postwar years, and they remained popular through the 1950s as Diane Webber emerged, increasingly nude, in
Sunshine & Health
and the Von Rosen magazines.
As Von Rosen’s publications became more daring, revealing everything but pubic hair, Henry Steinborn of Capitol News became concerned about police raids on his warehouse. He moved to a new location, obtaining a larger warehouse but displaying a smaller company sign above the door. Steinborn was making money for the first time in his life, he had ten trucks operating in the city, and more newsstands than ever were now quietly accepting girlie magazines. With the sale of each fifty-cent magazine, the newsstand owner earned a dime, and so did Henry
Steinborn. Thousands of magazines were selling each month in Chicago, and various publishers were hiring lawyers as advisers, hoping the lawyers knew how much of the female body could legally be shown in pictures. Some lawyers expressed opinions, others shrugged and said that a definition of obscenity depended on which judge was defining it; and so Steinborn’s panel trucks pluckily continued their deliveries to various newsstands, and eventually to a small bookshop located first on Dearborn Street, later on Van Buren Street.
In the front window of the store was a selection of current hardcover and paperback books that could be found in an ordinary bookshop, but near the back of the store, and under the counter, were books and magazines that could only have been supplied by a secondary.
In time, many customers became aware of the full variety of the merchandise, and they stopped in often, eventually getting to know the counter clerks well enough to gain flipping privileges with the girlie magazines without having to buy one. But most customers bought at least one magazine, tucking it into their coat or putting it into a bag; and two customers, perhaps the best patrons of the store, purchased copies of nearly every girlie magazine that was available for sale. One of these customers was Hugh Hefner. The other, a younger man, was named Harold Rubin.
A
S HUGH HEFNER
sat at his desk in the Playboy office on this wintry day in 1955 deciding which of Diane Webber’s nude photographs would be the centerfold in the May issue, he could hear a church bell ringing from the Holy Name Cathedral across the street. It was the 6
P.M.
Angelus bell reminding the faithful, as it did thrice daily, of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that, through a miracle of sexual uninvolvement, she would become the mother of the Messiah.
Thus did Catholicism dishonor sex by denying its necessity to those most virtuous; and this doctrine of denial would continue for centuries during which the Church demanded celibacy of its clergy, expected chastity of its unmarried parishioners, sanctified conjugal copulation mainly for the propagation of the faith, and canonized such women as St. Agnes because, rather than submit to male lust, she preferred death as a virgin martyr.
This asceticism was, to say the least, substantially at variance with the life-style being advocated across the street at
Playboy
magazine, and had Hefner initially given more thought to it, he might have located his offices further from the gigantic Gothic cathedral that dominated the block and cast a disapproving shadow down upon the gray four-story Playboy building at 11 East Superior Street.
But since great cathedrals cannot be constructed and main
tained without great sinners to justify them, perhaps Hefner belonged where he was. Like most unrepentant sinners, however, he could expect no benediction from the believers, and he had already aroused the cardinal’s wrath months before by reprinting in
Playboy
a medieval tale from Boccaccio’s
Decameron
that describes the carnal life of a convent gardener constantly seduced by sexually aggressive nuns.
The Church that had condemned this story in the mid-1500s had no higher opinion of it following its reappearance in the
Playboy
issue of September 1954, and after a recriminating call from the chancellery Hefner asked his distributors at Capitol to withdraw the issue from the Chicago newsstands, although these magazines were redistributed in other cities. Hefner did not want to escalate religious opposition so early in his publishing career, being overworked as he was with normal business problems and also having previously experienced negative signs that might have been induced by complaints from church members.
The Chicago postmen, for example, often delayed for several days delivering the mail to the Playboy building, stalling the magazine’s incoming subscription orders, and the Postmaster General in Washington denied
Playboy
the less costly second-class mailing privileges customarily granted to publications, because he considered
Playboy
obscene. The police enforced parking regulations in front of the Playboy office more vigilantly than elsewhere in Chicago, ticketing and towing away cars whenever possible—which one day prompted a Playboy employee named Anson Mount to call a policeman’s attention to an illegally parked car on the opposite side of the street, the limousine used by the Archbishop of Chicago, Samuel Stritch.
The policeman thought at first that Anson Mount was kidding; but when Mount insisted that parking laws in Chicago should be equitably enforced, the policeman asked Mount if he wished to register an official complaint. Mount said that he did, and after the form was prepared Mount signed it and listed his address. A week later, while Mount was at his apartment, his landlord knocked on his door saying that there were two visitors from the
police department. They were plainclothesmen, and after Mount had invited them in and the landlord had left, one of the men asked abruptly, “What do you have against the cardinal?”
Mount replied that he had nothing against the cardinal, but before he could say much more the other plainclothesman, suddenly enraged, lunged at Mount, slapped him across the head, and banged him against the wall. Then the men left, leaving Mount stunned and confused. His first instinct was to bring assault charges against them, but later he thought it would be unwise to do so. The consequences might be worse than he had received already, and a court case against the Chicago police seemed futile, time-consuming, and would undoubtedly produce newspaper publicity of no benefit to the magazine.
In spite of the opposition,
Playboy
was doing extremely well—it was, in fact, the fastest growing magazine in America. So suddenly had it succeeded that newsstands across the nation could barely keep it in stock, and advertisers that had once considered
Playboy
an improper medium for the promotion of their products were now reconsidering their position, never imagining that if they approached Hefner with ads he might have rejected them.
Hefner would not print any advertising that focused on male problems or worries, such as baldness, physical frailty, or obesity. Having made a small fortune at the newsstands by selling a magazine that emphasized pleasure, that linked naked women with dapper young men who drove sports cars and lived in bacchanalian brown-leather bachelor apartments, Hefner did not intend to desecrate this dream with advertisements reminding male readers of their acne, halitosis, athlete’s foot, or hernias. Hefner believed in health through hedonism; he was an optimist and positive thinker. Had he been otherwise, he would never have achieved what he had during the last two years.
He had started
Playboy
in 1953 with a personal investment of only $600. He had obtained this money from a bank loan, using as collateral the furniture in his Hyde Park apartment. He was
then twenty-seven years old, was living with his sexually unresponsive wife and crying baby daughter, was driving a dilapidated 1941 Chevrolet, but he was propelled by golden fantasies.
He had quit his $80-a-week position with Von Rosen’s firm the year before to accept a higher-paying less-interesting job with a children’s magazine that allowed him more free time to plan his own magazine. As one who for years had read and analyzed every magazine from the pulpiest pinups to the most slickly sophisticate, Hefner was convinced that what he had in mind was different from the rest, even from the girlie magazines that Von Rosen was distributing.
The articles in Von Rosen’s
Modern Man
, for example, as well as those in men’s publications like
True
and
Argosy
, were written for the action-oriented male readers interested in hunting and fishing, gun collecting and deep-sea diving, mountain climbing and other outdoor adventures and activities that reinforced the feelings of male camaraderie that so many men had experienced during World War II. These magazines ignored the reading interests of indoor urban types like Hefner who disliked hunting and fishing, and dreamed of one day dwelling in a modern bachelor apartment with a gleaming high-fidelity set and having a new girl and a new car. Hefner associated romantic adventure with upward mobility and economic prosperity, believing that men who were successful in bed were also successful in business; and while this was merely theory on Hefner’s part, he intended to promote it in his magazine as no other publisher was now doing.
Sex in other magazines was usually presented unwholesomely as a vice or scandal. One men’s magazine called
Male
printed each month an article entitled Sin City, in which it ruefully reported the night life in various American cities or towns with their burlesque houses, nightclubs, and brothels—a magazine that never failed to accompany the text with several photographs of exotic dancers or strippers.
The girlie magazines of Robert Harrison portrayed sex as bizarre behavior, and his high-heeled heroines with whips and frowning faces were, in the best Puritan tradition, offering pun
ishment for pleasure. The women’s magazines wrote about sex as a problem, hiring doctors or family counselors to provide solutions or solace. The magazine that most appealed to Hefner,
Esquire
, was now ignoring sex, and the magazines that were saturated with sex—the cheaper pulp magazines and
Enquirer
-style tabloids—presented it as an abomination to be endlessly explored with such headlines as: “How Wild Are Small-town Girls?” or “The Lowdown on the Abortion Business” or “The Multimillion-dollar Smut Racket.”
“Smut” was also a favorite headline word with the desk editors of large metropolitan newspapers, including the New York
Times
, because it fit easily into their space restrictions, it aroused reader interest, and it suggested editorial disapproval. Nothing pleased editors more than news that allowed them to express moral indignation while satisfying their prurient interest. A classic postwar example of this was the relentless coverage given to the affair on the island of Stromboli between director Roberto Rossellini and the married movie star, Ingrid Bergman, which prompted her self-imposed exile from Hollywood for seven years.
As Hefner planned his magazine, the headlines were devoted to more recent sexual revelations, including the sex-change operation of Christine Jorgensen, the café-society prostitution ring of the oleomargarine heir Mickey Jelke, and the 1953 Kinsey report on American women. Kinsey’s statistics stated that about 50 percent of all women, and 60 percent of female college graduates, had experienced intercourse prior to marriage, and about 25 percent of all wives indulged in extramarital sex. More than half of the female population masturbated, 43 percent performed oral sex with men, and 13 percent of the women had at least one sexual experience with another woman that resulted in an orgasm.
While the national press reported Kinsey’s findings at great length, several editorial writers viewed Kinsey as little more than a pornographer, and the conservative Chicago
Tribune
denounced Kinsey as a “real menace to society.” A few newspapers, feeling that the facts would offend their readers, decided to censor the report from their news columns—the Philadelphia
Bulletin
was one such paper—and other newspapers that planned installments on the report were dissuaded from doing so by protesting religious groups. Despite the controversy, Kinsey’s research was respectfully acknowledged within the scientific and academic communities, and it inspired one obstetrician named William Masters to begin his own research on human sexual response.
For Hefner, the report confirmed what he had long suspected—women were becoming increasingly sexual, and the postwar generation of which he was a part was quietly rebelling against the standards that had prevailed when his parents were young. Almost wistfully, Hefner saw his parents as loving relics of the Victorian era, monogamous and predictable, and his mother was perhaps among the last plurality of virgin brides. Hefner’s wife did not possess the virtue, or limitation, of his mother, and Hefner himself was somewhat ambivalent about the female trend toward greater sexual adventure. In a way he welcomed it, had already enjoyed it, and intended to take full advantage of it whenever he could; and yet he was still saddened by Mildred’s affair during their engagement—it had made her less special to him, she had become tainted by the trend, and partly because of this their marriage had not fulfilled for him the romantic promise of their campus courtship, and now a divorce seemed inevitable.
Hefner was not alone in his disillusionment with marriage—Mildred shared his view, as did several young married couples that they had known from college and who were now also becoming divorced or separated. So many couples of Hefner’s generation seemed restless and bored, unhappy in their gray flannel suits and suburban homes, and too young to settle down in the conformist fifties and join a country club and become inspired by the presidential leadership of an old general who patrolled golf courses in a cart.
Many young men who had survived World War II had been spoiled by its glory and become its romantic victims. For them the war had been a great adventure as well as a hardship, an es
cape from a neighborhood to an international event. But they had been disappointed after their return to civilian life by the dullness of their jobs, and they were unexcited by the women that they had perhaps hastily married during a furlough, or had married as a culmination to a long and dutiful caring correspondence that had relieved the barracks loneliness but had created a false sense of familiarity and compatibility.
But for women during the war it would have been almost unpatriotic not to regularly write V-mail expressing encouragement and hope and loving lies, suggesting a sexual fidelity at home that was often as fictional as that of their lovers overseas. The war was sexually liberating for women, particularly those who ventured into the expanded American job market and worked in factories or offices far from the restrictive influence of their parental homes, their relatives, and neighborhood churches. These women were among the first of their sex to earn equitable salaries, and with it they rented their own apartments, and dated different men, and learned much about themselves that would have astounded their domestic mothers, if not Dr. Kinsey. While they wrote letters to men they loved, they made love to men they didn’t, and along with this varied experience and experimenting they developed a tolerance and understanding that would one day contribute to their permissiveness as parents, a permissiveness that would be condemned by moral critics of the sixties.
But in the 1940s the overwhelming popularity of the war effort, and the social upheaval that it imposed and allowed, temporarily exculpated in America the expedient adventures and sexual dalliance of an entire generation. The war manufactured its own morality as it did its bombers and battleships. So righteous seemed the Allied cause that Cardinal Spellman of New York sprinkled holy water on American military planes before their raids on enemy cities, and so destitute were foreign women in these war zones that they eagerly traded their bodies to invading G.I.s for canned goods and cigarettes. So omnipotent was the government in Washington that, in the name of national security, it made propagandists of the press, which portrayed the Hiro
shima bombings as a holy holocaust, and many years would pass before the press would fully rise above its devotional gullibility of government and skeptically analyze the Capital’s cold war intrigues and Asiatic interventions.