Stiff Competition

The PLAYBOY Rabbit Head found itself in unfamiliar territory in 1969: Penthouse ads. Bob Guccione, editor-publisher of the upstart British magazine, had decided to take his publication to the States, and he wanted advertisers to know exactly what he was targeting. “We’re going rabbit-hunting,” read the cut line below an unsubtle image of the Rabbit in a rifle’s crosshairs. Hugh Hefner’s hugely successful formula for PLAYBOY, it seemed, was too tempting for imitators to ignore.

Guccione’s Rabbit hunt, and Hefner’s response to it, soon escalated into what became punningly known as the “pubic wars”—a clash in which the two print titans battled for full-frontal supremacy of the publishing industry’s lucrative nude-mag niche.

Guccione deserves credit: PLAYBOY was a smart target. Since its December 1953 debut, circulation had climbed steadily, reaching 5.7 million by December 1969. Over those 16 years, Hefner had captured the market—other men’s magazines were to PLAYBOY what fleas are to a bear. By daring to be more risqué, PLAYBOY had left Esquire, its inspiration and nearest competitor, in the dust. As Esquire editor Clay Felker bluntly put it to Rolling Stone, “PLAYBOY had out-titted us.”

In 1969 Guccione saw a similar opportunity and decided to take a shot at Hef, publishing the first U.S. issue of Penthouse that September. (It had been a U.K. lad mag for four years.) That February, the 147-year-old Saturday Evening Post had effectively gone out of business. These two milestones are more closely related than one might think. At the dawn of the 1970s, the industry was rapidly changing: Old-time general interest, family-friendly magazines were losing their readership to television; even venerable Life magazine, long a publishing staple, would switch from a weekly to an intermittent schedule in 1972. But specialty magazines, those covering subjects from sports to science to automobiles, were growing in popularity, and the highest growth area was the one least likely to be served by TV. This was the PLAYBOY audience: mostly young to middle-aged men who wanted to look at semi-naked models and read intellectually stimulating short stories and nonfiction. That format, combining revealing photos of women with excellent editorial fare, was Hefner’s masterstroke—and what Guccione sought to replicate.

The Brooklyn-born, New Jersey–raised Guccione had originally set out to become a painter and, like Hefner, had tried his hand at cartooning, though he eventually became a photographer. Living in London in the early 1960s, he and his wife launched a photo service that sold provocative pinups of young women via mail order ($2, or the British equivalent, for 10 pictures). Having had his cartoons rejected by virtually every magazine in town, he resolved to launch his own title to publish them. An informal study of London newsstands convinced him that the most successful periodical in England was the Chicago-based PLAYBOY. “I thought, I’ll do a magazine using the same formula—pretty girls, highbrow editorial—but aimed at a British audience,” Guccione says in an interview included in Filthy Gorgeous, the 2013 documentary about his life. To woo prospective investors, “I brought a copy of PLAYBOY around with me, and I said, ‘Just imagine this with the name Penthouse on it.’”

Premiering in England in 1965, Penthouse was a hit. Guccione gradually worked out his plan to launch in the States. He connected with the largest magazine distributor in America, the Curtis Circulation Company, which by that time was keen to find new profit channels—it had just lost a major cash cow with the demise of The Saturday Evening Post.

Guccione’s pitch wasn’t far off from his eventual product: He copied PLAYBOY practically feature for feature. Instead of a Centerfold showcasing a monthly Playmate, Guccione’s foldout spotlighted a monthly Pet; where PLAYBOY had the long-running Little Annie Fanny comic, Penthouse installed Oh, Wicked Wanda, a rather grungy knockoff of Harvey Kurtzman’s pop culture classic. Guccione launched his own Penthouse Club in London in response to Hefner’s Playboy Club empire. Even the word penthouse stemmed from Playboy history, being the title and setting of Hefner’s first late-night TV series, Playboy’s Penthouse.

So what did Penthouse give readers that was new? More skin, more heat. The major weapon in Guccione’s arsenal was his willingness to depict what PLAYBOY had not.

“In the wake of the so-called free-love ’60s, Penthouse chose to break open the market and distinguish itself from PLAYBOY by being raunchier: more overtly sexual photographs, pubic pictures, bizarro letters to the editor, models who ran the gamut as opposed to PLAYBOY’s girl-next-door types,” says David Friend, author of The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido. Although it flirted with pubic hair on a couple of occasions, including a pictorial of actress and dancer Paula Kelly in August 1969, PLAYBOY had never shown an explicit frontal shot. Guccione saw the open door and walked through it.

The February 1970 Penthouse showed a hint of pubic hair in one pictorial, followed by several pubic-hair-revealing shots in the April edition, causing small-town censors to yank the issue off newsstands. Censors may have been incensed, but readers were beguiled, and by September 1972 Penthouse’s sales had climbed to 2.2 million—nearly 10 times what it had started at just three years earlier. That was still less than a third of PLAYBOY’s circulation, which had hit an all-time high of more than 7 million, but Hefner eventually came to feel adjustments were needed.

“At first Hef tried to avoid engaging or responding,” remembers Dick Rosenzweig, Hefner’s right-hand man who had been with the company since 1958. “He definitely tried to convey a ‘So what?’ attitude in the beginning.”
But soon enough PLAYBOY was showing more and more of the pubic area—territory that had previously been obscured or blocked. In the January 1971 issue, Hefner allowed a peek of blonde pubic hair in Liv Lindeland’s Playmate pictorial and a year later went full frontal with a tasteful Centerfold of Playmate Marilyn Cole. Much more provocative poses followed. This “arms” race—not to mention legs, breasts and buttocks—evolved beyond full-frontal nudity to other arenas previously unexplored by PLAYBOY: fetishism, girl-on-girl, women touching themselves.

“The point was cultural and aesthetic but also market driven,” says Friend via e-mail. “The PLAYBOY philosophy, according to Penthouse, was, in effect, your father’s ethos—sexuality disguised. Penthouse was for younger and more liberated (read lowbrow, low-forehead) readers, epitomized by the crotch shots. PLAYBOY was somewhat crotchety in comparison and hid its treasures amid serious fiction and big-name bylines.” To use Felker’s construction, Penthouse wanted to out-crotch PLAYBOY.

“Hef was conflicted,” remembers former art director Kerig Pope about the magazine’s new direction, “but the art department made it clear they were in support of showing more.”

The photography was far from the only PLAYBOY staple affected by the changes. “The whole book was ‘heated up,’ ” from fashion to articles, as Thomas Weyr recounts in Reaching for Paradise, his extensively researched volume on the company. The shift even applied to LeRoy Neiman’s famous Femlin drawings. “An editorial decision was relayed to me to introduce pubic hair on my lovable, wholesome creation,” writes Neiman in the 50th anniversary collection celebrating his work. “At first I resisted, mainly because it posed a design problem. Eventually I came up with a solution regarding the pubic hair matter…a simple black triangle.”

Although the rise of Penthouse seems the proximate cause for the changes, Hefner claimed there were other considerations governing his actions. “At the top of the list was the more permissive attitude in films,” he told Rolling Stone. Deep Throat, after all, had come out in 1972, taking porn mainstream. “The decision to make the magazine what I call, not more permissive but more mature, is a matter of what we felt, in our judgment, our part of society was ready for.”

It wasn’t just Penthouse that was crowding the field of men’s magazines: Coq, Players, Dude and Genesis were just a few of the titles to enter the fray. Gallery was an even more direct clone of PLAYBOY than Penthouse had ever tried to be, renting an office less than a mile from Hefner’s staff. “I guess I’ve been flattered more sincerely—and blatantly—than any other magazine publisher in history,” Hefner once quipped. In 1972 PLAYBOY purchased the French title Lui and changed it to Oui, hoping that this younger, bolder, kinkier and more “continental” version of PLAYBOY could dig directly into Penthouse’s circulation. (After a blockbuster first year, Oui sank steadily into the red before PLAYBOY parted with it in 1981.) Then, in 1974, Larry Flynt’s Hustler arrived, quickly establishing that Flynt wouldn’t hesitate to go beyond what either Hefner or Guccione could abide.

For Hefner, the “war” culminated in late 1975 with back-to-back controversial covers: Two bare-breasted models embraced under the teaser line “Sappho: Stunning Portraits of Women in Love” on the October cover; a seated woman, one hand down her panties, blouse and legs spread wide, graced the November issue. Readers may have welcomed the more suggestive content, but many companies buying full-page ads did not. “PLAYBOY’s foray into explicit shots, lesbianism and female masturbation triggered outrage among advertisers, who deluged its offices with complaints about obscenity,” Steven Watts writes in his Hefner biography, Mr. Playboy. There was $40 million in annual ad revenue at stake, a Playboy executive fumed. Hefner decided to change course. “Gentlemen, we have lost our compass,” he declared, telling his team to cool down the content. “I [told] my staff we would not go down the road of imitating our imitators,” he later said.

That December he promised shareholders and newsstands alike that moving forward his covers would be less risqué. Besides keeping advertisers happy, there was perhaps another simple reason behind the revised stance: “Hefner’s heart was not in the raunch war,” as Weyr put it.

The pubic wars were, in Hefner’s own words, “much ado about foliage.” Considering the tumultuous era from the perspective of 2013, Hef remarked, “It’s almost comical to look back now at all the fuss over pubic hair.” Indeed, photos that 50 years ago qualified as racy today seem practically innocuous, even quaint; in the intervening decades, attitudes and norms have changed significantly.

Those changes have naturally affected the business, though readers may be surprised: Today in PLAYBOY’s pages, how much skin (and hair) is shown is a decision made not by the editor but by the model—a practice that is perhaps the biggest reveal of all.