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By winter of 1955,
America was rapidly changing.
The polio vaccine was officially approved by the FDA.
A small burger joint called McDonald's
held its grand opening in Illinois.
Disneyland is a delight for all youngsters.
Walt Disney opened his first theme park
in Anaheim, California.
And in Chicago,
we were still making waves at Playboy.
In the year since we started taking our own photos,
we'd begun adding playful elements to our photoshoots,
hiding things like a tie
or a set of golf clubs,
to imply that a man was just off camera
and giving our readers something to look for.
Thanks to our concept of the girl next door,
readership had exploded from 70,000 copies a month in our first issue
to 500,000 a month by the end of the year,
and with annual sales reaching $3 million,
I saw an opportunity to take Playboy even further
by going after a source of revenue
we'd barely tapped into... advertising.
After World War II, Americans got back to work,
and the economy was booming.
Suddenly, people had cash to spend on luxuries
like cars, TVs, and new appliances,
and they spent a lot, so major companies
began putting massive amounts of money,
over $5 billion a year, into promoting their products.
It was the Golden Age of Advertising.
For most magazines,
advertising is the largest source of revenue,
and advertisers choose where to advertise
based on the audience, the price, and the environment.
But Playboy had a different approach.
We were always, even in the very beginning
when we needed the money, very, very tough
in terms of our advertising policy.
I knew for starters that if we accepted
the kinds of advertising that appeared in the pulp magazines,
I would never be able to turn a magazine
with nudes in it into a class publication.
I only wanted to run high-class ads,
ones that would suit our features and articles.
My dad was very thoughtful
about who he wanted to advertise in the magazine
because he cared more about reputation
than he did actually about the cash on the table.
He didn't want to be in business with people
that didn't actually believe in the brand.
But now, with sales of Playboy at an all-time high,
I knew it was time to start going after
the big name brands that I wanted.
Uh, Hef, they're here.
Okay. Stall them five minutes,
then bring them up to the studio.
Okay.
Get Victor to meet me on the second floor. Now.
After months of tracking down potential advertisers,
we finally got the attention
of one of the most exclusive brands in town.
All I had to do was convince them to work with us.
I'd like you to meet Vince Tajiri,
our photo department head,
Art Paul, art director,
and this is Victor Lownes, head of promotions.
Welcome to Playboy.
Thanks very much.
Uh, Hef?
This is Bob from The Diners' Club.
I'm so sorry to keep you waiting. Hugh Hefner.
In 1955, the first independent charge card
in the world was introduced in America.
It was called Diners' Club.
This was before American Express, Visa,
or MasterCard were in the credit business,
and Diners' Club members could use their cards
at some of the best restaurants in the world.
The card was revolutionary,
and I had a plan to get it into our magazine.
What do you think of the studio?
Everything looks great.
As you may know, Janet here
was the first Playmate we photographed ourselves.
Photographing our own models has seen
a real spike in readership.
When they see your ad on our pages,
I'm predicting they'll choose to spend their money
using a Diners' Club card.
All it took was one look from Janet
and Diners' Club was in.
These advertising guys
didn't want to talk advertising.
They wanted to ask about the Playmates.
They were fascinated by it,
and we were able to take advantage of that.
Why don't you come to my office
and we'll talk some numbers. Sellers?
Bye, Janet.
With Diners' Club on board,
it wasn't long before other big names followed,
and soon, Playboy was featuring ads
from Marlboro,
Chanel,
Imperial Whiskey,
and Budweiser.
When we went to see people like Anheuser-Busch,
we could say to them, look,
you've got to be in this magazine.
This magazine reaches more college men
who are the next generation's leaders.
That was very influential.
Our new stream of revenue
was enough to keep the business running comfortably...
... meaning I could stay focused on the creative side of things.
She looks amazing, Vince.
It's a shame they can't be this big in the magazine.
Let's put this up on the board, Vince.
Charlaine had a point.
Here in the office,
the photographs felt more lifelike.
We started out with these great proofs,
but then we had to shrink them down
to fit in our magazine.
I knew there had to be a way
to give our readers a better experience.
I mean, what are our options here?
Hef wants a bigger photo, so, tabloid, am I right?
Are you talking about
making the entire magazine twice as big?
That means everything costs twice as much.
What's wrong with that?
We've spent three years
building a bond with our readers, right?
They like the magazine the way it is.
Think about the ad sales.
Bigger ads. More money.
There you go, Eldon. Problem solved.
Look, don't get mad at me 'cause I'm the only one here
willing to tell the truth.
Don't get mad at me for calling bullshit.
We'll just fold it.
Yeah.
Ladies and gentleman, the Playboy centerfold.
In March of 1956, we put out
our first issue ever with a fold-out centerfold
featuring model Marian Stafford.
The first Playboy centerfold I ever saw
was probably in fourth grade at a friend's house.
And it's not just opening the cover.
That centerfold, that fold-out
is that tactile experience of opening something
and revealing something.
It just seemed like you were opening a door
to a whole other world.
It wasn't life-size,
but you have no idea how many times
I made love to that centerfold.
It took me there, visually took me there.
I thought that that girl was right there in front of me.
The larger centerfolds were an instant hit with readers
and quickly became synonymous with our brand.
To this day, when people hear the word "centerfold,"
they immediately think of Playboy.
Sales and subscriptions skyrocketed,
and in December 1956, we hit a milestone
when our third anniversary issue sold over a million copies.
And after just three years, Playboy was the number one
men's lifestyle magazine in America.
We had beaten out Esquire,
the magazine that, three years earlier,
had refused to give me a $5 raise.
We were doing so well,
I needed to bring on someone who could focus
on the business side of the magazine.
So, I turned to an old friend who knew me
better than any of the other guys, Bob Preuss.
Balance sheet? Perfect.
Hef always had someone that he relied on
to be the business head.
In the early years, it was Bob Preuss,
who'd been his college roommate.
Demand for the magazine was rising every month,
and our staff could barely keep up.
If we were going to sustain the quality
our readers expected from us,
we not only needed to add more staff
but we also needed someplace to put them.
But we didn't just move to a new office.
This time, we got our own building.
Four stories, 30,000 square feet.
Plenty of space for our newly expanded staff...
... now over 100 people.
We spent a quarter-million dollars
to renovate it top to bottom.
It might have been a little indulgent,
but I wanted my team to have the very best.
We're in my executive offices now
on top of the Playboy building.
It's quite late at night
and my working hours are kind of strange ones.
I usually begin work about 1:30
or 2:00 in the afternoon.
I get in half a day that way with the staff
and things are quite hectic here during the day
with conferences and various calls
and things to attend to:
layouts, editorial matters, etcetera.
Then I go into the second half of my day
in the evening, and that's a little quieter.
There's nobody else here to bother me.
It works out pretty well that way.
At this point, I pretty much lived
in the office full-time,
but while my business was growing,
so was my family.
In the midst of our mounting success,
Millie gave birth to our second child,
a boy named David.
But with the magazine taking up all of my time,
I'll be the first to admit I wasn't acting
like the type of father or husband my family needed.
My father wasn't around a lot
when my brother and I were growing up,
but we would spend Christmas and birthdays with him,
so I always thought of him, in hindsight,
as kind of like a favorite uncle,
someone you were related to
who you knew loved you but didn't really know
who your friends were or how your grades were going.
It was 24/7 for him,
which is why he did not really have a family life,
even though he was married and had two children.
But he was working night and day.
And that was true for decades.
Arrange a meeting with everybody just to...
With success came attention,
and in January of '57, I was invited
to profile Playboy on an entirely new platform for me,
one that was quickly becoming
an American obsession... television.
In 1957, television was taking the country by storm,
and with only three networks to choose from,
CBS, NBC, and ABC,
roughly a third of the country
might be tuned in to one program.
Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace.
The show is Night Beat.
Mike Wallace's Night Beat was a popular talk show
known for addressing controversial topics,
and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity
to spread Playboy's message.
But I had never appeared on TV before,
and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous.
I knew that Night Beat was a very hot show in New York,
a show that was getting a lot of reaction.
I also knew that it was a tough show
and that he was asking tough questions.
And I had done very few interviews,
even for print, in those days,
because it was the very early days of the magazine.
A little under four years ago, a junior copywriter
in Esquire Magazine's promotion department
quit in a huff after he was refused a $5 raise.
You ready?
And that refusal turned out to be
one of the worst decisions ever made at Esquire
because the name of that copywriter was Hugh Hefner.
You'll be fine.
He is now the editor-in-chief of Playboy Magazine,
which claims to have pushed Esquire
right out of first place.
Hugh, we checked this month's issue
and found 20 pictures of girls in various stages of undress.
Now, sir, what's the kick that you get out of it?
At the time that Playboy started, and this was one
of the big reasons for beginning the book,
we felt there as no magazine
doing a really successful job
of entertaining the audience that we're trying to hit.
Let's not hide behind altruistic motives, Hugh.
Chicago Magazine quoted you to the effect
that sex will always be
a primary ingredient of the magazine.
Isn't that really what you're selling?
Kind of a high-class dirty book?
Um, well, I don't, uh...
I'd make a pretty, uh, strong case, uh,
in the feeling that the magazine,
as far we are concerned,
does not over-emphasize sex at all.
You think that this really reflects the tastes
and the standards of young, male Americans?
Truthfully?
Truthfully, without any reservation, yes.
When I first did my interview with Hugh Hefner,
I wasn't just playing devil's advocate with him.
I thought that he was about to subvert the republic
with some of the stuff
that he was putting in Playboy Magazine.
What he was doing, basically, was, I thought,
vaguely pornographic, vaguely obscene,
and he was putting a nice cover on it
by finding interesting intellectual stuff
to lend a little class
to what was essentially a trifle tawdry.
When I look at the tape,
I see a very nervous kid
who didn't have his act together
and was searching for words.
Mike didn't take me very seriously.
He said, in between segments of the show,
that he figured I'd be doing something else
in five years, and I was hurt by that
because it suggested to me
that he didn't think I was sincere.
Mike Wallace had torn me apart on national television,
and all I could think
was that by appearing on the show unprepared,
I had done Playboy more harm than good.
Part and parcel of being in the public eye is,
people are going to have something to say about you.
You can either let it bother you,
or if you are on the right side, just speak the truth.
I had to do something.
I needed to make it clear
that I was making a magazine
for a sophisticated audience.
The first initial dream was to try to package
the sort of magazine for a young urban man
that I would enjoy if I was a reader,
and the perception didn't go much further than that.
Once that began, a time came
when I really began to see
the possibilities of livin' the life.
If I was going to change people's opinion of Playboy,
I had to put myself in the spotlight
and show the public
that I wasn't just some creep peddling sex.
I was the epitome of a modern gentleman.
Taking inspiration from famous figures like Frank Sinatra
and characters like James Bond,
I changed my look.
I started dressing sharper...
... and I even added a new accessory to my image, a pipe.
For the first time, my photo was prominently featured
in the pages of Playboy...
... paired with an article detailing my interests,
fashion sense, musical taste...
... and my rise to success.
He invented the character
and then became the character.
I think, in a lot of ways, he was surprised
how many American men responded to that
and wanted to engage in a lifestyle on that level.
In 1959, I was even asked to appear
in an ad from a Chicago Mercedes dealership,
promoting their 300 SL convertible.
In Chicago, Hefner was almost immediately
the biggest celebrity in town,
but that spread quickly to the rest of the country.
For the next two years,
I started giving interviews
to any publication that would have me...
... and little by little,
I started gaining national notoriety.
I literally became a different person,
and I think that the commitment
in terms of changing my lifestyle, that wasn't so tough.
There was already a fascination with Playboy as a phenomenon.
It was just a matter of sort of takin' off the Clark Kent outfit
and puttin' on the cloak and flyin' out the window.
With my star on the rise,
all kinds of new business opportunities
were on the table for me, and in 1959,
the most intriguing
was from a local television producer from Chicago
named James McGinn.
I want to make a variety show.
Special guests, celebrity performers.
Playmates... dressed, of course.
Who did you have in mind to host?
You.
You're Mr. Playboy.
From Broadway, from Hollywood...
At the end of the '50s, variety shows
like The Tonight Show,
Sid Caesar's Show of Shows,
and The Ed Sullivan Show
were pulling in massive ratings.
I realized if Playboy could capture
even a small percentage of those viewers,
we could extend our brand far beyond just the magazine.
I think the motivation for pursuing television
was that it offered another platform
to share the brand philosophy.
But even with the backing of a Chicago TV station,
I knew we faced tough competition.
If we were going to succeed,
we needed to come up with a concept
that would really set us apart.
Playboy Magazine was always about
presenting a fantasy lifestyle...
beautiful women, high-end design,
and the latest in American culture.
I wanted to bring that experience
to a television audience, and just like that,
Playboy's Penthouse was born.
The concept of Playboy's Penthouse
was the magazine come to life.
It was a show that was taking place
in Hef's living room,
and Hef was the host of the party.
The show was going to be a huge undertaking,
so I asked the entire staff of the magazine to pitch in,
including one of our newest hires, Dick Rosenzweig.
I began working for Playboy in 1958.
I was hired as an advertising trainee.
But then Eldon came to me and asked me
to be the production syndication manager
of this new television show.
Nobody really in our company was qualified to do that,
but we all chipped in, as we did in those days,
and did double and triple duty.
We may have had an amateur staff
and a tiny budget,
but Playboy's growing reputation
allowed us to lock in an incredible show line-up.
Stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce,
best-selling author Rona Jaffee,
1958 Playmate of the Month Joyce Nizarri,
and my personal favorites,
jazz legends Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole.
I used jazz throughout the '50s
as a major element in the magazine.
That music spoke to me and contained those dreams
that I identified with so much.
We had our lineup complete,
but with just days before we aired,
we got word that broadcasters in the South
were threatening to pull our show.
You have to understand, this was the late 1950s,
a time of racial segregation
and growing racist sentiments in the South.
In 1959, this is four years
after the Montgomery bus boycott,
a woman locked up for sitting in the front of a bus
who paid the same fare as white people.
In that same season, rights workers were killed
trying to register people to vote
and had to beg the Department of Justice
and the FBI to intervene
during that very ugly transition
from slavery to Jim Crow desegregation.
It was a very violent season of fear and polarization.
Protests on both sides
were breaking out across the country,
and with our program planning to show
white and black people socializing,
Southern television stations were outraged.
So either we pull Nat and Ella or they pull us?
Pretty much.
Look, gentlemen, we cannot afford to lose the South.
That's half our audience.
The stations have all the power.
Fuck the stations. It's censorship.
Nat King Cole stays and so does everyone else.
We're making the show I want to make,
and if the South pulls us, they pull us.
We start taping tomorrow night.
People who were not old enough
to be around back then and see those Playboy shows
would probably see nothing wrong with them.
Why not have black artists and black musicians
and black comedians and black guests?
But in the '50s, that was very much a red flag
to certain people and even stations
in certain parts of this country,
and Hefner's intentional ability to break that barrier
was really a public service on his part
and rather daring.
On October 24th, 1959, we premiered
our first episode of Playboy's Penthouse,
and sadly, the Southern stations
stuck to their guns and refused to air it.
But we had made something I was truly proud of.
I'll admit, I was nervous to be the frontman
on a brand-new television show,
but I was excited to see my vision on TV.
Hello there. Glad you could join us this evening.
I'm Hugh Hefner,
editor/publisher of Playboy Magazine,
and your host.
This is Playboy's Penthouse.
Come on in and meet some of our guests.
Well, here we have Eleanor Bradley
and Ms. Joyce Nazarri,
two of our most popular Playmates,
and Lenny Bruce,
foremost exponent of sick humor and...
Oh!
Isn't that sick?
Oh, boy, the champagne is really
making my nose bubbly, Uncle Hugh.
Nat, what a surprise! Great.
I'm very pleased you could come up this evening.
- Thank you. - Come on in.
I was proud to feature Nat King Cole
and Ella Fitzgerald as two of our first guests.
Thank you.
Nat, this is Spec, A.C. Spectorsky.
They represented the best in American jazz,
and our show wouldn't have been complete without them.
These were very talented professionals
in their line of work, jazz,
and Hefner has always felt that it was right and proper
to have the most talented
and interesting people on this show.
It's great having you with us, Ella.
A real pleasure, as always.
The group is here,
and I wonder if you'd sing a song for us.
Well, we can try and do something for you.
It was so cleverly filmed and photographed
because it was a subjective camera.
You were the audience walking into that penthouse.
You were watching them.
You felt like you were there with them.
And that's when I think Hef
started being a kind of living, breathing
visual interpretation
of that man that you're reading about.
It was exactly what I had envisioned.
It was hip, fun,
and thanks to our featured Playmates,
it was also sexy.
I saw it as a chance for Playboy
to become bigger than just a magazine.
But without the South, there was no guarantee
that we'd pull in enough viewers
to keep the show on the air.
There were a few people who had the courage
of their convictions to stand with us.
Hefner's money and reputation was on the line.
He identified unequivocally with social justice
and with the civil rights movement of that time.
The ratings data came in,
and I wanted you to hear it from me first.
Is it good or bad?
They want to make a 26-week commitment.
- Really? - Yeah.
They're even asking about a second season.
A second...
Congratulations, Mr. Playboy.
Even without the South,
the response was better than I had expected.
The civil rights movement
has a particularly profound effect
on the younger generation
and on those who want to see themselves as hip and cool.
It is no longer cool and hip to be racist.
And Hugh Hefner latches onto that notion.
He feels it.
Papers across the country were talking about us.
The show was a hit,
and we went on to book even bigger names.
If he does that again,
I'll punch him a shot in the mouth.
Sammy Davis was a big visitor,
as was Tony Bennett...
Tony's gonna wail a little bit here.
... who was a great friend to playboy Cy Coleman,
so it was just a litany
of who the cream of the crop was
in entertainment at that time.
The success of Playboy's Penthouse
only solidified our status
as the top-selling men's magazine in the country.
Let's go for two. Thanks.
We had a guaranteed circulation
of over a million copies per month,
and I was now running a company worth over $20 million.
This is Donna Lynn, our Playmate for November,
and if Donna doesn't look exactly like a waitress...
But while my business was going great...
... that's because in Hollywood,
the scene is a little different.
... not everything in my life was perfect.
... pretty special things, and we thought Donna
was pretty special, even by those standards.
Hef invents the idea of the modern bachelor
without really knowing if that person actually exists
other than himself, and to tell you the truth,
he wasn't even that person.
He was married and living in Chicago.
We'll break for just a minute and we'll be right back.
I wasn't seeing him that much.
We would do the holidays, the family days, together,
but we weren't acting together as a couple.
He lived his own life. He didn't do it to be cruel.
It hurt, but it wasn't a deliberate cruelness.
I always respected him,
and I think he always respected me.
I think we recognized that we were dissimilar.
We were dissimilar. And what I wanted,
if I were in a marriage, what I wanted from it
is something he couldn't give me.
After a decade of marriage, Millie and I decided
that the best thing for both of us was a divorce.
- Thank you. - Thank you.
I believed, initially, that marriage
would be the answer to my romantic dreams,
and it wasn't.
And I think that that hurt and disappointment
led me in another direction.
Now that I was on my own, nothing was stopping me
from fully embracing the Playboy lifestyle.
So I did what every guy in his thirties dreams of doing.
I bought a bachelor pad.
The four-story, 40-bedroom house
was in the heart of Chicago.
I dropped $400,000, or about 3.2 million today.
And if you think that sounds like a lot,
I spent another ten times that
on renovations.
And let me tell you, it was worth every penny.
The main room is, of course, my favorite.
It has woodwork in it and a size and magnificence
that you rarely find in America today.
It looks more as though it belongs
on an English countryside
than in the heart of Chicago's near northside.
The hi-fi here in the middle of the room
was custom-built for the house,
and down below the main room,
we have the swimming pool.
It's kind of like walking into a part of Acapulco,
I guess you might say.
There are palm trees there and a waterfall.
Hef had a pool in his living room,
but Hef didn't swim.
Hef had the finest wine, but he doesn't drink.
He's the greatest host ever.
It was about other people's pleasure,
for other people to enjoy.
In addition to housing
Chicago's only private indoor swimming pool,
my mansion was fitted with the latest technology,
plus a bowling alley, hidden walkways,
a movie theater, and a full catering kitchen.
This house in Chicago was amazing.
Me and Peter Boyle, we started looking
all around the place, and we found ourselves
in a swimming pool on the second floor.
And there was this one place where you slid down a pole
and you got into this pillowed room
that had a glass front and that was the pool.
But the most legendary room of all was my master bedroom.
I designed it to look like something out of a Bond movie,
and the centerpiece was a circular, rotating bed.
And the point of this, of course,
is not simply a merry-go-round.
It's really turned the room itself
into four separate living sections
so that I can have it facing the hi-fi area,
facing the TV over here,
or for the work service or the fireplace.
I'd transformed the mansion into a bachelor's paradise,
and in December of 1961,
I published a ten-page spread in the magazine
that gave my readers an inside look.
Every decision that my dad made
was about fostering the brand,
so the mansion in Chicago was a reflection
of the brand's values, which were his values.
It was a place where you could have a really good time
but still find intellectual conversation if you wanted to.
It was an adult playground.
With the introduction of the mansion,
I literally got out from behind the desk
and then it was party time.
What had started out as my home
had now become the hottest spot in Chicago.
I spent money and invested money
in the future of this magazine and company and this dream
in a way that made no kind of business sense.
All reason and logic were gone,
and everything I touched turned into gold.
I was living the life I'd always dreamed of,
and I'd finally become the ultimate bachelor.
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