06.29.07 5:00 AM CDT
• Here at Playboy
• Chip Rowe
The latest issue of Illustration includes a tribute by Jack Raglin to Reid Stewart Austin (seen at left in a 1995 photo by Jacquelin Kimer), a former associate art director at Playboy who died last year. Austin was instrumental in recruiting Alberto Vargas to contribute his famous pinups. “At Playboy office meetings Reid would occasionally suggest using a new illustration by Vargas,” Raglin writes. “Hugh Hefner, a serious pin-up aficionado who had published some original Vargas illustrations in Playboy back in 1957, expressed some interest but deferred. Reid wasn’t about to give up. But rather than pester Hefner, he blew up a Vargas girl to poster size and pinned her to the wall for Hefner to see every time he passed by Reid’s office. The courtship was protracted, but Hefner eventually relented [in 1960] and agreed to print a single Vargas girl in an upcoming issue.” Hef has written that he saw a portfolio of unpublished Vargas paintings before deciding to again print them in the magazine, but it all occurred a long time ago and however it happened, the payoff was great: Vargas continued his relationship with Playboy for 16 years and 152 paintings.Austin wrote a number of wonderful books on pin-up artists, including two on Vargas, the most recent of which is Alberto Vargas: Works from the Max Vargas Collection.
The same issue of Illustration, which is available for $10 postpaid, includes a column by Austin in which he recalls how, in 1966, he quit “the best job I’d ever had” at Playboy in Chicago to move to Fort Lauderdale and set up a retail shop. After he told his boss, Art Paul, that he was leaving, Austin suggested he could continue on a freelance basis to act as Vargas’ art director. “Lo, they went for it—and I got a nice stipend in the bargain,” Austin wrote. “I would have done it for nothing, but that monthly fee often proved the saving of a struggling new business. God bless, HMH.”
By 1971, after several years of living outside the Playboy culture, Austin took his annual trip to Chicago to discuss Vargas's latest works. (The challenge of publishing a Vargas painting every month was to keep them fresh.) One image presented a challenge, Austin recalled, because it showed the model’s pubic hair (something that was revealed only rarely at the time) and there was no easy way to cover her crotch. “I suggested that her Bogart trench coat could be the foil,” Austin recalled. “Her hands plunged into her pockets could easily if awkwardly be made to cover the offending anatomy.” After some thought, Hef decided to publish the painting without alteration (it appears in the May 1972 issue). This worked out for the best, Austin reported, as “pubic hair was an aesthetic Alberto had never wished to wrestle with in public, nor fully resolved in private.”
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