Speaker 1: Why uzzy media productions. The minority of women's liberationists was
Speaker 1: on the streets across the country. In the end, I
Speaker 1: kind of came to understand that in many ways, women
Speaker 1: are all bunnies. I enjoy women, I enjoy being women
Speaker 1: with women very much, constantly surrounded by gorgeous girls and
Speaker 1: beautiful belongings. Hefner's world may seem enviable to some. I'm
Speaker 1: a very lucky fellow. With whatever problems or conflicts I've
Speaker 1: had in my life, I've managed to pursue and fulfill
Speaker 1: most all of my dreams. I personally would not want
Speaker 1: to go down in history as who happening On the
Speaker 1: night of March, two major social movements in America collided
Speaker 1: on live television. It wasn't on the news, It was
Speaker 1: on a late night talk show. But it's nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Almost everyone on stage whereas bell bottomed trousers and some
Speaker 1: shade of brown or orange, the set is adorned with
Speaker 1: red upholstered chairs and walls. Dick Cavitt, the sandy haired
Speaker 1: host with bushy sideburns, announces his final two guests of
Speaker 1: the evening. There are a lot of women in this
Speaker 1: country who feel like they're being pushed around, and they
Speaker 1: become very vocal. They call themselves the Women's Liberation movement,
Speaker 1: and we have two representatives in that movement here tonight. There,
Speaker 1: Cavot invites Susan Brown Miller and Sally Kimpton out on stage.
Speaker 1: The two prominent feminists sit down just a few feet
Speaker 1: from the show's previous guest, another man with sideburns, one
Speaker 1: who is smoking his trademark pipe and grinning like a
Speaker 1: cheshire cat. That man is Hugh Hefner or hef as Cavit,
Speaker 1: and most of America calls him. The founder of Playboy magazine.
Speaker 1: Is the walking, talking embodiment of the sexual revolution, or
Speaker 1: at least the red blooded male side of it. Cabot
Speaker 1: sets things off when he asked brown Miller a pointed question,
Speaker 1: what do you think men are doing wrong? They oppress
Speaker 1: us as women, they won't let us be and Hugh
Speaker 1: Hefner is my enemy? Who really set you up today?
Speaker 1: I'm more in sympathy than perhaps you know. The girls
Speaker 1: realized with I'm sorry, Then the ladies realize I am used.
Speaker 1: Girls referring to women of roll agents should suddenly the
Speaker 1: man responsible for dressing young women up as playboy bunnies
Speaker 1: and his clubs is getting dressed down on national television
Speaker 1: by a woman. It's the kind of confrontation that happens
Speaker 1: all the time on talk shows today. But Cabot's audience
Speaker 1: doesn't know what to make of it, and Brown Miller
Speaker 1: is just getting warmed up. Don't know what to do.
Speaker 1: You make them look like animals. Yes, women aren't buddies,
Speaker 1: they're not rabbits, they're human beings. It's Hefner now, who
Speaker 1: resembles an animal one frozen in the headlights, went oncoming
Speaker 1: train and then the knockout blow the day that you
Speaker 1: are willing to come out here with a cotton tail
Speaker 1: attached to your rear end. Heffner is visibly flustered by
Speaker 1: the assault and sits back in his chair. He pulls
Speaker 1: out a match and lights his pipe. The audience revels
Speaker 1: in the drama and his discomfort, And there were some
Speaker 1: feminists in the audience who sort of rushed the stage
Speaker 1: during the broadcast, and Dick Cavitt had to sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, restore order. This is Heffner biographer Stephen Watts.
Speaker 1: People were brought in to calm everybody down. Then it
Speaker 1: was quite the big deal. Cabot would later apologize for
Speaker 1: the charged encounter to Heffner. This turned into a roast
Speaker 1: Haffner evening, I have a sorry today on the Thread
Speaker 1: Hugh Heffner, Playboy icon enemy. This is the Thread a
Speaker 1: podcast from Aussie media where we explore the interconnecting lives
Speaker 1: and events of history. I'm Sean braswell. This season we
Speaker 1: pull the thread on the feminist leader Gloria Steinham. One
Speaker 1: of the turning points in Steinham's career, as we heard
Speaker 1: an episode one, was her assignment as a young reporter
Speaker 1: to go undercover as a Playboy Bunny. The experience opened
Speaker 1: her eyes to the realization that all women could be
Speaker 1: considered playboy bunnies. The man behind the Playboy Club and
Speaker 1: its bunnies was another legendary magazine founder and a very
Speaker 1: different sort of American icon, Hugh Heffner. In this episode,
Speaker 1: we trace Steinham's story back to the exclusive universe that
Speaker 1: Hefner created, to its early days, and to the Hollywood
Speaker 1: legend who inadvertently helped Heffner launch Playboy in the first place.
Speaker 1: Hugh Heffner's death last year marked the end of an era.
Speaker 1: Hugh Heffner, the publisher of Playboy, has died at the
Speaker 1: age of ninety one, and Hugh there was a Playboy
Speaker 1: till the very end, borrowing lavish parties well into his eighties.
Speaker 1: Heffner's extravagant lifestyle and outspoken views on sex were controversial
Speaker 1: while he is alive, and no less so after his death.
Speaker 1: Hefner considered himself to be a rebel an activist and
Speaker 1: to progress it. What Heffner was was a man on
Speaker 1: a mission to alter society's conservative views on sex, politics
Speaker 1: and social equality. Many had a far different conception of
Speaker 1: Heffner by the end of his life. One New York
Speaker 1: Times calumnist wrote after his death that the Playboy founder
Speaker 1: was a lecherous, low brow Peter Payne ice cream for breakfast,
Speaker 1: pajamas all day while bodyguards shoot male celebrities away from
Speaker 1: his paid harem. Or, as Gloria Steinham puts it, if
Speaker 1: I had made him up and put him in a novel,
Speaker 1: I would be hung from the highest tree because he
Speaker 1: was such a parody of himself. He was pathetic. Hugh
Speaker 1: Heffner changed the world, but the world also changed on
Speaker 1: Hugh Hefner. Heffner saw himself at the vanguard of the
Speaker 1: sexual revolution occurring in the mid twentieth century, not only
Speaker 1: as a participant but also a catalyst Stephen Watts. Again,
Speaker 1: Heffner was convinced, I think, probably with some justification, that
Speaker 1: he had played a very large role in the sexual
Speaker 1: revolution and in sort of loosening the sexual mores and
Speaker 1: values of American society. And he grew more bitter as
Speaker 1: the years went by when others did not recognize his handiwork.
Speaker 1: This is Russell Miller, a journalist and author of Bunny,
Speaker 1: The Real Story of Playboy. He did have a strong
Speaker 1: sense of resentment that he wasn't being sufficiently lauded for
Speaker 1: what he'd done. That he eventually said that it was
Speaker 1: Playboy that liberated America, but which part of America. Playboy
Speaker 1: was no different from any other pop culture fixture of
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties and sixties. It reinforced the primacy of
Speaker 1: men in American society. Hefner was selling something that advertisers
Speaker 1: were willing to support. Gloria Steinham again, he would never
Speaker 1: publish of an article or a story, even a fictional story,
Speaker 1: in which women want quote unquote, Heffner said, we think
Speaker 1: it's a man's world, or should be. And yet he
Speaker 1: was surprised when his relationship with America's growing women's movement
Speaker 1: became contentious. And I think he was genuinely stunned in
Speaker 1: the late sixties and early seventies when modern feminists begin
Speaker 1: to paint him as being an oppressor, an oppressor of
Speaker 1: women uh. And Heffner frankly didn't quite know what to
Speaker 1: make of this. He had always sort of viewed himself
Speaker 1: as liberating uh women as well as men for sexual experience. Heffner,
Speaker 1: to his dismay, found himself the whipping boy of the
Speaker 1: women's movement, and not just on the Dick Cabot Show. Well,
Speaker 1: I think he served Hefner as a kind of foil
Speaker 1: for the feminist revolution in that I think because of
Speaker 1: the magazine and the images and his personal prominence, ah,
Speaker 1: he became some one who was a very convenient and
Speaker 1: easy target as a kind of boogeyman. Hefner fought back.
Speaker 1: Not long after the encounter on the Dick Cabott Show.
Speaker 1: Hefner responded by taking the war to the pages of Playboy.
Speaker 1: He assigned an article to a male reporter to write
Speaker 1: about the women's movement, and uh when it came in
Speaker 1: and it was at all accurate, he wrote a memo,
Speaker 1: which then one of the women there leaked out. Hefner
Speaker 1: spelled out in the memo the kind of story he
Speaker 1: was looking for. These chicks are our natural enemy. What
Speaker 1: I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant
Speaker 1: feminists apart. Gloria Steinhum, who first exposed the Playboy clubs
Speaker 1: as an undercover reporter, when after Heffner again she released
Speaker 1: the leak memo to the media. She hoped it would
Speaker 1: prompt a backlash and show Heffner's true colors. The memo
Speaker 1: fell on deaf ears even laughter. Hefner and his feminist
Speaker 1: critics were not in fact total enemies. They had more
Speaker 1: in common than either cared to admit. They're on the
Speaker 1: same side when it came to big issues like free speech,
Speaker 1: civil rights, and reproductive freedom. Playboy was the first major
Speaker 1: U S magazine to advocate for the right to legal
Speaker 1: abortions on demand. It published letters from women describing the
Speaker 1: emotional and physical trauma they had experienced from seeking illegal abortions,
Speaker 1: but Hefner remained opposed to the women he called militant
Speaker 1: feminists for a long time. So feminism I think was
Speaker 1: something that was a sore point with Hefner. I think
Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties and nineties, says he got older. Um,
Speaker 1: I think he reconciled himself to this a lot more,
Speaker 1: and I think by the end of his life he
Speaker 1: considered himself to be a feminist. Most today would not
Speaker 1: think of Hefner as a feminist. His record is a
Speaker 1: bit complicated, says his biographer Stephen Watts. Honest, I think
Speaker 1: you Hefner's impact on on women in modern America. It's
Speaker 1: something of a mixed record. On the one hand, Hefner
Speaker 1: supported feminism in terms of equality before the law says what.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, he made no effort to conceal
Speaker 1: how he made women into sex objects. But actually I
Speaker 1: talked to Hefner about this, because he said, of course
Speaker 1: women are sexual objects for men in the same way
Speaker 1: that men are sexual objects for women. He said, The
Speaker 1: problem is is if you only objectify women, if you
Speaker 1: only see them as sex objects, and that's the rub.
Speaker 1: And I think that's the rub for Playboy too. How
Speaker 1: did Heffner wind up the enemy of so many women?
Speaker 1: Up next, we go back to the early days of Playboy,
Speaker 1: when Hefner transformed his controversial magazine into a global empire
Speaker 1: and transformed himself in the process. Playboy Magazine was an
Speaker 1: instant success when it launched in nineteen fifty three. The
Speaker 1: very fierce issue of the magazine was was very popular
Speaker 1: and it sold out pretty quickly. From what I gather,
Speaker 1: it was one of the most successful launches of a
Speaker 1: magazine in modern American history. The nineteen fifties were a
Speaker 1: time of abundance in America and the currents of the
Speaker 1: sexual revolution were just beginning to stir. I think Hefner
Speaker 1: and in his notion of Playboy, really fell into the
Speaker 1: culture at precisely the time when the culture was sort
Speaker 1: of ready to receive it. So right guy, right idea
Speaker 1: of right time. The majority of the magazine's readers were
Speaker 1: men between the ages of twenty and thirty four. In
Speaker 1: the primary attraction, the nude centerfold known as the playmate
Speaker 1: of the month. This is Russell Miller again the playmates
Speaker 1: in in um Playboy was always the wholesome girl next door,
Speaker 1: the kind of girl that you could take out and
Speaker 1: not worry about. You wouldn't mind introducing to your Mom.
Speaker 1: The humorous Mortzol once equipped that an entire generation of
Speaker 1: American men grew up thinking that women came with a
Speaker 1: staple in their midsection. Others were not as amused. Television
Speaker 1: host Mike Wallace interviewed Heffner in nineteen fifty six and
Speaker 1: suggested that he was selling quote, high class dirty book.
Speaker 1: Hefner responded, there's nothing dirty in sex unless we make
Speaker 1: it dirty. Within a few years of Playboy's launch, Hugh
Speaker 1: Hefner was a different man. Well. Playbook magazine changed Hefner's
Speaker 1: life dramatically when it became very, very successful, and he
Speaker 1: just sort of blasted off into the cultural stratosphere. Hefner
Speaker 1: threw himself into his work. He really did begin to
Speaker 1: live at the office. He had a separate bedroom suite
Speaker 1: sort of built off his office, and he stayed there.
Speaker 1: He rarely went home. Hefner used his office bedroom or
Speaker 1: other activities as well. He began to spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time around rather fetching young women. Uh He began
Speaker 1: to have liaisons and affairs with a number of them,
Speaker 1: and his marriage slowly began to crumble, and so Hugh
Speaker 1: Hefner decided to reinvent himself. He made a very conscious
Speaker 1: decision that he would become Mr. Playboy. He would become
Speaker 1: the guy that was being idealized in Playboy magazine. Heffner
Speaker 1: started to smoke a pipe, he dressed better. He surrounded
Speaker 1: himself with beautiful women, and he made no effort to
Speaker 1: hide it. I enjoy women. I enjoy being women with
Speaker 1: women very much. Most of the girls that I date
Speaker 1: are several years younger than I am eighteen to probably
Speaker 1: a good many of them, of course, are girls that,
Speaker 1: in one way or another, work for the magazine. Soon
Speaker 1: there was no real divide between Offner's work and play
Speaker 1: Hefner was more than a brand ambassador for Playboy, he
Speaker 1: was the brand itself. Constantly surrounded by gorgeous girls and
Speaker 1: beautiful belongings. Hefner's world may seem enviable to some. At
Speaker 1: forty four, he's unquestionably King Rabbit, and certainly he takes
Speaker 1: every opportunity to enjoy his dough. He moved into a
Speaker 1: new home. He called it the Playboy Mansion. It became
Speaker 1: the most famous party house on the planet, first in
Speaker 1: Chicago and later in Beverly Hills. What happened if Playboy
Speaker 1: mansion in a kind of typical day, was that it
Speaker 1: was the site for Hefner's uh sort of equally intense
Speaker 1: bouts of work and play. The one million dollar home
Speaker 1: became an exclusive playground, one where fantasies became reality among
Speaker 1: celebrities and scantily clad women, or so it seemed to
Speaker 1: many who did not journey inside the mansion's walls. It
Speaker 1: was I crowded. There were lots of men, there quite
Speaker 1: a lot of girls. Russell Miller again, he wentness firsthand
Speaker 1: the typical evenings at the Playboy Mansion. They weren't sort
Speaker 1: of big celebrities. They were be team actors and second
Speaker 1: class footballers and hairdressers. And they'll just be hanging around
Speaker 1: all a bit bored, drinking wine and beer and stuffing
Speaker 1: his sandwiches until about eleven o'clock when a secretary suddenly
Speaker 1: emerged from his room on the top floor and came down,
Speaker 1: running down the stairs a quick, quick, He's gonna come down,
Speaker 1: make like there's a party. Stephen Watts says it was
Speaker 1: like something out of the pages of The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 1: After was sort of like Jay Gatsby in that he
Speaker 1: always had one foot in and one foot out. Partly
Speaker 1: of participant, partly an observer. Hefner was also a creature
Speaker 1: of habit. He was a very wretched, vented man. He
Speaker 1: was addicted to routine. The movie nights, for example, were
Speaker 1: set on the set schedule of nights, the same kinds
Speaker 1: of movies on the same days of the week, with
Speaker 1: the same groups of people. He ate the same meals
Speaker 1: the same day of the week, and the same recipes
Speaker 1: and everything. Heffner's routine was often at odds with the
Speaker 1: Playboy image. The reality of life in the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: mansion was very, very different from that that the magazine
Speaker 1: constantly portrayed. And I have to tell you that Hefner
Speaker 1: played Monopoly three times a week with the same four friends.
Speaker 1: That's right, Monopoly games, Fried Chicken, old movies, and old men.
Speaker 1: It was like Hooters had opened a retirement home. But
Speaker 1: for Heffner, it was perfect. He didn't like to leave
Speaker 1: the mansion. He was sort of charming and and and
Speaker 1: and funny and pleasant, you know, and a very amiable
Speaker 1: in individual. Except and I thought I had a strong
Speaker 1: feeling he was just cut off from from reality. And
Speaker 1: I said to him once they said, why didn't you
Speaker 1: ever go out, and he seemed quite shocked. Why should
Speaker 1: What on earth would I want to go out? What's
Speaker 1: the point? I got everything I need from here. And
Speaker 1: part of what Heffner needed and got was a steady
Speaker 1: supply of young women. Hundreds lived at the Playboy mansion
Speaker 1: over the years, constantly replenishing here and large the women
Speaker 1: recognized that they were um second class citizens. A lot
Speaker 1: of the girls um quickly became disillusioned, and they recognized
Speaker 1: that they were just there as decoration, as for sexual playthings,
Speaker 1: and would would would leave and not come back. Hugh
Speaker 1: Lefner managed to create a mystique around his own Playboy image,
Speaker 1: whatever the reality of mansion life may have been, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't long until Heffner and Playboy had another idea.
Speaker 1: Take the fantasies from the pages of the magazine to
Speaker 1: Playboy clubs with male members only, and what they're created
Speaker 1: was a place for readers of the magazine to come
Speaker 1: to these places and experience in real life the Playboy
Speaker 1: lifestyle with good food and good liquor and sophisticated jazz music,
Speaker 1: all the kinds of things they were talking about in
Speaker 1: the magazine, and of course very attractive young women. A
Speaker 1: job as a playboy bunny was also very attractive to
Speaker 1: many young women. Most bunnies were college students or aspiring
Speaker 1: actresses or models. They were drawn to the flexible schedule
Speaker 1: and a chance to earn more than their fathers. The
Speaker 1: Playboy clubs would become a worldwide phenomenon during the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: It seemed that playboy could do no wrong. You know.
Speaker 1: Hefly began to talk about the whole Playboy world where um,
Speaker 1: you would stay your your entertainment would be provided by
Speaker 1: Playboy club, your reading would be provided by Playboy magazines.
Speaker 1: You would stay in play By hotel, used Playboy money.
Speaker 1: I mean just he got carried away with them with
Speaker 1: the notion that that playboy could take over the world.
Speaker 1: Up next, we find out what really launched Playboy. Heffner's
Speaker 1: fantasy powered rocket ship might have crashed and burned on
Speaker 1: the launch pad without the star power of the playmate,
Speaker 1: who Hefner admired above all others. Hugh Heffner grew up
Speaker 1: in Chicago during the Great Depression. Here's biographer Steven once again.
Speaker 1: His parents, Glenn Hefner ran Grace Heffner, were transplanted Nebraskans
Speaker 1: from a very traditional background, and Heffner grew up. He
Speaker 1: had a very happy childhood, but one that he felt
Speaker 1: was a bit restrictive on the religious and moral front.
Speaker 1: They were sort of middle class folk, m very good fearing,
Speaker 1: very respectable Russell Miller. Again, they didn't drink, they didn't
Speaker 1: smoke um. They there was no high living. Hefner himself
Speaker 1: admitted at the age of eighteen that he was still
Speaker 1: a virgin. Heffner was a gangly teenager five ft ten
Speaker 1: one fifteen pounds. He was shy and awkward around girls.
Speaker 1: He was something of a loner, and he spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time in his bedroom. He was a cartoonist,
Speaker 1: a fledgling cartoonist even as a young boy, and he
Speaker 1: had a very vivit imagination. I guess I would say
Speaker 1: Heffner loved movies and pop culture, and he immersed himself
Speaker 1: in fantasy worlds of his own creation. In the eighth grade,
Speaker 1: he discovered Esquire magazine and he hung its modest pin
Speaker 1: up girls on his bedroom walls. The movies and the
Speaker 1: magazines inspired the young Heffner to reinvent himself for the
Speaker 1: first time. By high school, he had transformed himself into
Speaker 1: the life of the party, and then in high school
Speaker 1: he was enormously popular. He always looked back on his
Speaker 1: life uh in high school as being a kind of
Speaker 1: golden ero. Hefner entered the army in World War Two
Speaker 1: after high school. Then he went to the University of
Speaker 1: Illinois on the g I Bill, where he studied journalism
Speaker 1: and writing. After college, he moved to the suburbs and
Speaker 1: married his college sweetheart, Millie. But like many college grads,
Speaker 1: Hefner struggled to bridge the gap between his aspirations and
Speaker 1: his employment options. He gave up on his dream of
Speaker 1: being a cartoonist and took a series of copyrighting jobs
Speaker 1: or advertising agencies. Hefner soon grew unhappy at work, unhappy
Speaker 1: with Millie, now pregnant, and daunted by the prospect of
Speaker 1: becoming a parent. He longed for a better life and
Speaker 1: a more sophisticated and more glamorous life. He used to
Speaker 1: walk along sort of fancy streets in Chicago and look
Speaker 1: up at the windows of apartments of people who had
Speaker 1: high fives and fancy cars and thought they look in
Speaker 1: the windows and think about that's what I want to be.
Speaker 1: One day that's what I want to have one day.
Speaker 1: Hafner's discontent came to a head after he attended a
Speaker 1: high school reunion in nineteen fifty two and was reminded
Speaker 1: of that golden era again. And he came home actually
Speaker 1: from this gathering sort of deeply depressed. And he told
Speaker 1: the story later in life that he was in downtown
Speaker 1: Chicago and he was standing on one of the bridges,
Speaker 1: kind of looking out over the water, just wondering about
Speaker 1: his life. And as he was standing on the bridge
Speaker 1: looking out of the water, thinking about his high school days,
Speaker 1: he decided he had to do something to change his life.
Speaker 1: And what he did was to go home, and over
Speaker 1: the next several days he began to put into action
Speaker 1: a plan that had been kind of percolating in the
Speaker 1: back of his mind, and that was to create a
Speaker 1: magazine for young men like himself. And that magazine, of course,
Speaker 1: turned out to be Playboy. Hafner bristled at the restrict
Speaker 1: demorality of his Midwestern upbringing, not to mention the growing
Speaker 1: conformity of nineteen fifties suburbia, and he was convinced that
Speaker 1: there were a lot of young guys out there just
Speaker 1: like him. This post war period was one where the
Speaker 1: economy was booming and young men like him, we're getting
Speaker 1: decent jobs with, you know, pretty decent salaries, and I
Speaker 1: think having been in the war, they were looking for
Speaker 1: broader experience, deeper, more authentic kind of experience, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them were feeling pressure to be family men
Speaker 1: and to have a lot of kids, and to move
Speaker 1: to the suburbs and that kind of thing. Heffner wanted
Speaker 1: to create a magazine that would serve as a pathway
Speaker 1: to a richer kind of experience for these men, an
Speaker 1: entertainment magazine for the upwardly mobile urban mail, something breezy
Speaker 1: and sophisticated that included original writing and tips on fashion
Speaker 1: and style, and of course, the all important centerfold. Hefner
Speaker 1: worked hard to gather up around eight thousand dollars to
Speaker 1: launch Playboy. He called on all his friends and indeed
Speaker 1: his family to put in a small amount of money,
Speaker 1: and he raised enough money to make the first edition feasible.
Speaker 1: That first issue, which Heffner had assembled on his kitchen table,
Speaker 1: hit newsstands in December nineteen well. Haffner was extremely nervous
Speaker 1: about the first issue of Playboy because he borrowed money
Speaker 1: from his family. He actually sold some of his furniture
Speaker 1: and his card to raise money. He just gambled everything
Speaker 1: on it. It was an all or nothing venture for Heffner,
Speaker 1: and everything hinged on that first issue. He wasn't sure
Speaker 1: if people would buy it. He was so unsure that
Speaker 1: he didn't put actually a date on the first issue,
Speaker 1: nor his name. Actually, when the magazine first came out
Speaker 1: from the distributor, he went down into Chicago and sort
Speaker 1: of a walk from newsstand to newsstand and hid behind
Speaker 1: a tree or behind a card to watch to see
Speaker 1: if guys who came by the news stand were buying
Speaker 1: his magazine, and they did in the thousands. Playboy quickly
Speaker 1: sold out, thanks in large part to one unforgettable centerfold.
Speaker 1: Hugh Hefner was never shy about his admiration for the
Speaker 1: screen legend Marilyn Monroe. Do you think you would have
Speaker 1: dated her? I would have loved to. This is eighty
Speaker 1: six year old Hugh Heffner talking about Monroe in a
Speaker 1: two thousand and thirteen interview. You know, I'm a sucker
Speaker 1: for blond, and she's the ultimate blond. Monroe also had
Speaker 1: an oversized impact on Hefner's life. She was the launching
Speaker 1: key to the beginning of Playboy. Heffner knew that he
Speaker 1: needed to make the first issue of Playboy extraordinary, and
Speaker 1: that meant he needed the perfect centerfold, the ideal woman
Speaker 1: to anchor his new magazine. He combed through nude photographs
Speaker 1: and models and pin up girls from across the nation,
Speaker 1: and then he found what he was looking for. That year,
Speaker 1: Marril Monroe was Hollywood's biggest news star. The twenty seven
Speaker 1: year old blonde bombshell had wowed audiences in films like
Speaker 1: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire The
Speaker 1: year before, America was shocked to learn that Monroe post
Speaker 1: nude as a young struggling model, but many Americans still
Speaker 1: had not seen the actual evidence, and so it happened
Speaker 1: that Hugh Hefner, in desperate need of the perfect centerfold
Speaker 1: for his new men's magazine, learned that a local Chicago
Speaker 1: calendar company owned the rights to Monroe's nude images. Hefner
Speaker 1: persuaded the owner to sell him one of the nude photos,
Speaker 1: which featured Monroe against a red velvet backdrop, and so
Speaker 1: he was able to buy the by that the rights
Speaker 1: to that picture for five hundred dollars um, which was
Speaker 1: a huge amount of money at that time and pretty
Speaker 1: much cleaned him out. But Hefner was convinced that he
Speaker 1: had in his possession the most valuable photograph in the world.
Speaker 1: When play Boy hit newsstands, a clothed Marilyn Monroe appeared
Speaker 1: on its front cover. Inside was the red velvet image Monroe.
Speaker 1: Heffner wrote in that first issue is natural Sex Personified.
Speaker 1: She became the magazine's first centerfold, the first Playboy playmate.
Speaker 1: He launches the first issue of Playboy with Marilyn Monroe
Speaker 1: as the first playmate, and it's really the start of
Speaker 1: everything that happens thereafter. The first edition was extraordinarily successful.
Speaker 1: The centerfold picture of Maridon Monroe was a sensation. Monroe
Speaker 1: put Playboy and Heffner on the map, and he launched
Speaker 1: his empire on these nude photos of Maryland, having never
Speaker 1: gotten her permission, having never met her um, and he
Speaker 1: didn't offer her dime. This has Monroe biographer Sarah church Well,
Speaker 1: we will hear more from her and about Monroe's response
Speaker 1: to the nude photographs in the next episode. And Hugh
Speaker 1: Hefner literally became a millionaire thanks to these photographs, and
Speaker 1: with them, Hugh Hefner began his remarkable run as the
Speaker 1: nation's leading playboy, converting his own dream into a collective
Speaker 1: fantasy for millions of American men. Ten years later, a
Speaker 1: young reporter named Lauria Steinham went undercover in one of
Speaker 1: Heffner's Playboy clubs and entered into the crosshairs of that fantasy.
Speaker 1: What she learned there would change her life, and, via
Speaker 1: her efforts, the lives of countless women. And what about
Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe, the woman whose image helped launch Playboy in
Speaker 1: the first place. Monroe's path to fame and fortune was hard,
Speaker 1: even tragic, and very different from Hugh Hefner's. Hefner and
Speaker 1: Monroe were contemporaries, both born in nineteen six, but they
Speaker 1: never met. Today, they lie next to each other for
Speaker 1: eternity and a mausoleum in Los Angeles. This was Heffner's wish,
Speaker 1: not Monroe's. Even in death, Monroe was not safe from
Speaker 1: the men who exploited her, from the men she liked
Speaker 1: to call the wolves. Writing and the Thread is produced
Speaker 1: by Libby Coleman and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered
Speaker 1: our show special thanks to Cindy Carpian, Tracy Moran, and
Speaker 1: James Watkins. This episode features music by Accelerated Readers with
Speaker 1: a song called Bunny Song and the Magnetic Fields with
Speaker 1: a song called Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits. To learn
Speaker 1: more about the thread, visit ausy dot com, slash the
Speaker 1: thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
Speaker 1: the thread on Apple Podcasts. Check us out at aussi
Speaker 1: dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love
Speaker 1: surprising and engaging stories from history, look no further than
Speaker 1: the flashback section of ausy dot com. That's o Z
Speaker 1: e y dot com in the end where always by
Speaker 1: right