Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [51]
In magazine editing and publishing, especially in the more specialized fields, Chicago is second in importance only to New York. It was in Chicago that the Smart family originated Esquire and its sister publication Coronet. (Ultimately both magazines were moved to New York where Coronet languished and died.) It was here that a gadget-minded family named Windsor launched that perennial school-library favorite, Popular Mechanics, now part of the Hearst Magazine chain and, until this year, when it moved to New York, edited at 200 East Ontario Street. And Chicago today is the headquarters for the most spectacularly successful new magazine of the postwar era – Hugh Hefner’s much copied but still inimitable Playboy.
A five-dollar difference in salary was the turning point in Hefner’s career. It all started when Esquire moved to New York. Hefner was on the staff and his employers offered him eighty dollars a week if he made the move from Chicago. Hefner demanded eighty-five. Esquire refused. So Hefner stayed in Chicago and put together his own magazine.
For six hundred dollars (which he had to borrow) Hefner bought the rights to the celebrated nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and Playboy was off and running. Today it is one of the wonders of the magazine field. Successful as it is, however, the bulk of the Hefner fortune now comes from the “Playboy Clubs,” a chain of Key Clubs in leading cities across the United States. The four-story Playboy Club in Chicago alone nets Hefner more profit than his magazine.
Hefner recently had a disillusioning experience with another magazine, Show Business Illustrated, which he introduced in September of 1961 – at the same time that multimillionaire Huntington Hartford, the A & P heir, was launching a rival magazine called Show. There was a good bit of speculation about which of the two – if either – would survive, in view of the fact that they were both set up to blanket the same market. Because of Hefner’s phenomenal success with Playboy, most of the “experts” thought that he would run rings around Hartford.
But SBI never got off the ground. Hefner poured more than $1,250,000 into the publication before giving up and selling out to Hartford. He had made the common mistake of trying to handle too many enterprises at one time.
While overseeing his empire, Hefner still manages to live the kind of after-hours life portrayed in his magazine – with money, parties, and girls, girls, girls. There are voluptuous Playboy “Bunnies” in his office, his reception rooms, his swimming pool, and throughout his lavish North State Parkway mansion. And they are the enticing decorations at his famous Friday night parties, which start at midnight and continue until sunup.
But make no mistake – Hefner works hard. Long after the last guest has stumbled his good-by, Hefner will be at his desk, in the private office in his home. He plays hard, but he works hard – and at the most unusual hours.
Three times within a period of a few months in early 1Q62, Hefner has been honored by brotherhood organizations. These citations have disturbed a considerable number of people, and for a while the newspapers were deluged with angry letters-to-the-editor. The writers could not understand why a man with Hefner’s reputation as a playboy should be so honored.
The reason is apparent to all who know Hefner’s uncompromising stand on race relations – who know, for example, that he bought back the franchise to the Miami Playboy Key Club when the operators refused to admit Negroes, because such a policy is in direct contradiction to his principles. (And, incidentally, some of the cutest Bunnies in his Chicago Playboy Club happen to be Negro