Free Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese Page A

become weary of defending its rakish image in the courtroom. Though it had won the major obscenity case brought against it by Postmaster General Frank Walker, a prominent Catholic and Democratic National Committee chairman, the litigation had been costly and time-consuming for the magazine, lasting from 1942 to 1946.
    Even before this, the Esquire management had been intimidated by members of the Church: In an article in one of Esquire ’s subsidiary magazines, Ken , there had been unflattering references to the Catholic Church’s support of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and as a result of the article, written by Ernest Hemingway, the Catholic hierarchy encouraged priests in their Sunday sermons to denounce Esquire ’s publications, and soon there was extensive boycotting at the newsstands of Esquire, Coronet , and particularly Ken , which hastened the latter’s discontinuance. And so in 1951 the nude photography of Andrede Dienes appeared not in Esquire but in Modern Man , and the most daring publisher in America at this time was undoubtedly George von Rosen, a position he held until Hefner would surpass him after 1953 with Playboy .
    Hefner and Von Rosen were in some ways similar. Both had been reared in puritanical homes in the Midwest and were the sons of fathers who were accountants of German-American ancestry; and both were orderly, ambitious, and self-absorbed. Von Rosen, eleven years older than Hefner, was a lean, lively, green-eyed man with the taut tidy features of a naval commander, and he controlled his magazines like a fleet of vessels. He demanded strict punctuality from his subordinates, cleanliness in their cubicles, and formality in their dealings with him. The ambience within the company was almost sterile, and the conservative midwestern men and women that he employed were emotionally detached from the nude photographs and layouts that they handled—as was Von Rosen himself, being in this sense quite different from Hugh Hefner. To Von Rosen, the magazines represented an efficient, profitable operation; to Hefner, magazines were a personal passion.
    If this distinction was not so apparent to Von Rosen, it was because he did not really know Hefner well during their time together, and what Von Rosen did know left him unimpressed. He considered Hefner’s cartoons mediocre, refusing to publish even one of them in his magazines, and he was mildly shocked one day when Hefner arrived at the office carrying a package and announcing that it contained an excellent pornographic movie. Hefner’s amiable offer to screen it for the staff was peremptorily refused by Von Rosen, who had no desire to see such a film himself and was irritated that Hefner would suggest showing it on company time. Although Hefner performed adequately in the promotion department, he somehow conveyed the impression that he was engaged in several outside interests and adventures, and that his destiny would never be determined by a single employer. This attitude was not gratifying to George von Rosen. Had Von Rosen known the full extent of Hefner’s preoccupations, he would have been more bewildered than perturbed, and possibly convinced that there was something about Hefner that was sexually bizarre.
    At this time Mildred Hefner was pregnant, and they had finally moved out of his parents’ home into a charming apartment in the Hyde Park section of Chicago; but Hefner was still unsatisfactorily married and was having an affair with a nurse with whom he would soon make a sex movie. This film, which would be shot in the apartment of a male friend and collaborator of Hefner’s, was a private venture that he did strictly for the fun and experience of doing it, having no illusions that he would ever become a professional maker of films, even sex films. However, he did believe that his future career would somehow be related to sex, for this was the subject that more and more dominated his thinking. He began to broaden his curiosity and