Playboy Philosophy, Installment 11

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The Playboy Philosophy

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Editorial by Hugh M. Hefner

The eleventh part of a statement in which playboy's editor-publisher spells out—for friends and critics alike—our guiding principles and editorial credo

The Playboy Philosophy is a sometimes rambling, disorganized discourse, because the writing of each new installment brings forth a succession of ideas and feelings that vie for expression. We put them down as they occur to us. When we have concluded the series, we will probably edit it into a more disciplined form as a book, but for magazine publication, this more direct, organic approach suits our purpose, since the Philosophy is intended as a living statement of our beliefs, our insights and our prejudices.

This issue we had intended discussing modern America's sex attitudes and behavior, but that fascinating subject will have to wait for a month or two, for another related concern—censorship—has been too forcibly and personally thrust upon us to be denied additional comment. On June 4th, we were arrested in our home on charges of "publishing and distributing an obscene publication." If that fact seems incredible to our readers, the full story behind the arrest is even more unbelievable. It serves to emphasize a point we discussed in earlier installments of the Philosophy regarding the importance of the separation of church and state in a free society.

The arrest was allegedly prompted by the nude photographs of Jayne Mansfield appearing in the June issue of Playboy. Were these photographs the real reason for the action taken against us? Or is it possible that The Playboy Philosophy itself, critical of the church-state implications in the Chicago justice recently meted out to comedian Lenny Bruce, and emphasizing that true religious freedom means freedom from as well as freedom of religion, supplied the motive?

Knock, Knock. Who's There?

The Mansfield melodrama began late on a Tuesday afternoon. We were asleep in our home (or, as Time reported it, in our "humble 40-room pad on Chicago's North Side"). We had been working all through the previous day and night on the August installment of the Philosophy and retired in the late morning to grab 40 overdue and badly needed winks. We'd gotten about half that number when the intercom beside our bed buzzed us awake. It was our housekeeper, who informed us that four of Chicago's finest were at our arrest and that CBS-TV was there also, with cameras.

The charge, we were told, was obscenity—someone had objected to the pictures of Jayne Mansfield in the June issue and managed to get a warrant for our arrest. Now, it should be mentioned that a violation of the Chicago obscenity statute is a misdemeanor carrying a maximum fine of $200 for the guilty; it is not uncommon, when the charge is a minor one, to serve the warrant and arrange for the booking and posting of bond at a time convenient to all concerned. We asked our housekeeper, therefore, to request that the officers contact our attorneys the following morning and make arrangements through them for accepting the warrant, etc. At this point the melodrama took on some of the attributes of high comedy as our housekeeper misunderstood our instructions—which were given, we must confess, while only three quarters awake. She went downstairs and gave our message, not to the police, but to the men with the TV cameras, who took it to mean that we would have a statement to make to the press through our attorneys the following morning.

We turned over, only half believing that we weren't still asleep and the whole thing just a bad dream caused by the frankfurters and Pepsi we'd consumed just before retiring; we'd managed to get another 1½ winks when the intercom buzzed us awake a second time. We got our instructions straightened around and our housekeeper signed off to carry them down to the officers of the law; ½ a wink later the intercom buzzed again. The policemen had refused to listen to her, she said; what's more, they had followed her back into the house and were, at that moment, in the hallway just outside our room. She was trapped in another part of the house—unable to return to her office, which opens onto our private quarters, for fear they would follow her there also.

Now fully awake, and convinced that the franks and cola had nothing to do with the situation, we decided it was time to call our lawyer; we reached him, appropriately enough, at a meeting of the Civil Liberties Union. We dressed to the thumpity-thump-thump of police fists pounding on our bedroom door. The protectors of law and order were contemplating breaking it down when our attorneys arrived.