Hugh
Hefner died September 27, 2017, but mass market sex magazines died fifteen
years earlier. Hefner created an industry, like Steve Jobs. That doesn’t mean
he was alone. Innovation in magazines or films or any other kind of
popular culture is similar to creativity in other fields. Sex may be the topic
but how it gets presented comes from what happens when networks spin off,
experienced personnel circulate, and rivals imitate and jockey for position with
each other. A good way to trace this process is the field of men’s magazines
from the 1950s through the 80s when it had huge circulation and made big
fortunes. An entry point into the network is Hugh Hefner and Playboy Magazine.
Road map:
Similarities and networks between
Esquire and Playboy
Life-spans of US magazines and
generational die-offs
Evolution in the men’s magazine
niche
Sex work markets
Tie-ins between sex magazines and
film
Summary of sex models’ career
patterns
Two dimensions of porn: How much
sex; Beauty / wealth
Who made the big fortunes in sex?
Does creativity work the same way
in all fields?
Similarities and networks between
Esquire and Playboy
Hefner
worked for Esquire Magazine before he started Playboy in 1953. Esquire was the
elite men’s magazine of its time, publishing a mixture of men’s fashion, short
stories by famous writers, and sex mostly in the form of cartoons by pin-up
artists of the 1940s. Playboy followed the same format. Its main innovation was
adding a glossy color photo of
semi-nude women. This was a detachable centerfold fold-out, that could
be hung up like World War II pin-ups or the calendars that followed. This would
evolve.
For the
outset, look at Esquire at the end of the 1940s and early 50s, with Playboy
overlapping:
Logo: Since its origin in 1934, Esquire always featured on its
cover a cartoon figure of a balding, pop-eyed gentleman. Playboy created a
similarly light-hearted logo, a rabbit dressed in tuxedo or other
tweedy/debonair clothes. The bunny, of course, “breeds like a rabbit.” Esquire was an honorific title for a
wealthy gentleman, although depicted humorously as a “sugar daddy” or “dirty
old man.”
 |
| Esquire covers 1934-1951 |
 |
| Esquire 1951, Playboy 1955 |
Some of
Playboy’s early covers were close imitations of an Esquire cover. Here they
depict the dating game, Playboy’s looking surprisingly like a women’s romance
magazine:
 |
| Esquire 1952, Playboy 1956 |
Fashion and upscale consumption: Esquire’s content from the beginning was very
fashion-oriented. Playboy updated to current styles and new products. When
long-playing, high-fidelity records came on the market in the late 1950s,
Playboy ran photos of well-dressed party scenes featuring records and hi-fi
equipment:
 |
| May 1959 Playmate of the Month posed at a record party |
And
sometimes undressed, tripping out on music and wine:
 |
| July 1959 Playmate Yvette Vickers listening to jazz |
Modern
jazz had been around since the late 40s, but was an esoteric scene and fell
into the background in the mid-50s with the explosion of popular rock ‘n
roll. Hefner pushed jazz as a more
adult and upscale version of hipness, featuring regular jazz reviews and
sponsoring jazz festivals. Since jazz musicians were heavily black, Hefner’s
parties became a beacon for social integration at the time of the civil rights
movement-- and gave legitimacy while the magazine was moving the nudity
frontier.
Literature: It became something of a joke to say that you read a men’s
magazine for the articles. But in fact Esquire was one of the chief literary
magazines of its day, publishing Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and
André Gide. Playboy carried on,
publishing short stories by the new generation-- Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov,
John Updike; sci-fi writers like Arthur Clarke; feminists Doris Lessing and
Margaret Atwood. Esquire kept pace
with Playboy for a while on the sex front, but as nude photos became more
prominent, Esquire switched course and in the 1960s became the exponent of
so-called “New Journalism” blending reportage and first-person fiction
techniques by writers like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Tim O’Brien. The
magazines were dividing into separate niches.
Cartoons and pin-ups: But not yet in the mid-50s. Esquire had been running risqué
cartoons for years. Now they morphed into Playboy’s photographic version of the
same scenes:
 |
| 1954 Esquire cartoon; 1955 Playboy centerfold |
In the
1940s, Esquire regularly carried sexy pin-up art by famous artists Alberto
Vargas and George Petty. Up through the late 1950s, it produced an annual
calendar, with a pin-up for each month.
Playboy continued to feature not only sexy cartoons but some of the same
artists:
 |
| 1954 Esquire calendar; 1971 Playboy pin-up art by Vargas |
It was
the pin-up connection that created Playboy’s sensational debut in December
1953. In a later interview, Hefner said everyone had heard about Marilyn
Monroe’s nude calendar, but no one had seen it. It had been shot in 1949 when
she was a bit-part actress, and printed by a company that made hang-up
calendars carrying custom-made local advertisements. By 1952 Marilyn was a
rising star with a buzz about her early nudity. Hefner found out that her
photos were owned by a calendar company in the outskirts of Chicago, and talked
them into selling the rights for $500 (about $4500 in today’s dollars). Playboy’s first issue, with Marilyn as
centerfold, sold out at 50,000 copies. Her career as a sex star rocketed, as
did Playboy’s reputation-- the following issues selling even better as
distribution expanded.
 |
| 1946 Varga pin-up in Esquire calendar; 1953 Monroe centerfold |
There
were network connections on both sides. Marilyn’s pose-- torso in profile, arm
up, head back as if gazing out over her bare armpit-- is virtually the same as
Vargas’ pin-up from 1946. Tom Kelley, the Hollywood photographer who did the
shoot with Marilyn in 1949 had no doubt seen Vargas’ work. Marilyn posed extensively both for
photographers and pin-up artists in her early career:
 |
| Marilyn posing for Earl Moran pin-up |
Marilyn
had even posed for a 2-page color
photo in Esquire in 1951. (Playboy’s centerfolds would be 3-page.) But it
attracted no particular attention; it wasn’t nude, the color wasn’t
particularly good, and there was no publicity build-up around it. When Hefner’s
turn came, he made a point of telling wholesalers and distributers nationally
that “some of the guys from Esquire had stayed behind and were creating this
great new magazine” (2003 interview) and that it would include the Marilyn
Monroe calendar pictures.
 |
| Esquire 1951 photo of Marilyn |
So how
did Hefner know how to locate the original rights? He had been working for
Esquire in promotion, but quit when the magazine headquarters moved from Chicago
to New York. Hefner became circulation manager for Chicago companies that
produced a variety of magazines, including art photography and men’s magazines.
These gave him the crucial links-- the big hurdle for any new product being
distribution. But what did he have to sell? The same grapevine brought him the
info that rights to the Monroe calendar were owned by a local company. This too
was not an accident, as many of the notable pin-up artists of the time worked
in Chicago, and the main distributers of calendars were in the same part of the
country. Hefner came up at the heart of a dense network. And he started early,
producing a high school magazine about movies and radio shows, and editing a
college humor magazine at University of Illinois.
Such were
the ingredients that came together at Chicago at the turn of the 1950s: a
publishing center for many national magazines; a center for magazine and pin-up
artists and calendar publishers; a famous men’s magazine, Esquire, that had
successfully fought government censorship over semi-nude pin-ups, and whose
employees included some ready to go in a new direction.
 |
| 1946 trial: Attorney for U.S. Post Office asks Methodist bishop for opinion about obscenity of Vargas pin-up |
The
public atmosphere was changing. The Kinsey reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, came out in 1949 (reviewed by
Hefner in his college magazine), with the second volume Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. It was becoming legitimate to talk
about sex.
One more
factor coincided in the mix: color photography was starting to come into its
own. News and art photographers had used black and white since the beginning of
the 20th century; as in movies, color photography was expensive and the colors
were garish and unnatural. Printing on glossy paper was expensive. (Pin-up
calendars used cheap paper.) For technical reasons, even pin-up artists like
Gil Elvgren who took color photos of the model referred to them in order to do
his painting, which in turn would sell as pin-ups but also for advertisements
(like Coca-Cola) and for mainstream magazine covers. By the mid-1950s, it was
feasible for Playboy to print a glossy color fold-out, but too expensive to
have more than one full-size color photo per issue. The rest of Playmate of the
Month feature (on the back side of the fold-out) would consist of
black-and-white photos-- in Hefner’s marketing ploy, these were not sexual but
showed her in ordinary scenes such as a college girl. As the 60s wore on, color
photography became less expensive, and the quality improved to where it could
out-do the best black-and-white photographs. The number of photo features in
Playboy began to increase. This would be a major point of competition when it
faced a new set of rivals in the 1970s.
Life-spans of US magazines and
generational die-offs
Magazines
are born; the successful ones expand, reach a peak, and eventually decline and
disappear. The beginning and end points tend to cluster, implying something
external is happening to the entire field at particular historical moments.
 |
| US general interest magazines timeline |
The big
mass-circulation magazines clustered in two generations. Collier’s Magazine and Saturday Evening Post started in
the late 1800s, and rose to over 1 million per issue in the beginning of the
20th century. Up through the 1930s they competed over the top position at close
to 3 million. Both had famous artists doing their covers and illustrations
(Norman Rockwell at Saturday Evening Post; Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the
Gibson Girl pin-up, at Collier’s). Famous writers provided short stories or
serialized their novels-- Sherlock Holmes stories, Jack London, Faulkner, Scott
Fitzgerald, later Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger; humor from Ring Lardner and
P.J. Wodehouse; science fiction from Ray Bradbury; mysteries from Agatha
Christie; cartoonists like Charles Addams and Bill Mauldin. Winston Churchill
reported on World War I, Hemingway on WWII. After the war these family
magazines started losing money and readers, and closed in the late 1950s and
60s.
In the
mid-1930s came another burst: Esquire in 1933, Life in 1936, Look in 1937. The
latter two were photojournalism, with large staffs of photographers covering
news, entertainment celebrities, and human interest, publishing weekly in
black-and-white. In the 1940s and early 50s Life boomed to 13.5 million. Its
close imitator Look lagged behind but in the 1960s both leveled out around 8
million. Losing advertisers and readers, their circulation were still an
impressive 5.5 - 6.5 million when they closed down in the early 1970s.
In a
separate category was Reader’s Digest, a monthly that excerpted books and other
magazines. It started slowly in the 1920s, but by the 1980s led all magazines
at around 18 million, and was still on top as it declined in the 1990s and went
bankrupt in 2009 with a still impressive 5.5 million. Reader’s Digest was
immune to generational trends, buffered by sampling what others were publishing
at the time, which made it into a kind of index fund of the publishing
business.
The
dying off of Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post was widely attributed to
television becoming almost universal during the 50s. (TV also brought the
demise of national radio networks and their comedy and drama shows. This in
turn freed up radio for independent stations, which now promoted rock ‘n roll
and the youth culture of the late 50s and 60s.) Despite TV, the second wave of magazines, the photojournalism founded
in the mid-30s, did well into the 60s, before collapsing in the early 70s. The
outburst of men’s sex magazines in the early 70s coincides with this dying off.
The new men’s mags were photo magazines too, except in color instead of
black-and-white; and with a decidedly different kind of appeal than family
magazines. *
* The
older men’s magazines like True, Argosy, and Stag were about hunting, fishing,
and outdoor life. That
“male” world was declining, as farms disappeared and population became increasingly
urban and college-educated.
The
decline of Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post reflected a shift in public
ethos. The latter’s conservative politics and glorification of old fashioned
small-town lifestyle attracted a diminishing number of readers. Popular authors
moved to other magazines (like Esquire), and the older magazines economized by
publishing more on current events (bringing them into competition with news
magazines) and replacing artists’ illustrations with photos for covers and
advertisements. This is the same as the shift away from pin-ups and cartoons in
men’s magazines; underlying both was less the growth of TV than the maturing
techniques of color photography and color printing.
Collapse
of the big photojournalism magazines also came from being caught in a cultural
transition. Life see-sawed as it lost revenue, publishing articles in the late
60s describing LSD and the psychedelic youth culture, but this alienated their
conservative readers and advertisers. It also had trouble covering the civil
rights movement, the assassinations and riots of the mid-60s onwards, and the
anti-Vietnam War movement. Exposés offended traditionalists accustomed to the
uniform patriotism of World War II and its aftermath. Damned if you print and
damned if you don’t, either way photojournalism lost.
The
failing magazines still had quite respectable circulation while they went into
financial crisis; some, like Life and Look, went out with closing numbers above
the peak of virtually all magazines in U.S. history. In a business where
advertising is the income difference-maker, gross numbers are less important
than any downward trend. Ad agencies are above all a network of the buzz,
driven by crowd-following emotional flows, and are the first to desert a sinking
ship.
Evolution in the men’s magazine
niche
Among
the generational births and die-offs, Playboy is an anomaly, starting in 1953
during a trough for other successful start-ups. But we can see it as a spinoff
and continuation of Esquire, of the mid-1930s generation. For a while they
share the same sex-plus-literature-plus-lifestyle niche, but in the 60s Esquire
becomes the hot center of current literary movements, while Playboy becomes a
sex mag. Esquire dying in 1977 (to be sold and later reinvented in various
forms) fits the die-off pattern of the older generation magazines.
Hefner
made his way cautiously through the 1950s, while a sexual revolution was slowly
building up. One sign was the growing divorce rate: by the 1960s half of all
marriages were ending in divorce. The Kinsey Reports revealed that even earlier
a substantial portion of Americans had sex before marriage, although they kept
it hidden. Sex was separating from marriage. Sex was already much looser in
Europe, especially in Scandinavia. Erotic literature was published in Paris,
even when people had to sneak it through customs into English-speaking
countries. Around 1960 censorship relaxed and Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were published in the US. Hemingway had already
published his “the earth moved” sex scene, and James Baldwin had written about
homosexual and interracial love. In this respect, mass magazines were the last
medium to join the sexual revolution.
In 1959
Hefner set up the first Playboy Club, where cocktail waitresses wore bunny
costumes (basically a one-piece bathing suit), and launched a late-night TV
show starring himself with a array of cool guests. He began to cultivate a
public image, surrounded by his Bunnies and Playmates, wearing three-piece
suits, smoking a pipe, and flying in a fur-lined plane. (Was this what Jane
Fonda was satirizing with her fur-lined space-craft in the Brigitte
Bardot-inspired 1968 film, Barbarella
?)
 |
| Hefner with Bunnies and girlfriend: 1966, 1970 |
Through the
1960s, Playboy gradually showed more nudity. A capsule summary of the
progression is illustrated by the annual New Year’s covers, in which the
Playboy rabbit displayed Playmate shots of the year as an art gallery. The first such cover in 1956 showed the
rabbit looking at a real art gallery, basically of Renoir-era nudes. Having
implied that it is all a matter of high (European) art, Hefner went on to
equate it to his centerfold art.
 |
| Playboy annual art gallery covers: 1956, 1958 |
Over the
next two decades, there was progressively less coyness, cover-up, and tease.
Leaving this aside for the moment, notice what happens to the Playboy
rabbit. In 1968 he is still
wearing a tuxedo-- proper evening dress. By 1971, he wears a cross between an
old-fashioned smoking jacket and lounging pajamas:
 |
| Playboy gallery covers: 1968, 1971 |
By 1973
the necktie is gone, and the rabbit is wearing a gold chain, open-necked shirt
and jacket-- the lounge lizard look. In 1977-- the last time Playboy ran its
annual gallery or had a full-sized rabbit on the cover-- he looks like a
mafia-type stud.
 |
| Playboy gallery covers: 1973, 1977 |
What
happened during the late 60s and 70s was informalization. Old-fashioned formal clothing
disappeared. Being casual and counter-cultural became the high status look,
then the new normal. Hefner’s image of the playboy-- the old Esquire
man-about-town, the millionaire with the sports car and the yacht-- was superseded.
Not that rich people weren’t still there, but they struggled like everyone else
to keep up with the fashion change. More than a fashion change, it was a change
in social manners and prestige-- looking like a rebel was the thing to be, even
if everyone else jumped onto the same rebel trip. In fact, the first move in
the style rebellion might have been started by women. The mini-skirt of the
late 1960s was a way to flaunt convention, and to shock prudish old ladies as
well as conservative men:
 |
| Topless bathing, mini-skirt, and disapproving looks: late 1960s |
This may
be a reason why young women in the second-wave feminist movement, challenging
convention by wearing tight jeans, living in hippie communes and flashing
nudity at rock concerts, threw themselves at first into the outburst of public
eroticism. Probably the most
widespread taboo to be broken during the years 1968-71 was living together
without being married. This used to be called “living in sin” and before 1950
it could get you blackballed by the kind of people who read the Saturday
Evening Post. But the change to what became called cohabiting was accepted with
amazing speed. Sociologists figured out it was similar to being married in most
respects except these couples didn’t have children, and they broke up even
faster than the rising divorce rate. The new pattern was serial monogamy; young
middle-class people had sex with a number of partners but usually just one for
each period of time. A few short-lived communes tried to practice free love,
but those quickly broke up over jealousy. Within a few years cohabiting couples
were accepted by their relatives and everyone else as the new normal.
The
ramifications of this sexual revolution would go on into following decades.
Until the 70s, children born out of wedlock were called “illegitimate”, and
this was considered the biggest of all scandals. But the taboo was already
broken in Scandinavia, with its socialist welfare for unemployed women and
their children. Gradually middle class white women started having children on
their own; in the lower classes, both white and black, this was already common
but now it affected the majority of children born. The practice was legitimated
by the radical feminist movement (although not initiated by them-- they were
just adding an ideological reason for an existing trend). The movement for
openly gay sex and gay partnering extended the sequence of liberalizations in
the 80s and 90s.
In this
atmosphere, it is not too surprising that sex magazines of the 1970s were breaking
taboo after taboo of what could be displayed in photos. Who knows where it
would end?
 |
| US sex magazines timeline and circulation |
Playboy’s monthly circulation had risen to 4 million by the end of the 1960s. A British magazine, Penthouse, decided to enter the US market in 1969, after its owner Bob Guccione discovered that he was outselling Playboy among American troops in Vietnam. Within a year Penthouse was selling over 1 million and rocketed to 3 million by 1972.
Journalists
started referring to the contest as the “Pubic Wars” in a pun on the Punic Wars
between ancient Rome and Carthage. Up to that time, the borderline between
nudity and obscenity was considered to be whether the photo showed pubic hair.
Penthouse began to encroach on this zone, at first with coy shots in mirrors,
strategically placed flowers or towels, side-angle views, by 1972 arriving at
full frontal nudity. Closely following suit, Playboy was surging in the
competition. In late 1972, it sold 7.2 million copies-- the second highest
circulation of any American magazine of any kind except TV Guide.
By 1973,
competition shifted downward. Legs started spreading for the camera, pubic hair
led to outer labia. Penthouse photographers became known for soft focus shots,
showing what might be obscene through blurred lenses and shadows. Guccione had
been an aspiring painter, from an Italian family in Brooklyn; he had tried
painting in Italy, then became a cartoonist and eventually editor of an
American weekly newspaper in London. He hooked up with the sex market when he
married a former dancer from a London strip club, who ran a business selling
pin-ups. In 1965 Guccione started Penthouse, using London club workers and
models, and recruiting uninhibited Scandinavians and Continentals. Lacking
funds to hire professional photographers, he taught himself photography, using
classic painting techniques of lighting and shadows and modeling himself on
Degas.
Penthouse
intruded into Playboy’s niche, with beautiful photographs, luxury settings made
lush with flowers and feminine fashion. Hefner claimed that Guccione had lifted
the title from his TV show, Playboy Penthouse. There was a change in emphasis.
Playboy’s centerfold shots-- initially the only full-color nudes in an issue--
were done in a studio, with elaborate lighting, luxury backdrops, beautiful
hair-dos and clothing. On the whole, they were smiling faces, a wholesome look
designed to contrast with cheap pornography. Any bodily flaws-- not just pubic
hair-- were carefully airbrushed away. Hefner had said from the outset his aim
was to show nice girls have sex lives too.* The black-and-white photos
surrounding the centerfold illustrated this by shots of the model in everyday
life, even pictures with her family while growing up. Penthouse, in contrast, was about sex all the time, showing
each model in a set of color photos, usually in an erotic (or auto-erotic)
reverie. The typical Playboy model was statuesque, strikingly beautiful, with
large and shapely breasts and perfect figure. Penthouse models, especially
before the magazine became rich, were less stunning but looked artistically
erotic through the combination of lush photo technique and pushing the pubic
frontier.
* The
classic good girl/bad girl contrast ran throughout the business of photography,
literature and film. Marilyn Monroe was initially type-cast by Hollywood as a
bad girl (The Asphalt Jungle, Don’t
Bother to Knock, Niagara). Her breakout came when she started getting roles
as a dumb blonde (neither of which she actually was), sexy but good-hearted (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year
Itch, Some Like It Hot, and the late, neglected film, The Prince and the Showgirl). The “girl next door” cliché
popularized by Hefner was essentially the good girl type.
Playboy
now was going the same route. Both magazines started showing couples making
love, the men always very handsome and fit and elite, in exotic locations and
costumes. Some were stills from film, some celebrity couples. Combined with
shadows and soft focus, couples sequences made the photos more erotic while
leaving the genitals covered because the bodies were in the way. By 1973, men’s
penises were being shown (although erections would be taboo for another
decade). Lesbian sex photos also became popular in both Penthouse and Playboy,
sometimes showing oral sex but at a distance and obscured by the position of
the bodies. Playboy tended to make its female duos playful and to bill them as
sisters (keeping up its nice-girl theme).
Using the same formula, in 1973 Penthouse launched a women’s magazine,
Viva, while a Playboy imitator launched Playgirl, mixing fashion with male
nudity. These never proved financially successful.
As the
market became increasingly erotic, Playboy worried about keeping its clean-cut
image, and decided to launch an edgier magazine to appeal to younger readers.
The plan was it would protect Playboy from going down the path where Penthouse
was heading, while giving access to its revenue. Oui was launched in 1972 as an
American version of the French magazine Lui, combining French content with recycled
Playmates in more revealing poses. Oui was an immediate success, jumping to 1
million. But the rest of the plan did not work out. Oui never made a profit on
the large amounts invested; it didn’t take market share from Penthouse, which
kept on growing; and it didn’t protect Playboy from being pulled into the
Penthouse path.
Competition
was becoming multi-sided, as more magazines entered the US market. Also in
1972, Gallery was launched. It was virtually a clone of Playboy, published in
Chicago, in a building right across the street. The owner even copied
Hefner’s mansion and lavish
lifestyle. It also had a celebrity tie-in, the co-owner being F. Lee Bailey, a famous criminal lawyer
who defended the Boston Strangler and later O.J. Simpson. Gallery was soon overwhelmed with expenses and was sold
in early 1974; it survived in a modest niche, and prospered in the 1990s in the
beauty/luxury slot when other magazines were turning to hard-core and quirky
sex variations. More fatefully, the Gallery start-up attracted the attention of
Larry Flynt, a working-class type who owned a string of strip club bars in
Ohio, patronized by factory workers going off shift. Flynt already had a cheap
black-and-white newsletter carrying photos of strippers at his clubs; and its
circulation was growing in the sex-charged atmosphere. His potential investment
in Gallery did not pan out, so Flynt started his own magazine in summer 1974,
Hustler.
By this
time, Penthouse and Oui (and less frequently Playboy) were publishing photos
that showed women with their legs spread and less air-brushing and shadows
between them.* Flynt brazenly advertised his new magazine as showing fully lit,
real women rather than retouched images, including “showing pink” -- labia in a
state of arousal. Advertisers
stayed away, but Flynt had plenty of cash flow from his profitable clubs; it
was even an advantage since advertisers could exert no pressure on what he
published.
*
Playboy showed more in feature articles such as reviewing sex in cinema (including
X-rated films), and “The Year in Sex” showing nude night clubs, beauty
contests, and nude beaches. It thought it could get away with this because the
photos were small rather than full page, “news” rather than original content,
while the iconic centerfold remained conservative by comparison.
The
first 12 months were a rocky beginning. Hustler could not afford good quality
paper or photography, and its models although sexually explicit were not
particularly attractive. Flynt aimed for a working-class atmosphere without
luxury settings, although as he got more money, he would waver back and forth
imitating Penthouse. By spring 1975, Hustler was running out of money and
almost folded. From a friend in the porn business, he heard about paparazzi
photos taken with a telephoto lens of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sun-bathing in
the nude, showing her pubic hair. Flynt bought the photos for $18,000 (about
$85,000 today) and published them in his July issue. It sold a million copies
and created a media flurry. Flynt had replicated what Hefner had done with the
Marilyn Monroe calendar in December 1953. Flynt was suddenly rich, and Hustler
was on its way to a peak circulation of 3 million at the end of the 1970s.
The
booming sex market attracted more magazines, growing to as many as 40
competitors. Most successful of the new entrants was Club, another British
magazine that entered the US market in 1975. Its publisher Paul Raymond ran a Paris-style nightclub in
London while ripping off the Playboy bunny motif. He had plenty of photo
material from his British clubs and magazines, while saving money by cutting
down on the articles and literature that Hefner and Guccione bought to keep up
their image. Club would become 4th or 5th in circulation behind the big three sex
mags. Club pushed the others by
expanding to four or more nude photo features per issue, with plenty of crotch
hair and open labia.
An even
more blatant way of testing public acceptability was Hustler’s monthly “Beaver
Hunt,” a contest in which readers sent in nude photos of girlfriends and wives
(and sometimes of themselves). In 1977 Gallery started a similar contest called
“The Girl Next Door ” with the winner getting $500 ($2000 in today’s dollars)
for a full-length layout, and a chance at the yearly Grand Prize of $5000
($20,000). Hustler offered $50 ($200) for a published picture, $750-1000
($3-4000) for a pictorial. Neither magazine had any lack of entries pushing the
boundaries of genital display.
Playboy
was riding high with 7.2 million sales of its November 1972 issue. But the peak
was passed, and by spring 1973 its circulation had declined to 6.7 million. By
1977, Playboy and Penthouse were tied at 4.5 million, the former falling, the
latter approaching its peak. (A single issue of Penthouse in September 1985
sold 5.4 million copies, containing old nude photos of the current Miss
America, made earlier in her life.) By the 1980s, everyone was declining.
Playboy held on better than the others, with 4.2 million in 1985, number 11 on
the list of best-selling US magazines, just below Time Magazine, and ahead of
Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, and Sports Illustrated. The same year Penthouse was
number 14, at 3.2 million.
In the
1980s, virtually all the sex magazines were losing advertising. Most now
carried nothing but ads for phone sex services. Through the 1990s, they relied
on the old formula of pushing the edge: now erections, close-ups of oral sex,
intercourse with explicit penetration, even pissing shots. It was a vicious
circle. The more extreme they became, the less advertising they got; their
circulations declined; they tried for something even more sensational. Long
before the Internet and its plethora of free sex sites, they were caught in a
spiral downward.
The
nearest to an exception was Playboy, whose circulation was still a respectable
3.1 million in 2004-- enough to be number 18 on the list of national magazines,
only a few slots below Time.
Playboy’s moment of crisis came early. In 1975, it published a cover
with a woman-- not nude-- but her legs spread in what would be a pornographic
pose, and her hand in her shorts while eating popcorn. Ostensibly it went along
with a feature on sex in the movies.
Playboy’s
executives had worried about the cover. Now they were concerned that retail
chains might refuse to display the magazine. This was a warning shot for
Playboy, which shifted back to more conservative covers, although its inside
pages continued, with some wavering, to keep not too far behind Penthouse. But
it had reached a frontier beyond which it would rarely go: essentially the
crotch-tease shots of Penthouse (and Playboy itself) around 1973. Into the
1980s and 90s Playboy published very beautiful women topless or in leg shots
like old-fashioned cheese-cake, avoiding the labia shots that filled rival
magazines. Advertising held up, running the same ads for liquor, cigarettes,
and music equipment that Playboy had since the 60s (and that Penthouse once
had-- but never Hustler).
By the
1990s and early 2000s, Penthouse was keeping itself going by selling Special
Editions consisting of models from previous years. Essentially without ads,
they kept expenses down by recycling their photo archives. By the late 90s,
Playboy was doing the same thing.
Sex-work markets
One
reason all the magazines had tended to converge on a similar erotic edge was
because their personnel circulated between them. Top photographers worked for several magazines. Jeff Dunas,
a master of the Penthouse style of diffused-light romantic pornography, left to
become chief photographer for Oui, in the rival Playboy stable. Playboy
photographer Suze Randall, who would get her models in the mood by stripping
along with them during a photo shoot, moved to Hustler and contributed photos
of herself made with a remote camera cord; later she worked for Penthouse. Some photographers, especially in Europe, would sell
pictures from the same photo shoot to different magazines by giving the model
different names. Particularly as the photos became more erotic, the bolder
models would move from Playboy to Penthouse, and vice versa, as well as
appearing in the now-numerous British magazines, and the foreign-language
editions that both magazines sold throughout Europe.
 |
| Playboy photographers Bunny Yeager (left, 1968); Suze Randall (right, 1976) |
Some
photographers started out in women’s high fashion magazines, doing
advertisements, covers and “editorials” (photo features). Stan Malinowski,
whose photos and covers appeared in Vogue and Cosmopolitan, worked for Playboy
and Penthouse in the 60s through the 80s. * The publisher of Lui (French
predecessor to Oui) began as a fashion photographer, moved successively to
radio, music producer, publisher of music magazines, and finally a sex mag.
Helmut Newton, a photographer for Vogue and other international magazines,
brought out a book of very pubic (but arty) black-and-white photos in 1982-- a
sign of the hyper-sexual atmosphere at the end of the 70s. Such cross-overs
help explain why photos in women’s fashion magazines in the 80s and 90s started
looking like pornographic poses, using the cover-up devices of men’s magazines
from the mid-70s.
*
Malinowski also did the Opium perfume ads of the 1980s, in the period of
“heroin chic.”
 |
| High-fashion advertisements: 1995, 2004 |
How did
sex-content producers get women to pose in a less-than-honorable but
high-visibility job? How is best answered, where did they recruit their
models? From the network of
adjacent types of sex work. If we define “sex work” as selling sexual
attraction for money, the field includes not just prostitutes and porn actors
but cocktail waitresses, fashion models, actors, singers, dancers and
showgirls; and these connected with networks in theatre, night clubs, film,
entertainment production and publicity. It was a community that normalized sex
work for at least part of the spectrum, facilitating gradual transition from
one type of sex work to the next. *
*
Marilyn Monroe, out of work in Hollywood in the late 1940s when her bit-part
film contracts were not renewed, sometimes traded sex for meals, temporarily at
the prostitution end of the sex-work spectrum. A 1996 Penthouse Pet had been a prostitute in the early 90s
in a (legal) brothel in Nevada, after starting out as a bikini-clad model at
NASCAR races.
A grocery
checkout clerk moved to London to try out for a job in the Playboy Club as a
Bunny. The club manager took nude photos of her and sent them to Hefner, who
flew her to Chicago. She became Playboy’s first full frontal nude centerfold in
1971, alternating as girlfriend to both Hefner and her London boss and
eventually marrying the latter. Another Bunny at the same club became
girlfriend of a famous disk jockey and later an American singer, and posed in
1971 Penthouse for a crotch-tease pubic shot. Penthouse’s earliest pubic bush shot was provided by a
fashion model married to photographer Clive McLean, who later went on to work
for Hustler. In 1975, a Playboy Books editor working on a collection with staff
photographer Pompeo Posar (a former colleague of Salvador Dali), posed for him
in the most explicit crotch shot Playboy would run.
Some
came from low-paying jobs. A Swedish woman with a 40-24-36 figure, working as a
nurse at London hospital, posed for Penthouse in 1973 with legs spread in broad
daylight on a deserted beach. Her picture was carried in subscription ads with
her bright red bathing suit rolled down to her waist. Suze Randall was another
London nurse who answered an ad for nude modeling, then decided to become a
photographer after discovering she wasn’t making a lot more money dancing in
clubs. She was 30 years old when she made the big time working for Playboy.
Penthouse
often got breakthrough photos to move through the stages of the Pubic Wars by
using hard-core porn actresses, under different names and dialing back from
what they did on screen. Playboy followed the same strategy in auxiliary
features on famous porn stars Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace. Deborah
Clearbranch moved from rural Georgia to California “trying to break into movies,”
became a topless go-go dancer and provided Penthouse with its first spread-legs
crotch shot. Next year she posed for brand-new Hustler with a black man with a
huge penis (probably a porn film performer himself). The pictorial got Larry
Flynt shot by a segregationist. She changed her name to Desirée Cousteau and
made hard-core films into the 80s.
Some
women moved from theatre into sex modeling. Demi Moore acted on Broadway, posed
for the cover of Oui and (under an assumed name) for a layout in a European sex
magazine in 1981 before getting the squeaky-clean TV role on the Demi Moore
show. Lori Wagner acted on Broadway, posed under an assumed name in
boundary-breaking shots for Penthouse in 1975, then quit her Broadway gig to
fly to Rome for a part in Caligula. She lost most of her speaking lines but got
a passionate lesbian oral sex scene. Hostile reaction to the film effectively
ended her career. Her co-star Anneka di Lorenzo struggled to get into
mainstream film, but her notoriety closed her out. She had been Penthouse Pet
of the Year in 1975, leading the way through a series of Punic War stages. “How
famous do I want to be?” she said. “Let’s just say I’m going to be the sexiest
woman in the world.” [IMDB bio]
The big
sex magazines claimed their models appeared in their own pages exclusively, but
in fact the most daring ones circulated among Playboy, Penthouse, Oui and
others. Early photos in British publications like Mayfair and Page Three didn’t
count, since these were considered minor league.
Models
for sex photos were often badly paid (Marilyn Monroe got $50 (about $500 today)
for her 1949 nude shots; photographer Tom Kelley got $500 ($5000); Hefner
parlayed it into millions. Fifty years later, a Playboy Playmate of the Month
got $25,000, and a chance for $100,000 as Playmate of the Year. At the extreme
end of the spectrum, Guccione paid Joanne Latham 70,000 pounds (about $600,000
today) because he wanted someone exceptional for Penthouse’s Tenth Anniversary
issue in 1979. Latham was a busty Brit who was currently the subject of a media
frenzy in England, repeatedly appearing as the Sun newspaper’s Page Three Girl,
and pursued by many magazines. Guiccione no doubt got carried away by the
English buzz, and he was bidding against Playboy at the height of Penthouse’s
circulation and income.
Sex
photos in major magazines held out prospects. Few models made it to the top,
but those who did publicized the possibility of rapid ascent. In this respect,
sex modeling was like fashion modeling, where large numbers of beautiful young
women congregated in Manhattan or London, attending runway tryouts and casting
calls. Ashley Mears’ book describes how aspiring models lived off hand-outs and
rent subsidies from agents, and in return were expected to provide publicity
and atmosphere at glitzy restaurants and clubs-- by being there on display, and
ceremonially carrying in huge bottles of champagne when the establishment was
entertaining a “whale” on a big expense account. Competition was especially
high since models tend to rapidly age out of their beauty peak, both in fashion
and in Playboy style. But even if one’s career never took off, they had a
period of adventure near the center of the action.
Not all
models were from the lower classes. In England, some of Penthouse’s boldest models
were from the aristocracy, attracted not by money but by membership in the hip
elite of the 70s, centered on drugs and antinomian self-presentation generally
(AKA the counter-culture). One was Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter.
Some sex
models moved to the other side of the camera. British model Joanie Allum
married a photographer and became a photographer herself, working for Club,
Mayfair, Gallery and others, with a knack for making fairly ordinary women look
highly erotic. Bob Guccione’s wife, Kathy Keeton, went from being a club
stripper, to Penthouse’s first advertising manager, to running the entire
business while Guccione concentrated on the photography. Husband/wife teams
were prominent in the sex business. Tom Kelley’s wife made up Marilyn Monroe
for her 1949 shoot, arranging the red drape background while Tom took the
photos from a 10-ft. ladder. In
1973 Playboy photographer Russ Meyer posed his wife, actress Edy Williams, in a famous spread-legs swimming pool
shot.
Erotic
sequences of celebrity couples making love, prominent during the breakout period
of the mid-70s, featured people like an Andy Warhol “star” with
girlfriend; a TV action-series star with
wife; a former Swiss ski champion with his actress wife. Sometimes it was a comeback
in a declining career: a dancer from West
Side Story in the 1950s, Hollywood film in the 1960s, doing a couples shoot
to show he still had it at age 40. A 15-year old actress in 1965 in The Sound of Music appeared nude in
Playboy in 1973 to try to change her image.
Some sex
models moved up because of the access it gave to high-level dating
markets. Attending parties and
publicity events with celebrity athletes, movie people, and the glitzy elite,
led sometimes to meeting film producers and lining up jobs; sometimes to
acquiring boyfriends and husbands. A 1972 Playmate became girlfriend to a noted
British stage director. Playboy’s receptionist married a Chicago Bears
quarterback whom she met during her nude photo shoot. Playmate of the Year 1993
Anna Nicole Smith married an aging Texas millionaire, after meeting at a
nightclub performance; this would touch off an inheritance battle with his
60-year-old children. Melania Trump was the most successful at the marriage
route; starting as a fashion model in Europe and New York, with a bit of nude
photographs, before marrying a real estate developer, boxing promoter, and TV
reality show host.
A few
sex models made it through to become mainstream film or TV stars. Marilyn
Monroe, of course; Playmates Stella Stevens, Dollie Reed, Barbara Edwards and
others. English actress Helen Mirren posed for Oui early in her career, and had
a speaking role in Guccione’s orgiastic film Caligula (1979); this did not prevent her from later playing Queen
Elizabeth II. Playboy had film celebrities in their pictorials as much as
possible, although their nude shots were generally rather modest. Jayne
Mansfield appeared in Playboy in 1955, part of her campaign to challenge
Marilyn as the great bosomy sex star. It was the right strategy; Jayne’s next
films made her famous. Established stars joined the procession. Brigitte Bardot
posed in 1958; Raquel Welch in 1979 in a bikini bottom, but kept her arms
crossed over her breasts. Madonna posed nude in 1985, which was in her
repertoire anyway. Posing had become an accepted part of Hollywood publicity.
The last
big star to come up this way was Pamela Anderson. She got her start with a
Playboy cover in 1989 and Playmate of the Month layout in 1990, preceding her
career role in Baywatch, 1992-1997.
She was discovered when stadium video cameras spotted her in the crowd at a
Canadian League Football game wearing a beer company’s T-shirt, and flashed her
on the Jumbotron screen. Signed by a modeling agency, she moved to L.A. and had
two breast-enhancement operations.* Even as a film star, sex mag photos for
Pamela were not a one-and-done; she kept appearing for covers and features in
Playboy and Penthouse through the 90s and later, leveraging her stardom in both
directions.
* There
was also a lot of cosmetic surgery in Hollywood in the 1940s. Marilyn Monroe
had her hairline changed and went from
strawberry-brunette to golden blonde before her career took off.
 |
| Norma Jean Dougherty in 1945 before going blonde |
Symbiosis between sex mags and
film
Film
stardom is the career allure of sex work. The San Fernando valley, just outside
Hollywood, was the center for porn films, because of the glut of models and
actors. For a long time, porn films were very low-budget, since they could not
be shown in theatres, and made small income from rentals and sales for private
showings. L.A. was also a center for “glamour” photographs of the stars, sold
to tourists as well fan magazines. This was the backdrop for the surge of
pin-ups for troops during WWII, continued in calendars for hanging in male
places like barbershops and garages. As we have seen, photographers and artists
and their models traveled between mainstream advertising and national
magazines, film publicity, and men’s sex magazines.
The sexual
revolution in visuals was helped along by an economic crisis of the film
industry. In the 1960s, film audiences had dropped to less than half the 1950s
level (and still further below the 1940s peak). Half the movie theatres in
America had closed. The number of films made fell to an all-time low. This was
a reaction to the coming of TV in the 1950s. For a time Hollywood staved it off
by concentrating on big blockbuster films, based on Broadway musicals and
classic novels (The Sound of Music;
Ben-Hur) all done in overpowering Technicolor (early TV being
black-and-white). A side-effect was to eliminate other genres, like film noir
and serious dramas that came across well in atmospheric black-and-white. The
die-out paralleled the disappearance of magazines carrying literary short
stories and serialized novels.
Starting
in the 60s, the major studios became targets for take-overs by corporations,
perpetually thereafter churning through a series of mergers and realignments.
The family dynasties that controlled the major studios disappeared, giving way
to independent producers who used the studios mainly for distribution. The
Motion Picture Code, set up in 1934 under religious pressure, had censored sex
and violence on the screen and required evil always to be punished in the end.
It was replaced in 1968 by a rating system, ranging from G for general
audiences, M for mature audiences, and X for no one under 16. This brought a
huge difference in how films were made. The Code office reviewed film scripts
in advance and demanded changes; the rating system merely labeled finished
films, leaving choice to the discretion of audiences and parents.
More
sexually explicit films had already been coming in from Europe in the 1950s,
underming the code. The Graduate,
which somehow made it through the Code office at the end of its tenure in 1967,
depicted a young man having affairs simultaneously with his girlfriend and her
mother. It was the surprise hit of the year. It contained a scene where
middle-aged Anne Bancroft seduces Dustin Hoffman by opening her legs at him in
a most unlady-like way. With the Code gone, it was followed by even more erotic
films like Clockwork Orange (1971),
about a gang of British rapists, directed by Stanley Kubrick. (The star of this
film, Malcolm McDowell, would go on to play the title role in Guccione’s
Penthouse production, Caligula.)
 |
| Mrs. Robinson’s come-on in The Graduate, 1967; 2004 Fashion ad |
The way
was open for sex to merge with mainstream films, as well as to exploit its own
niche. Playboy photographer Russ Meyer had already pioneered this path, with
underground cult films like Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in 1963 (big busted go-go dancers driving around in
fast sports cars and beating up men); in 1970, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (featuring former Playmates, set in
the Hollywood drug scene). X-rated films became an advertising come-on,
attracting buzz and a rush of audiences to theatres showing pornographic films.
The first big hit was Deep Throat
(1972), with a plot line about a woman (Linda Lovelace) who had her clitoris in
her throat. The title became notorious as a nickname for the government
official who secretly leaked information about the Nixon administration during
the Watergate scandal of 1973. Audiences also rushed to see Behind the Green Door (1974) because it
starred Marilyn Chambers, who had been widely viewed on TV advertising Ivory
Snow detergent.*
* The
title came from a popular song (“Don’t know what they’re doing, but they laugh
a lot, behind the green door...”). The film also included an Oakland Raider
lineman as bouncer.
Hollywood
came out of its economic difficulties in the 1970s. Rotating stars between sex
magazines and movies was increasingly legitimate. It was in this less
restrictive atmosphere about visual taboos that the pornographic revolution of
the sex magazines took place.
The
introduction of video cassettes in the 1980s furthered the trend. Played in the
privacy of the home, explicit porn of any kind could be viewed, along with the
entire spectrum of films. This would play its part both in the normalization of
visual sex, but also the decline of sex magazines at the turn of the century.
Summary of sex models’ career
patterns
Altogether,
484 women were Penthouse Pets between 1969 and 2009. Of these, 80 were noted
for something else besides their magazine appearances. The percentage rose
steadily from 8% in the 1970s, to 26% in the early 2000s. The main area of
career success was film, TV and video.
Usually
they started in B-movies, horror films and sex comedies. Aside from Marilyn
Monroe and Pamela Anderson, the biggest success was probably 1974 Playboy cover
girl Debbie Shelton. A former Miss USA and Miss Universe runner-up, she
appeared in multiple episodes of Dallas in the 1980s. A 1973 Penthouse Pet was
in Jaws (1975) as a nude swimmer who
gets eaten by the shark. Playmate of the Year 1973 Cyndi Wood played more or
less herself in Apocalypse Now entertaining
soldiers in Vietnam. Other models played opposite Burt Reynolds and Sylvester
Stallone, appeared on Magnum P.I. or
in Batman.
A much
more typical post-photo career was soft-core films and videos, often
proceeding to hard-core porn. Even
models from more respectable Playboy went this route: Terri Weigel, a centerfold in 1986, went on to Penthouse in
1992 and to star in porn films. By
the 90s and early 2000s, porn film performers were a major source of
recruitment for magazine photos, and vice versa.
Very few
made the reverse route from porn to mainstream. Ironically, the most successful
of these was Traci Lords. She was an early-developing teenager, who got a fake
driver’s license showing she was 22 when she was only 15, dropped out of high
school, answered a newspaper ad for a modeling agency, and posed in the
mid-1980s when open genital shots were the fashion. After a number of minor
magazines, she was in Penthouse in 1984, and acted in pornographic movies. In
1986-- when she was 18 and finally legal-- news got out about her underage
photos and films, resulting in a huge scandal, criminal charges against the
producers, and retraction of a great deal of material from the market. Traci
now went to acting school, and began performing mainstream films. In the 1990s
and 2000s she recorded a breakthrough music album and had many roles in TV
series. Her success illustrates the Hollywood line “It doesn’t matter what they
say about you as long as they spell your name right.” But this is not generally
true for work in porn; more likely Traci benefitted from sentimental support
for going straight and getting a second chance.
A
half-dozen sex models made the transition to management, mainly by directing
porn films and sometimes producing them.
Other
common patterns:
A large
number of Pets and Playmates got their start as beauty contest winners.
A few
started as athletes: Pamela Anderson was a gym instructor. Penthouse’s 1993 Pet
of the Year was a six foot one inch athlete who danced in a Las Vegas chorus line
(where tall women were preferred). She eventually married the producer of Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles. The 2000 Pet
of the Year was a professional gymnast, a member of the Czech national team;
she took her own initiative in sending nude photos to Penthouse. (Sex workers
of all kinds moved to the West after the collapse of the Communist bloc, where
such work was often admired rather than stigmatized.)
Some trained
as ballet dancers: Joanne Latham, who shifted from TV commercials to a huge
payout from Penthouse in 1980. Delia Sheppard danced in Denmark and Paris
(where she did fashion modeling for Dior); after injuring her back, she became a Las
Vegas showgirl, a Penthouse Pet in 1988,
and broke into mainstream film and TV. (We could add Bridget Bardot, who
got her break via ballet in the late 1940s.) Ballet was also the entry point
for French model Christine Haydar, who did a highly erotic shoot for Penthouse
in 1977 photographed by her husband; the couple moved to Turkey where she
became a top film star.
Some
came from the hippie milieu. Oui in 1975 featured a German actress and film-maker
who lived in a Munich commune of five women and one man; she eventually became
a yoga teacher. The same year, Penthouse featured a Munich photographer who was
simultaneously Professor of Fine Arts and member of a rock band. He and his
wife (subject of the photos), moved to Hollywood, where they did portraits of
rock stars, pictures for men’s magazines and advertisements for corporate
clients. His wife now styles herself High Priestess of alternative lifestyles,
healing arts, and sacred sites of elves and fairies. An English woman who
pushed the Pubic Wars frontier for Penthouse in 1972 was a screamer for Rod Stewart’s band. Anneka di Lorenzo
started in L.A. as a rock-band groupie.
Most
famous of the hippie background was Tera Patrick, whose Thai mother married a
US soldier in Vietnam, returning to Thailand while Tera was raised in San
Francisco by her hippie father. At age 14 she signed with a Japanese modeling
agency, and spent two years in Tokyo, having sex with the photographer and
getting addicted to Valium. Her father brought her back to the US, where after
college she went back into modeling because she needed money. She became a
Penthouse Pet in 2000, going on to features in Playboy and many other sex
magazines while making hundreds of porn videos. She married a fellow porn actor
and then a Hollywood special effects artist. Crossing over to the business
side, she created a talent agency, a video production company, lines of
clothing and herbal products.
Some
came to bad ends. In the 70s several Penthouse Pets died of drug overdoses. A
1989 Pet made a career in British TV, but was subject of stories at age 33 that
she was homeless and addicted. A 1998 Penthouse Pet of the Year was later
arrested for assault on her husband, and sent to prison for tax fraud. After
release, she became a kindergarten teacher.
1980
Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratton was murdered by her jealous
boyfriend. She had sold ice cream at a Dairy Queen in Vancouver when she was
hustled by a car show promoter, who sent nude photos of her to a Playboy
competition. Hefner put her up in the Playboy Mansion guest dorm, and got her
parts in films and TV, aiming to make her a big star. The boyfriend stalked
her, took her earnings, and got her to marry him while on tour in Las Vegas.
When she filed for divorce, he killed her and committed suicide.
Many
just disappeared back into ordinary life. Exquisitely beautiful Lilian Müller,
discovered by Suze Randall (and effectively launching her photography career),
appeared on three Playboy covers in the 1970s. Eventually she became a local
celebrity in Norway as a motivational speaker. A 1974 Penthouse Pet, discovered
during a film casting call in Sweden, made soft-core films for a couple of
years, but unable to break into mainstream, she opened a jeans shop and retired
to private life. Joanne Latham, presumably after spending her money, became a
yoga teacher. The statuesque Penthouse Pet of the Year 1997 made Penthouse
videos, moved back to Missouri and opened a tattoo and piercing parlor. The 1998
Pet of the Year did advertising tours for Kia, moved home and married a
pharmacist.
Two dimensions of porn: How much
sex; Beauty / wealth
We may
be inclined to think that the direction of innovation in an cultural field is
always towards the increasingly edgy. Breaking with existing standards and
taboos creates attention, initially a succès
de scandale, which then becomes normal and is outdone by something further.
Pierre Bourdieu asserted this as the principle of development in art fields,
illustrated by the scandals of the early Impressionists. But this does not
accurately describe the history of visual sex markets.
Pornography
existed in the era of painting (back to the 1700s at least) and in photography
(dirty postcards of the early 1900s).
These showed erections, oral sex both cunnilingus and fellatio,
intercourse with penetration, even pissing. Essentially these included all the
variants and perversions that sex mags were pushing as their circulation
declined in the late 1980s and 90s.
The extreme edge was the same throughout; what changed was what could be
shown in public.
What
concentrating on edginess leaves out is another dimension: how beautiful the
images are, which in turn relates to how much money and cultural capital the
producers have.
Cheap
porn mags existed in the 1940s and 50s, printed on cheap paper, with grainy
black-and-white images. They were shot on cheap sets, often in motel rooms, and
the models were rarely beauties. The main exception were professional strip-club performers (Lily St. Cyr,
Tempest Storm, Sheree North), but here the principle tended to apply: the
better-known names showed less flesh, confining themselves to their stage
routines (at most topless dances and G-string teases). There was an inverse
relation between how much sex shown and how much beauty. It was a vicious
circle: underground markets with limited sales and income meant inability to
hire the best models and photographers, and to market an attractive product. It
was edgy but it didn’t move the field.
As
public tolerance changed in the era of mass circulation men’s magazines, both
dimensions-- how much sex and how much beauty-- were for a while being
traversed. Hefner’s Playboy in the 1950s explicitly aimed to counter the
low-quality porn image. As his revenue increased into the 1960s, he emphasized
beautiful models, in beautiful settings and (to the extent they wore them)
clothes; carefully and elaborately photographed in lengthy studio sessions with
attention to lighting and retouching; printed on glossy paper in the best
color. (This explains why for the early decades Playboy had only one glossy
photo set per issue.)
Penthouse
entered the market led by an editor coming from a background in classical
painting, who transposed art techniques into photography. He simultaneously
pushed the sexual edge: taking off from existing images of bare breasts and
buttocks, to showing pubic hair, crotches, genitals in various stages of
arousal, sexual acts with self and others. Initially Penthouse models were less
beautiful than Playboy’s, but made up for it by combining luxurious settings,
artistic photography, plus the leading edge of sexual display. At its height of
popularity, Penthouse was moving on both dimensions, followed by its imitators
depending on how much money they had.
A
side-dimension was arty nudes, which both Penthouse and intermittently Playboy
in extra features used as protective legitimation. Art nudes could be
recognized (if the accompanying text didn’t tell you) by unrealistic color
tints, abundance of form-shaping shadows, surrealism and bizarre props. The
effect of arty nudes was generally neither beautiful in the sense of pretty, nor
erotic. Some photographers following contemporary art movements used
deliberately ugly models or effects (as in paintings by Lucian Freud). Nevertheless, I would include art nudes
in the beauty/wealth dimension, since the common denominator here is high
cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sense. Above all, art was the link to
traditional respectability and immunity from legal prosecution.
Hustler
sought out a distinctive niche, both by pushing the edge of the genital
frontier, and by repudiating the fantasy upper-class, luxury image of both
Playboy and Penthouse. Nevertheless, Hustler featured beautiful women when it could
afford them. Mainly, it rejected high cultural capital (AKA “good taste”).
Playboy,
like Esquire before it, sold the combination of beauty, wealth, and tasteful
sex. The upper-class/ tasteful components were devalued with the antinomian/
informalization trend of the 1970s and 80s. Nevertheless, Hefner stuck to his
mission. By the end of the 70s, Playboy ceased to follow Penthouse in
high-profile genital shots. Nor did Penthouse follow Hustler in the low-taste
route. For over 10 years, Penthouse had a fairly stable market, without pushing
further on the sexual edge, working out the erotic and aesthetic possibilities
of techniques accumulated over past years. Playboy’s mix of old-fashioned
pin-up poses and modest pubic shots kept up high circulation longer than any
other magazines. It was the sexual edge-pushers who lost market share most
severely in the 1990s.
Who made the big fortunes in sex?
At the
peak of his career at Penthouse in the early 1980s, Bob Guccione was listed in Forbes 400 richest persons in America, at about $400 million ($1.6
billion today). Hugh Hefner was a multi-millionaire since the late 1950s,
owning a huge Chicago mansion, and buying Playboy Mansion West in L.A. in 1971
as revenue approached its peak. Larry Flynt first became a millionaire in 1975,
and by 2014 had about $500 million-- the figure came out in October 2017 when
he offered $10 million in a full-page newspaper ad to anyone producing
information leading to impeachment of President Trump.
These
fortunes did not necessarily last. Guccione went bankrupt in 2003, in debt for
over $25 million dollars. He was largely self-financing, and always took big
risks with his money.
In the
early 1960s, unable to attract investors for his Penthouse start-up, Guccione
decided do it himself. Thereafter he would never take on co-investors or
partners. He came from a small business entrepreneurial background. His parents
were Sicilian immigrants to New York; his father the accountant for a small
factory owned by his wife’s brother. Later, when Penthouse became a $140
million per year operation, he ran it like a family business: his father as
treasurer; sister, daughters and son for office manager, circulation and
marketing, with his wife unofficially overseeing everything. As circulation
rocketed in the 70s, Guccione bought adjacent townhouses in Manhattan and razed
them to build a nine-story mansion, the largest private residence in New York
City, importing Italian architects to do the marble and create a atmosphere of
Caesaresque grand luxury. Completed, the house cost $5 million a year to
maintain. He filled it with a $60 million art collection ranging from
Botticelli to Van Gogh to Picasso.
Guccione
started a Penthouse Club in London in 1970, but lost its casino license the
next year. Unfazed, he built the Penthouse Adriatic Club in Yugoslavia (a
cheap-labor Communist country then opening to the West), and flew in Penthouse
Pets. It went bankrupt within a year, after Guccione had sunk $45 million of
his own money ($225 million today).
Ambitious
to have his own movie studio, he invested in Hollywood films (including Roman
Polanski’s Chinatown ). In 1976 he
launched the first-ever big-budget X-rated porn film, Caligula. Gore Vidal was commissioned to write the screenplay,
actors John Guilgud and Peter O’Toole had major speaking roles, along with
Penthouse Pets for the sex scenes. It took three years to complete, at the cost
of $17 million to Guccione (about $85 million today). But distributers refused
to show it, so Guccione rented a Manhattan theatre to show it himself. He
grossed $20 million, for a modest profit.
Meanwhile
he bought an Atlantic City property and proceeded to build a hotel/casino. But
he was unable to get a license, lenders backed out of financing, and by 1980
construction stalled. It sat empty until bought by Donald Trump in 1993.
Guccione lost $145-160 million.
Thinking
still bigger, in the early 1980s Guccione funded a research laboratory in San
Diego, hiring 80 nuclear physicists to produce the world’s first nuclear fusion
reactor. It was to be the solution to the world’s fossil fuel crisis and clean
air. It lost $20 million.
In 1985,
things started to go seriously wrong. The IRS claimed $45 million back taxes,
forcing him to sell the casino and close the nuclear-fusion lab. Guccione also
had spent a lot of money over the years on new magazines: Viva in 1973, running
nude males and fashion for women (closed in 1979 with a dearth of
advertisements); Omni, a science and science-fiction magazine, in 1978; Longevity,
a health magazine dedicated to the quest to live forever; these closed in 1996,
having lost $100 million. Loans to support his magazines built up heavy debts
in the 1990s. In 1993 Guccione tried to finance his way out, selling $80
million in bonds on his holding company, to be repaid at 10% interest in 7
years. It turned out to be a risky gamble when the markets collapsed in
2000. Guccione had to sell his art
collection, put up as collateral for tide-over loans.
The last
straw was the coming of the Internet in the late 1990s, providing plenty of
free sex photo sites, on top of sex on cable and pay-per-view TV. Penthouse
sales plummeted to 600,000, and Guccione’s role at playing Caesar (Augustus?
Nero?) was over.
Hefner
was also a big spender, once he had the money. He started Playboy with $8000
(about $70,000 today) in personal loans from family and friends, including his
brother who worked in television. At first he did everything himself. Like
Guccione, he found that professional photographers were too expensive, so the
first year Playboy ran nude photos bought through the grapevine. The Playboy
Clubs, which Hefner started in 1959, did not actually make a profit. But they
gave prestige and publicity, with the Bunny outfits creating an iconic presence,
establishing Playboy and Hefner himself in the celebrity circuit (and also
providing more of a continuous career path for sex models than a rare photo
shoot). Clubs of this sort were imitated by all the major players in the sex
entertainment field, and became a basis for networks recruiting new sex models.
But Playboy Clubs lost out as center city locations deteriorated when commerce
moved to suburban malls; most of their income came from the London club, which
had a casino. Playboy hotels, records, movies and books rarely made money.
Spinoff magazines were money sinks, and Oui was sold off in 1981.
Playboy’s
circulation continued fairly strong (compared to all other magazines) in the
1990s. But in 2000 the company’s value started to fall, from $1 billion to $185
million in 2010. Hefner took the company private and held on until his death in
2017. By this time it was making most of its income from licensing rather than
Playboy itself.
Larry
Flynt came from a lower class background than Hefner and Guccione. Using his
savings from serving in the Navy, in 1965 he bought his mother’s bar in Dayton,
Ohio for $1800. He upgraded it and starting taking in $1000 a week, which he
used to buy two more bars. Upgrading again, in 1968 he opened the Hustler Club,
with nude hostess dancers. Soon he had eight clubs in Ohio cities, each
grossing $250,000-$500,000 a year (altogether, $10-20 million today). Building
on a publicity newsletter, he began publishing black-and-white photos of the
dancers in 1972. By putting off paying sales taxes on his clubs, he funded his
Hustler Magazine start-up. After a rocky start, his $18,000 investment in nude
photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis put Hustler on the map and made him rich.
Flynt
leveraged the fame of Playboy and Penthouse by announcing he would take the
revolution in sexual explicitness well beyond them. Rivalry with established
competitors not only created new contents; it also was a deliberate move to
draw attention to oneself as a new niche in a recognized field. Guccione had done
the same thing when he brought Penthouse to America in 1969, taking out a
full-page ad in the New York Times declaring “We’re going rabbit hunting.”
Flynt’s
campaign for publicity had another moment at the center of sensational attention. In 1977, while
Flynt was on trial in Georgia for obscenity, he was shot by a white southerner
enraged at a photo sequence Hustler had published showing a black man with a
white woman. Flynt ended up permanently in a wheelchair, while Hustler’s
position as the number three-selling sex mag was assured.
Flynt
turned out to be a better businessman than Guccione or Hefner. He had a clear
eye for losing operations. In his early years in Ohio, he closed down an
unprofitable vending machine business. Staying closer to his home field, he
created several spinoff magazines of Hustler in specialized sex markets, but
shut down the experiments when they didn’t pay their way. His privately owned
holding company, set up in 1976, included publishing as well as distribution.
Monitoring his ventures closely and living a relatively modest life-style,
Flynt kept overhead down and anticipated the decline of print pornography by
licensing the Hustler name. Branding rights kept his company solid from the
late 90s onwards, leaving Flynt as the richest of the big three magazine
owners.
He may
have been outdone by the comparatively unknown Paul Raymond. An Englishman of
Hefner’s age (thus 5 years older than Guccione and 17 years older than Flynt),
Raymond began as a small-time carney operator and street entertainer. In the
late 1950s, he started one of the first legal strip clubs in London, mixing
Parisian dance revues with Playboy look-alike Bunny waitresses. In the 70s he
purchased theatres and produced sex comedies, reinvesting in property in Soho,
London’s entertainment center, as well as posh districts elsewhere. Raymond’s
early efforts at adult magazines failed, but in the 70s he followed Guccione’s
example by bringing his Brit-filled Club magazines to the US. He went on to buy
Mayfair and most of the other leading sex magazines in Britain. At the time of
his death in 2008 he was worth 650 million pounds or a billion dollars. Most of
this was from real estate while property values soared.
So how
is money made in the sex business? The female models and performers are the
lowest paid (though information is lacking about the pay of male strippers).
Women did better if they moved into photography or management at successful sex
magazines. * They did particularly well if they played their opportunities on
the marriage market (as Kathy Keeton did with Guccione, and a series of
Playmates did with Hefner). A select few made it through the intense
competition to become highly paid film and TV stars. Even here, top actors make
less than big film producers-- a pattern paralleled in sex magazines.
* Dawn
Steel moved from secretary to merchandising director at Playboy, to running the Star Wars merchandising, to head of
Paramount Pictures. Anna Wintour started as fashion editor for Penthouse’s Viva
spinoff, and became editor-in-chief of Vogue.
The
underlying mechanism is that beautiful bodies are more perishable than images
recorded of them. A brief photo-shoot results in sales that depend on how
widely the product is marketed. Fame as sex stars in the dishonored porn
economy do not parley into very lucrative careers; and turn-over of top photo
models is very rapid, the longer careers covering 5 or 6 years at most. Fame in
the mainstream mass entertainment world can last longer, but least so as a sex
star. Marilyn Monroe drank and drugged herself to death when she felt her looks
were going at age 36 (having been a top star for 9 years, since she was 27).
Jayne Mansfield’s movie star career lasted only 2 years, although she rode her
fame on the night-club circuit for another decade. (She famously said, “Is it
possible to go back to being a starlet?”)
The top
money competition was among the men. They made money by closely monitoring
their rivals; concentrating on access to the most willing models and the best
photographers. Hefner and Guccione both began with experience in periodical
distribution. Flynt and Paul Raymond began by expanding their sex-oriented
clubs and managing their own publicity. All of them were essentially
self-financed, which kept profits from being eaten up by financial
professionals, and gave them a free hand without someone looking over their
shoulder concerned with mainstream respectability. But they lost money when
they ventured into areas they did not know well (casinos, hotels, nuclear
power, or magazines that had nothing to do with sex). Guccione shows that
following one’s own personal interests, when flush with new-found money,
results in keeping pet projects going even when they become a drain. Paul
Raymond (and for that matter another fringe-player in such markets, Donald
Trump) did best because they combined glitz with a concentration on booming
real estate.
Does creativity work the same way
in all fields?
Let us
define creativity as successful innovation. It’s not enough to have the idea,
people have to carry it through to realization. This is not merely an
individual process.
Is the
creative process the same in all fields? Tracing networks of scientists and
philosophers, we have found the most successful were protégés of the eminent
thinkers and researchers of the previous generation. They also honed their
creativity by rivalry with their contemporaries, keeping up with the latest
techniques personally or by close intermediaries. Shakespeare began as an actor
in the same networks who performed early hits by Marlowe and Kyd, and learned
playwriting by collaborating in theatre companies that spun off from each
other. Later an actor in Shakespeare’s troupe, Ben Jonson, spun off to become
the success story of the following generation.
In the
business world of high tech, Steve Jobs collected the most creative contacts in
Silicon Valley, and lured many away to work for Apple. He wormed out of Xerox
the bit-mapping technique that turned personal computers from typewriters into
touchable/ clickable screen images. This in turn was snapped up by Steve’s
sometime collaborator Bill Gates, who made Microsoft into a giant by switching
alliances to the old-guard enemy, IBM.
The
formula for innovative entrepreneurs thus includes: apprentice-like contacts
with the leaders of the previous generation. Spinning off new organizations using new techniques. Keeping
close contact with your rivals,
imitating/stealing from them; hiring their personnel; and shaping a
niche that is close enough to reflect their halo of fame, but distinct enough
to make your own identity.
Is the
path to success the same in every field? (Does it work in all branches of
business? in politics?? in the military??) The only way to find out is to investigate, field by field.
The research on all of these has not yet been done. But this is what it looks
like:
The sex
entertainment field probably generalizes to other fields of popular
entertainment.
The
basic processes of creativity have been operating throughout history for scientists
and intellectuals-- this is where the network patterns were discovered.
Business
entrepreneurs again fit the checklist. But as French sociologist Michel
Villette emphasizes, stalking your rivals, keeping up potentially treacherous
contact with them, and stepping in at moments of weakness to take over their assets is particularly prominent in business.
Politics
and social movements fit the general pattern to an extent, operating as
networks of niche-seeking rivals creating the field of political issues. But
politics is a field where outsiders from beyond the established networks are
most frequent, probably because politics and social movements are intrinsically
contentious; and they aggressively attempt to promote generational die-off of
incumbent power-holders.
Stay
tuned as research progresses.
References
Carlye
Adler and Hugh Hefner. Interview, Sept. 1, 2003. Fortune Small Business.
John
Colapinto. “The Twilight of Bob Guccione.” Rolling
Stone, April 1, 2004.
Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars. Parts 1-13 (1953-1981). posted Oct. 16, 2008 - Nov. 1,
2016. venusobservations.blogspotcom
Wikipedia
articles on specific magazines, publishers and models.
IMDB
biographies.
Charles
Martignette and Louis Meisel. 1996. The
Great American Pin-Up.
Francis
Smilby, 1981. Stolen Sweets: The Cover Girls of Yesteryear.
Robert
Sklar. 1993. Film. An International History of the Medium.
Edward
O. Laumann et. al. 1994. The Social Organization of Sexuality.
Philip
Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz. 1983.
American Couples.
Lewis
Yablonsky. 1968. The Hippie Trip.
Ben
Zablocki. 1980. Alienation and Charisma. A Study of
Contemporary American Communes.
David
Halle. 1984. America’s Working Man.
David
Grazian. 2008. On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife.
Ashley
Mears. 2011. Pricing Beauty: The Making
of a Fashion Model.
on creativity and
careers:
Pierre
Bourdieu. 1993. The Field of Cultural
Production.
Randall
Collins. 1998. The Sociology of
Philosophies.
-- “Shakespeare’s self-creating networks.” https://creativity-via-sociology.blogspot.com/2017/07/
-- and
Maren McConnell. 2016. Napoleon Never
Slept.
Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot. 2009. From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero.
Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot. 2009. From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero.
