Fifty years ago, Hugh Hefner introduced the first issue of Playboy with the words, "If we are able to give the American male a few extra laughs and a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age, we'll feel we've justified our existence."
All in all, Hefner kept his word, delivering abundant female nudity against a background of politics, art, humor and literature to readers who reveled in the magazine's male libido-driven observations on popular culture.
The "background," as it turned out, came to encompass a trove of significant voices and images, and as part of its ongoing anniversary festivities, Playboy invited experts from Christie's into the magazine's vast New York, Chicago and Los Angeles archives to go through 5,000 works of art, 10,000 photographs and countless manuscripts and put together an auction aimed at selling some of its legacy to its loyal fan base.
When the 311 lots -- including cartoons, rare manuscripts, fine art, photography and memorabilia -- go on the block on Wednesday in New York, they are expected to bring between $1.5 million and $2 million. Though this is nothing to sneeze at, the money is only part of Playboy's motive for holding the sale. "I thought we could generate a million dollars for the company and reach a million people with the extraordinary story of Playboy and its impact on the world of literature, design, ideas and art," says Christie Hefner, chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises, the founder's daughter.
"We know we have collectors, so we thought that instead of engaging in private negotiations to sell part of the collection, we would have a public auction, where anyone anywhere can own a piece of Playboy."
Leaving aside the feminist politics that evolved alongside, and at times in opposition to, Playboy's evolution -- famously critiqued by feminist Gloria Steinem, who went underground as a Playboy bunny in 1963 -- Playboy's archives offer a fascinating window onto the magazine's relationships with a remarkable array of intellectuals and artists who shaped American thought. In fact, the first lot in the sale goes a long way toward expressing Playboy's unique mix of artistic and intellectual content with sexuality and humor. It is a black-and-white cartoon drawn by Hefner that appeared in the first issue of the magazine. It shows a couple of geeky, grinning male art students staring at an entirely abstract painting. The punch-line, "Man -- is she stacked," says all we need to know about the Playboy ethos. Playboys live in a world of art and ideas while seeing naked women at every turn.
"We went through a ton of material and selected things that represent the broad cultural base that Playboy is trying to describe," says Tom Lecky, a Christie's specialist in manuscripts and rare books who helped assemble the sale. "Playboy was a lifestyle magazine without a specific ideology. There are interviews with Fidel Castro, Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Buckley, Cassius Clay, which were designed to reach a broad audience with a broad range of voices."
Lecky, along with Francis Wahlgren, dug through Playboy's to find manuscripts that offer as much to the scholar as to the Playboy fan. These include rare glimpses of the paper trails of handwritten notes, carbon copies and typewritten manuscripts between editor and author that have been all but erased by the dominance of electronic communication. "You can see from the manuscripts," said Aaron Baker, the magazine's curator of Playboy art, "that when people said they read Playboy for the articles, they meant it."
Highlights of the sale include Ian Fleming's manuscript of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," the precursor to the James Bond series, which shows the author's thought processes as he prepared his work for its U.S. serialization. It is expected to sell for $18,000 to $24,000. Expected to bring $20,000 to $30,000 is the manuscript for Jack Kerouac's "Before the Road," originally published in Playboy as a prequel to the author's "On the Road." The typescript and corrected galleys show Kerouac's changes to the text and his ambivalence about finding a title.
Multiple drafts of an interview with Ayn Rand by Alvin Toffler show Rand reworking the text as she clarifies the presentation of her philosophy of objectivism. Lecky thinks this could well draw an institutional buyer. "Scholars have long had access to the printed version of her interview, but this is unstudied," Lecky says. "You can see the thought processes, how it changed, what was added, designed. It is a unique opportunity for scholars."
