American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story (2017) s01e05 Episode Script

1 It was 1962 and America was changing.
The space program was in full swing, and John Glenn became the first person to orbit the earth.
Johnny Carson was named the new host of The Tonight Show, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had kept the country on edge for 13 days, came to an end.
While American culture was shifting, the world of Playboy had exploded.
Our magazine had over one and a half million readers each month.
And the Playboy Club had become the biggest party in Chicago with over 100,000 key holders.
With the mounting success of the Chicago Club, it was time to take our party national.
And I knew the perfect location for the next Playboy Club New York City.
But the competition was tough.
New York was home to the some of the world's hottest and most iconic nightlife.
So I sent Victor Lownes to get a better feel for the market.
I found a perfect location on East 59th Street.
I was staying at the Plaza Hotel, and I noticed a "for rent" sign on a building that I could see out of my window at the Plaza.
Central Park here.
Cartier, Tiffany's.
And you see these picture windows here? That's all the advertising we'll need.
When people walk by and see that spiral staircase filled with a rainbow of Bunnies We got 'em.
When can renovations begin? We should be cleared to start in two weeks.
I'm finalizing everything with the Department of Buildings today.
Which reminds me, Victor.
Preliminary budgeting has us at 2.
5 million.
Right now we're overextended by a lot.
We're pre-selling memberships, that'll help.
No, it will help, you're right, but Bob, it's New York.
I know it's New York, but it doesn't hurt to limit risk.
This is what I want.
This design, at this address.
To me, that's worth the risk.
They put $7 million into renovations, and that was a huge amount at that time.
And that did not even take into account the advertising budget.
So Victor really had high hopes for this Club being really the jewel in the Playboy Club chain.
With our plans in place, we started construction.
And at seven stories high, the Club would have twice the capacity of our Chicago location.
But I soon realized that doing business in New York had risks I hadn't anticipated.
To open a club, you needed a liquor license.
And to get a liquor license, you had to go through the state's licensing board.
But no state government was more corrupt than New York's.
Albany was since the 19th century and continuesto this day, a cesspool of corruption.
If you want to get anything done in New York State, you gotta pay somebody.
You've got to pay some elected official, right, to get the go-ahead.
That is how things are done in New York.
Soon enough, we were informed that in order to open our Club, we had to pay a corrupt government official a bribe of $100,000.
This is blackmail.
That's how it works.
Well, we're not paying him.
We need to open the Club now and we can't do that without a liquor license.
Plus, we've already started selling memberships.
We have over 10,000 customers who already paid.
How would they react if we canceled the opening? Arnie insisted that pay-offs were the cost of doing business.
But paying a bribe went against everything I stood for.
Hefner's an extremely moral person.
You had to be, and there were so many trumped-up charges, and efforts to indict us for things that we didn't do wrong that we had to keep our nose clean.
I knew it was a risk to involve Playboy in any illegal activity.
But if we wanted to get our liquor license to open our club, I had no choice.
So I paid the bribe.
What I didn't know then was that in going against my conscience, I was making a decision that would haunt Playboy for years to come.
That commands my heart to love you? On December 8, 1962, after a rocky start, our biggest venture yet, the Playboy Club New York finally opened its doors.
With its spiral staircase, elevated piano bar, and 360-degree fireplace, it was even more stunning than our Chicago operation.
We had comedians and singers.
A cue around the block.
It was a huge success right from the start.
And I had the most beautiful date in the room.
My girlfriend, Cynthia Maddox.
Cynthia wasn't the only woman I dated, But anytime I was at the Club, she was at my side.
Within weeks, we were averaging over 3,000 guests a night.
Not bad, huh? Not bad at all.
And I knew if we could conquer the New York nightclub scene, we could succeed anywhere.
Within a year, we had Playboy Clubs in Miami, New Orleans, St.
Louis, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Kansas City, Cincinnati and Los Angeles.
Playboy was on top of the world.
But just when it seemed like everything was going our way a decision I made months earlier was about to threaten the entire Playboy empire.
Hef? Hef Bob? Sorry, I know it's early.
It's 10:00 a.
m.
It's important.
Just a few months after the New York Club opened, my staff caught wind of a government operation that could shut us down.
New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, had announced a corruption investigation with a specific focus on the State Liquor Authority, the same organization that had forced me to pay a bribe to get my club open.
I knew it was only a matter of time before Rockefeller's investigation would lead directly to Playboy.
Hefner had apparently given a bribe to two New York state officials, the Chairman of the Republican Party of New York and the Chairman of the State Liquor Board.
In Hugh Hefner's mind, he had done what he needed to, to get Playboy's liquor license in New York Practically every club owner in New York City had paid a bribe.
But I knew our success made us a big target.
And if investigators found out, the Club could be shut down.
The Playboy name could be tarnished, and we could face criminal charges.
To save Playboy's reputation and my own, I decided there was only one thing to do.
Once one succumbs to a bribe transaction, you are hooked forever.
Anything you need, names, dates, Playboy will give it to you.
We went to the District Attorney's office in New York, and we told them what had occurred.
And they said they would work together on this.
First time, I think that it ever happened in New York.
Hefner and Morton, the way they felt about it had a certain rationale.
And with all the evidence We even paid the bribe with a check.
And, I mean, so there was no question about evidence.
And there was no question about blowing the whistle.
I followed through with my promise and turned over all of our books.
By handling it the way we handled the approach works out in the end.
And the word gets out to these people that you cannot touch us with these unlawful suggestions.
After months of investigation and a high-profile trial, Judson Morhouse, the man who had forced us to pay the bribe, was removed from office, disbarred, and convicted on charges of both corruption and extortion.
Our testimony proved so vital to the state's case, Playboy was forgiven on all counts.
Hefner had, in fact, come clean.
And then he did whatever he could to break the whole scheme of corruption by providing testimony against these two guys who were convicted.
While I was dealing with the Clubs, the world was changing.
And I quickly realized Playboy needed to change with it.
The pill came in in 1960.
And there were topless go-go dancers in both New York and, uh, San Francisco.
And the sexual revolution had become a reality.
And with that a permissiveness that offered a new possibility in terms of freedom.
It was also a time of revolution too, and you can't separate that either.
I have a dream It was a time of questioning old mores and values.
It was a reaction to the very repressive values that had existed in the '40s and '50s.
It was questioning a lot of the fundamental views that people saw were hurtful.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
At City Hall Park another multitude welcomes the young democratic Bay Stater.
With John F.
Kennedy pushing a progressive agenda in the White House, it seemed like America was on the cusp of a new era.
And I knew then that Playboy needed to be at the forefront of the revolution.
We began publishing articles tackling the changing times.
We slammed nuclear testing, criticized America's corrupt auto industry, and basted America's outdated government leaders.
We were even covering social issues like economic reform.
Even some of my early critics had to admit the magazine was doing important work.
The come-on for Playboy in the '60s was the fact that you were going to see the Playmate of the Month.
Once you bought the magazine and began to read it, then you understood that there was stuff worth looking at.
Worth reading, worth thinking about.
And some of it was indeed groundbreaking.
Playboy in its tenth year was becoming more influential than ever before.
Writers, cartoonists, photographers, artists, they all wanted to be part of this cultural revolutionary piece of work that we were doing.
And some of them, and many of them actually worked for less than their normal fees just to be part of it.
Because I was the face of the company, I wanted to start my own column to address topics I cared about.
From drug law reform to separation of church and state.
I called it The Playboy Philosophy.
But our biggest addition was inspired by the conversations I was having with celebrities and intellectuals at my parties and on my TV show.
I thought it would be great to give them a platform to talk about the issues they cared about, and I knew our readers would love it.
We called it The Playboy Interview.
The first Playboy Interview was with my good friend, Miles Davis.
In an interview that took place over two days, he went beyond talking about music and opened up about his experience as a black man in America.
The magazine wanted to prove itself to be broad-minded.
Miles Davis was this very important guy.
The interview was comprehensive, patient, finely edited.
Over the next few months, we interviewed Peter Sellers, Jackie Gleason, and Ayn Rand.
The interviews themselves could have up to 40 hours of material, compiled over weeks or months.
Well, the thing that makes the Playboy Interview completely unique is, it's incredibly in-depth.
I mean, who's gonna give, you know, somewhere between ten and 25 hours to an interviewer, you know? I mean, especially now, when every celebrity is so completely controlled by publicists.
By spending so much time with celebrities, we developed a rapport.
And they shared things with us they would never tell any other publication.
It was a big status thing to do the Playboy Interview.
And I think I answered some things perhaps a little more frankly than I normally would, thinking I'm in the big time of Playboy now.
The Playboy Interview went on to become one of the most iconic features in the magazine's history.
The interview was in the first 20 years, you'll see that they are like a classical symphony.
One melody leads into the next melody and the third melody is a counterpoint on the first melody.
There is a comprehensiveness to them.
Many years later, Steve Jobs said about his first Playboy Interview, it was the single best thing in media he had ever done.
With all of our new editorial features, there was so much to do at the magazine that I had little time for anything else, including my girlfriend, Cynthia.
I'm bored.
I've gotta get this done by tonight.
I've, uh I've gotta get this done by tonight.
Cynthia You're really not making this easy for me.
But I have to work, okay? I knew I should have been spending more time with Cynthia, but my devotion to the magazine was far from the only problem in our relationship.
He dates other girls, and I don't like it.
He knows I don't like it.
And he doesn't like when I date, and he feels it's wrong when I date.
Discussions go back and forth and we try to work things out, but I don't know what's going to happen if this continues on.
I'll be right back.
Cynthia was a very vibrant young woman.
And they had a romantic relationship.
Hefner never indicated that he was a one-woman man.
And that was not to Cynthia's liking, as one can imagine.
Throughout all the years with Playboy, I never had a monogamous relationship.
I think I was committed to that lifestyle.
It was a young man's fantasy.
I was in a unique position as the publisher of Playboy.
Mm-hmm.
Well, let's set it up.
Or try to.
I'll, I'll call you back, Spec, okay.
Everything okay? It's great.
These heels, though they're a killer.
I'm sure if you talk to the Bunny Mother, she'll let you go back to the dressing room and take five.
Oh, I don't know, she seems pretty strict.
Plus it's always fun to break the rules every once in a while, isn't it? Cynthia Maddox was really beautiful.
Hef, uh, fell in love with her.
They started dating.
But Cynthia wanted to have a relationship with him.
She just didn't wanna be another girl, and Hef wasn't prepared for that.
In the spring of 1963, my relationship with Cynthia came to an end.
Part of what my pursuit of happiness has been all about has been an attempt to walk a different road.
And when you're walking a different road without a map, uh, you're gonna make mistakes.
And, you know, when you're involved in a, in a series of romantic relationships, the nature of that is gonna hurt.
I was sad to see Cynthia go, but work was a welcome distraction.
And soon, bigger issues of the day were taking up all of my attention.
The Negro still is not free.
The Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum, but the peaceful demonstrations advocated by Martin Luther King Jr.
, soon gave way to violence as police in Birmingham, Alabama brutally assaulted black protestors.
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.
Playboy had been involved in Civil Rights issues for years, and we weren't going to stop now.
We did everything there was to do about Civil Rights.
It was an overwhelming fact that black people were badly treated and that the magazine should do what it could to make that better.
The thing about the magazine that nobody realizes is it was the only magazine in America that was fearless on any topic you gave it, Playboy could cover it and could cover it honestly.
In early 1963, a new leader in the Civil Rights Movement had captured the nation's attention.
Malcolm X was a polarizing figure, who, unlike Dr.
King, encouraged violence as a means of protest.
We need an organization that no one downtown loves.
We need one that's ready and willing to take action, any kind of action Not when the man downtown sees fit but when we see fit.
By any means necessary.
Malcolm X was a black nationalist who thought white people were barbaric by not allowing us to use public facilities.
In that season of fear and polarization driven by former slaveholders and segregationists, the argument was that Malcolm did not deserve a platform.
In the spring of 1963, Malcolm X agreed to sit down with us.
We can't publish this.
"The white man must realize that the sins of the fathers are about to be visited upon the heads of the children who have continued those sins, only in more sophisticated ways.
" This is practically a declaration of war.
If I'm not mistaken, it's what he's been saying for years.
It is not our place to get involved in his crusade.
Why not? Because we're white? Because we don't like what he's saying? Look, we've fought for years against censorship of all kind, to be able to express ourselves the way we see fit, live our life how we want to.
Let's not become hypocrites here, Spec.
Print this as is.
Malcolm X, his message was really important.
But his rhetoric and language was definitely threatening, even to those who had embraced civil rights.
Black people, you cannot trust the white devil.
The white devil will always try to keep you in chains.
So the fact that you would have Hugh Hefner giving Malcolm X an interview in Playboy magazine, whoa, man, now that's wild.
And they were interested Hefner stood almost alone in the social, political role, as a force to be dealt with.
It was courageous 'cause he was being encouraged to not publish the Malcolm X interview.
But he did not surrender.
We knew that publishing the interview could mean losing subscribers, but I was willing to bet America was ready to hear his words.
As it turns out, I was right.
After the Malcolm X interview ran, letters poured in from all over the country, thanking us for covering his movement.
After nearly a decade, Playboy magazine was finally being recognized as much for its editorial content as for its centerfolds.
But that was all about to change.
- Hef?! - Bobbie! - Hef! - What is it? The cops are downstairs.
Just tell them I'll deal with it tomorrow.
They're here for you.
On June 4, 1963, I was arrested and charged with creating and distributing an obscene publication.
Newspapers quickly picked up the story, and I couldn't help wonder why the city of Chicago was coming after me now.
We knew the magazine wasn't obscene because I knew my plans for the magazine, I knew that the Supreme Court had already established that nudity was not obscene.
The difference with Playboy is that we went mainstream immediately.
The obscene publication in question was our June issue, specifically, an eight-page spread of actress Jayne Mansfield.
Playboy had published nude photos of Mansfield twice before, but our new photos were unique.
Taken on the set of her upcoming film, Promises! Promises!, it was the first mainstream Hollywood movie to feature a star in the nude.
The standards of obscenity were very vague in these years.
Prosecutors claimed that those pictures were particularly obscene because there was a full-dressed man, another character from the film sitting on the side of the bed, and they claimed that the captions were obscene.
They talked about Jayne Mansfield writhing around in the bed.
After spending the night in a Chicago jail cell, I was released on bail and returned home to start working on how to fight these ridiculous charges.
There aren't a whole lot of things in our society, not many publications, that are willing to stand up and say sex is good.
I'm the guy and Playboy's the magazine that is willing to say sex is a good thing.
Sexual imagery is a good thing.
The act itself is a good thing.
And before you can tell me that it hurts somebody, you have to make a serious case.
What makes something obscene? The Supreme Court still hasn't come up with a legit definition, a specific definition.
It's intentionally written in a vague way.
So, if you were to try to publish a national magazine, you are open, uh, to prosecution left and right.
We need to avoid court at all costs.
I just don't think we have a choice here.
And we have the money to settle.
You think the city of Chicago's gonna let us settle out of court? You know what? We gotta try.
- I agree with that.
- We can afford it.
We need to be prepared for both eventualities, frankly.
Hugh Hefner was facing a criminal sentence, a prison term.
How many people are willing to risk criminal prosecution? Even if you're ultimately acquitted, you have enormous expenses, enormous amount of time drained, and a big stigma, being accused of engaging in obscenity.
So you have to be willing to place your resources and your reputation on the line.
Despite my team's advice, I knew settling wasn't an option.
These charges were censorship, plain and simple, and no one was going to take away my freedom of speech.
I don't take on cases that are easy.
And I don't take on cases I don't believe in.
So you're saying this case won't be easy? Six years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that it's not enough to point to a single article or image to label a publication as obscene.
You have to look at the magazine as a whole.
Well, there you go, Playboy's primarily focused on lifestyle, not nudity.
Correct.
So what's the catch? Well, when we go to court, no matter how clearly we explain it, we'll be at the mercy of a jury.
The man I had chosen to represent mehad already won some of America's most controversial cases.
His name was William Ming Jr.
I look forward to seeing you at the arraignment.
- Thank you, William.
- You're welcome.
Three years earlier he had defended Martin Luther King Jr.
on perjury charges, winning him an acquittal in front of an all-white jury.
And a few years before that, he served on the legal team that won the landmark U.
S.
Supreme Court case, Brown v.
The Board of Education.
Ming was also involved in the NAACP, the ACLU.
Hef's very much into Civil Rights, so it was a perfect match.
Police yesterday carted two tons of obscene magazines, films, and photographs to the city incinerator and burned them.
In the weeks leading up to the trial, the city of Chicago stepped up its efforts to damage our business.
And anti-pornography activists came out of the woodworks.
Men who would stand by and see their women degraded and debased as they are with the breast and the buttock presentation by Playboy are not men at all.
But the more they attacked, the more I knew I had to defend Playboy.
In your June issue, you show Jayne Mansfield unclothed, lying in bed with a man fully clothed.
Mm-hmm.
It looks like you're asking for it.
- Why? - Uh, you It looks as though the photograph is designed since we have both sexes involved here Mm-hmm.
solely to arouse the viewer.
The difficulty is most people who get into censorship really know very little about it.
They don't know much about it psychologically.
They don't really recognize the effect that these things have.
And so what we were really doing was, uh, reporting on a, on a movie in the making and, uh, since a name personality was involved, the pictures we felt had legitimate journalistic interest.
This morning a man is on trial in Chicago charged with violating that city's laws against obscenity.
He is Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine.
Many court cases involving motion pictures, books, and magazines have left considerable gray areas in determining just what is salacious and obscene.
The trial began on November 20, 1963, and from the beginning, jury selection put us at a huge disadvantage.
We discovered that they essentially rigged the jury with not only almost all women, but people from very conservative organizations.
The moment the trial began, it was clear we were fighting an uphill battle.
For more than a decade, Playboy magazine has done more to damage American values than any other publication currently in circulation.
It is up to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to protect the basic human decency that this country stands for.
Your sworn duty, as members of the jury, is to defend and uphold the laws of the Constitution.
A constitution which not only protects the freedom of Mr.
Hefner, but which also protect the freedoms of your fellow citizens.
Hefner's point was, you had the right not to buy, but not the right to deny it to be seen and to be read.
And when he was attacked on that basis, he would not surrender his First Amendment rights.
The prosecution launched into their case.
Your honor, the prosecution would like to call its first witness.
In your professional opinion, do you find these pages to be obscene? Without reservation.
What do you think is the aim of all this? In my opinion, to stimulate or inflame the sexual appetite of the average person.
For nearly three weeks, the prosecution argued that the pictures in Playboy could incite readers to commit sexual crimes.
Then something unexpected happened.
Kennedy's death was the first presidential assassination of our time.
It was earth-shattering, and it would come to define a generation.
This is a sad time for all people.
We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed.
The world came to a halt.
For me, it is a deep, personal tragedy.
I know that the world shares the sorrow thatMrs.
Kennedy and her family bear.
His firm commitments to support the cause of democracies throughout the world Suddenly, the future of the progressive movement was in question.
Across the country, a great outpouringof grief, shock, and revulsion.
JFK's assassination for the generation of young people is the same as the attack on Pearl Harbor was for the prior generation.
Subsequent generations the blowing up of the Challenger and 9/11 in that it destroys the optimism and idealism.
It is a break with a sense of security in the past that everything was fine.
And a reminder that no one is invulnerable.
But just as the country was struggling to come to grips with the loss, and life seemed like it would never get back to normal, it was finally time to hear the verdict.
And now, the fate of the Playboy empire was in the hands of the jury.
Everything I had worked for would be affected by this decision.