#13 HUGH HEFNER’S KARMA–Part Two: Through the Gates of the Heavenly Mansion

Nude on a Blue Cushion, Modigliani, 1917

If Coke
Is a mystery
Michael Jackson
History
If beauty is truth
And surgery the fountain of youth
What am I to do
Have I got the gifts to get me through
The gates of that mansion

–U2, “The Playboy Mansion”

Hefner landed consistently great quarterly earnings reports, and though his empire faltered and contracted finally, he found ways to ride it out.  Harsh jolts happened, and yet, what persists is the idea of the Playboy Mansion, where you live in opulence, your needs and tastes taken care of, your entertainment available 24 hours, your important, glamorous friends coming round regularly, extravagant, vivid parties, and of course the distraction of your harem, increasingly filled with buxom platinum blondes.

The apex of samsara, the highest dimension of birth in confusion, the Buddha called deva loka, the “god realm.”  It features ceaseless layers of sensual pleasure.  It looks fantastic, smells, tastes, touches, and sounds ecstatic.  Everything you do or think delights.  Pleasure becomes a continuous round of drinks or trysts, games or outings, sans the usual earthly mess. That’s what you look forward to when you awaken: the long day ahead filled with golden light.

While there’s higher birth as a god, this also applies to the best dimensions of human worldly experience.  You live like a god, while others live like animals.  Sometimes all you need is money.

Without women undraped to reveal their sexual selves, somehow the Mansion doesn’t come into focus.  The gates don’t open so the coffers can fill.

The longtime, culturally-ingrained attack on sexually explicit writing and depictions of naked women came in those days under the label “obscene.”  At the very least it violated “good taste” of how women ought to be shown and matters that belonged within marriage behind closed doors should not be dragged into the public market place.  At worst, it constituted an invitation to ugly behavior and lax morals, inciting animalistic impulses in men (whom society had some trouble keeping on a leash as it stood), and—this seems like the right word—degrading women from good Christian wives and mothers into slatterns and worse.  (We can see here how the feminist critique wasn’t so very far from the conservative Christian one.)

We might pause and consider one Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), an Italian, bohemian painter noteworthy for his portraits and nudes.  “Nude on a Blue Cushion” (1917) portrays a lovely, voluptuous, entirely unclothed woman languidly reclined and smiling with amused invitation.  By act of painting her and offering the result for public consumption, he certainly violated the closed door ethic.  Do we think her form aroused his male lust?  Decidedly—it’s right there in the paint.  Would we call this obscene and degrading?  I doubt, at least, that any of that was on Sig. Modigliani’s mind.

Modigliani, of fragile health living in penury, dead by 35, had neither longevity, fame, nor fortune. He didn’t have that kind of karma, though nowadays his paintings fetch millions.  In fact, he had only one showing of his artwork while alive, in a gallery across the street from a Parisian police station.  With one of his nudes hung in the front window, a crowd gathered, drawing the attention of the gendarme, who had them all taken down.  When the gallery owner demanded an explanation, the inspector told him, ““Ces nues…ils ont des p-p-poils!” (“These nudes…they have b-b-body hair!”).

That circumstance–that sight of a woman’s pubic hair can shock enough to make a man stutter—hadn’t changed by the early 1970s, when other sexually explicit mags came along in an attempt to get a piece of the Playboy pie.  Chief among them, Penthouse, sought to stake out territory through far more sexualized images of women, as well as people actually having sex.  Perhaps now long forgotten, Playboy’s women had never revealed their pubic hair.  From the distance of time and space, the images of its first 20 years were downright modest.  (Which is it?  Modest or obscene?)

Hefner, under competitive pressure, reluctantly broke the taboo on pubic hair in 1972 with Miss January, Marilyn Cole.  As it happened, while visiting my friend Greg’s house at 12 years of age, he took us into his older brother’s room and fished out from under the mattress the first Playboy I ever saw (almost a rite of passage for males of my generation), opening the centerfold on Ms. Cole–the first fully naked woman I’d ever seen.

It stopped my mind.  It overwhelmed me.

My Catholic parents most certainly would not have approved.  That wasn’t what they wanted my young mind doing. Was this picture teaching me to objectify and reduce women to purely their appearance?

Looking at that image now, 50 years later, with the wisdom of hindsight…fuck if I know.  I see the richness of the photography, its luxuriant glamour.  All that comes to me is that’s one magnificently gorgeous woman, of goddess splendor, still beyond anything I happen to think.

Marilyn Cole, 1972