And then the memories started to slide back in. Fat Maxey, a fixture at the I/Thou, who had the most handsome boy in the Haight as his lover. Nobody knew how he did it, least of all me, though I was properly jealous.… Then the one Haight hanger-on who had connections down the peninsula and took me on a guided tour through the locker room at Stanford. I was supposed to be impressed, but I had spent too many years working out at the Evanston Y to do more than glance at the athletes changing into their uniforms.
What I remembered most was my first night in ’Frisco, when “Jesus” had stepped out of the shadows and offered me a french fry.
Then most of my San Francisco memories started to slide away. It was dark out and I fell asleep. The next thing I knew the stewardess was shaking me gently to say we’d arrived at O’Hare.
Shea met me at baggage claim, told me it would be a short ride, and threw my bags into the backseat. I was out of it and saw little of the city. It was a windy night and I could hear the waves of Lake Michigan sweeping over the beach.
There were lights on in some of the windows of the apartments, but I couldn’t make out the whole building. Bob gave the apartment keys to me and told me they didn’t expect me at Playboy until noon.
I fumbled for the light switch and glanced around. I had lucked out. Wall-to-wall carpeting, big living room, large windows overlooking the lake, medium-size bedroom, and what looked like a fully equipped kitchen.
There were two huge floor pillows in the living room and I collapsed on one of them, too tired to go into the bedroom and strip to my shorts.
It was a very bright morning when I woke up, wondered where the hell Cat was, then jerked fully awake. An hour to brush my teeth and make it down to the Palmolive Building, renamed the Playboy Building. They had really come up in the world since the last time I’d been in their offices. Playboy was now the biggest-selling newsstand magazine in the country, with a circulation of seven million. It usually ran to three hundred pages, half of which carried ads. Playboy now paid the rent of many of the magazine outlets that carried it.
The receiving line to greet me included Nat Lehrman, the head of the department; Bob Shea; Robert Anton Wilson—he and Shea later collaborated on the popular Illuminatus books; Toba Cohen; and a black woman, Estella. If I ever had any questions about who to see for what, I went to Estella.
My office was small but okay, equipped with a filing cabinet and a large electric typewriter. I’d never used one before—I’d rest my fingers on the keys and find I’d typed a whole line. It was a week before I stopped swearing.
The Advisor division was larger than I thought. A battery of three girls kept large file folders of copies of all the letters that came in. The answers were canned and the girls would choose one to fit the letter. Every single letter was answered, but the same writer was never repeated twice—we didn’t want to start a correspondence with any of them.
The letters asking sexual questions were referred to our sex experts, Drs. Masters and Johnson—but I would edit whatever they wrote, rewriting their answers into Playboyese.
I tried only once to run a sexy letter and answer it. The writer said he liked to go to the local theater and sit in the balcony. Some of the other patrons would hit on him, which he didn’t mind but which gave him such a huge headache he had to go home. What should he do?
My answer was simple:
“Take two aspirin and go back to the balcony.”
My three assistants, the watchdogs for the column, told me college students frequently wrote in with “humorous” questions, thinking the Advisor would fall for them. This was obviously one of them.
I’d lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco for three years, but Chicago was still my hometown—and always would be. When I worked on Rogue, I used to hang out at “The Gate of Horn,” along with others of the staff—we even ran a short pictorial on them. The Horn was a great hangout and featured Peter, Paul, and Mary; Gibson and Camp; Odetta; the Clancy Brothers; Joan Baez; Jo Mapes; Hamilton Camp; Judy Bright, and others. It was the middle of the folk music boom and at least one member of the staff took up the guitar.
I was similarly inspired and spent a couple of hundred on a banjo. I enrolled at the Old Town School of Folk Music and did my best to learn the simplest of folk songs about running to Cripple Creek. After several months of picking at the strings, I realized I’d never be able to do more than hobble to Cripple Creek and consigned the banjo to a corner of the closet.
A previous favorite spot in Chicago when I worked on Rogue was Second City. It had started as the Compass Players—originated and run by Mike Nichols and Elaine May—then in 1959 it moved to Old Town and renamed itself Second City. It specialized in improvisational comedy (make it up as you go along). In later years it was the chief supplier of actors for Saturday Night Live.
The editorial staff of Rogue became ardent fans, and from 1961 to 1963 we ran full-page house ads featuring some of the players (Severn Darden, Paul Sand, and Melinda Dillon). Second City moved several times and for a while it had a small courtyard in back. I remember snooping back there once and ran into Alan Arkin, practicing on his guitar. (No reason he should remember me but I never forgot him.)
When I came back to Chicago in 1969 to work for Playboy, I became a fan of Second City once again when John Belushi (later a star in Animal House) had been added to the cast, along with Joe Flaherty and Harold Ramis. Ramis moonlighted writing jokes for Playboy’s joke column and later became the director of hit movies such as Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day.
Another asset of the city was community theater—probably more popular in Chicago than in New York. The most popular theaters were the Organic Theater and the Kingston Mines, along with more than a dozen others.
The hit of the Organic Theater was a three-part science fiction play—complete with special effects—titled Warp. The play died when it moved to New York. The Organic was a small theater, and Warp didn’t do well in a larger Big Apple venue. Its last show in Chicago was a sensation—all three episodes of Warp played on the same night and the intermission was catered by the high-class restaurant next door.
The Kingston Mines specialized in really offbeat plays, especially those put on by the Theater of the Ridiculous, directed by “Eleven.” Probably the most successful of Eleven’s plays was The Whores of Babylon. I loved it and saw it a dozen times. The three whores (two guys in drag, one woman) were something of a Greek chorus. The major actors played various characters from comic books, movies, and mythology. Probably the most impressive was Frankenstein’s monster. The actor entered from the back of the theater and clumped his way to the stage, arms outstretched. Once onstage, he broke into a smooth waltz, then froze for a moment while one of the whores delivered a soliloquy. (I paraphrase here.)
“What do we really know about the monster? What was his favorite song? Did he dream? What did he like for breakfast?”
The “whore” cocked his head, became more serious and the audience grew absolutely still. In one way or another, we were all outcasts playing a role for the people we met. It especially hit home to me. What did people—my friends, my relatives—really know about me?
Not very damn much.
I covered a drag show at a club named Sparrows—drag was not my favorite thing, but I knew it would appeal to a lot of readers. A lot of talent went into the show, including one of the performers who did a “triple”—he did a drag as the MC from Cabaret doing a drag.
I watched him put on his makeup for a photo shoot and he explained the process. “First you take off the face”—he powdered his entire face—“then you put on the face.” Rouge, lipstick, eyebrows, etc. When he put on his wig, the transformation was complete. I would have opened the door for him, helped him into his chair at dinner, etc.
The wardrobe “mistress” was a thin black man who came up from the South Side in complete drag. I asked him why he worked in the club and he said, “I want to be onstage someday, God willing.”
That was his a
mbition, and he was deadly serious about it.
A few months after I came on staff, Spectorsky asked his troops to submit any ideas on how the HMH company could expand. It had the magazine, a book division, and published several one-shots each year. The company was very rich (I think by this time Hefner had bought his own 737—The Big Bunny). The magazine was now worth $1 billion, and apparently expansion was on Hefner’s mind.
I wrote a memo suggesting he invest in—at the time—a relatively little-known magazine published in San Francisco titled Rolling Stone. Baron Wolman, the magazine’s top photographer and a friend, had taken me to the offices, which struck me as fairly primitive. A newsprint tabloid folded in two so it could be sold on the newsstand with the same size as the regular magazines. With one exception the staff struck me as very young, but that was one of its appeals.
By comparison, the staff of Playboy was middle-aged.
Stone’s best cover—a real grabber at the newsstand—was a nude shot of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Playboy had nothing to match it—the airbrushed covers of Playboy featured anonymous nudes, but who the hell were they? And who really cared?
Yoko Ono and John Lennon were real people.
In one sense, the stats were discouraging. A print run of a hundred thousand with estimated sales of eighty thousand (a statement of ownership in the magazine scaled that down to sixty thousand).
Advertising rates were $1,600 and almost all of the ads were record company ads (what else?).
The company had no book division, but World Publishing, Bantam, and Holt, Rinehart and Winston were all doing books on the rock scene “by the editors of Rolling Stone.”
In general, Stone published a combination of news and feature articles—Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and other rock groups were frequent subjects. The young staff were eager beavers; the oldest member/part owner was Ralph Gleason, who held down the post of music editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Stone was definitely not a “fan” magazine like most of the youth-oriented publications. It was serious, it was honest, and it had the respect of its readers. What I caught was an attitude of yes, it would always be a “rock” magazine, but the staff wanted to branch out into other areas and eventually did. The magazine “made” Hunter S. Thompson.
Jann Wenner, the major owner/editor was as young as his staff—early twenties—but had a very good idea of what he wanted the magazine to be and had the reputation of being a hard driver.
The thrust of my long (two pages, single-spaced) memo was not what the magazine currently was but what it could be—and would be—in the future. The ground floor was there if anybody wanted to invest in it.
So much for my memo. Hefner was mildly interested, but he wanted a 51 percent interest in Stone—ownership. What he was going to do with it, I had no idea—a teenage version of Playboy? He knew everything about “sophisticated men’s magazines” but absolutely nothing about the sort of magazine that Stone wanted to be.
I’m pretty sure that Wenner could have used the money—later, he moved the magazine to New York, and that must have been expensive—but no way was he going to sell a controlling interest to the king of the “sophisticated men’s magazines.”
I had written the memo, I had pointed out the possibilities. I was also glad when Hefner decided to consign it to the circular file. It would have been a good investment for Hefner, but he would have made a lousy owner.
Hefner’s next decision hurt not only me but Bob and Ginny Heinlein as well. The interview with Bob was finally edited, set in print, and announced in the magazine for the following issue.
It was suddenly pulled, with no explanation.
A reporter for the San Francisco Examiner had claimed he interviewed Charles Manson—the leader of the notorious Manson murderers—who stated (according to the reporter) that he had modeled his career after the character of Michael Valentine Smith, the lead in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Hefner sensed a scoop for the magazine and asked Bob to comment on Manson’s statement. Bob refused—it wasn’t in the contract that he’d signed with Playboy for the interview. Heinlein was one of the very few subjects that Playboy had paid for an interview—the magnificent sum of two grand.
I probably could have covered it in my introduction to the interview, saying that Bob never discussed his own stories, but if he did, he certainly wouldn’t have had anything to say directly about Manson.
Nobody would buy that, and Hefner shelved the interview and substituted something else. Bob returned Playboy’s check, but Spectorsky wouldn’t accept it. Spectorsky stated that as far as he was concerned Bob had fulfilled the terms of the contract.
Heinlein then donated the two grand to the charity for the three astronauts who had been burned alive while testing their capsule.
Bob himself had never sent back Playboy’s check. Ginny had. Bob was much too sick to do anything, least of all rework any part of the interview. Ginny did what she knew Bob himself would have done.
I was pissed, but the man behind the curtain had spoken, and there was nothing I could do. I apologized profusely, but neither Ginny nor Bob blamed me. I was merely a cog that had been caught in the gears—nobody blamed me, and the Heinleins remained friendly.
The interview finally surfaced when Hefner decided there were so many imitators of Playboy on the market, he might as well start one of his own and dilute the competition. The title was Oui, a knockoff that looked very much like Playboy itself, complete with centerfold, cartoons, and various departments. The nudes showed a little hair (the magazine did not go “pink,” as Hustler did, but it came close). The Heinlein interview, shortened and cut up with several full-page cartoons, appeared in the third issue. I figured later that the original interview had run close to twelve thousand words and that three thousand of them had been chopped out.
Hefner was in charge of the cartoons for both the magazines, and they were much closer to his heart than a science fiction author he was probably totally unfamiliar with.
I never read the shortened version until years later, and to give the devil his due, the new introduction was good and the interview itself hadn’t suffered that much.
Oui was eventually discontinued, the feeling being that rather than taking circulation from competitors, Oui was taking it from Playboy. There was also the fear that if they tried to compete with Penthouse and other magazines in the field, it would lose its reputation as a “sophisticated men’s magazine” and become just another skin book.
Other competitors engaged in what was called the “pubic wars.” More hair, more pink showing, and finally one of the magazines printed a photograph of male and female models having simulated intercourse.
Playboy was smart to get out when it did, its reputation and its gloss of sophistication still intact.
When Heinlein recovered from his illness, he hired a private eye to interview Manson. It turned out Manson was illiterate. (Other sources claimed that Manson read good literature. Take your pick.)
There was one more task that Playboy assigned me, which was to change my life. They had a roundtable discussion of homosexuality, which they wanted me to bring up to date. Stonewall had happened a few months before, and the powers that be decided it would be a hot topic. Shortly after Stonewall, gay liberation groups had sprung up at most major universities in the country. There was a meeting to be held in Chicago of representatives of gay groups from the Universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Chicago. Playboy decided to send their somewhat suspect (I’m sure by this time) Advisor to cover it.
I went to the hotel where the meeting was, found the room, and walked in.
My life changed in an instant; it was like slamming a door. In the room were all the guys I had wanted to meet in college but who, at the time, were as much in the closet as I was. We had passed each other in hallways, sat next to each other in class. I had lusted after some of them—and hopefully, some of them had lusted after me.
I had been leading two lives for y
ears and now one of them was abruptly dead. I would never see Herb, Ron, and $50-a-trick rent boys again.
I didn’t have to.
XX
THE FIRST MEETING place for Chicago Gay Liberation was in the home of one of the members who lived on the North Side. All of us were gung ho. We had a cause—“liberate” Chicago so gays would be accepted by everybody. It was a black member who shook his head and brought us down to earth.
“You’ll be lucky if you liberate yourselves.”
Tom Biscotto, one of the actors in The Whores of Babylon, edited the first few issues of our newsletter; then I took over with help from Marie Kuda and Henry Konkie.
Our first action was to picket a restaurant that had canned one of its employees because he was gay. (To the best of my knowledge, they never hired him back. So much for gay pressure.) Somebody then suggested we picket the local branch of the Chicago Police Department, which had made Lincoln Park off-limits to gays at night.
That idea was dropped when we learned the police were tired of dragging out bleeding gays who had been beat up when they made the mistake of propositioning the wrong man in the park.
The next big affair was a dance in “Wobblies” Hall, which in years past had been the meeting place of the Industrial Workers of the World Union.
A gay dance! My God! I showed up five minutes late, after the phonograph had started and the floor was filling with dancers. I watched for a while, then somebody said, “Hey, you wanna dance?”
It took a moment for me to realize he was talking to me. He was about my height, slender—we all were back then—with bright red hair.
I couldn’t believe it and promptly chickened out. “Ah—I’m waiting for a friend.”
The friend I was waiting for was standing right in front of me, but it took me a good five minutes to realize it. When I did, I went looking for him, but several people told me he had already left—obviously with somebody else.
What was the sense of gay liberation if you refused to liberate yourelf? Our black member had been right.
Not So Good a Gay Man Page 16
