‘There are few things sadder than throwing your own going-away party’: Playboy leaves Chicago

‘There are few things sadder than throwing your own going-away party’: Playboy leaves Chicago

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While some media outlets paid tribute to Playboy’s official exit from the city of its birth, all was relatively quiet as the company slipped its editorial productions to the West Coast, fully consolidating its operations in Los Angeles where founder Hugh Hefner could keep a close eye on it from his Mansion. Just ask someone who knows: Scott Smith spent a year at the institution, and lived to tell of it. Read about it below or listen above:

“There are few things sadder than throwing your own going-away party. But that’s exactly what Hugh Hefner did in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. To mark the departure of Playboy magazine’s editorial operations for Los Angeles, America’s horniest octogenarian threw one last party via an 800 word, misty-eyed eulogy to the company’s nearly 60 years in the city of Chicago.

He was one of the few who marked the occasion. There was no retrospective in the city’s glossy culture magazines, no historical timeline in either of the daily newspapers. Even television news, which rarely passes on an opportunity to cover newsworthy nudity, didn’t seem particularly interested. Aside from an op-ed here or radio segment there, Playboy’s departure from the city of its birth went largely unnoticed.

Perhaps it’s because you only get one going-away party. Playboy, for its all intents and purposes, left Chicago in the mid-1970s when Hefner – after decades in the first Playboy Mansion on State Street – headed west to establish a new mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Now, before I go on, I want to offer some disclosure: From March of 2009 to approximately March of 2010, I worked for Playboy.com, first as its Senior Editor and then as is its Director of Content. I stopped working as Playboy.com’s Director of Content when Playboy…asked me to. More specifically, someone from HR ordered me to, in a conversation that featured the words ‘severance’ and ‘can stay until the end of the day…if you want to.’ But the year in between was a lot of fun. It’s hard to bear too much ill will toward a job that once asked you to write a script for something called Playboy’s Naked Yoga. Yup, I said a script.

So any personal animus I might bear toward the organization is tempered with affection. I’m more a fan of Chicago than almost anything and knowing this city was the birthplace of THE iconic magazine brand of the 20th century ought to be a point of pride for anyone who calls Chicago home and particularly for someone like me who’s spent his formative years working in media.

In his Tribune piece, Hefner offered a detailed highlight reel of the magazine’s first 20 years in Chicago, including the Hyde Park apartment where he laid out the first issue, the first Playboy Jazz Festival in 1959 at the old Chicago Stadium, the first Playboy Club in 1960, and the company’s move into the Palmolive Building in 1965 with nine foot high letters spelling out Playboy. And then the following:

‘By the mid-1970s, I moved to Los Angeles, the land where my dreams had come from, but Chicago remained the company’s base, headquartered in the Lake Shore Drive offices we’ve occupied since 1989. Now, after nearly 60 years, the Playboy offices in Chicago have closed as we consolidate our operations in Los Angeles.’

So by Hef’s own admission, there’s been nothing worth mentioning about Playboy’s time in Chicago since the first Bush administration. At least from his point of view.

And this is exactly the problem with Playboy magazine: It’s all from his point of view and long ago stopped leading the culture in favor of following it. Last month’s cover promised features on The Walking Dead, Bruno Mars, Jon Hamm and Meghan McCain. Contemporary? Sure. But territory most other modern major magazines have already covered.

In the book Mr. Playboy author Steven Watts quotes Hefner as saying  ‘I’ve always edited the magazine for myself, on the assumption that my tastes are pretty much like those of our readers.’ This was fine when Hef was in his 30s. But now a magazine that’s supposed to be about contemporary culture and aspiration is trapped in amber, held hostage by a 84-year-old man who long ago sought to wall himself off from the concerns of the everyday man.

I can’t remember where I read it now, but Hefner said he moved into the Chicago mansion, in part, because it allowed him to centralize his work and his social lives. This freed him, he said, from worrying about pedestrian things like how he was going to get to work or what he was going to wear for that day. And I suppose life is easier when you can go to work in your pajamas. But eventually the young men who looked to Playboy, who were it’s core audience – and had to worry about things like wearing pants and getting to work on time – realized Hef and his magazine didn’t have much to say to them. I mean, do people still want to visit the Mansion in L.A.? Sure. But people still want to visit Disneyworld. But nobody ever talks about living there.

A couple years ago, Playboy’s CEO said the company was going to shift to ‘brand management’ as its core strategy with an emphasis on opening new Playboy Clubs around the world. Essentially, Playboy as a company was going to be about being Playboy. The trouble is, the modern Playboy brand – particularly the clubs – isn’t all that strong. Last year’s NBC TV show The Playboy Club – a show about its Hefnerian heyday that essentially said life stopped being cool after the 1960s – got yanked off the air after three episodes. Rumors of a Chicago Playboy Club re-opening after a 20 year absence turned out to be little more than trumped-up publicity for the show. And even The Playboy Club casino at the Palms in Las Vegas is closing. It sounds like a bad joke. ‘Your mama’s so dumb she couldn’t even keep a Playboy Club open in Las Vegas.’

Two events last year symbolized Playboy’s reversal of fortune over the past couple decades and its reaction to it. First, Playboy sold off its online business to a company called Manwin. You’ve probably never heard of Manwin but they run a whole bunch of websites that offer free porn on the Internet. It’s exactly the kind of company that’s made it hard for Playboy to make money online. So hard that Playboy decided to get out of the business altogether then turn around and sell it to the very people who put them in that position in the first place. Also notable: Hefner’s decision to take Playboy from a publicly-traded company available on the New York Stock Exchange to a private company controlled largely by him. It was yet another example of Hef doing everything he can to turn inward keep his world free from external forces.

So if this week’s end of Playboy’s party in Chicago was met with a collective shrug it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The party’s location was really far away and seemed like it’d been over for a while now. Plus, Hef was the only one on the list.”

The Paper Machete is a weekly live magazine at the Horseshoe in North Center. It’s always at 3 p.m., it’s always on Saturday, and it’s always free. Get all your The Paper Machete Radio Magazine needs filled here, or download the podcast from iTunes here.