Algren at Sea (37 page)

“No.”

You made a good move in not asking Ann Landers, A.B.

A third-person view of the Woo Grotto is made by a trapdoor in its roof, some busybody reported in
Time.
I glanced up uneasily to see if Victor Lownes III were looking down in the third person. Another window, offering an underwater view of swimmers, has been built for Victor or anyone else who enjoys watching other people swim underwater, in a bar which can be reached either by a rockified spiral stair or a fireman's pole. I didn't think I was ever going to be in that much of a hurry.

My host's earliest ambition, I learned, was to be a cartoonist, and that, of a sixty-nine volume scrapbook detailing his life, the first several volumes are of cartoons. “I remember the early embarrassment of putting my arm around a girl . . . this became one of the most difficult periods of my life. So I withdrew into fantasies by writing and drawing,” Hefner explains.

The cartoons are not about Hugh Hefner, but about a youth named Goo Heffer, attending a school called Stink-much High. There are no girls in these cartoons.

Causing me to wonder whether the girls who were twisting now, the girls wearing bunny tails and the girls who were modeling, all the girls who were becoming professional girls, were girls any more at all. Hefner had moved into his present arrangement, he says, “to live the life we were writing about,” just as the waitresses in the key Playboy Club are images projected from the foldout nude offered monthly by
Playboy.
The
Playboy
complex had not begun, as Hefner himself appears to believe, with the loan he had made to start a magazine, but with the projection of his teen-age fantasies into teen-age cartoons. Hugh Hefner, Playboy of the Midwestern World, non-conformist
bon vivant,
was nothing more than a public-relations image. My host, I now knew, though he himself did not know it, was Goo Heffer. I put down
Time
and picked up the
Wall Street Journal
to see how Goo's impostor had managed to make his fantasy come true.

“Mr. Hefner's image of success is not without some tarnish. Recently he decided to fold
Show Business Illustrated,
a magazine he started last August. The magazine's backlog of manuscripts and advertising will be turned over
to its chief rival for $250,000, hardly enough to lighten the loss of 1.5 million incurred in its brief life.

“If SBI has been a flop that Mr. Hefner would like to forget, there is no disputing the success nor the important role Mr. Hefner has played in attaining it for
Playboy
. . . its advertising income in the 1961 calendar year was up 74% from 1960 and its circulation was up 15%.

“‘Playboy
is the bible of the upbeat generation,' Mr. Hefner explains, ‘it promotes good material things—status, growth, individualism, the idea that you can't get ahead unless you get off your backside and get moving.'

“Readership surveys made by
Playboy
show that most of its readers are males between 18 and 35 years of age.

“Most other magazine publishers say that
Playboy's
penchant for nudes is what sells the magazine, a suggestion which is deeply resented by Mr. Hefner. Each issue of
Playboy
has a fold-out picture of a Playmate of the Month, who for her near-nude modeling is paid $3,000, the same amount received by the writer of
Playboy's
lead story.

“Few magazines are so closely identified with their creators as
Playboy.
Mr. Hefner vigorously promotes himself as a suave playboy constantly in the company of comely females.

“The ‘carefree playboy' image can be deceiving. It is studiously promoted as part of the magazine's success formula, and hides a serious, business-like approach to profit-making. . . . Despite the image built up by his magazine, Mr. Hefner's associates say his greatest interest is work, not girls.

“Nearly every week-end Mr. Hefner throws open his house for midnight-to-dawn parties attended by ‘my bunnies,' entertainers, advertising executives and others. Despite this apparent gregariousness, Mr. Hefner has few intimate friends. He considers himself a non-conformist with a cause. He says he was born into a strict, somewhat puritanical family—‘an earth fertile and ripe for the blossoming of a rebel. . . .'

“32,000 keys (at $100.00 per key) have been purchased for a seven-storey Playboy Club to open on New York's East Side in late summer or fall. Clubs are also due to open this year in St. Louis and Baltimore and in at least six other cities in 1963, including one to be built in conjunction with a 200-room Playboy luxury hotel on Los Angeles's Sunset Boulevard. ‘If the hotel bit is successful we may try it in other cities, particularly in Chicago.'

“Mr. Frank Gibney, formerly editorial director of
Show Business Illustrated
and now publisher of
Show,
explains the failure of the former: ‘I wanted to intellectualise SBI. Hefner wanted to use his
Playboy
techniques and make everything breathless. The two concepts just didn't go together.'

“Hefner insists he sold SBI ‘Not because it wasn't doing well, but because it wasn't doing well enough, by my standards.'

“On his office wall hangs a framed share of
Esquire, Inc.
common stock. Beneath it is a sign bearing these instructions: ‘In case of emergency, Break Glass.'”

I put aside the attitude assumed by the
Wall Street Journal
toward Hefner as being envious toward my host simply because he had become a multimillionaire without going to New York. I returned to the
Post
story, confident that it would be fairer.

“My father and mother gave us intellectual freedom . . . but they imposed rigid Protestant fundamentalist ethics on us. There was no drinking, no smoking, no swearing, no going to movies on Sunday. Worst of all was their attitude toward sex, which they considered a horrid thing never to be mentioned. . . . What we're selling is good, healthy, upbeat revolt against the things that have been ruining America. The nudity is the revolt against the Puritanism that overtook us in those grim days after the 1920s and stifled creative expression.”

Well, I be dawg, I told myself, putting the
Post
down carefully and saying it again to myself, this time aloud, just to be sure I was still in my own skin, “I just be purely
dawg.
”

I was in the predicament of the bettor who has seen his animal finish plainly a head ahead of the bettor who has seen
his
animal finish a half-length in front. For my own recollection of the days that had followed the 1920s had been the days of the 1930s. And that in those days Hemingway had returned to write his greatest book, while Steinbeck and Richard Wright and Tennessee Williams and James Agee were making their discovery of America too. It had been a decade of bold discoverers in all the arts; a time when beauties appeared of whom men still speak with wonder: Garbo and Hedy Lamarr and Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner.
Anna Christie, Ecstasy, The Glass Menagerie, The Maltese Falcon, The Petrified Forest, The Grapes of Wrath,
and
The Ox-Bow Incident
all broke with Puritan thinking, I knew. It had been a first-person time because the inhibitions that make people act in the third had been broken
by the plain economic need of acting in the first-person. Hunger is never resolved in the third person. We could not
afford
inhibitions.

When you're drinking another man's booze and yet you feel his success is a hollow fraud, your obvious move, as a gentleman, is to say good night.

Lucky for me, I'm no gentleman. Even when asked to leave, if the booze is free I stay on in the event that some one may start frying eggs. After that I
may
say good night, but only when force is resorted to and not always then. What I wanted to get straight, before leaving here, was which generation, the Beat or the Upbeat, was the most revolutionary. I wanted to stick around long enough to see whether Allen Howlberg or Gregory Corset would drop in. Their poetry, like Hefner's cartoons, had always spoken as the voice of a group. Of “We” but never of “I.” I felt they would be at home among people who preferred dances in which nobody touched another.

One eye on the entrance to the grotto in event next month's Playmate of the Month should swim in, and the other squirrel-eyeing Vic Lownes's door in the ceiling, I had a hard time reading Mr. Davidson's piece in the
Post.

“The emphasis on hi-fi, sports cars, good food and drink,” Hefner kept explaining to Mr. Davidson, who seemed to be getting bored, “good entertainment, good literature and good music”—“is to stimulate our young men to educate themselves so they can make enough money to enjoy these benefits. In this way we can help overcome the educational gap between ourselves and the Russians. Our mission is to make this the Upbeat Generation instead of the Beat Generation and thus perform a service for America.”

Meaning, I took it, that “we'll eat so well and dress so well and drive so many sports models that the Russians will break at last. ‘We can't stand the pace,' they'd have to admit. ‘Please take us over.'”

And overnight the conquering symbol of the Upbeat Generation, a pair of bunny ears, would be flying over the Kremlin!

For it wasn't, as Marx had thought, hunger that led to revolution. It was affluent rebels buying Hollywood beds and nylon carpeting, rotating sunlamps and Playboy party kits who were overthrowing the old regime. I glanced apprehensively about me: these people were
dangerous.

Which was the
real
Hefner, the
Post
inquired; the playboy or the businessman? And promptly plumped for the businessman who was selling “mail-order sophistication” to middle-aged American sophomores who think they can buy good taste “for a six-dollar magazine subscription.”

The
Post's
Mr. Davidson had just scored a near miss. He was right in pointing out that Hefner is a businessman and no closer to being a playboy than Pepsi Cola is to being a Martini, but the product Hefner is selling is more than mail-order sophistication. Hefner himself provides the lead:

“My whole early life was a telescoping of the Puritanical, unproductive years that the entire country went through. Maybe I have become a symbol of revolt because of that, because I was never really free until the day my magazine was born. Before then I had lived through one series of restrictions after another. We had three unhappy years,” he adds of his marriage, “and the walls around me grew higher.”

In recalling his early embarrassment at putting an arm around a girl, the interviewer had given his subject the benefit of the doubt that he no longer suffers such embarrassment. But the bosomy girls blooming in the pages of
Playboy
or serving the key holders of the Playboy Club are not blooming in order to gain a lover's caress; but, rather, to serve as an object of temptation that the righteous man (read “business” for “righteous”) will resist.

The weakness in our society that the
Post
accredits Hefner with discovering is not a weakness so much as it is a falsification, and one of which H. L. Mencken made much. It is the puritan falsification that damns the act of love as evil because it leads to birth, and birth brings original sin.

No matter that the maddened fathers of Salem dressed their women in black instead of bunny suits: the feeling toward women was the same, and they sang it:
and as life that comes from women is evil, so women are evil. The force behind Hefner's image of a woman is one of contempt born of deepest fear. What he is selling is Cotton Mather Puritanism in a bunny outfit.

These were young men and women who saw that the promise of
America lay in what the country could do for them. It kept them doing the Twist to all hours.

Hefner's salary, as editor and publisher of
Playboy,
is $100,000 a year. He also receives $300 a week from International Playboy Clubs, Inc.

“These are material things,” he explains, “but awfully fundamental and what made this country prosper. It was losing sight of them in the thirties and forties that placed this country in jeopardy.”

Upstairs I could hear them getting the country out of jeopardy.

O'Daddyland was a secret country that rose on West Congress Street a decade ago, flourished secretly, then ceased to be when His Imperial Majesty, Our Lord High Sovereign Dingdong Daddy, ceased to be. Just as the first jackhammers of the new expressway began breaking stone a mile away.

Nobody came to the bare wood door of O'Daddyland but Daddy's old cellmate: some shambling piece of psychotic refuse who had his own knock late in each brown afternoon. And left after dark with several brown boxes, bound with brown twine and marked
First Class,
for depositing in out-of-town postal stations.

For there flowed behind O'Daddyland's door a ceaseless Niagara, a true rushing cataract, a winding Blue Nile of girls, girls, girls.

Don't-Care girls and Won't-Care girls and Can't-Care girls. Girls from the country looking flattered, girls from the brothels looking wronged. And some, it seemed, who were strangely praying.

All in attitudes of carnal passion. Blue films, stag films, stills, postcards, and comic strips that would have caused the mind of the creator of Daisy Mae Hawkins to snap instantly—all left like brown ships topheavy with obscenity for ports where love-making is never thought of as anything but a game.

So all day long the half-crazed king went slipper-slopping through the dark old flat, coughing, hawking, sneezing, sleezing, one shoulder higher than the other from sleeping forty years on federal iron, now and then spitting against the wall.