Thy Neighbor's Wife, page 6
He found work as an advertising copywriter in a Chicago department store, then in a small advertising agency; he quit the first job and was fired from the second. He next was hired by the promotion department of Esquire, Inc., which published the men’s fashion magazine and also a sophisticated pocket-sized monthly called Coronet; and Hefner quickly conjured up images of himself working in a creative atmosphere surrounded by urbane editors and Varga girls. But after working there he found the setting sedate, the female employees dowdy and prim, and the men living unadventurous lives with none of the verve reflected on the illustrated pages. One afternoon when Hefner removed from his pocket a photograph of actress Carmen Miranda twirling on a dance floor with her skirts high and wearing no panties, and showed it to a Coronet executive, the latter turned away, seeming unamused.
In 1951 the company announced that it was moving the Esquire-Coronet promotion offices to New York City, but Hefner, who had just been refused a five-dollar raise, resigned and remained in Chicago. He liked Chicago, and was feeling better about himself there after he had arranged with an independent printer to publish five thousand copies of a book of drawings and cartoons he had done characterizing the city. While the book was not financially profitable, its press reviews brought Hefner local attention, and he foresaw the day when he might be able to launch a slick magazine devoted to Chicago urban life.
In the interim he found a job at eighty dollars a week, twenty more than his Esquire-Coronet salary, as the promotion manager for a Chicago magazine magnate named George von Rosen, a shrewd and prescient man who, having failed to gain employment on The Christian Science Monitor, and having worked as a circulation manager for several music magazines and one that catered to Protestant ministers, decided after World War II to become his own publisher and hopefully prosper in the increasingly popular market of the girlie magazine.
A fortune had already been made during the war by such New York publishers as Robert Harrison, whose many magazines—with titles like Flirt, Titter, Wink, and Eyeful—had greatly appealed to lonely servicemen at home and overseas. But Harrison, who was personally offended by nudity and would in 1952 devote himself to exposing scandal in his new publication Confidential, limited his sex magazines to black-and-white photographs of young women wearing bathing suits, negligees, and undergarments only slightly more immodest than might be found in the ladies’ lingerie ads of the New York Times Sunday magazine, which was one of the nation’s principal stroke books sub silentio.
Among other magazines offering masturbatory possibilities before George von Rosen entered the market were movie magazines that displayed starlets in bikinis, adventure magazines that occasionally depicted scantily clad beauties in distress, the nudist-family magazine Sunshine & Health, and such large circulation magazines as Life and Look, which, in beguiling ways, sometimes surpassed all other publications in presenting sexually arousing photographs.
Life and Look in the late 1930s justified as photojournalism the controversial pictures they printed of actress Hedy Kiesler swimming in the nude with a nipple exposed, from a scene in a Czechoslovakian movie called Ecstasy. So sensational was the reaction to the film, and to the publicity surrounding it, that Ecstasy was later banned or cut by censors everywhere; and when Hedy Kiesler moved to Hollywood to work on other films, she sought a-new identity by changing her name to Hedy Lamarr.
In 1941 Life published perhaps the most famous pinup picture of the war years, that of Rita Hayworth in a lacy satin slip kneeling on a bed; her stilted but oddly sensual pose—unrivaled in popularity except for a studio publicity photo of the rear view of Betty Grable in a tight-fitting bathing suit—was later reported to have been attached to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Life’s photograph in 1943 of a smiling blond model, Chili Williams, whose polka-dot swimsuit seemed to be tucked inward at the crotch, received 100,000 “feverish” letters, according to the magazine, as well as a screen test for Chili Williams that led to small parts in Hollywood.
While some publishers thought that the pinup craze would subside after the troops had returned home, George von Rosen believed that these filaments of fantasy had permanently infiltrated the erotic consciousness of the returning veteran; and during the postwar years he circulated assorted magazines that emphasized what he considered three essential elements—guns, guts, and girls. The laws at this time regarding girlie photographs were not clearly defined, pending the final outcome of such lengthy litigation as that fomented by church groups and postal authorities against Sunshine & Health magazine, which persisted in selling on newsstands and sending through the mail its monthly editions containing unretouched nude photographs. Total nudity was lewdity, the Post Office claimed, but members of nudist associations which supported Sunshine & Health, and saw themselves as cultists and not pornographers, believed that the First Amendment guaranteed their right to accurately portray the nudist movement, including its pubic hair, in their official magazine.
Similar rights were claimed by unofficial nudist magazines, one of which—Modern Sunbathing & Hygiene—was published by George von Rosen. While he obeyed the postal policies banning pubic hair, he featured breasts and nipples almost exclusively on the young bodies of buxom women, some of whom violated nudist tradition by posing alone indoors, far from the bucolic family gatherings celebrated in Sunshine & Health—thus lending credibility to the rumor that when Von Rosen was unable to find attractive photos of legitimate nudists, he was not averse to using strippers.
Women who could easily have passed for strippers appeared regularly in Von Rosen’s Art Photography magazine, but, as if to assure the censors of their lofty purpose, they stood nude in statuelike repose, muted as the undraped marble maidens of classical sculpture, their expressionless faces and innocuous eyes avoiding direct contact with the potentially lustful lens of the camera.
Such delicacy was neither expected nor desired by Von Rosen in his more flamboyant girlie magazines because, inasmuch as the models wore some semblance of clothing, he felt that they deserved concomitant freedom of expression, such as the option to wink at the camera, to leer, swing their hips, and smile with their mouths open.
The most successful of his girlie magazines was started in 1951, not long before Hugh Hefner had joined his staff. It was called Modern Man, and its first cover girl was actress Jane Russell smiling as she sat on a rail fence, wearing frayed shorts, a tight-fitting jersey, and leather boots. While the pictorial focus of Modern Man was voyeuristic, Von Rosen saw himself not as a salacious man but a businessman now bringing to a market craving photogenic females the same detached efficiency that had characterized his career when he was selling Etude to piano students and The Expositor and Homiletic Review to preachers. His initial editorial problem with Modern Man was not in determining what men wanted to see but rather what men wished to read, if anything. At the same time he had to attempt to appease the censors by providing in his magazine editorial matter of hopefully redeeming social value to counterbalance the breasts and buttocks that so fulsomely filled his pages.
Deciding to refrain from publishing any word or idea bordering on the pornographic or politically controversial, the editorial content of Modern Man became similar to what might have been acceptable in the essentially asexual outdoor men’s magazines such as True and Argosy. In the first issue of Modern Man there was an article on the lure of mountain climbing, an interview with actor Dana Andrews on his boat with advice on how to sail, a feature on such stylish custom-made cars as the 1913 Jaguar, a photo essay on Paris’ Place Pigalle, a shopping guide for collectors of classic guns. The reader response to this last item, and to subsequent articles on gun collecting and hunting, prompted Von Rosen to eventually start other magazines devoted entirely to these subjects. If there was anything innovative in Modern Man, it was perhaps Von Rosen’s decision to print in this one magazine both the photographs of jovial seminude pinups and the solemn totally nude art models, a combination that would later be imitated by Hefner in Playboy.
Wishing to present the most respectable examples of art nude photography, Von Rosen spent thousands of dollars during the first year of Modern Man to buy the work of a distinguished Hungarian named Andre de Dienes, who in the 1930s had specialized in photographing European art and sculpture exhibited in the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre and other great museums. Many of De Dienes’ photographs of classical nude sculpture had appeared in Esquire before the war, but at the time Von Rosen was starting Modern Man the editors of Esquire were deemphasizing the titillation that had tinged their magazine since its inception in 1933. Not only did the Esquire editors think that girlie magazines would soon become anachronistic in postwar America, as so many veterans advanced educationally through the G.I. Bill, but the magazine had also become weary of defending its rakish image in the courtroom. Though it had won the major obscenity case brought against it by Postmaster General Frank Walker, a prominent Catholic and Democratic National Committee chairman, the litigation had been costly and time-consuming for the magazine, lasting from 1942 to 1946.
Even before this, the Esquire management had been intimidated by members of the Church: In an article in one of Esquire’s subsidiary magazines, Ken, there had been unflattering references to the Catholic Church’s support of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and as a result of the article, written by Ernest Hemingway, the Catholic hierarchy encouraged priests in their Sunday sermons to denounce Esquire’s publications, and soon there was extensive boycotting at the newsstands of Esquire, Coronet, and particularly Ken, which hastened the latter’s discontinuance. And so in 1951 the nude photography of Andre de Dienes appeared not in Esquire but in Modern Man, and the most daring publisher in America at this time was undoubtedly George von Rosen, a position he held until Hefner would surpass him after 1953 with Playboy.
Hefner and Von Rosen were in some ways similar. Both had been reared in puritanical homes in the Midwest and were the sons of fathers who were accountants of German-American ancestry; and both were orderly, ambitious, and self-absorbed. Von Rosen, eleven years older than Hefner, was a lean, lively, green-eyed man with the taut tidy features of a naval commander, and he controlled his magazines like a fleet of vessels. He demanded strict punctuality from his subordinates, cleanliness in their cubicles, and formality in their dealings with him. The ambience within the company was almost sterile, and the conservative midwestern men and women that he employed were emotionally detached from the nude photographs and layouts that they handled—as was Von Rosen himself, being in this sense quite different from Hugh Hefner. To Von Rosen, the magazines represented an efficient, profitable operation; to Hefner, magazines were a personal passion.
If this distinction was not so apparent to Von Rosen, it was because he did not really know Hefner well during their time together, and what Von Rosen did know left him unimpressed. He considered Hefner’s cartoons mediocre, refusing to publish even one of them in his magazines, and he was mildly shocked one day when Hefner arrived at the office carrying a package and announcing that it contained an excellent pornographic movie. Hefner’s amiable offer to screen it for the staff was peremptorily refused by Von Rosen, who had no desire to see such a film himself and was irritated that Hefner would suggest showing it on company time. Although Hefner performed adequately in the promotion department, he somehow conveyed the impression that he was engaged in several outside interests and adventures, and that his destiny would never be determined by a single employer. This attitude was not gratifying to George von Rosen. Had Von Rosen known the full extent of Hefner’s preoccupations, he would have been more bewildered than perturbed, and possibly convinced that there was something about Hefner that was sexually bizarre.
At this time Mildred Hefner was pregnant, and they had finally moved out of his parents’ home into a charming apartment in the Hyde Park section of Chicago; but Hefner was still unsatisfactorily married and was having an affair with a nurse with whom he would soon make a sex movie. This film, which would be shot in the apartment of a male friend and collaborator of Hefner’s, was a private venture that he did strictly for the fun and experience of doing it, having no illusions that he would ever become a professional maker of films, even sex films. However, he did believe that his future career would somehow be related to sex, for this was the subject that more and more dominated his thinking. He began to broaden his curiosity and to be almost as intrigued with other people’s sex lives as he was with his own. He continued to read books about sex laws and censorship, about the social mores and rituals of the ancient past, the attempts by kings, popes, and theocrats like Calvin to control the masses by declaring certain private acts of pleasure to be forbidden and punishable. He read the scurrilous classic tales of such writers as Boccaccio and the banned books of Henry Miller that many G.I.s discovered in Europe during World War II and smuggled into the United States. Hefner examined in art books the reproductions of nude paintings by the masters, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, Titian, Ingres and Renoir, Rubens, Manet, Courbet, and many others who often portrayed the body with the genitals uncovered, the breasts grandly revealed, the eyes focused more directly on the observer than Von Rosen would have permitted in his photographic art magazine. It was doubtful that Von Rosen’s magazine had yet presented anything as suggestive as Manet’s painting in 1865 of an almost leering young nude woman, or Courbet’s two voluptuous naked ladies embracing in bed, or Goya’s naked maja reclining on pillows with her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes staring at the spectator, her dark pubic hair exposed.
Of course the difference between this and what appeared in men’s magazines was characterized by one word—art; and yet what was defined as art, and what was condemned as pornography, often changed from one generation to the next, depending on the audience for which a work was intended. The nude art that hung in the great museums was created for the nobility and upper classes that commissioned it, while the photographs that appeared in the magazines were printed for the common man in the street, whose museum was the corner newsstand.
And it was this latter group that the censors wished to protect from indecency, and to control as well, when in 1896 the United States Supreme Court sustained a conviction against a publisher named Lew Rosen, whose periodical Broadway contained photographs of women defined as lewd. This was the first federal conviction under the Comstock Act, named in honor of the most awesome censor in the history of America, Anthony Comstock.
FOUR
ANTHONY COMSTOCK was a vengeful, evangelical man born in 1844 on a farm in New Canaan, Connecticut. The death of his mother when he was ten left him extremely morose, and throughout his life he idolized her and later dedicated his purification campaigns to her memory.
As one who had masturbated so obsessively during his teens that he admitted in his diary that he felt it might drive him to suicide, Comstock was terrifyingly convinced of the dangers inherent in sexual pictures and literature, and was aware that legal authorities were very lax in dealing with the problem. Though a federal law had been passed in 1842 banning the importation of French postcards, Comstock had often seen these small erotic pictures circulated among soldiers while serving with a Connecticut regiment in the Civil War. And he was equally appalled in New York after the war by the prevalence of prostitutes on lower Broadway and the sight of sidewalk vendors selling obscene magazines and books.
There were no federal laws at this time against obscene publications, although in the state of Massachusetts there had been antiobscenity statutes as early as the 1600s. These statutes, however, denned obscenity not in sexual terms but rather as words written or spoken against the established religion—for example, in the Puritan colony of Massachusetts until 1697, the penalties against blasphemy included death, and even later the statute stated that offenders could be tortured by such methods as boring through the tongue with a hot iron. The laws in Puritan-dominated Massachusetts also opposed the distribution and possession of religious literature expressing Quaker opinions, and in 1711 there were additional sanctions against the singing of irreverent songs, with the offenders sometimes locked in a pillory.
It was not until 1815, in Pennsylvania, that a man was cited for sexual obscenity—he displayed for sale a picture of an “indecent” couple; but since this violated no American law, the arrest was supported by an existing English law dating back to 1663, the case of Rex v. Sedley, in which Sedley was fined and jailed for a week after exposing himself naked from the balcony of a tavern, drunkenly shouting obscenities and pouring urine from a bottle on other customers. While this blatant behavior appears to have little relevance to the case of the American caught showing a sexual picture, the Pennsylvania law enforcers regarded both acts as examples of public indecency contrary to common law as well as to the moral strictures of religion.
The first erotic book banned in America was the illustrated edition of the English novel by John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, sometimes called Fanny Hill. This book, published in London in 1749—and prosecuted in Massachusetts in 1821, following a similar order in England—described the social and sexual life of a young prostitute, and among the early Americans who owned a copy was Benjamin Franklin.
It was not unusual to find in the libraries of colonial American leaders books that might have been defined as sexually obscene, by such writers as Ovid and Rabelais, Chaucer and Fielding. But since the reading of books in those days was largely limited to the well-educated minority, the need for literary censorship was not considered so important as it would in succeeding generations, when the common citizen became more literate, printing presses became more numerous, and religion in the expanding nation ceased to dominate daily Me as it had among the early settlers. As more schools opened, including the first public high school in 1820, there was increasing concern in government over the type of books that should be available to students; and it was a similar concern for youth, and a desire to protect it from corruptive influences, that Anthony Comstock expressed in the 1860s when he sought to justify his censorship campaigns in New York.
