Playboy of the Eastern World
Actually it’s easy to believe. Playboy grew fat and rich by whispering in the ear of frat boys. Whatever language frat boys speak now Playboy had better learn. “Playboy’s trying very hard in a Dorian Gray-like effort to stay young,” Fitzpatrick muses. By Playboy he means Hugh Hefner, who’s in his 70s and lives in LA but has never let go of the magazine. “Part of it goes to Hefner’s insanity about appearing young and vital. The insanity, I think, is him appearing with 25-year-old girls.”
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I was talking to Fitzpatrick because he’s contributed to Playboy as both a writer and illustrator and has a feel for its history. “They only hired the best,” he says, mentioning Ed Paschke and Chuck Walker as other local artists Playboy put in the spotlight. “They were very serious about the art that went into the magazine. When you got the phone call from them early in your career it meant you were going somewhere. I’ll tell you what, it got noticed. Of all the little accolades I got in my career, including a museum show, I probably got more phone calls from people seeing my stuff in Playboy. I don’t think I ever worked for a better artistic editor in my life than Kerig Pope.”
Those are keys Playboy used to hold, in an era when young men believed the road to vanity passed through something called sophistication.
Not that Playboy is the first publishing institution to leave Chicago for New York. Last year Book magazine took off.
About four months ago Kramer was approached by a headhunter looking for a New Yorker to fill the Playboy job Kaminsky wound up with. “They must have sent out a mandate that said, ‘We’re really looking for a different way of doing this,’” says Kramer, who wasn’t interested. “To go with Maxim hardly seems like that.” Actually it does. Maxim is of the wildly successful British “lad magazine” school, which in Kramer’s words is grounded in “lots of babes,” if not naked babes, and an assumption that “nobody’s got an attention span worth talking about.”
About the time Kramer moved east, Book signed a marketing partnership with Barnes & Noble: anyone who joined the chain’s “readers’ advantage” program would get a year’s subscription. The deal’s been a godsend for Book, a bimonthly that now claims a circulation base of 675,000 and has actually delivered as many as a million and a half copies of an issue. The problem, says Kramer, is that after a year readers think of Book as a freebie and don’t feel like paying to keep getting it. So the deal might have to be tweaked.
