Thy Neighbor's Wife, page 8
Thousands of citizens soon petitioned President Rutherford B. Hayes to pardon Bennett, and there was talk of appealing to the Supreme Court; but these efforts were diminished when Comstock, who had somehow obtained love letters written by the sixty-year-old Bennett to a young woman, publicly condemned Bennett as a lecherous adulterer. Bennett’s admission from prison that he had written the letters did not help his cause with some people, including Mrs. Bennett and the wife of President Hayes; and it was reportedly Mrs. Hayes who urged her husband to ignore the Bennett petition.
Bennett served the full term at hard labor and was greatly debilitated by the experience. After his release he traveled in Europe, leaving the editorship of his paper to an associate who had run it during his imprisonment. In 1881 Bennett published a book called An Infidel Abroad, a collection of his own typically irreverent articles and comments that had established him in the free-thought movement of nineteenth-century America, a movement that in succeeding generations would include such publishers as Emanuel Julius, whose controversial Little Blue Books in the 1920s commenced the nation’s mass-market paperback industry; Samuel Roth, who was often imprisoned between the 1930s and 1950s for dealing in books banned by the government; and Barney Rosset, who would eventually impede the postal censors in a celebrated court case.
D. M. Bennett, who died the year after publishing An Infidel Abroad, was long survived by his eminent tormentor, Anthony Comstock. Before Comstock’s own death in 1915 he sent many other men to jail, being particularly gratified in 1896 when the United States Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Lew Rosen, whose publication Broadway had traveled through the mail featuring pictures of evocative women partially covered in lamp black that could easily be erased by the subscriber at home. Although Rosen’s energetic attorneys had contested the lower court convictions with various arguments—including the fact that the copy of Broadway used in evidence had been mailed in response to a government decoy letter, and also that Lew Rosen himself had not been aware of the ease with which the photographed women could be deprived of their carbon covering—the Supreme Court supported the Comstock Act and Lew Rosen was forced to serve thirteen months at hard labor.
The death of Comstock did not lessen the prosecution of pornography; it was continued by postal censors and church leaders, by the antivice society in New York and similar organizations in other cities, such as the Watch and Ward Society of Boston and the Chicago Law and Order League.
The Chicago league was directed by Arthur B. Farwell, a descendant of New England Puritans whose own missionary zeal had been intensified by the disheartening news when he was younger that his father, a political leader, was financially and socially involved with certain Chicago swindlers, rogues, and a prominent madam. From then on the younger Farwell was decidedly aloof from his father, and was equally intolerant of any citizen who profited from political schemes, gambling, or sought pleasure from immoral sex.
Most Chicago brothels were closed temporarily in 1912 after constant petitioning by Farwell’s league, and it succeeded in 1915 in having Chicago’s saloons shut down on Sundays. If Farwell’s league had little success during Prohibition in curbing the profitable partnership between politicians and gangsters that produced the speakeasies and whiskey wars, it was partly because Chicago after the Volstead Act of 1919 was under the strong influence of ethnic groups—mainly the Irish—who did not share the prohibitionists’ view of whiskey as a vice, although on matters of sex the Irish were possibly more puritanical than the Puritans.
In fact, by the 1920s—as Hugh Hefner’s sober Methodist parents from Nebraska had settled into Chicago—the Irish-Catholics had more or less replaced the Farwell-type bluenose Protestants as the enforcers of sexual morality in the city. The great Irish immigration of the mid-1800s had imported into Chicago a fierce brand of Catholicism founded on sexual regulation and orthodoxy, and the city gradually reflected these values politically and socially, becoming less tolerant of unorthodox thought and behavior. Even when the Irish did not control the mayor’s office—which they did regularly since the 1920s—the orthodox Catholic view on morality and sexual censorship was reinforced by the preponderant number of Irish-American state legislators, aldermen, ward leaders, states attorneys, police officers, and politically connected clergymen. The Irish were more quickly successful than other immigrants because they arrived in the new land with an ability to speak the language, were united in their religious beliefs, and were politically hardened and organized as a result of their shared struggle back home against the English. Fortified by their interfaith marriages and political cronyism, they slowly shaped a Chicago Democratic machine from their South Side shanties, blue-collar bungalows, and tenements that excluded blacks, and from such a neighborhood came not only Mayor Richard Daley but also the two Irish-Catholic mayors who had preceded him, Ed Kelly and Martin Kennelly.
Daley’s neighborhood was not so different from other ethnic white areas largely populated by the Polish, or Czechoslovakians, or Italians, or Russian Jews; nearly all were inhabited by socially conservative Chicagoans tightly tied to their families and trade unions, and they were more enduringly insular and immutable than the ethnic Americans living in more liberal cities, where the neighborhoods were not so formidably preserved as blocs of votes. Chicago was well organized, solid, stolid—a town of regulars who were shocked less by political chicanery and extreme racism than by an attempt of a neighborhood theater owner to show a sexy movie.
The films that Hugh Hefner had seen as a teenaged usher at the Rockne Theater, and as a patron of other cinemas, had been screened beforehand by a police censor board, whose reviewers usually included five housewives married to policemen. When Hefner was working in Von Rosen’s promotion department, Chicago’s main distributor of magazines refused to carry Von Rosen’s products because they were sexually oriented and might provoke the displeasure of City Hall and church leaders. Von Rosen’s magazines were therefore circulated circumspectly to newsstands by drivers working for a smaller, hungrier, more daring firm known within the trucking trade as a “secondary” distributor.
In almost every large American city there was a primary distributor that circulated the socially acceptable mass-market magazines, like Reader’s Digest and Ladies’ Home Journal, and a “secondary” distributor that took what the primary preferred not to touch. In Chicago the secondary was the Capitol News Agency, and, like such firms in other cities, its warehouse was located on a remote side street and had bricked-up windows so that snoopers on the sidewalk could not see what was stored within. An arriving driver with a truckload of new magazines from the printing plant, before gaining entrance to the warehouse, had to first ring a buzzer at the side door and identify himself through the intercom; then the big sliding door was elevated, the truck entered the warehouse, and, after the door had been lowered and locked shut, the shipping clerks helped the driver unload the merchandise along the interior docking area. The cartons of magazines were counted and checked against the invoice. Some of these cartons had been sent from such distant points as Los Angeles and New York, being transported by carriers who traveled the secondary routes through America, dropping off cartons along the way in places like Denver and Des Moines, Cleveland and Columbus. After the big truck had left the Chicago warehouse, smaller panel trucks owned by Capitol would deliver within the city prearranged numbers of magazines to specific news dealers, some of whom would sell the magazines under the counter or in plain brown wrappers.
Although Capitol’s merchandise was transported as cautiously as was bootleg whiskey in an earlier era, and was perhaps driven by some of the same drivers, not all of the cartons handled in the Capitol warehouse contained sexual publications. Capitol also distributed a few academic and literary magazines, such as The Partisan Review, that did not sell well enough in Chicago to interest the primary distributor. Also in the Capitol warehouse were certain political publications that were offensive to Chicago’s municipal and religious leaders, such as the Communist Daily Worker. And Capitol handled all the black publications—Ebony magazine, The Negro Digest, Tan, as well as the newspaper the Chicago Daily Defender.
The Capitol News Agency was founded in the mid-1930s by a Chicago horseplayer named Henry Steinborn, who in the beginning circulated mostly tip sheets, but he also included in his truck a few magazines then considered indecorous or obscene—Sunshine & Health, The Police Gazette, The Hobo News, film fan magazines featuring “starlets” in swimsuits, and certain women’s confessional magazines. Although no erotic photographs appeared in the confessional magazines, many priests in Chicago and around the country believed that their sin-centered content and private disclosures aroused lustful thoughts, and parishioners were urged to avoid reading these magazines. (Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity—known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision—evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women’s confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional.)
With the popularity of the girlie magazines during World War II, Capitol’s business, along with that of other secondaries around the country, greatly increased. Capitol circulated within Chicago the Robert Harrison publications (Wink, Flirt, Whisper, Eyefull) and also those of another New York publisher named Adrian Lopez (Cutie, Giggles, Sir, Hit). After the war, when paper rationing was lifted, there were newer magazines like Night and Day, Gala, and Focus, all of which featured a tall, blond California bathing beauty named Irish McCalla and an attractive somewhat devilish, dominant high-heeled brunet from Florida named Bettie Page. These two women, more than any other photo models, were the masturbatory mistresses for many thousands of men during the postwar years, and they remained popular through the 1950s as Diane Webber emerged, increasingly nude, in Sunshine & Health and the Von Rosen magazines.
As Von Rosen’s publications became more daring, revealing everything but pubic hair, Henry Steinborn of Capitol News became concerned about police raids on his warehouse. He moved to a new location, obtaining a larger warehouse but displaying a smaller company sign above the door. Steinborn was making money for the first time in his life, he had ten trucks operating in the city, and more newsstands than ever were now quietly accepting girlie magazines. With the sale of each fifty-cent magazine, the newsstand owner earned a dime, and so did Henry Steinborn. Thousands of magazines were selling each month in Chicago, and various publishers were hiring lawyers as advisers, hoping the lawyers knew how much of the female body could legally be shown in pictures. Some lawyers expressed opinions, others shrugged and said that a definition of obscenity depended on which judge was defining it; and so Steinborn’s panel trucks pluckily continued their deliveries to various newsstands, and eventually to a small bookshop located first on Dearborn Street, later on Van Buren Street.
In the front window of the store was a selection of current hardcover and paperback books that could be found in an ordinary bookshop, but near the back of the store, and under the counter, were books and magazines that could only have been supplied by a secondary.
In time, many customers became aware of the full variety of the merchandise, and they stopped in often, eventually getting to know the counter clerks well enough to gain flipping privileges with the girlie magazines without having to buy one. But most customers bought at least one magazine, tucking it into their coat or putting it into a bag; and two customers, perhaps the best patrons of the store, purchased copies of nearly every girlie magazine that was available for sale. One of these customers was Hugh Hefner. The other, a younger man, was named Harold Rubin.
FIVE
AS HUGH HEFNER sat at his desk in the Playboy office on this wintry day in 1955 deciding which of Diane Webber’s nude photographs would be the centerfold in the May issue, he could hear a church bell ringing from the Holy Name Cathedral across the street. It was the 6 P.M. Angelus bell reminding the faithful, as it did thrice daily, of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that, through a miracle of sexual uninvolvement, she would become the mother of the Messiah.
Thus did Catholicism dishonor sex by denying its necessity to those most virtuous; and this doctrine of denial would continue for centuries during which the Church demanded celibacy of its clergy, expected chastity of its unmarried parishioners, sanctified conjugal copulation mainly for the propagation of the faith, and canonized such women as St. Agnes because, rather than submit to male lust, she preferred death as a virgin martyr.
This asceticism was, to say the least, substantially at variance with the life-style being advocated across the street at Playboy magazine, and had Hefner initially given more thought to it, he might have located his offices further from the gigantic Gothic cathedral that dominated the block and cast a disapproving shadow down upon the gray four-story Playboy building at 11 East Superior Street.
But since great cathedrals cannot be constructed and maintained without great sinners to justify them, perhaps Hefner belonged where he was. Like most unrepentant sinners, however, he could expect no benediction from the believers, and he had already aroused the cardinal’s wrath months before by reprinting in Playboy a medieval tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron that describes the carnal life of a convent gardener constantly seduced by sexually aggressive nuns.
The Church that had condemned this story in the mid-1500s had no higher opinion of it following its reappearance in the Playboy issue of September 1954, and after a recriminating call from the chancellery Hefner asked his distributors at Capitol to withdraw the issue from the Chicago newsstands, although these magazines were redistributed in other cities. Hefner did not want to escalate religious opposition so early in his publishing career, being overworked as he was with normal business problems and also having previously experienced negative signs that might have been induced by complaints from church members.
The Chicago postmen, for example, often delayed for several days delivering the mail to the Playboy building, stalling the magazine’s incoming subscription orders, and the Postmaster General in Washington denied Playboy the less costly second-class mailing privileges customarily granted to publications, because he considered Playboy obscene. The police enforced parking regulations in front of the Playboy office more vigilantly than elsewhere in Chicago, ticketing and towing away cars whenever possible—which one day prompted a Playboy employee named Anson Mount to call a policeman’s attention to an illegally parked car on the opposite side of the street, the limousine used by the Archbishop of Chicago, Samuel Stritch.
The policeman thought at first that Anson Mount was kidding; but when Mount insisted that parking laws in Chicago should be equitably enforced, the policeman asked Mount if he wished to register an official complaint. Mount said that he did, and after the form was prepared Mount signed it and listed his address. A week later, while Mount was at his apartment, his landlord knocked on his door saying that there were two visitors from the police department. They were plainclothesmen, and after Mount had invited them in and the landlord had left, one of the men asked abruptly, “What do you have against the cardinal?”
Mount replied that he had nothing against the cardinal, but before he could say much more the other plainclothesman, suddenly enraged, lunged at Mount, slapped him across the head, and banged him against the wall. Then the men left, leaving Mount stunned and confused. His first instinct was to bring assault charges against them, but later he thought it would be unwise to do so. The consequences might be worse than he had received already, and a court case against the Chicago police seemed futile, time-consuming, and would undoubtedly produce newspaper publicity of no benefit to the magazine.
In spite of the opposition, Playboy was doing extremely well—it was, in fact, the fastest growing magazine in America. So suddenly had it succeeded that newsstands across the nation could barely keep it in stock, and advertisers that had once considered Playboy an improper medium for the promotion of their products were now reconsidering their position, never imagining that if they approached Hefner with ads he might have rejected them.
Hefner would not print any advertising that focused on male problems or worries, such as baldness, physical frailty, or obesity. Having made a small fortune at the newsstands by selling a magazine that emphasized pleasure, that linked naked women with dapper young men who drove sports cars and lived in bacchanalian brown-leather bachelor apartments, Hefner did not intend to desecrate this dream with advertisements reminding male readers of their acne, halitosis, athlete’s foot, or hernias. Hefner believed in health through hedonism; he was an optimist and positive thinker. Had he been otherwise, he would never have achieved what he had during the last two years.
He had started Playboy in 1953 with a personal investment of only $600. He had obtained this money from a bank loan, using as collateral the furniture in his Hyde Park apartment. He was then twenty-seven years old, was living with his sexually unresponsive wife and crying baby daughter, was driving a dilapidated 1941 Chevrolet, but he was propelled by golden fantasies.
He had quit his $80-a-week position with Von Rosen’s firm the year before to accept a higher-paying less-interesting job with a children’s magazine that allowed him more free time to plan his own magazine. As one who for years had read and analyzed every magazine from the pulpiest pinups to the most slickly sophisticate, Hefner was convinced that what he had in mind was different from the rest, even from the girlie magazines that Von Rosen was distributing.
The articles in Von Rosen’s Modern Man, for example, as well as those in men’s publications like True and Argosy, were written for the action-oriented male readers interested in hunting and fishing, gun collecting and deep-sea diving, mountain climbing and other outdoor adventures and activities that reinforced the feelings of male camaraderie that so many men had experienced during World War II. These magazines ignored the reading interests of indoor urban types like Hefner who disliked hunting and fishing, and dreamed of one day dwelling in a modern bachelor apartment with a gleaming high-fidelity set and having a new girl and a new car. Hefner associated romantic adventure with upward mobility and economic prosperity, believing that men who were successful in bed were also successful in business; and while this was merely theory on Hefner’s part, he intended to promote it in his magazine as no other publisher was now doing.
