Jagger instead of Jackie

 Yesterday I posted here a picture of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner sitting on the floor, surrounded with pictures on the floor - he's organizing them.

I seem to remember Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in her job as an editor at a book-publishing company, sitting on the floor with pictures.

I looked online for that picture of Jackie, but couldn't find anything.  I think maybe I read a description of her on the floor with pictures, but didn't see a photo of it - so for a picture for today, instead, I selected a picture of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger with Hugh Hefner.

        Hugh Hefner threw a lot of parties in the 1960s and 1970s and invited famous people to them.

Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger; Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner

-30-

if you don't swing, don't ring

 

Millie Williams and Hugh Hefner

In the 1960s, when Playboy magazine had been richly successful, publisher Hugh Hefner bought a mansion in his hometown of Chicago:  the "Playboy Mansion."

It had a sign by the front door that said, in Latin, "If you don't swing, don't ring."

(in Latin??  ...oh - kay...)

------------------------ Millie Williams was Hugh Hefner's first serious girlfriend - they went to college together - he was on the G-I bill, same as my dad. - After World War II, an American soldier could go to college "on the G-I bill."

        My dad was born in 1923; Hugh Hefner was born in 1926.  Same generation.  They did their part in World War Two, to "make the world safe for democracy."

(Who is going to make it safe for democracy, now? - I don't know...)

        Hugh Hefner's first crush in high school was a girl named Betty Conklin, who didn't respond to him - that was his first heartbreak, according to the documentaries.

Betty Conklin, Millie Williams (who was Hefner's first wife), and Barbi Benton, his girlfriend from 1968 to 1977 - looked amazingly alike.  Dark brown hair, same face-shape, and smile....

Hugh Hefner organizing pictures for his magazine

-30-

no, it was Curtiz

 I said on here the other day that Hal Wallis was the director of the 1942 movie, Casablanca.

Wrong.

Hal Wallis was the producer of Casablanca; Michael Curtiz was the director.

(I knew that, too - just forgot at that moment.)

-30-

the gamblers

 I have a book about Hugh Hefner's favorite movie:  Casablanca:  Behind The Scenes, by Harlan Lebo.

(I bought it at Barnes & Noble about 30 years ago.  Now I'm finally reading it.)

------------------ [excerpt from a conversation with Julius Epstein, scriptwriter (The Man Who Came To Dinner; Arsenic And Old Lace...)] -------------- 

        What did the moguls have that made them successful?  What did Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck, Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, and David O. Selznick have?  No one could pin it down.  Most of these men were practically illiterate and uneducated.  They weren't creative.  But they had something.

        I think what they had was tremendous desire, and showmen's instincts.  They were gamblers.  Today, heads of studios are lawyers, accountants, former agents - they're a different breed.

        In those days, the studios could make a picture a week....

    

-30-

where the heroes were

 

a scene from the 1942 film, Casablanca

        I could hardly believe it when I read a Comment where someone referred to Hugh Hefner as an "appalling swine."

(actual swine:  "Leave us out of this!")

------------------------------- If you put pictures of people with no clothes on in a magazine and publish it, some people are going to like that, and some people are going to criticize.  Or, at least, this was true in the 1950s when Playboy was first invented and published.

Playboy magazine, I'm not an expert on - but when I watch interviews and documentaries about Hugh Hefner, I feel kinship with him because he related to the world through some of the same art forms that I'm interested in - movies, music, and books.

His daughter Christie Hefner says of his love for the movies - "That's where the heroes were, that's where you had the stories of standing up for what was right, that's where he got his sense of romance.  His favorite movie was Casablanca...."

        I totally relate to that.

Hal Wallis, director of Casablanca

-30-

not much but now and then

 Listening to videos about Playboy, I find interesting history, and ideas.  Then again one is reminded that the entertainment which Hugh Hefner developed and provided is controversial for many people.  (I recently read an Internet comment referring to him as an "appalling swine.")

--------------------- [excerpt from Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen - copyright 2020, Arcade Publishing] ----------------

        Jean, John, and I hung out sometimes at Hugh Hefner's.  Not much but now and then.  It was an open house nearly twenty-four hours, hung with Picassos and full of celebrities, sports figures, sexy women.  

The sexy women were the whole draw.  

Believe me, it wasn't the Picassos.  Anytime I hit Chicago I got a call from the Playboy Mansion inviting me to stay there as a guest.  I never did, but we dropped in now and then and socialized....

I liked Hefner, and I remember one night he explained to me it had always been his dream as a kid to have a house that was going all the time and you never paid any attention to the clock.  

You woke when you liked, ate breakfast when you wanted, did what you wanted.  No matter when.  If you rose at 2 a.m., your day began there and your schedule worked according to your own time.  

        Meant nothing to me, as other guys' dreams never do, but if it made Hefner happy to live life that way, and it did, great.  All I know is he was a friendly and generous host, rich, successful, and if he enjoyed rising at eleven at night, having breakfast, and then playing Monopoly with celebrities, who am I to gainsay him?

-30-

key club

 
Hugh Hefner with Playboy Club "bunnies"

Hugh Hefner started Playboy magazine in 1953.

In 1959 he had a TV show called "Playboy's Penthouse," where he could communicate the Playboy philosophy and lifestyle to the public at large.

In 1960 he opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago.  He said it was to provide "our readers with the full Playboy experience."

        In a "Chicago Stories" documentary on You Tube, comedian Dick Gregory describes the nightclub:

"The food was good,

and the drink was stiff,

and the entertainment was nice.

That's what made people keep comin' back.

        And the bunnies was part of the show."

The "bunnies" were girls who were hired to work at the Playboy Club.  They were waitresses, cigarette girls - one was a roaming "Camera Bunny" who took photos, to capture the fun times.

-30-

conversation in his halls

 

University of Oxford

-------------------------- [excerpt from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald] -------------------- It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns.  Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town.

        I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say.  So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.

        And then came that disconcerting ride.  We hadn't reached West Egg Village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored suit.

        "Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly.  "What's your opinion of me anyhow?"

        A little overwhelmed I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.

        "Well I'm going to tell you something about my life," he interrupted.  "I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear."

        So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation in his halls.

        "I'll tell you God's truth."  His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by.  "I am the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west - all dead now.  I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years.  It is a family tradition."

        He looked at me sideways - and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying.  He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford"....

-----------------------------------------------------

        On You Tube, there's a video titled, "The Making of Playboy - A Chicago Stories Documentary."  

In it, when various interviewees discuss Hugh Hefner's extravagant style of entertaining guests at the Playboy mansion in Chicago during the 1960s and early Seventies, the narrator says, "Hefner was often compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald's protagonist, Jay Gatsby, opening his mansion to everyone from Barbra Streisand to Tony Curtis."

-30-

the genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald II

         At nine o'clock one morning late in July Gatsby's gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three noted horn.  It was the first time he had called on me though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.

        "Good morning, old sport.  You're having lunch with me today and I thought we'd ride up together."

        He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American - that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.  

This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness.  He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.

        He saw me looking with admiration at his car.

        "It's pretty, isn't it, old sport."  He jumped off to give me a better view.  "Haven't you ever seen it before?"

        I'd seen it.  Everybody had seen it.

{excerpt from The Great Gatsby.  Charles Scribner's Sons.  1925}

-30-

the genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald

 -------------------- [excerpt from The Great Gatsby] --------------- Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know - though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train.  

I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans.  

        I was sure that they were all selling something:  bonds or insurance or automobiles.  They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.

        As soon as I arrived I  made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table - the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

-30-