Word that Hugh Hefner has shuffled off this mortal coil at 91 seems like news from a vanished era. I ran this marvelous clip from 1969, of soul diva Carla Thomas at a televisual Playboy party, a couple of years ago, and it seems right to revisit it today.
The whole notion of Hugh Hefner has been something between a cautionary tale and a failed smutty joke for so long that it's hard, sometimes, to remember that for a magical few moments (somewhere, I wrote before, "between Mad Men and Aquarius") he genuinely had his finger on the pulse of much that was new, exciting, and even a little dangerous in American culture. It all turned tawdry - and likely much of it always was - but in ways we're really only starting to sort out, Hefner and Playboy shifted something, and even more than that came to represent that shift, in many ways obvious and less so, from our perception of The High Life (grooving in a penthouse with Carla Thomas, for example) to how we react when the moment starts to pass us by (Hef ossified; it seems in retrospect ever more an unwise and a desperately sad choice).
There was much to abhor about the man, his world view, and his various creations. Perhaps in time we can more calmly regard the wildly American story of a boy who had a dream (essentially one of dirty pictures being available, as it were over the counter, true, but still a genuine American Dream), who idolized movie goddesses and jazz musicians, and who at his best achieved an affect that was simultaneously truly hip and almost touching naive, and who just wanted to help other guys have as good a time as he had stumbled on to. If he'd just faded away sometime before the hangovers of 1969 got too intense (penthouse nights, even with a live soul soundtrack, don't come without some cost), he'd be remembered as a mythical figure of sorts, the Pied Piper of Sex.
And perhaps, after the air of tacky leering and sniggering exploitation fade, we'll find something different, possibly even something admirable, in the Midwestern boy who tried to become the Ultimate Roué (even as the very idea of roué-dom came to seem both dated and meretricious). Maybe not; but we'll always have a few jewels on the order of Carla Thomas slinking her way toward a mod conversation pit, and that's not entirely nothing to leave as a legacy, no?
He did alright for a straight guy. He defied the convention of the time when he started out.
ReplyDeleteBut Muscato's right, he sort of outlived his hipness, or hipness changed and he didn't. His first act was pretty sweet, it's just that, as we have pointed out to us over and over again, very few people get second acts.
ReplyDeleteMy little girl loves this song! She was dancing to it this morning.
ReplyDeleteRun, Marilyn, run. Rise up.
I don't know for sure what the man did, except be at the right place at the right time. Starting in 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court began re-writing the doctrine regarding an adult's right to possess pornographic imagery, free from interference by the state. By 1973, the law was entirely changed, basically into what we have today.
ReplyDeletePlayboy first published in December 1953, so he would seem to be a wee bit ahead of the curve, but probably not much. Almost as soon as camera technology existed, men started using it to photograph nude women.
And, fortunately for some of us (looking at you, Mr. P....), men, too!
DeletePeenee has a Polaroid?
DeleteAmen
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