Hef

Hugh Hefner has died, leaving behind a very mixed and difficult heritage, well covered here and so I'm not going to get too deeply into it, except that he set the standard for James Bond: Polite, educated, suave and considerate, but then exploitive and superficial. 

And a terrific market for cartoonists.

Not Bond; Hefner. 

The best description of Playboy is a wisecrack so old I can't source it, but it was that Playboy and National Geographic offered their readers the same things: Well-written, fascinating articles, excellent production values and colorful pictures of beautiful places they were never going to get to visit in person.

Word among writers was that, if you had a reputation and a prominent name, you could  get a nice, four-figure paycheck from Playboy for something mediocre that wouldn't have sold elsewhere, because your name on the cover was what Hef paid for: Those articles guys claimed they read.

But, while cartoonists could be naughtier in Playboy than elsewhere, they still had to deliver quality work, and some very good artists did nice stuff there for good money.

 

Start with the fact that not all his cartoons were about sex, and that many of us first encountered Gahan Wilson in the pages of Playboy. 

Joseph Heller may have fobbed off a deleted chapter from "Catch-22" on the magazine, but Wilson did some fine work in their pages, more a case of pushing the limits of weird than pushing those of sex. Before there was National Lampoon, there was Playboy.

 

And, while sex was largely the point of the publication and largely the topic of its cartoons, there was a New Yorkerish vibe to them, at a time when such themes wouldn't have made the cut at that august journal.

I could easily see this Handelsman piece running in today's New Yorker, but it wasn't going to sell there back in the day.

Nor would this.

And note that the answer to "What sort of man reads Playboy?" doesn't include old farts.

As often as the cartoons reflected naive girls being taken advantage of, they also merrily poured scorn on the sort of entitled jerk that Fred MacMurray notably played in "The Apartment," and were very much on Jack Lemmon's side in that setting.

 

Not that naive young Jack Lemmon types got off the hook entirely. (I'm sure this was originally in color, but as long as his face, his toothpaste and the bridal veil are preserved, I will still give it very solid scores.)

 

In any case, here's a little dose of what's-good-for-the-gander, though it once again relies on the over-sexed woman. But the joke is at the expense of an oversexed but inept old fart and so fair is fair.

Remember, whether you give Hefner any credit for the shift from Victorian attitudes or not, women are allowed to enjoy sex.

 

This is one of a series John Dempsey did on the topic of sex education, and it rather reflects the Playboy assumption that young people were pretty much on board and that their parents's generation was not.

 

And if you don't like where Playboy came down on the topic, remember how Hollywood also flailed during the sexual revolution of the 60s -- Mike Nichols made Mrs. Robinson a villain when she was really a sad, trampled-upon, pathetic alcoholic, and "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" felt pretty damn stupid to those of us who weren't 40 years old and watching the whole thing from pricey homes in the Hollywood Hills.

I still recall with a blend of humor and disgust a Hollywood screenwriter who, as part of a fellowship I had to a writers conference, was supposed to be giving me a critique of my work, but spent the time instead pumping 20-year-old, long-haired me for language and references he could use to hide the fact that he was quickly closing in on what Suzy Creamcheese said of someone else,

"And he used to drive by in his gold Cadillac and peer in the window. 'Cause he could never get over the amount of groupie status that you had and he didn't have, possibly because he's fifty years old and wretched."

Hollywood still hasn't given up on the story of the disillusioned middle-aged man whose life is turned around by a freewheeling young girl half his age, and we can sit in a bar late some night arguing whether there is a difference between Bill Holden getting his rocks off in "Breezy" and Bill Murray going through a significant regeneration of values in "Lost in Translation."

The more contemporary of which is still way too old a movie to be on the radar of today's 20-somethings.

Much of this is generational, and, back in the heyday of Playboy and the sexual revolution, there was also a barrage of retrospective movies about young men in our parents' generation coming to grips with sex, including "Summer of 42" and "Goodbye, Columbus," and our response was "Wait -- over a freaking diaphragm? What?"

But one of those sorting-out-sex movies that left me scratching my head was "Carnal Knowledge," and, if I didn't get the point of Jules Fieffers' screenplay back then, I will always carry with me this brilliant cartoon he did for Playboy that sums it all up, Playboy and Hef and the sexual revolution and life itsownself:

 

Comments

[Kip W]

Even though going back through all the Playboy cartoon collections I have carries a certain amount of built-in disappointment with it, I still have to say Hef was one of the best things to happen to cartoons. I feel like he raised the bar for everyone. I sent them a batch, back in the 70s. No doubt they still wonder why I never sent them another.

If he'd done nothing but encourage Jules Feiffer, it would all have been a plus, and he got some fine work out of Jack Cole (I'll stop before I start listing names).

Perhaps if there's a Heaven, everybody returns to their perfect form. Up there, Hef's lounging in horn-rimmed cheaters and puffing on a briar pipe, listening to Brubeck and Coltrane. I raise my glass to him.

[Ignatz]

Not only Jack Cole, but Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder. He actually hired Kurtzman away from MAD to do a MAD-like magazine called "Trump," but that didn't work out, so he did "Little Annie Fanny" instead.

[Cynthia]

Is he also objectifying and exploiting women "up" there?