Read Hef's Little Black Book Online
Authors: Hugh M. Hefner
Hef's Little Black Book (9 page)
T
he Tao of Backgammon and
Its Cunning Secrets
Of all the games we play, the one I most enjoy and that I’m best at is backgammon. It’s a natural game for me and I was fortunate enough to learn from world-class players. It’s all a combination of skill and luck. But more than anything, it is a running and blocking game.
And understanding the blocking portion of it is the most sophisticated form of strategy. Many players get their pieces out of play by moving them around and into their own home prematurely. The key is blocking. Of course, the other half of the game is the cube. The cube is the betting device, which makes the game particularly exciting. Knowing when to accept—or give—a double is really as important as the game itself.
There would be no meaningful conversation during backgammon—just fine, acrid, sparkling bluster. With this pursuit, his mind was buried deep into the argyle board, into the game, like with Pacman but without the
bloop
sounds. He loved the utter gentlemanly brutality of it: brain matter aswirl, hands flying, neurons snapping, and yet the constant movement, of fingers and of ego, the unending back-and-forth brag, of studious guesswork. Barbi, who had the sweetest noggin to date, who was damned good at it, who had tourneys named for her, claimed they discovered the game maybe in Africa, on the big tour of the world? “Actually,” she said, “Hef was responsible for bringing backgammon to this country.” He, of course, had been puzzling about it, knew about it, was waiting for it, learned it enough, then had decided in fact that Los Angeles needed a backgammon discotheque as the seventies dawned, and he opened a club minus Bunnies (not that the waitresses weren’t spectacular) called Pip’s, where he hunched over his game board. He and this game would never part, as he even now pulls down a board and marches it poolside to make trouble every warm summer Sunday. Near the nude sunbathers, but of course.
H
ere then was a young fellow (twenty-seven years old!) with an idea, a dream, an impossible dream, inculcated in him, defining him, eating him alive, with nothing else to do but just to go do it, to go make it happen. Also, and this is important, he had no money with which to do it. (He bleared his eyes at jobs that mattered not at all—promotional copywriting!
please!
—that drove him mad, while he dreamed dreams of elsewhere.) So he borrowed against his furniture, for God’s sakes! That gave him six hundred bucks, to begin with. He culled a few grand more from friends, from acquaintances, from his own folks (nice and most puzzled folks who could not bear to think of what their boy was about to do), by way of goodwill, of sheer force of will, because his eyes burned with this dream. People had to believe, had no other choice if they paid attention, and those that did became rich. (He was always one to share his bounty.) “If a guy didn’t dream impossible dreams, life would hardly be worth living,” he depicted himself declaring in his private cartoon-paneled autobiography, illustrating the moment of
Playboy’
s birth (the personal cartooning did not end after high school, you see). Then he had his cartoon self add, “Especially because—sometimes—even the most impossible ones come true!”
And at that moment, he had no idea of what was truly to come.
F
ollow the Brightest Light You See in the Dark
When I was a boy growing up on the far West Side of Chicago, the beacon from the tallest skyscraper on Lake Shore Drive used to sweep across the sky at night. There was something mysterious and mystical about that beacon. It represented a world of sophistication and adventure that I could only dream about. That beacon was like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in
The Great Gatsby.
The connections between F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and my own young dreams were powerful ones. I wanted to live in that world and chronicle it as Fitzgerald had done the roaring twenties.
And of course that’s exactly what I did. Later I even acquired the skyscraper with the beacon. It became the Playboy Building. And that beacon? It became the Bunny Beacon.
His would be a true-blue American story—a great one as well, Horatio Alger style (with sex, but still…)—because he quested, because he risked, because his gut told him secrets and he listened to his gut, as all humans should but all too rarely do. He was a straight arrow, born of kindly and repressed parentage, Glenn and Grace Hefner, good Methodists, simple folk and proud of it, thank you, who asked for little, who made a boy who asked for a little more. (Lights in the sky!)
T
he Calling
I came to a moment in time in which I realized that I did not simply want to become my parents. I did not want to simply become what someone else expected me to be. I wanted to march to a different drummer. Each of us in our own way has to find some reasonable accommodation to what other people expect of us. But first and foremost, if you don’t pursue your own dreams and become the person you want to be, it’s over in much too short a time.
And so, married too soon, bogged down, boggled with his lot, he rolled up his sleeves, sat down at a card table, stared at his L. C. Smith typewriter, and started spinning a yarn, a concoction of bluster and hope that would become pure fortune. He had wanted to call his magazine
Stag Party,
with a logo that featured an antlered buck swilling a cocktail, which would have been most unfortunate. More fortunately a magazine called
Stag
sent him a cease-and-desist order (no antlers allowed), and then he reconsidered and found his rabbit, the ever thumping, ever procreating playboy of the animal kingdom. What would come of it, besides the bestselling men’s magazine in the history of the world, in no particular order: nightclubs and hotels and casinos and resorts and women dressed as bunnies and women dressed not at all and
various publications and a book imprint and merchandise bearing rabbit heads and television programs and movie productions and cable channels and video marketing and a record label and video games and a humming Website and Mansions, but certainly, and most important of all, good life, always good life, no matter what.
And so he also said: “Society may urge you to live your life for somebody else. But enlightened self-interest is for the good of everybody. If you don’t care about yourself, you’re going to find it difficult to care for other people. H. L. Mencken was the one who said: ‘A puritan is somebody who is very upset because someone, somewhere, is having a good time.’”
T
he Wisdom of the White Lie
I had two different letterheads—one for
Stag Party
and the other for my imaginary distributing company called Nationwide News Company. When I wrote a letter on the magazine’s stationery, I was the editor, publisher, or promotion, advertising, or circulation director as circumstances dictated. When I was writing to newsdealers, I was the general manager or president of Nationwide News Company. I was the entire staff of both. That’s all there was—just me, my typewriter, and that card table.
“I wanted a job that I could love,” he said. So he created one for himself, one that nobody else could ever have. He had no dough, no real experience at what he would need to do. He just let his head rumble, when he wasn’t knocking it against walls: “Sometimes I would find myself in a crowded elevator or a building lobby, and I would be overwhelmed and demoralized by the notion that I was the only one who was still unplugged and disconnected.” He would not be the first or the last one to feel such demoralization. And yet he had nothing to lose by sticking his long neck out. So he did.
I
f You Don’t Reach for the Sky, You’ll Never Leave the Ground Floor
You have to calculate the odds before taking risks. But if you don’t take chances on the things you really want, then you’ll never know. Rational risk is part of what life is all about. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?
As a boy, he let a girl turn him inside out. As a man, he turned himself inside out. Girls, this time, would come later. “When you talk about self-reinvention,” he said, “the extent to which I have done it and chronicled it—done it at a conscious level—is probably the most unique and remarkable thing about my life.” He decided he was not the guy living the life he was living—married, working for people he did not want to work for, bottled up, lost as lost gets—and incited a personal rebellion. He reinvented himself, and soon enough he got the girl and the girl and the girl and the girl, et cetera.
Did we say that he got the girl?
Et cetera.
T
he Importance of Self-Reinvention
I’m a dreamer, a crusader who wanted to change the world. There are so many things in life that force you into a box and force you to conform to values handed down by others. When you are very young, both society and family define you. There should be a time when you begin to define yourself for yourself.
Hef’s Five Lucky Breaks
When a fellow knows that he is up to something, he might well write himself an annual letter explaining exactly what had happened during said year, for the sake of history. Here is the awestruck letter Hugh M. Hefner wrote to himself upon finishing the year in which he made a new magazine for himself, a magazine called
Playboy.
January 1954
What do you say when a dream comes true? What words do you use? How can a guy possibly express a thing like this?
I own a magazine—a magazine of my very own. Or more precisely, I am president of, and hold a majority of the stock in, a corporation that owns a magazine. Of course, we’ve very little money in the bank and the road ahead will be a rough one, but nevertheless, the dream has become a reality—and whether we succeed or fail in the months and years ahead, I’m getting my chance to try.
Only a series of very lucky breaks has made this fantastic thing possible. If I believed in Fate, I’d think there was some sort of predestination in it. Certainly much of my life, and especially the last three or four years, has been a preparation for this. For there is nothing on earth I would rather be doing than editing and publishing this magazine called
Playboy…
Lucky break #1.
We needed a gimmick. Something special for the first issue to talk about in my promotion letter to
newsdealers and attract attention to the magazine from the very start. We got a gimmick—the biggest one of the decade. The nude calendar of Marilyn Monroe had received unprecedented publicity all over the country, yet no magazine had published it calendar-size or in color.
Life
had reproduced one of the two poses in an inch-high two-color picture, and that was that. The calendar company that owned the better of the two shots (the one
Life
hadn’t reproduced) was located in a Chicago suburb. I walked in there cold and came out with permission to reproduce the picture in full color for $500—and they threw in the color separations on the deal, which are worth around $400 by themselves. We’ll never know how many thousands of dollars that picture was worth to us. It immediately classed us as big-time with the newsdealers and probably with our readers too.
Lucky break #2.
With orders for 70,000 copies in our pocket, Rochelle Printing agreed to print the magazine for a half down at the time of shipment and 90 days credit on the second half. On our monthly schedule, this was eventually worth more than ten grand in credit to us. Sax at Rochelle was willing to go along because he’d just purchased a new press and needed work for it. More special timing.
Lucky break #3.
Empire News took over our distribution and gave us more financial security. We got an especially good deal from them because we already had the 70,000 orders.
Lucky break #4.
This one concerns Central Photo Engraving and it’s a first-rate example of how we kept ?
falling in, and coming out smelling like roses. I didn’t have any contacts in the engraving field, so Johnny Mastro of
Esquire
suggested three good houses and El went and talked to them. The first two offered good unit rates and credit. The third Johnny suggested was Central Typesetting, a big outfit that specializes in both type and engravings. When I looked up the address in the Yellow Book, I got “Central Photo Engraving” by mistake and had El go there. The place we picked by mistake gave us six months of engravings as an investment and tossed in $600 in cash.
Lucky break #5.
This one is the topper. I think the name of a magazine is extremely important, because it can greatly aid or limit a publication’s growth. I further feel that
Playboy
is the perfect title for our magazine and what we hope it will become—but we had to have the title
forced
on us. We were almost to press with the first issue and we were using the title “Stag Party.” With the aid of hindsight, I can say with certainty that it would have been an extremely limiting name—particularly considering how well the magazine has been accepted as more than a girlie book. It took a threatening letter just before print time from the lawyers of
Stag
magazine to make us abandon “Stag Party”—thoug we’d all had reservations about that title for some weeks. Over a weekend we selected
Playboy
and the terrific rabbit symbol. I often think—what if
Stag
hadn’t threatened us until after we’d published an issue or two under the “Stag Party” logo. Like I said, we’ve been lucky.
a
llow Yourself to Feel Successful, and You Will Be
