Failure™ Magazine

The Playboy Book

“Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America.”

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History, Life

What was it that made Playboy so successful?
Initially it was successful largely because of the Playmate of the Month feature. Hefner was very shrewd to use Marilyn Monroe as the first major pictorial. But readers kept buying the magazine not only because it had pictorials of very attractive women—with high production values that set it apart—but because it showcased a lifestyle that a lot of people found very satisfying. It was not an outdoor-adventure magazine with stories about guns and camping and the like, which was really the only other sort of magazine for men at the time. Hefner always said that Playboy was an indoor magazine.

In the book you note that before Playboy, Hefner wanted to launch Pulse: The Picture Magazine of Chicago. What happened to Pulse?
It was a project that never got very far off the ground. My sense is that Pulse was going to be a feature magazine about urban living in Chicago with features on high-profile figures. Hefner didn’t think he had the capital so the project fell by the wayside. But it illustrates that early on he was not only interested in magazine publishing, but also that his ideas about the good life were framed in this urban context. Some of those ideas about urban sophistication informed the lifestyle that he put forth in Playboy.

Another interesting tidbit in the book is that the original name for Playboy was Stag Party. What happened to Stag Party?
There was already a magazine called Stag. And after letters of introduction had gone out on Stag Party letterhead, the attorneys at Stag sent Hefner a letter urging him to reconsider the name. Ultimately he viewed it as a stroke of good fortune because the name Playboy allowed him far more latitude in terms of putting forth the vision that he had for the magazine and the lifestyle. It was much better suited to what he wanted to do.

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