Algren at Sea

  “I know,” I cut him off, “the trouble is you can’t get foot on the ground either way. I’ve been getting that from too many people around here lately.”

  “Yes—but who started it? Didn’t I tell you they built the system around me?”

  “I’ll take your word. Now would you mind de-echoizing? Like stop haunting yourself? Or simply go into the fourth person? Like disappear altogether?”

  “I live here, buddy.”

  “You live nowhere. You said so yourself. Don’t give me a hard time because you work for Playboy.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” he pleaded for sympathy.

  “Stop whining,” I stopped his act, “go out and get a steady job, O’Connor.”

  “If you’d get a steady job yourself,” he continued to sniffle around, “and settle down, you could have your own grotto,”—and a low faint whistling went along the walls like a wind out of times long gone.

  I was alone.

  I returned to my reading and came upon a typewritten memo planted, it became plain, by a West Coast counteragent between the pages of Playboy. For it bore a black M pendant on a field of gold, that I guessed stood for “Money,” which revealed itself as the seal of THE MILLIONAIRE CLUB:

  “The nation’s first penta-cabaret” addressed itself to TOP EXECUTIVES without qualifying what it was they had to be atop of. The way they were going about getting members, any farmer who did his own milking could get in and I hoped he would.

  “You don’t have to be a millionaire, just think like one,” the invitation explained. Now they’d gone and let in everybody in the country except the millionaires.

  “The fact that you have been selected for charter membership will indicate without further elaboration the type and caliber of the gentlemen to whom this invitation is being made.”

  As you are a well-known overstuffed ass, in short, you are entitled to bray with us other asses if you come well dressed.

  “In a very special sense this is a very special sort of club. The reason is presaged in the name of the club itself—The Millionaire Club.

  “The point is, this is more than just a gentleman’s club. It goes considerably beyond being a first-rate restaurant and entertainment palace (with perhaps the finest bouquet of luscious mamsells in all the world to serve you).

  “It’s a club where you will meet the most outstanding group of successful, creative, accomplished, and forward-moving executives in the West. You will rub elbows with The New Millionaires . . . participate in the excitement of Million Dollar ideas . . . catch the tempo of Million Dollar deals.

  “It’s because of the very special character of our membership that you will receive the title MEMBER OF THE BOARD ROOM of the Millionaire Club.”

  “O’Connor!” I hollered, leaping in fright to my feet. “Come back, Terrible Tommy! I want to join you! It’s you or Billy Sol Estes!”

  No echo returned. O’Connor was gone.

  Gone with the light of Chicago past, when I earned seven cents every Sunday morning by going to the cigar store for a package of Ploughboy snuff for Mr. Kooglin, the newspaper agent who had never made me account for ten copies of the Abendpost, undelivered yet. Gone with the days, a little later, when if someone asked you for a cigarette, you had to give it to him and say, “How are you for spit?” Gone with noons when we made sun pictures of Blanche Sweet and streetcars had green trolly shades. When Ada Leonard danced at the Rialto and Kenny Brenna sang, O Why Did I Pick a Lemon in the Garden of Love Where Only Peaches Grow?

  And Billy Marquart looked like he could whip anybody in the world, and Milt Aron knocked out Fritzie Zivic, and Altus Allen put up the best fight of his career against Johnny Colan, and Lem Franklin kayoed Willie Reddish, and Davey Day knocked out Nick Castiglione, and a kid named Johnny Rock used to get knocked out, week in and week out, at the Marigold. And everybody went to see Johnny Rock get knocked out.

  They had come up and gone down, some fast and some slower, those who got too good too soon and those who came along slower and got less. But had made it last longer.

  When had this great change taken place? When had we suddenly come into a time when nobody said, “I’m counting my money,” but said instead, “I’m reviewing my holdings,” though it seemed he was still doing the same thing? When had it come about that it was said of someone, “He swings,” when all that was meant was that he consumed much more than he needed?

  The reduction of the American dream to a race whose purpose, apparently, was to see who would become a member of a make-believe board had not begun, I knew, with Hugh Hefner. What Hefner had done, consciously or not, was to effect a transition of the hope of an American aristocracy qualified only by capacity to consume, that had been proffered by Time in the 1930’s.

  “The Time community is an upstanding, right-thinking group,” its editors had addressed potential subscribers then, “shrewd as they are able. So far only one of you has insured himself for $7,000,000 and only one of you has become King of England. Most of you are just alert, intelligent Americans, quietly successful in your own fields or headed for success. Among you, for example, are thirty percent of the officers and directors of practically every well-known U.S. corporation. All told, you entertain 1,640,000 dinner guests each week. Time is more proud of its subscribers than of anything else—that is why we like to think of our subscribers as a unique community—the most alert group of men and women in America. And now speaking for the community, we invite you to join us.”

  Time walking streets she walked when young like an old whore in the rain, boggles blindly out from under her torn umbrella at that flashy new hooker working the other side of the street, yet sticks stubbornly to her own pitch—”one of you is the King of England, thirty percent of you entertain 1,640,000 dinner guests” (she’s grown a little confused of late), while the new hooker is pulling in hundred-dollar tricks by giving each a tin key with the story: “Fulfill your dream world! Make money on everything! Become a member of the board and get into the tempo of million-dollar deals!”

  The price I had paid for doubting the Divine Rightship of Business in 1937 had left me stuck in a woo grotto in 1962, I perceived, contending with the spiritual heirs of those who had believed. Yet I felt no sense of loss.

  Where were they? What had they won, the young men and women of the thirties who had gained membership in the same community as that of the fantasist who had had himself insured for $7,000,000? Like myself in the narrowing years, by now they had either had it or they had missed it: neither those who had accepted the invitation of Time nor those who had declined it would be invited anywhere again. Yet among those who had sought the profferred success, I could not recall one to whom it had brought more than physical comforts accompanied by persistent anxieties. Of whose achievement was no more than that of having a bottle of one’s own upon a stool of one’s own among other quietly successful Americans, each drinking a defeat of his own, I do not speak—yet by such failures as have had to be buried fast and forgotten faster, one may now surmise the casualties to be incurred and left unattended in order to keep bright the colors of Playboy’s promise of an exclusive community built upon consciencelessness.

  “Police said the body of Connie Petrie, 26, was found in her bed. In the room were four empty prescription bottles and a bottle half full of a powerful stimulant.

  “‘We offer our girls lie tests,’ Victor Lownes III, Playboy Club vice-president explained, ‘we try to protect ourselves and the girls if we hear any bad rumors about them. She had a delightful personality. Very sweet. She wasn’t the prettiest bunny in the place, but she had such a nice personality that sort of made up for it. When she refused to take a lie test, that was no indication she was guilty of anything. But it was an indication that we could not afford to keep her in our employ. We don’t necessarily believe every rumor, but we do feel an obligation to protect ourselves.’”6

  “The man with whom she was living told police she came in drunk at 5:30 A.M. He slap
ped her, and she went out for a walk. When she returned at 7:30 she went to bed, where she was found dead by her lover at 10:30 A.M.”7

  “‘What we have going is a cult,’ adds Victor Lownes III. ‘The rabbit is a father symbol. We could tell them to go right out the window and they would follow our advice.’”

  “‘I’m in the happy position of becoming a living legend in my own time,’ Hefner said, ‘I have everything I ever wanted—success in business and identity as an individual.’”8

  Chicago’s Playboy Key Club, its owners claim, is the most profitable bar, per square foot, in the world, and employs more talent than any other employer of talent in the city.

  The Key Club waitress with a bunny tail pinned on her behind pays two dollars a night for rental of her bunny suit, contributes two dollars a night to a bartenders’ pool, and earns no straight salary herself. She is dependent upon tips, which average around two hundred dollars a week. Her foundation garments, of which she has two, cost fourteen dollars apiece. If she is one of the more fortunate girls, she may get to model as the Playmate of the Month.

  This monthly nude featured by Playboy is never modeled by a professional. The girl is recruited from the offices of Playboy or the tables of the Key Club, and is by contract bound not to model elsewhere for two years after Playboy’s use of her. She receives three thousand dollars upon signing a release and two more at later dates.

  Although it is understood that key holders are forbidden to touch the girls, and that the girls are forbidden to date key holders, Playboy’s public relations people have projected the image that these constitute Hugh Hefner’s private harem.

  This is purely for public consumption. What the bunny is to Hefner is what it is to his Playboy community: an object of temptation to be resisted. The psychology is that of the man who derives his morality by not drinking, by not gambling. by not making love: one whose conception of the successful man is he in whom all passions, all temptations have been diverted into a single devotion to business, business, business. The restrictive walls of which Hefner complains are those which he himself has raised to keep life away. The success of the key clubs is due to the fact that millions of young American males cannot function except within this same restricted existence. Although the projected image of Hefner is that of a man living spaciously, he is actually a man in a broom closet. The importance of this being that his success speaks for broom-closeted multitudes.

  “My girl and I are having fairly frequent flareups about dating others,” one Playboy reader writes to the Playboy Adviser for help. “I agree with her completely that if I do, she should be allowed to also. I agree intellectually, but not emotionally. My feelings are, bluntly, that I don’t like it a bit. She says this is unfair and I say, ‘How right you are. I’m selfish and illogical. But I don’t feel guilty when I’m dating other girls and I do feel unhappy when you’re out with other guys, and you’ve told me you want me to be totally honest in our relationship.’ Then she cries or rants and I clam up and the evening is ruined. Last time it happened I got mad enough to say, calmly, that she could take it or leave it, we weren’t married and had no obligation to each other. My point is that if I can’t have a relationship on my own terms I’d rather do without it, though I’d far prefer to sustain it. Her point is that any third party would see things her way. As a third party do you think she is right?—A.B. New York City.”

  “No.”

  You made a good move in not asking Ann Landers, A.B.

  A third-person view of the Woo Grotto is made by a trapdoor in its roof, some busybody reported in Time. I glanced up uneasily to see if Victor Lownes III were looking down in the third person. Another window, offering an underwater view of swimmers, has been built for Victor or anyone else who enjoys watching other people swim underwater, in a bar which can be reached either by a rockified spiral stair or a fireman’s pole. I didn’t think I was ever going to be in that much of a hurry.

  My host’s earliest ambition, I learned, was to be a cartoonist, and that, of a sixty-nine volume scrapbook detailing his life, the first several volumes are of cartoons. “I remember the early embarrassment of putting my arm around a girl . . . this became one of the most difficult periods of my life. So I withdrew into fantasies by writing and drawing,” Hefner explains.

  The cartoons are not about Hugh Hefner, but about a youth named Goo Heffer, attending a school called Stink-much High. There are no girls in these cartoons.

  Causing me to wonder whether the girls who were twisting now, the girls wearing bunny tails and the girls who were modeling, all the girls who were becoming professional girls, were girls any more at all. Hefner had moved into his present arrangement, he says, “to live the life we were writing about,” just as the waitresses in the key Playboy Club are images projected from the foldout nude offered monthly by Playboy. The Playboy complex had not begun, as Hefner himself appears to believe, with the loan he had made to start a magazine, but with the projection of his teen-age fantasies into teen-age cartoons. Hugh Hefner, Playboy of the Midwestern World, non-conformist bon vivant, was nothing more than a public-relations image. My host, I now knew, though he himself did not know it, was Goo Heffer. I put down Time and picked up the Wall Street Journal to see how Goo’s impostor had managed to make his fantasy come true.

  “Mr. Hefner’s image of success is not without some tarnish. Recently he decided to fold Show Business Illustrated, a magazine he started last August. The magazine’s backlog of manuscripts and advertising will be turned over to its chief rival for $250,000, hardly enough to lighten the loss of 1.5 million incurred in its brief life.

  “If SBI has been a flop that Mr. Hefner would like to forget, there is no disputing the success nor the important role Mr. Hefner has played in attaining it for Playboy . . . its advertising income in the 1961 calendar year was up 74% from 1960 and its circulation was up 15%.

  “‘Playboy is the bible of the upbeat generation,’ Mr. Hefner explains, ‘it promotes good material things—status, growth, individualism, the idea that you can’t get ahead unless you get off your backside and get moving.’

  “Readership surveys made by Playboy show that most of its readers are males between 18 and 35 years of age.

  “Most other magazine publishers say that Playboy’s penchant for nudes is what sells the magazine, a suggestion which is deeply resented by Mr. Hefner. Each issue of Playboy has a fold-out picture of a Playmate of the Month, who for her near-nude modeling is paid $3,000, the same amount received by the writer of Playboy’s lead story.

  “Few magazines are so closely identified with their creators as Playboy. Mr. Hefner vigorously promotes himself as a suave playboy constantly in the company of comely females.

  “The ‘carefree playboy’ image can be deceiving. It is studiously promoted as part of the magazine’s success formula, and hides a serious, business-like approach to profit-making. . . . Despite the image built up by his magazine, Mr. Hefner’s associates say his greatest interest is work, not girls.

  “Nearly every week-end Mr. Hefner throws open his house for midnight-to-dawn parties attended by ‘my bunnies,’ entertainers, advertising executives and others. Despite this apparent gregariousness, Mr. Hefner has few intimate friends. He considers himself a non-conformist with a cause. He says he was born into a strict, somewhat puritanical family—‘an earth fertile and ripe for the blossoming of a rebel. . . .’

  “32,000 keys (at $100.00 per key) have been purchased for a seven-storey Playboy Club to open on New York’s East Side in late summer or fall. Clubs are also due to open this year in St. Louis and Baltimore and in at least six other cities in 1963, including one to be built in conjunction with a 200-room Playboy luxury hotel on Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘If the hotel bit is successful we may try it in other cities, particularly in Chicago.’

  “Mr. Frank Gibney, formerly editorial director of Show Business Illustrated and now publisher of Show, explains the failure of the former: ‘I wanted to intellectuali
se SBI. Hefner wanted to use his Playboy techniques and make everything breathless. The two concepts just didn’t go together.’

  “Hefner insists he sold SBI ‘Not because it wasn’t doing well, but because it wasn’t doing well enough, by my standards.’

  “On his office wall hangs a framed share of Esquire, Inc. common stock. Beneath it is a sign bearing these instructions: ‘In case of emergency, Break Glass.’”

  I put aside the attitude assumed by the Wall Street Journal toward Hefner as being envious toward my host simply because he had become a multimillionaire without going to New York. I returned to the Post story, confident that it would be fairer.

  “My father and mother gave us intellectual freedom . . . but they imposed rigid Protestant fundamentalist ethics on us. There was no drinking, no smoking, no swearing, no going to movies on Sunday. Worst of all was their attitude toward sex, which they considered a horrid thing never to be mentioned. . . . What we’re selling is good, healthy, upbeat revolt against the things that have been ruining America. The nudity is the revolt against the Puritanism that overtook us in those grim days after the 1920s and stifled creative expression.”

  Well, I be dawg, I told myself, putting the Post down carefully and saying it again to myself, this time aloud, just to be sure I was still in my own skin, “I just be purely dawg.”

  I was in the predicament of the bettor who has seen his animal finish plainly a head ahead of the bettor who has seen his animal finish a half-length in front. For my own recollection of the days that had followed the 1920s had been the days of the 1930s. And that in those days Hemingway had returned to write his greatest book, while Steinbeck and Richard Wright and Tennessee Williams and James Agee were making their discovery of America too. It had been a decade of bold discoverers in all the arts; a time when beauties appeared of whom men still speak with wonder: Garbo and Hedy Lamarr and Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner. Anna Christie, Ecstasy, The Glass Menagerie, The Maltese Falcon, The Petrified Forest, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Ox-Bow Incident all broke with Puritan thinking, I knew. It had been a first-person time because the inhibitions that make people act in the third had been broken by the plain economic need of acting in the first-person. Hunger is never resolved in the third person. We could not afford inhibitions.