Hustler, 1976.
 
I’ve never quite bought into the idea that red is always a color of sex and desire. Not that I give a fuck or have any scientific evidence to back up my uninformed opinion other than the anecdotal prejudice that if red was a color of arousal then we’d all cop off at stop signals and dear old Santa Claus would be a sex god.

Maybe he is.

And maybe this explains why porn mags get into spreading some Christmas cheer every December by getting a little festive with their covers.

Such naive and dot-to-dot thinking led me to browse (ahem—for research purposes…of course!) through a fine selection of vintage, glamor mag covers just to get the inside skinny on how they once celebrated the Holiday Season. For if there is one thing I do know, thanks to analytics, is that our dear readers like stuff that says “NSFW” with a hint of the naughty, the naked, and the red.

So maybe red does mean sex?

I mean just look at the amount of red splashed out on the following selection of covers—it’s enough to give one hypertension. And note too how it was once seemly for megastars like Jayne Mansfield, Burt Reynolds, and Joan Collins to appear on the cover or even naked in the centerfold of such glossy, adult entertainment mags.

And last but certainly not least, these covers offer a potted history of porn mags. From when once adult magazines were about artful erotic photographs and great writing (by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, George V. Higgins, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, interviews with writers like William (Lord of the Flies) Golding, and articles on the threat of the impending devastating weather changes and corruption in politics) the adult mag soon became just a selection of close-up hardcore pix which might not have looked out of place in a medical textbook (Gynecology 101?) and very little readable content. It was, I guess you could say, rather prescient of how our world has moved from text to pictograph and hieroglyph (emoji) via technology.

But, anyway, this is all a by-the-way to sneak in a few saucy vintage covers for your seasonal entertainment.
 

Joan Collins on the cover of Playboy, Xmas 1983.
 

Don’t be fooled by technical side of Practical Photography, 1965.
 

Jayne Mansfield on the cover of Variedades, 1956.
 
More saucy covers, after the jump…
 

Patti never made the Playboy scene, but she was a CREEM Dream at some point in the late 70s

Bebe Buell was one of the most famous rock and roll girlfriends of the 1970s (she doesn’t like the term groupie, calling Pamela Des Barres’ scene in L.A. “West Coast crap”). Her first relationship with a rock star came when she dated Paul Cowsill of the Cowsills; she was 16 at the time. During the 1970s she also had romantic involvements with Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, and Jimmy Page. Famously, she gave birth to Steven Tyler’s daughter but knowingly named her with the “wrong” name Liv Rundgren to shield her from Tyler’s addiction problems. Although Todd Rundgren and Buell were breaking up around around the time of Liv Tyler’s birth, Rundgren committed to the deception and for years did not divulge that he wasn’t Liv Tyler’s biological father. Liv Tyler herself didn’t know the truth until she was nine years old.

One of the major turning points in Buell’s life was becoming the Playboy Playmate of the Month in November 1974. She didn’t need Playboy to date Rundgren, whom she’d already been seeing for a couple of years. (In her Playmate Fact Sheet, she lists “My boyfriend, Todd Rundgren” under “Favorite Performer.”) While posing in Playboy probably didn’t help her recording career any, it did have the effect of elevating her status among the rock elite—as she said, after “I did Playboy ... the rock stars came-a-hunting.”
 

 
Another notable woman living in NYC at that time was Patti Smith, who had yet to record any music under her name. She also had some fairly serious dalliances with Rundgren, and was also friendly with Buell. According to Buell in the essential oral history of punk Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, it was actually Smith who convinced Buell that she should say yes to Playboy.

More interestingly, Smith would have been totally down with posing for Playboy herself.

Here’s Buell on the subject:
 

The person that talked me in to posing for Playboy magazine was Patti Smith. At the time I was doing well as a cover-girl model for Revlon, Intimate, and Wella. I had four or five big accounts. But my role models weren’t models. I admired girls like Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, those were the girls I looked up to and aspired to be like.

So when Playboy asked me to pose, Patti said, “I wish Playboy would ask me, I’d do it.” Patti had really big boobs, a lot of people don’t realize that. She was extremely well-endowed and she always thought that kind of stuff was really cool. She showed me pictures of Brigitte Bardot, Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, and all these Playboy pictures. She’d say, “Being in Playboy is like Coca-Cola. It’s Andy Warhol. It’s American, you know, it’s part of America, this magazine.” She said, “Do it. It’ll be great. It’ll fuck up that fashion thing.”

-snip-

Patty’s idea of feminism seemed to me to be about not being a victim–-that women should make choices in full control of their faculties and make a rebel stand.

Posing for Playboy was a rebel move. It almost ruined my career as far as legitimate Fashion work went. The only magazines that ould book me after that were like Cosmopolitan and stuff. I lost all my bread-and-butter clients. I lost Avon and Butterick. All the straight fashion magazines stopped booking me.

But how could I regret it?

 
So there you have it. Patti Smith, of course, did not end up ever posing for Playboy but instead released Horses in 1975 and eventually became an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Monique St. Pierre, Playmate of the Year, June 1979.
 
Marilyn Monroe was the first Playboy cover girl featured in the magazine in December 1953. That copy of Playboy wasn’t actually dated as publisher and editor Hugh Hefner didn’t know if there would ever be a second issue. Marilyn was also the magazine’s first “Sweetheart of the Month,” a title which changed to “Playmate of the Month” with Playboy’s second issue in January 1954 when Margie Harrison became the magazine’s first ever centerfold. Marilyn’s iconic photo spread only appeared over pages 16-18. Since then, Playmate of the Month has continued right on up to present day with Elsie Hewitt featured as Playmate of Month for June 2017 and Brooke Power featured on the cover as Playmate of the Year.

There was a well-told urban myth about the glamorous Playmates featured on the cover that claimed they were given a marking, out of twelve, according to Hefner’s tastes. This was based on the stars printed on the cover either on or next to the letter “P” of Playboy. This rumor alleged Hef was giving “stars” for either the cover girl’s looks, or performance in bed, or even how many times the old goat had slept with her. This was never true. The stars which appeared on the cover between 1955 and 1979 denoted regional or international advertising for that particular issue.

Playboy is now synonymous with America and American values as Mom’s apple pie, the Stars and Stripes, and Abraham Lincoln. That Hefner’s magazine and his multi-million dollar porn industry have achieved such a strange (shall we call it?) respectability says much about the dynamic changes in culture and morals over the past six decades.

A selection of Playmates was recently offered the opportunity to replicate their iconic covers some thirty years on from their original appearance. Playmates Candace Collins, Monique St. Pierre, Cathy St. George, Charlotte Kemp, and Reneé Tenison, among others, were photographed by Ben Miller and Ryan Lowry as part of this project. As can be seen from the photographs below, the results are quite incredible.
 

Monique St. Pierre, 2017.
 

Candace Collins, Playmate, February 1979.
 
More then and now Playboy Playmates, after the jump…
 

 
Of all the places on earth that I know to be real, the Playboy Mansion is the one that in my mind, probably features as fictional. Sure, there’s a Playboy Mansion but—it has an actual address? Someone pays the heating bill? People actually go there? One thing I discovered while researching this post is that Google Maps will not give a result for the search input “Playboy Mansion”—but of course, they do have it.

Yes, the Playboy Mansion does exist, tucked between Westwood and Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. Playboy bought the 21,987-square-foot house in 1971, and the house features a wine cellar with a secret door dating from Prohibition, a screening room with a built-in pipe organ, a game room, three zoo/aviary buildings, facilities for tennis and basketball, a waterfall, and a swimming pool area, which has a patio and barbecue area, a grotto, a basement gym with a sauna below the bathhouse. The grounds include a large koi pond with an artificial stream, a small citrus orchard, and two forests.

Clearly, they chose well…..

2016 was a pivotal year in the history of the legendary empire built on masturbation, what with Playboy ceasing publication of nudes as well as announcing the sale of the Mansion for $100 million. In effect we can say that the “Playboy era” may have definitively come to a close, all the more bizarre that this would happen the same year that Donald Trump would secure the White House.

Shortly before the sale of the house, Hugh Hefner gave well-respected photographer Jeff Minton permission to photograph the house and the property exhaustively, and Minton took full advantage, taking nearly 6,000 photographs. Minton believes that Hefner became interested in hiring Minton based on Minton’s picture of a monkey that had appeared in New York magazine, and suitably enough, Minton commenced his photographic tour of the Mansion with “Hugh’s monkeys” and went from there.

Minton’s goal is to generate “the most comprehensive look at the mansion ever, down to the smallest details.” Minton’s strategy was to stay away from what might be called “explicit” material in favor of odd glimpses of forgotten corners that prompt speculation about who chose to place that particular object in that setting or what was happening just outside the frame.

For those who have never been to the Playboy Mansion, Minton’s photographs provide a fascinating insight into the creation of what is arguably the most hedonistic estate on earth.
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....

 
I feel like the world would be a better place if more artists and designers had an attitude like Hattie Stewart. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, and she treats the world of pop culture like her own personal playground. Last year she posed for pictures wearing a shirt of her own design that was studded with fake logos for acts like Miley Cyrus, in a style she termed “death metal meets Britney Spears.”

Speaking of which, here’s one of Stewart’s scurrilous “doodle-bombs” on a cover featuring the über-twerker. She also has odd little tattoos on her wrists.

Stewart’s work reminds me of Pee-wee’s Playhouse meets the Paul Frank monkey—painted by Keith Haring. On mescaline.

In this series Stewart takes disrespectful aim at some vintage Playboys, including covers that Harry Crane on Mad Men probably, ah, “enjoyed looking at.”
 

 

 
More Playboy “doodle-bombs” after the jump…....

 
Sorry folks, if you thought you were going to see Dolly Parton naked—it just ain’t gonna happen. Under no circumstance was Dolly ever going to show her goods in the October 1978 issue of Playboy. Here’s what she had to say about the whole “taking it all off” for the men’s magazine during an interview she did with Lawrence Grobel in 1978:

I got kind of scared when I thought they wanted me to do something … I didn’t want to be naked on the front of a magazine unless everybody would know it was a joke. I wouldn’t want to be naked even then.

In 2014 Dolly was asked again to pose for Playboy but, “she passed this time around, saying it wouldn’t be appropriate because of the work she now does with children and the Imagination Library, her charity that supports childhood literacy.”

Now let’s forget about Dolly and Playboy and focus on that damned rabbit. That has to be one of the most sinister-looking rabbit costumes I’ve ever seen. What the hell were they thinking?

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Roman Polanski’s first film after the horrific murder of his wife Sharon Tate and their friends at 10050 Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, in 1969 was a reworking of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Polanski said the murders had traumatised him to such an extent that making movies seemed utterly pointless.

I couldn’t think of a subject that seemed worthwhile or dignified enough to spend a year or more on it, in view of what happened to me.

That may sound extremely pompous, but I couldn’t make another suspense story. And I certainly couldn’t make a comedy: I couldn’t make a casual film.

Polanski suffered a severe depression. He was deranged with grief and felt a terrible guilt for what had happened. He abandoned the film he had been working on, The Day of the Dolphin, but eventually he started to tentatively look for a subject of substance worthy of his attention. He had once had an ambition to make a film based on one of Shakespeare’s plays. Together with the writer and critic Kenneth Tynan he began adapting Macbeth for the screen.

This dark film of witchcraft and brutal, bloody murder was considered too close to the recent events in Polanski’s life for any Hollywood studio to produce. The director therefore approached a friend, Victor Lownes, who was a senior executive with Playboy. Lownes had been partying with Polanski the night of the Manson murders. He had also produced Monty Python’s first theatrical film And Now For Something Completely Different. Lownes secured $1,500,000 from Hugh Hefner to make Macbeth.

Polanski and Tynan refused to cast the expected middleaged Shakespearean actors in the lead roles opting instead for the relatively unknown Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis as his wife, with Martin Shaw as Banquo and Terence Bayler as MacDuff. Polanski had met Finch on a plane journey and was mesmerized by the young actor’s charisma. Finch was then best known for his television work, while Annis had at one time been considered the next Elizabeth Taylor. In fact Taylor herself briefly took the actress “under her wing.” She had also modelled and was friends with a many of London’s music scene—including Jimi Hendrix.

Filming took place during some of the worst weather imaginable in Wales and the north of England. The weather along with Polanski’s perfectionism and his insistence on multiple takes caused a $600,000 overspend. On its release, the critics were overly harsh—either damning it with feint praise or like Pauline Kael, impolitely suggesting that the excessive violence in the film was Polanski’s way of exorcising his wife’s murder. The film was bleak, unrelentingly so, with an ambiguously downbeat ending. However, it was also far, far better than any critic gave it credit for, and Polanski was more in tune with a younger audience who were coming of age at the start of the 1970s against a background of Vietnam, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and terrorism across Europe and the Middle East.
 

 

 
More ‘Macbeth’ after the jump…

 
These delightful scans of the Playboy Club Bunny Manual of 1968 come from “Bunny Regina,” who worked at the Detroit Playboy Club from July 1968 (if her inscription is any indication) to sometime in 1969. Maybe Debbie Harry can dig hers out as well? After all, she was a Bunny at New York City’s Playboy Club from 1968 to 1973. (If you’d like more information about that weird institution of the Playboy Club that was so culturally iconic in the 1960s and 1970s, check out The Bunny Years: The Inside Story of the Playboy Clubs and the Women Who Worked as Bunnies by Kathryn Leigh Scott.)

“The Bunny has become what the Ziegfeld girl was to another generation,” burbles the introduction with evident pride. Here are some of the rules and so forth Bunnies had to master:

No fraternization, either with “other employees of the Club” or with “Keyholders.” ... “She is also not permitted to give her last name, home address or phone number.” No chewing gum or eating while on duty, no alcohol consumption while “in the Club.” No drinking of “soft drinks, lemonade or even water” while one is “in view of keyholders and guests.” (Backstage is OK.) Bunnies get one free meal per day worked.

There’s a whole merit/demerit system that smacks a lot of the military, or at least a military school. You earn merits by working on your day off when the club needs a replacement, working a private party, or transferring to another club when management needs it. (These merits do turn into hard cash, by the way.) There are lots of actions that bring one demerits, including tardiness, failure to attend a “Bunny Meeting,” poor service, untidy lockers, and so forth. The most eye-popping reason for a demerit is “repeated costume offenses,” which include improper positioning of bunny ears (yes, this is totally in there) and “unkept tail,” which while suggestive in that spelling almost certainly was supposed to say “unkempt.”

Then there’s smoking. The rule about smoking is so important that it is set in ALLCAPS: “IN ALL CASES WHEN A BUNNY IS SMOKING WHILE ON DUTY, SHE IS TO ‘TAKE A PUFF’ AND SET THE CIGARETTE IN AN ASHTRAY. BUNNIES ARE NOT TO STAND OR SIT HOLDING A CIGARETTE.”

If you’re a Bunny, all sorts of things are tax-deductible, so keep your receipts! Legitimate tax deductions include “bunny hose,” wigs, cuff links, and cosmetics.

You can get these images in a slightly larger format at the Ex Playboy Bunnies Website.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

January 1982
 
Art Spiegelman is about as close as you can come to an eminence grise in the comix game. As the co-editor of Raw in the 1980s (his wife Françoise Mouly was the other co-editor), Spiegelman injected the U.S. underground comix scene with a healthy dose of intellectual experimentation, introducing such talents to the country as Chris Ware, Joost Swarte, Mark Newgarden, and Charles Burns. In 1991 Spiegelman completed his autobiographical years-long project Maus—if you haven’t read it you really should. Not for nothing did it become the first “graphic novel,” as the terminology had it and fitfully still has it, to win the Pulitzer Prize. Since that time Spiegelman spent several years as art director for the New Yorker and published several high-quality works like In the Shadow of No Towers, Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, and Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! He has the credibility that only roots in the underground scene can give you, he’s blended high art and low art (he was also involved with the creation of Garbage Pail Kids, for instance), and he’s generally a walking encyclopedia of comix history and lore. In 2008 I saw Spiegelman give a presentation on “Comics 101” as part of the New Yorker Festival, and it was a delight.
 

 
Raw existed from 1980 through 1991, and it must have been quite a challenge for Spiegelman and Mouly to pull off the publication of such an ambitious and infamously large-format book in Soho, one that surely had a host of printing issues most magazines don’t have to worry about (having their own dedicated printing press surely helped with that). Fortunately, to help pay the bills, Spiegelman was doing freelance work for Playboy from 1978 to 1982. I’ll bet those checks with the little rabbit in the corner (??) sure came in handy. 

His first cartoon for Playboy was a wordless 12-panel item called “Shaggy Dog Story” in the January 1979 issue about a woman having sex with a dog. Maybe not content-wise, but visually at least it wouldn’t look out of place in Raw, which isn’t necessarily true of his other work for Playboy—it has a jagged look that evokes ... something earlier and continental, not art nouveau but something similar. Most of Spiegelman’s cartoons for Playboy came in the form of a running series called “Edhead,” which depicted the adventures of a poor fellow who consists of a head but no body—that ran through most of 1979, then stopped until two further strips in 1981. In the January 1982 issue Spiegelman and Lou Brooks did a large panel of “Teasers” full of sophomoric jokes. My favorite thing he did for Playboy was a one-off four- (or eight-)panel strip called “Jack ‘n’ Jane/Rod ‘n’ Randy,” which is so elegantly complex that you can practically see the germ for Chris Ware’s entire future career in it. The idea is that every frame is divided into two; in the top frame a man and a woman converse, and in the bottom frame you get a parallel dialogue between the man’s penis and the woman’s vagina. OK, so maybe it isn’t exactly Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary—it’s still pretty impressive for a few square inches of real estate in the back of a nudie magazine…..

(Click on the images for a larger version.)
 

October 1979
 

December 1978
 

February 1979
 

March 1979
 

April 1979
 
Several more “Edheads” and a rejected Playboy parody for Wacky Packages, after the jump…...

 
Of all the Venn diagrams in the world, I suspect I can forgo the one showing Hello Kitty/Playboy demographic overlap. I’m guessing it would consist mainly of creepy guys as well as cooler women who don’t give a damn what people think of them. I’m OK with the second group…...

French retailer Colette recently announced a new line of products mashing up two of the most recognizable (if oddly matched) brands on earth.

Here’s RocketNews24’s report:

French clothing and accessories retailer Colette is introducing a line of Hello Kitty x Playboy items, including candy, mirrors, memo notes, lighters, mugs, Leica cameras, iPhone cases, socks, bowties, boxers, shirts, and more. Naturally, the items sport one of two perfect logo mashups—Kitty wearing bunny ears, and the Playboy bunny with a bow on one ear.

The collaboration was celebrated last Friday at Paris’ Crazy Horse cabaret, with Hello Kitty designer Yuko Yamaguchi in attendance, who said the new design was “really sexy cool.” Also in attendance was Colette creative director and purchasing manager Sarah Andelman, who spear-headed the campaign.

Although the club typically includes a variety of topless acts, all of that night’s entertainment was PG. After all, it’s still Hello Kitty.

 
That the event was held at a strip club that had to be made “PG” for the evening might have been a warning sign that went unheeded.

Having said that, if you want to wear a $274 Hello Kitty/Playboy-branded bowtie, I’m not going to judge you for it. (Well, I probably will judge you for it, but here’s to hoping you have other fine qualities.) And actually, context is everything, if you’re a super cool hipster librarian lady, you really can buy and display any and all of these products, go for it!
 

Portable speaker, €40 ($54.94)
 

iPhone case 5/5S, €25 ($34.34)
 

Bowtie, €200 ($274.72)
 

Lighter, €5 ($6.87)
 

Lollipops, €5 ($6.87)
 

Temporary tattoos, €6 ($8.24)
 

Bonbons, €1 ($1.37)
 

Coffee mug, €12 ($16.48)
 

Dice game, €10 ($13.74)
 

Multicolored ballpoint pens, €4 ($5.49)
 
via RocketNews24

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
I Have No Mouth, But I Must Drink: Hello Kitty Wine
Laurie Anderson gets her young feminist mind blown by a Playboy Bunny

 
From the March, 1968 issue of Playboy featuring the art of body painting.

 

 

 
(via Nistagmus)

 
Speculating on how an 85-year-old Lenny Bruce would be celebrating his birthday today is as fun as it is pointless.

But it’s pretty easy to guess that edgy comedy’s patron saint would not have been able to stretch out casually on TV for 25 minutes in conversation with a legendary publisher and lifestyle creator like the Hef.

That’s what happened in 1959 on the first episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, Hugh Hefner’s first foray into TV, which broadcast from WBKB in his Chicago hometown. This was the first mass-market exposure of the erstwhile club-bound Bruce, and its high-end hepness set the tone for the show’s two-season run, which featured a ton of figures in the jazz culture scene.

Of course, the dynamic between the eloquent snapping-and-riffing Long Islander Bruce and the perennially modest Midwestern Hefner is classic as the comedian covers topics like “sick” comedy, nose-blowing, Steve Allen, network censorship, tattoos & Jews, decency wackos, Lou Costello, integration, stereotypes, medicine and more.
 

 
Part II | Part III | Part IV

 
As everyone probably knows by now, Marge Simpson appears on the current cover of Playboy.  In order to capitalize, I suppose, on this pop-cultural moment, The Huffington Post launched a “Who’s Hotter?” slide show contest whereby its readers could rank their favorite, “celebrity models—from actresses to TV personalities to still-hot supermodels-turned moms.”

Well, as the eagle-eyed folk at Sociological Images note: “Ironically, the slide show did not contain the Playboy cover that inspired the Simpson drawing.  Behold Darine Stern (above), the first black woman on the cover of Playboy (1971). “

And, for those of you keeping score, other than Marge’s “yellow,” the HuffPo’s slide show was composed exclusively of white women.