Free Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese

banning pubic hair, he featured breasts and nipples almost exclusively on the young bodies of buxom women, some of whom violated nudist tradition by posing alone indoors, far from the bucolic family gatherings celebrated in Sunshine & Health —thus lending credibility to the rumor that when Von Rosen was unable to find attractive photos of legitimate nudists, he was not averse to using strippers.
    Women who could easily have passed for strippers appeared regularly in Von Rosen’s Art Photography magazine, but, as if toassure the censors of their lofty purpose, they stood nude in statuelike repose, muted as the undraped marble maidens of classical sculpture, their expressionless faces and innocuous eyes avoiding direct contact with the potentially lustful lens of the camera.
    Such delicacy was neither expected nor desired by Von Rosen in his more flamboyant girlie magazines because, inasmuch as the models wore some semblance of clothing, he felt that they deserved concomitant freedom of expression, such as the option to wink at the camera, to leer, swing their hips, and smile with their mouths open.
    The most successful of his girlie magazines was started in 1951, not long before Hugh Hefner had joined his staff. It was called Modern Man , and its first cover girl was actress Jane Russell smiling as she sat on a rail fence, wearing frayed shorts, a tight-fitting jersey, and leather boots. While the pictorial focus of Modern Man was voyeuristic, Von Rosen saw himself not as a salacious man but a businessman now bringing to a market craving photogenic females the same detached efficiency that had characterized his career when he was selling Etude to piano students and The Expositor and Homiletic Review to preachers. His initial editorial problem with Modern Man was not in determining what men wanted to see but rather what men wished to read, if anything. At the same time he had to attempt to appease the censors by providing in his magazine editorial matter of hopefully redeeming social value to counterbalance the breasts and buttocks that so fulsomely filled his pages.
    Deciding to refrain from publishing any word or idea bordering on the pornographic or politically controversial, the editorial content of Modern Man became similar to what might have been acceptable in the essentially asexual outdoor men’s magazines such as True and Argosy . In the first issue of Modern Man there was an article on the lure of mountain climbing, an interview with actor Dana Andrews on his boat with advice on how to sail, a feature on such stylish custom-made cars as the 1913 Jaguar, a photo essay on Paris’ Place Pigalle, a shopping guide for collectors of classic guns. The reader response to this last item, and tosubsequent articles on gun collecting and hunting, prompted Von Rosen to eventually start other magazines devoted entirely to these subjects. If there was anything innovative in Modern Man , it was perhaps Von Rosen’s decision to print in this one magazine both the photographs of jovial seminude pinups and the solemn totally nude art models, a combination that would later be imitated by Hefner in Playboy .
    Wishing to present the most respectable examples of art nude photography, Von Rosen spent thousands of dollars during the first year of Modern Man to buy the work of a distinguished Hungarian named Andre de Dienes, who in the 1930s had specialized in photographing European art and sculpture exhibited in the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre and other great museums. Many of De Dienes’ photographs of classical nude sculpture had appeared in Esquire before the war, but at the time Von Rosen was starting Modern Man the editors of Esquire were deemphasizing the titillation that had tinged their magazine since its inception in 1933. Not only did the Esquire editors think that girlie magazines would soon become anachronistic in postwar America, as so many veterans advanced educationally through the G.I. Bill, but the magazine had also