According to the Daily Mail, tis true.
Quote from Daily Mail
How do you explain to anyone who is young today how sexually repressed, monochrome, uptight, judgmental, narrow-minded, earnest and fundamentally furtive the Fifties were? It’s impossible.
The Fifties, both here and in America, were a world in which, to a boy like me, sex was a secret. A time when Hollywood films showed married couples wearing pyjamas and **83** in twin beds, and where the sexiest outfit a girl might wear was a floral two-piece bathing costume made of what looked like corrugated iron.
It was an era when teachers forbade girls from wearing patent leather shoes because the shiny leather toes might act as mirrors and thus reflect their knickers into a boy’s casual gaze.
But then came reports of a new magazine in America called Playboy, containing photographs of beautiful young women who were stark naked.
What? Surely that had to be a misprint. The only time any girl was naked in those days was when she was alone in the bathroom with the door firmly bolted.
But, no, naked, she was! And not any girl. In an extraordinary lucky break for the magazine and its creator, the first Playboy centrefold in 1953 was none other than the famous film star Marilyn Monroe — albeit with a photograph taken before she had suddenly become famous that year.
But throughout my teenage years, the culture and lifestyle that Playboy would espouse — namely, that sex was normal and could even be fun — seemed to me to be in exciting naughty collision with everything my generation had been taught to believe.
Hugh Hefner, then a young psychology graduate, had gambled a family loan of $600 to start a magazine that unashamedly reflected his own libertarian attitudes on sex and the burgeoning consumer society.
It was aimed, he said, at men like himself: educated, intelligent and keen on cars, wine, music, movies, books and pretty girls. And, although opprobrium and disgust immediately rained down on him from pulpits and opinion-makers in arch conservative Middle America, he caught the zeitgeist perfectly.
Fighting and winning censorship and distribution battles, he proved that an awful lot of men were interested in seeing photographs of beautiful, naked women.
Well, of course they were. Evolution hadn’t been mucking around when it had added sexual curiosity to the recipe that created humanity.
Hefner intuitively saw this, and although he was eight years ahead of the introduction of the Pill — the invention that was to change the relationship between men and women for ever — he saw that a change in attitudes was coming.
But he was clever, too. For those who knew where to look, there had always been nudie magazines, often European, passed surreptitiously between secretive readers. Hefner’s brilliance was that his magazine would not be sold at the back of seedy shops. It would be confident in itself and would not only be about naked girls; it would also be intelligent and literate.
And for that, it hired the best writers, names such as Gore Vidal, Margaret Atwood and Norman Mailer, to give it respectability in grey print.
Nor would the models appear provocative or vulgar. The photography would usually be classy, never crude. And, like the Playboy bunnies who would people his home, the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, and the Playboy Clubs, the models would be wholesome-looking, jolly, cheerleader types.
The mix worked brilliantly. Playboy made nudity respectable. Famous stars such as Sharon Stone, Madonna, Jane Seymour and Joan Collins were flattered to take their clothes off for it, while male stars would be thrilled to hang out with Hefner at the parties in his mansion.
As opposition dwindled, so much a part of the U.S. establishment did Playboy become that eventually statesmen such as President Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King would agree to be interviewed for its pages.
Whether as much time was spent reading those interviews as gazing at the girls, no one can tell. But it meant that while most other magazines to include nudity would have been banned in family homes across Middle America, Playboy could sit there in the living room, by the television guide.
Within 20 years, sales reached more than seven million copies a month in the U.S., with several other editions around the world.
Not everyone liked it, of course. Feminists hated the way the women in the magazine were simply considered homogenised sex commodities for men’s gratification, deeming the bunny outfit, with the big ears and cute little pompoms on the girls’ bottoms, in the Playboy Clubs to be demeaning.
Without a doubt, though, Playboy had won the battle. Sex and nudity was no big deal any more. Whether you liked it or not, the world had moved on, with women’s magazines and Sunday supplements publishing nude photographs to few howls of complaint.
The pace of change, however, didn’t stop with Playboy. Indeed, it just kept accelerating.
By the Seventies and Eighties, Hugh Hefner’s baby had rivals, such as the rather grubby Penthouse. There were others, too, everywhere — with Paul Raymond building himself a London property empire on sexy mags.
The barriers had been smashed to smithereens. But soon, the rival publications around the world would have to go to ever greater lengths to be noticed. And they did.
Soon Hefner’s magazine wouldn’t even try to compete with the vulgar, sometimes semi-gynaecological photographs found on the top shelf in many newsagents. Even the milder ones, such as Loaded, were far more provocative than Playboy had ever been.
Gradually the revolution in sexual attitudes, and in what is allowable and appropriate in print, began to consume its creator. The rise and rise of internet pornography completed the act. Yesterday, Playboy surrendered.
Unable, and **86**, to compete with the galaxies of porn available on the internet, where every imaginable sexual position is brutally available for any boy with a smartphone, 89-year-old Hugh Hefner has decided that from March next year there will be no more nudity in Playboy. Whether he’s happy with that, we don’t know. He holds only a 30 per cent stake in his creation, and the magazine itself hasn’t made money for years, with its U.S. sales down to 800,000 a month. Indeed, most of the Playboy income comes from licensing its brand for bath products, clothing and other merchandising.
In all likelihood, it was probably a decision forced on him. Advertisers, it seems, no longer want their products appearing in a girly, if slightly old-fashioned, magazine.
Strange to think that Hugh Hefner, the anti-establishment figure who took on the prudes of America, should now be seen as old-fashioned.
Even stranger to imagine Playboy without a pretty, smiling, pneumatic centrefold of a naked girl to look at.