On my previous visit I'd been unsmilingly cleared by a young man with tweed jacket, guest-list clipboard and turbulent complexion (peanut-butter plus pimple problem). Today the closed gates were unattended. My cab idled. Suddenly a mounted camera jerked its head in my direction - surprised, affronted. 'Let me have your name, sir,' I was asked by an ornamental boulder on my left. After several unfriendly questions and delays, the gates grudgingly parted. warning, says a sign on the curved drive: your visit may be RECORDED OR TELEVISED.
'An elegant English Tudor home, L-shaped, with slate roof and leaded windows', Playboy Mansion West teems with car-boys, handimen, minders, butlers, bunnies. Everyone is brisk with corporation esprit, with problem-solving know-how. They bear themselves strictly, in accordance with some vague but exacting model of efficiency and calm. Their life's work, you feel, is to ensure that nothing ever gets on Ner's nerves.
The library sports a double backgammon table, a panelled, Pepsi-crammed icebox, various framed mag-covers featuring Ner, and a wall of books: bound editions of Playboy and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a modest collection of hardbacks — The Supercrooks, Sex Forever, Luck be a Lady, Winning at the Track with Money Management. Over the fireplace hangs a jokey, Renaissance-style portrait of Ner, emphasising his close resemblance to Olivier's Richard III. (I later telephoned Don and asked him if this visual reference was an intentional one. Bemused, Don trudged off to check, and returned with an indignant denial.) As I walked to the window two limousines pulled up self-importantly in the forecourt. Slamming doors, busy car-boys, watchfully craning bodyguards. Having gone out, Ner had now come back. The interview would soon begin. Normally, I had read, recording equipment is set up to monitor a Hefner interview; also, the drapes are carefully drawn. 'Security request we close the drapes whenever Mr Hefner is in a room.' But things are laxer now. The sun can shine, and it's still OK if Ner is in a room.
And in he came, wearing scarlet silk pyjamas, with pipe and Pepsi — all as advertised. He apologised for being late and, in answer to my query, gave assurances that all had gone well at the doctor's. We settled down. The interview went through two phases, quite distinct in timbre. For the first hour or so, Ner talked like a politician: he has a hundred well-thumbed paragraphs in his head, each of them swiftly triggered by the normal run of questions. He is comfortable with criticism from the Right (abortion, censorship), rather less so with criticism from the Left (misogyny, philistinism). Actually Ner believes that these orthodoxies go in cycles: now that pornography has become — ironically — a civil-rights issue, he can imagine himself 'returning to the sexual avant garde' and reliving his old crusade. If such a challenge were to arise, the father of sexual liberation won't duck it. Nor shall Ner's sword sleep in his hand — no sir.
During the second part of the interview Ner relaxed: that is to say, he became highly agitated, showing the wounded restlessness of a man who thinks himself persistently misunderstood. His eyes, previously as opaque as limo-glass, now glittered and fizzed. So did his Pepsi: he took such violent swigs that the bottle kept foaming to the brim. His language grew saltier. 'That's all bullshit,'' he said repeatedly, swiping a finger through the air. You saw the Chicagoan in him then — the tight-jawed, almost ventriloquial delivery, the hard vowels, the human hardness of the windy city, the city that works.
What changed Ner's mood? First, a discussion of Bobbie Arn-stein, the private secretary who committed suicide after involving Playboy in a drugs scandal during the mid-Seventies. Ner was able to give himself a quickfire exoneration on this 'very scummy case'. He was far less convincing, though, when talk turned to the case of Dorothy Straiten. There is clearly something central and unshirk-able about the Straiten story; it is the other side of the Playboy dream: it is the Playboy nightmare. All set for stardom, likely to become the first Playboy-endorsed Hollywood success, Stratten was murdered by her rejected husband in circumstances of hideous squalor. The controversy has been ceaseless (and deeply unwelcome to the corporation), with the TV film Death of a Centrefold, Bob Fosse's Star 80 and now Peter Bogdanovich's memoir The Killing of the Unicorn. Dorothy Stratten was Playmate of the Year for 1980, but she never saw 1981.
'Dorothy', he said, his face briefly wistful, 'was a very special person, very trusting, a very special — human being.' People talked about the connections between Dorothy's death and the mores of the Playboy world — 'But that's all bullshit. There is not and never has been a casting-couch thing here.' He then went on to slander Bob Fosse (off the record: a private thing between Ner and me). 'Recreational sex can still be moral - and that's what I'm all about. You have responsibilities as a bachelor. Nobody has ever had an abortion because of me. Nobody. It's like a family here. People stay with us for a very long time: my night-time secretary was a Playmate in 1960! I am a warm and caring person and so is the company. That's the kind of guy I am.’
The interview ended with some deliberation about the photographs that would illustrate this article. A recent and idealised portrait of Ner was produced in its frame — the sort of thing a sports or nightclub personality might hang over his bed. Wouldn't this do? 'It's never been used before,' droned Don (who had, of course, been ponderously present throughout). I hesitated. Did they seriously think that any magazine other than People — or Playboy — would publish such an 'official' study? Was the Editor-Publisher of genius losing his grip? Should I be frank? Was now the time to start calling Hef Ner? I said nothing. We sat there admiring the photograph, all agreeing how very special it looked.
The girls are always saying they feel 'safe' in the Mansion, and yet the Easterner is pretty happy to take his leave — to leave the atmosphere of surveillance, corporation propaganda and PR p's and q's. Ner cruised out of the library and into the hall. An average evening was beginning. In the dining-room two elderly celebrities (Max Lerner and Richard Brook) were ordering complicated meals, with many doctorial vetos and provisos, while in the adjacent room the little squad of playmates and playthings, of honeys and bunnies, sat quietly around a table with their glasses (soft drinks only: Ner' doesn't want them sloppy). Momentarily hushed and alert, the girls seemed ornamental and yet not quite passive, on call, expected to disport themselves in a certain way, expected to do whatever is expected.
5. The Playboy Philosophy
Publishing a sophisticated men's magazine seemed to me the best possible way of fulfilling a dream I'd been nurturing ever since I was a teenager: to get laid a lot — Hugh M. Hefner
Hefner has been inviting moral judgments for over thirty years. It shows. It takes it out of a guy. Never altogether cynical, not yet entirely deluded, he is nonetheless committed to a sanitised, an authorised version of his Jife. The tendency is common enough, especially out here in the land of the innumerate billionaire, where a game of Scrabble is a literary event, where the prevailing values are those of the pocket calculator. 'There are times', Gloria Steinem has said, 'when a woman reading Playboy feels like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.' This is a frivolous remark, and blasphemous, too. Say that about Playboy, and what's left for Der Sturmer? If commercial pornography is imagined as a flophouse, with bestiality in the basement, then Playboy is a relatively clean and tidy attic. It is hardly pornography at all, more a kind of mawkish iconography for eternal adolescents. Playboy 'objectifies women' all right, in Joyce Wolfe's quaint phrase - but let's be objective here. According to the old Chicago axiom, there are two areas of wrongdoing: ethics and morals. Ethics is money and morals is sex. With Hefner, the line between the two is blurred or wobbly. It is a very American mix.
Three points need to be made about Hefner's oft-repeated contention that Playboy is like a family. First, it is a family in which Poppa Bear gets to go to bed with his daughters. Secondly, it is a family in which the turnover in daughters is high. Thirdly, it is a family in which no tensions, resentments or power-struggles are admitted to or tolerated: at Playboy, everyone is happy all the time. Of every conceivable human institution, a family is what Playboy least resemb
les. True, Hefner's daughter Christie is now the figurehead of the company; true also that he has recently opened his arms, Dynasty-style, to a second, putative son (though he admitted to me that there was, of all things, 'a problem' with young Mark). But they're grown up now: they're on the payroll, under the wing, like everybody else. Hefner isn't paternal — he is exclusively paternalistic, wedded only to the daily exercise of power.
At the time of the interview I had not read Bogdanovich's The Killing of the Unicorn. More to the point, neither had Hefner. I assume that his tone would have been very different — less spirited and aggrieved, more furtive and beleaguered. The Bogdanovich memoir is a labour of love, verging on a kind of sentimental mysticism, and its central accusation (that Hefner bears a measure of responsibility for Stratten's death, not only metaphorically but directly too) carries more emotion than weight. Some unpleasant facts, however, are now on record; and one is less disturbed by the sexual delinquencies than by the corporation automatism, the com-mercialised unreality with which Playboy glosses everything it does. Expediency, double-think, self-interest posing as philanthropy — this is the Playboy philosophy, powder-puffed and airbrushed by all the doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.
You are an eighteen-year-old from some dismal ex-prairie state, a receptionist from Wyoming, or a local beauty queen - Miss Nowhere, Nebraska, perhaps. Your boyfriend's salacious Polaroid suddenly transforms itself into a first-class air ticket to Los Angeles. Límoed to the Mansion guest-house, you are schooled by smiling PR girls, aides, secretaries. No outside boyfriends are allowed into the Mansion - and these are, indisputably, 'healthy young girls'. Natural selection will decide whether you will be orgy-fodder, good for one of the gang, or whether you have what it takes to join the elite of Hefner's 'special ladies'. Signed up, set to work in the Playboy Club or on the promo or modelling circuits, you will find the divisions between public and private obligations hard to determine. You will also experience a wildly selective generosity, the also-rans routinely overworked and underpaid, the front-runners smothered in celebrity purchases — jewels, furs, paintings, cars, and what Californians call a 'home'. If Hefner wants you to be a special lady then so does everyone else at the ranch. And when the call comes for you to join the boss in the inexorable Jacuzzi, it isn't Hef on the line: it's his night-time secretary — This process used to be called seigneurism. 'Warm and caring'? Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
'Without you', Hefner once joked to a gaggle of Playmates, 'I'd have a literary magazine.' Yes, but what would he have without the literature? He'd have the Playboy Channel for one thing, and all the footling vapidity of unrelieved soft core. Sexcetera, Melody in Love, Pillow Previews, Alternative Lifestyle Features, 'nudity', 'strong language' and what are laughingly known as 'mature situations'. Christ, a week of this and you'd be like Don the PR man ... And so we leave him, strolling his games parlour (there are bedrooms in back), his paradise of pinball, Pepsi and pyjama-parties — the remorselessly, the indefinitely gratified self. It is in the very nature of such appetites that they will deride him in time. One wonders what will happen to the girls when they grow up. One wonders what will happen to Hefner, if he ever gives it a try.
Hef at seventy. Ner at ninety. Now wouldn't that be something special?
Observer 1985
Paul Theroux's Enthusiasms
'I have always disliked being a man,' writes Paul Theroux, in a brief essay called 'Being a Man'. 'The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion.' Not only pitiful: also 'stupid', 'unfeeling', 'right-wing', 'puritanical', 'cowardly', 'grotesque', 'primitive', 'hideous', 'crippling' - and 'a bore', too, what's more. Although there is some truth in these iterations, the adult male has no practicable alternative to being a man — certainly no cheap or painless one. But maybe Mr Theroux has found a way round being a man (I concluded, towards the end of this hefty selection of occasional pieces, Sunrise with Seamonsters). Being a boy!
As a novelist, Theroux is attracted to the dark, the haunted, the hidden; he is also attracted to the theme of childhood, though more for its terrors than its exhilarations. As a literary odd-jobber, however, as a left-handed gun, he is breezy, temperate and mild — often downright sunny. Nothing makes him blue. A tour of a crammed and rotting madhouse in Afghanistan can't spoil his spirits. He contrives to have a fun-filled week on the New York subway, strolling among the mangled Morlocks with the transit police. He even hits it off with John McEnroe.
Sunrise with Seamonsters is full of jaunts and larks and treats and sprees, obsessions, hobbies, self-indulgences. First, there are the trains. Theroux has already written two whole books about trains, but the choo-choos and chuff-chuffs feature prominently in this one too. The Aztec Eagle, The Lake Shore Limited, The London Ferry, The Frontier Mail, The Izmir Express - The Nine Forty-Five! The whistles, the manifests, the long waits and chance buttonholings still provide endless fascination for this dark-spectacled Bradshaw, train-spotting from the wrong side of the glass. Perhaps the most reckless piece in the book is a seduction fantasy (young man, mature woman - 'her sobs of pleasure', etc.), followed by an essay in praise of the older ladies. 'At her age she could know every trick in the book and, if it weren't for her pride ... she could probably make a fortune as a hooker.' Cor. The seduction takes place in the South of France. On a train.
The book bristles with other enthusiasms. Theroux dabbles in photography; he is crazy about maps; he writes and then personally publishes a special Christmas story for his kids; he goes 'harbour-hopping' round the Cape in his boat, Goldeneye. Mr Thoreau (I mean Mr Theroux, but is there any relation?) is a Cape Cod buff, a true-blue Cape Codder, romping and gambolling there annually with his extended family. 'I get sad', moons Theroux, 'thinking that the summer is about to end.' After dinner there are parlour games: Kemps, Up Jenkins, The Parson's Cat, and Murder. Or else he rows along the coast to his folks' house, and horses around with his middle-aged brothers. 'We were not writers, husbands, or fathers. We were three big boys fooling in front of their parents.’
About a dozen of the pieces collected here are about writers; but the approach remains personal rather than literary. A couple (on S.J. Perelman and V.S. Naipaul) are warm pen-portraits inspired by friendship. Others get in as one-time idols (Henry Miller, Kipling, James) who have influenced or liberated Mr Theroux. And occasionally his pen will flash from its scabbard to defend undervalued heroes and neglected favourites (Joyce Gary, John Collier, V.S. Pritchett's Dead Man Leading). Theroux praises Pritchett's criticism for its non-academic slant, and obviously sees himself as following in this line himself. But I don't think Pritchett is ever quite as non-academic as his young admirer. A naturally alert and energetic reader, Theroux is nevertheless much happier with the particular rather than the general. When he does venture into theory ('from the Jacobeans onward [there are] villains who are truer and vastly more enjoyable than saintly heroes who never put a foot wrong'), you get a sense of something callow and furtive, as if Mr Theroux still does his reading in the small hours - under the blankets with a flashlight.
In his travels, both mental and actual, Theroux does of course address himself to harsh truths and ugly realities. He could hardly avoid them, having spent his twenties in the equatorial Third World, with the Peace Corps: 'it was a way of virtuously dropping out and delicately circumventing Vietnam'. In a brave piece called 'Cowardice' Theroux makes an amusing boast of his own gutlessness. But all travel is brave, in a sense. To some writers, leaving the house can seem quite an exploit. And, boy, Mr Theroux certainly gets around.
Uganda, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Burma, India, Malaysia: these are among the poorest and most chaotic countries on earth, and Theroux confronts them with what strikes me as an entirely boyish intrepidity. Beady-eyed, sensual and unflinching, he writes with concern, with feeling, with pity — but with no obvious distress. It is possible that his early experiences in Afri
ca inured him to such spectacles. Certainly his one attempt at a compassionate High Style, 'Leper Colony' (1966) — 'limbs are clubs to thump dirt pits for trash, to wish for knives' — is the only example of literary posing, and the only profound embarrassment, in this engaging and endearing book.
Again, it is curious how neatly Theroux sheds his complexities when he writes left-handed. Sunrise with Seamonsters is more a holiday from authorship than an extension of it. (The writing is much looser than the fictional prose, with many a ready-made formulation: 'howling snobs', 'stifling heat', 'whiff of romance', 'hive of activity'.) Why do writers travel and then tell their tales? Graham Greene, whom Theroux much admires, travels to escape spleen and to embrace nostalgic. V.S. Naipaul, another mentor, attempts to take psychological readings of foreign cultures by way of a risky self-exposure. With both Greene and Naipaul, the traveller and the writer are the same man. Paul Theroux, who has more readers per book than either, tells traveller's tales mostly for the hell of it: long letters home. His mature responses to the things he sees are to be found elsewhere — in Jungle Lovers, Saint Jack, The Mosquito Coast.
Observer 1985
Gay Talese: Sex-Affirmative
Just over half-way through this interminable book (Thy Neighbour's Wife), we are given a welcome pen-portrait of Dr Alex Comfort, the aged author Joy of Sex and its sequel, More Joy of Sex. Comfort is glimpsed in one of the rumpus-rooms of Sandstone Retreat, a Californian holiday camp dedicated to the proposition that everyone should go to bed with everyone else. Strolling naked through the clumps of threesomes and foursomes, the pot-bellies and appendix scars, suntans and tattoos, Dr Comfort regularly megs his cigar to 'join a friendly clutch of bodies and contribute to the merriment.’