I haven’t read PLAYBOY religiously since. . .  Well perhaps that’s not a good choice of words. 

I haven’t been a consistent reader of PLAYBOY since my undergraduate days, some ten years ago.  At first it was the faddishness of the magazine that attracted me—the novelty of being able to keep abreast of the latest drift of the intellectual and cultural cosmos, of being in the liberal vanguard.  Soon, however, the novelty wore thin, interest withered, and I began to tire of the manufactured pretense of the magazine, those provocative and voluptuous glossy air-brushed bodies in the picture spreads had, at last, all the substance of a creampuff and the freshness of month-old lettuce.  It was then that I realized that this fare, while captivating and tasty, was not much more than intellectual junk food: easy to swallow but with very little nutrition. 

I decided that there were other publications where challenging ideas roamed the pages; and if one’s libidinal appetites were unsatisfied other magazines had photographs of beautiful women in even more appealing circumstances.  Time rapidly passed PLAYBOY by: while Hugh Hefner was artfully plotting a strategy for the introduction of pubic hair into the consciousness of Middle America, PENTHOUSE was already well invested in it.  Today for the same price anyone can buy glossy magazines with double-paged pictorials, spreads of denuded pudenda (one hesitates to say “aux naturelles,” although morphologically it may be arguably correct); a state undreamed of and unnatural in the eyes of God and Hugh Hefner. 

Still, PLAYVOY held a fascination for me, because of all the publications and all the media in our vast and exotic country, this magazine,  the germ, the seminal statement of the ideas and ideals, the myths and mores, that compose the corpus of the American Dream.  Ineffable, unknowable in any other medium it speaks clearly in the red-white-blue-green glossy pages air-brushed to smooth the harsher edges of reality.  Herein is found in copy and graphics the aspirations of Middle America: the possessions which, compounded one upon the other, form the body of the Good Life: domiciles, clothing, transportation, inebriants, and coming last but not least, sex. 

Sex is, as everyone knows, PLAYBOY’s bottom line.  It’s the product that sells the product.  The quasi-intellectual copy, fiction and non-fiction, is only salve to soothe the liberal guilt pangs of its readers, still inexorably bound to Victorian notions of erotic sin and damnation.  But the pictures are what make the magazine.  And of all the photo subjects, none projects this sexual mythology more than the woman who bares herself to the world in the monthly centerfold. 

Like the PLAYBOY  bunny—that lubricious lapin image of fecundity—the Playmate is known and understood around the world as a metaphor for the American Dream.  She is what every man aspires for, and ev ery woman envies.  Beautiful, aloof, erotic, yet incorruptibly wholesome, she is the ideal mix of virgin and whore, daughter and lover. 

And, as with any dream, one never really expects to confront the organic, animate personification of that somnial image.  One may always hope, but coming face to face with a metaphor occurs only on those rare, star-crossed occasions when life imitates art. 

So it was that I had no fathoming of what lay in store for me on a recent Thursday morning as I answered a call from Hervey Housler, the gallant and personable manager of White Dog on North College Avenue in Fayetteville.  His sonorous voice came ringing over the line asking if I would like to interview the PLAYBOY playmate of June, 1978, who was appearing at the store to help them celebrate their second anniversary.  I don’t get offers like that every day.  In fact, I have never gotten an offer like that before.  I immediately rose to the occasion and accepted Hervey’s kind invitation.  Here was my opportunity to know, to penetrate, this small piece of the American Dream. 

Her name is Gail Stanton.  She stands 5 feet 1 inch in bare feet, but in high-heeled platform shoes is elevated some four inches more.  The raw data is easy enough to ascertain: 102 pounds, twenty-five years old, and a body that provokes among males a delight more utilitarian than aesthetic.  Deep blue eyes are framed in a corona of casually coiffured dark brown locks that fall in rows of curls to her shoulders. 

Her outfit consists of black leatherette material carefully fitted over sylphish curves.  The bottom is what were know a few years ago as “hot pants;” a name well taken. The top is a short-sleeved sheath dominated by decolletage.  My mind wanders as I ponder the significance of the color black which imbues and commands this scene.  In the mythology of the North Atlantic Caucasian cultures, it is the color of evil, of sin.  Is this PLAYBOY’s homage to its ethnic and cultural origins?  Or perhaps someone with a monumental sense of humor is playing a cruel joke on her lusting admirers by proscribing, ruling out of bounds, this luscious pear. 

But what is the place of knowledge in sin?  Was not the first and greatest sin simply the commission of the act of learning?  If this is the transgression she is guilty of, then I shall be a willing miscreant.  She will play Virgil to my Dante as we explore the circles of heaven and hell in the American Dream. 

    We begin with her beginnings.  She was born and raised in Memphis, and prides herself in being part of the unique culture of the South.  Working as a data processor, she spent her outside hours modelling for photographers.  When, in 1976, a PLAYBOY photographer came to Memphis to shoot for the “Girls of the South” spread in an upcoming issue, he was approached by Gail’s photographer, who suggested she be tried as a subject of the photo study.  The rest is history.  Of the twelve females featured in that 1976 spread, only she was invited to become a Playmate. 

Her mother, however, was outraged.  She offered her daughter $10,000 (the same amount PLAYBOY would pay) not to accept.  But Gail, with visions of embarking on a career far more rewarding and glamorous than processing data, refused the offer.  “Because I felt so strong about PLAYBOY I went ahead on my beliefs.”  And now her courage has led her to the threshold of success. 

I find it intriguing that her mother is the primary force in the family.  Did she get her strong will from her mother?  She smiles.  “I am very independent, very career oriented,” she admits.  Her family just didn’t understand before.  They didn’t know what kind of organization PLAYBOY was.  Now, after seeing how their daughter is treated, they are behind her 100 percent.  And her mother even goes so far as to say that if she had been in Gail’s position she would have done the same thing herself.  As a tale of the enlightenment of an American family it borders on the inspirational. 

Knowledge is not an easy burden to bear.  Their Aufklarung was accompanied by trials.  Her father (a deacon in the Baptist Church) and her mother had to face their friends, acquaintances, and the congregation of their church.  It was hard on her family.  Some cruel things were said, Gail believes, more out of jealousy than anything else. 

I try to imagine a young girl raised in a strong Baptist family in a Mississippi River town.  What hellish demons did she meet in the preachers’ sermons?  What eternal fires were promised to her and all other little girls who strayed from the paths of righteousness?  And what phantasma drives her to refute these ogres and ghouls?  It is, it must be, her vision of the radiant alabaster walls housing the golden city of the American Dream. 

And what of love?  “I love a lot of people,” she responds. 

But what does it mean for her, this elusive, absolute universal force? 

“Love is caring about a person (who, in turn) cares about me for me.” A seeing, knowing energy that penetrates the shrouds in which we hide ourselves.  I am surprised by how far removed this humanistic vision of romantic love differs from the casual sport of PLAYBOY’s erotic fantasies.  In those sleek pages she is nothing more than another expensive possession with which the successful man decorates his artfully contrived existence.  Her vision, though, is that of a solitary human being seeking the humanity of others.  In her perfect love she will be unveiled to the eyes of her lover stripped of worldly pretense; not as a “Playmate” or expensive objet d’art, but as another human soul, naked to the world save the mortal cloth that gives her shape. 

She continues.  It is a powerful moving force that “is 60 percent sex, 40 percent compatibility.” 

I am struck by her formulaic expression.  And what about Christian love?   What is its composition?

Her face tightens, eyebrows darken over blue orbs, her jaw tenses.  Apparently Christian love and erotic love are not to be compared.  Perhaps, in the eyes of Middle America, they are of two different worlds, each occupying separate hours and days in the week.

It is, she answers tersely, “Whatever works for you.”  She’s not here to talk theology, or even American mythology, but to represent Playboy Enterprises Incorporated (PEI).  Her agenda, evangelical but non-Miltonian, is to explain Hugh Hefner’s empire to man.

PLAYBOY is now a “lifestyle” magazine, she says.  It is, I decide, a combination tour guide manual and list of commandments; everything one needs to know to enjoy the opulent ravishments of the American Dream.  It serves as a cookbook, listing the ingredients of the Good Life.  I recall, though, that in the early ‘70s PEI over-capitalized in the PLAYBOY lifestyle: casinos, hotels, resorts, night clubs, and more were added to the empire that was then suffering from a cash-flow problem.  Perhaps PLAYBOY took itself too seriously, or perhaps America wasn’t prepared for its vision of the Dream.  For whatever reason, the  PLAYBOY lifestyle of that time failed.  The properties were sold and the corporation retrenched.  Apparently it’s one thing to profess a lifestyle, and quite another to profit in it.

For Gail the PLAYBOY lifestyle is very real.  She is the compleat  PLAYBOY reader, skilled in its many parts.  “I always read PLAYBOY completely through,” she tells me.  Her favorite section is the Forum because of the witty editorial responses to readers’ problems.  Some readers have complained to her, though, that the magazine contains “a bit too much advertising.”  It is an opinion the advertising department would strive mightily to disabuse her of.

And does she subscribe to the philosophy of the magazine?

“No, because I don’t think it’s right for me.”  The sexual and personal freedoms are not for her.  She still dreams of a husband and family: a domestic vision integral to the larger Dream.

With how many children?

“Three hundred and fifty-two.”  She laughs, her eyes relaxed, almost vulnerable for an instant.

             What do you look for in a man?

            “He has to be intelligent, mature. . . “

  What is meant by “mature”?

“He has to be career oriented, established.  I am very ambitious and I’ve got to have an ambitious man.”

But can she, can anyone, really be happy driven by such a cold and lonely master as ambition, I wonder.  The demands of her life must be exhausting.

“I travel 99 percent of the time,” she tells me.

Doesn’t  this life, a life promoting PLAYBOY in stereo stores, car lots, shopping centers, and shoe stores get lonely?

“It sure does!” She answers.  In all of this she has to take time in every day for herself, perhaps to sort things out, to regain touch with her humanity. 

But where is joy in this version of the Good Life?

“I enjoy making other people happy.”

But this isn’t the PLAYBOY philosophy.  Happiness is something to receive, not to give.  This is an attitude more suited to social workers or missionaries.

“I am a missionary for PLAYBOY.”

I am stunned.  Where is the happy life, full of the opulence and eroticism pictured on the pages of the magazine?  Where is this vision of the American Dream if not with her?  Playboy, playmate, plaything . . . the vocabulary is that of recreation, of life spent in sport; the world is its arena, and the bed its playground—square, round, rectangular or hexagonal; with or without satin sheets and mink blanket; equipped with an electronic headboard and enough stereo and optical equipment to cause a brown-out in Chicago.  Where is the pleasure, the happiness that these ingredients of the Good Life provide?

The life she describes is one of work not play; of duty and sacrifice rather than pleasure and self-indulgence.  My mind recoils.  So this is the Dream revealed: a lonely existence in the service of harsh ambition, pursuing the mirage of success.  All our labors, with which we buy our ticket to the Good Life, soon becomes not the means but the end itself.  Wealth cries out for more wealth; success demands more of the same.  A life spent obtaining possessions is without the time or passion to enjoy them.  The joy which beckons us to the American Dream is lost to work, play is sacrificed for drudgery and lust is constricted until it is nothing more than self-serving masochism.

This is the very negation of PLAYBOY’s American Dream.  All its promises of self-indulgent pleasures are broken.  There is no happiness, no joy, no bliss. Only dried, weathered excuses for self-sacrifice.  Hugh Hefner himself is the classic textbook case of the anal-obsessive neurotic character—unable to enjoy the fruits of his work because of its demands—who is the true inhabitant of this distorted vision.  In the magazine he is pictured sitting Scrooge-like on his luxurious round bed late at night studying photographs of naked women.  I think, so this is the use he finds for his evening hours and the instruments of seduction; a withdrawn and ineffective copulation, an erotic spiritism once removed: a laying of hands, not on the bodies themselves, but on these two-dimensional photographic icons.  In this lonely scene one sees the genesis of the inflatable plastic doll, the real-life playmate of America’s Hefners.

What a grand, magnificent joke played on us by some cosmic prankster.  Everything we desire is denied to us: the harder we struggle for it the more distant it becomes.  It’s as if some 20^th-century Puck had dropped through the clouds and decided to befuddle this small egotistical nation of men and women.  Through his transmogrifications the most successful citizens are now only circus clowns who, unknown to them, have been tricked into performing for the amusement of some vast stellar audience and a few earthly cognoscenti of the absurd who have been tipped off to the joke.

I step out of White Dog into the mid-morning sun, exhausted by this unexpected climax.  In my hand is her autographed glossy picture.  As I glance down at it my eye is caught by her inscription: “Thanks for being my friend.  Love always.”

Did she really feel that a bond had been erected between the two of us in those moments between dark and light we shared among stereo components and album covers?

Or was she just speaking metaphorically?