Thy Neighbor's Wife (61 page)

Christie’s reunion with her father in no way detracted from her close ties to her mother, Mildred, whom she continued to telephone almost daily and to visit nearly each week, not out of a sense of obligation but one of affection; and though she knew that it was highly unlikely, even after her mother’s divorce in 1971 from her second husband, that her parents would remarry—
one reason being that her mother was now deeply involved in a three-year romance and sharing her home with a charming hairdresser twelve years her junior—Christie did succeed in strengthening the bonds of friendship between her estranged parents. At Christie’s suggestion and instigation, a number of Hefner family reunions were held during the mid-1970s, bringing under one roof her parents with their young lovers; her divorced uncle Keith from Aspen, usually accompanied by one of his après-ski starlets; her collegian brother David, an aspiring photographer who retained the surname of his former stepfather; her own male companion, invariably an older man; and her white-haired conservative grandparents, Grace and Glenn Hefner, who seemed to enjoy the reunions while privately believing in the superior wisdom of their ways. The elder Hefners made no secret of the fact that their lifetime’s experience with sex had been strictly limited to one another; and after more than fifty years of marriage, they said they had no regrets. Although Glenn Hefner had become a millionaire through investing in his son’s stock, and had for years helped to audit the corporation’s books, he claimed that he had never once in his life looked at a nude photograph in
Playboy
. The only magazines he enjoyed, he insisted, were
Fortune
and
Business Week
.

Except for a few quiet references to nepotism expressed by middle-level executives, there was throughout the Playboy building a celebratory response to the announcement that Christie Hefner was being promoted to the rank of vice-president in her third year with the company, earning at the age of twenty-six a salary approaching $50,000; and even those employees who believed that she was being elevated too quickly had to admit that, more than any other individual, she had improved the public image of
Playboy
since the bleak days of the drug probe, the stock decline, and the death of Bobbie Arnstein.

But coinciding with her success as a media attraction were a number of unrelated events that also contributed to the com
pany’s restored stature with the advertising agencies, the bankers, and the investors. The magazine, for example, in continuing to buy and publish outstanding work by prestigious writers—John Cheever, Irwin Shaw, Alex Haley, David Halberstam, Saul Bellow—was finally receiving in literary circles the recognition that had long been its due; and of special significance were news-making
Playboy
interviews with such individuals as the deposed union boss Jimmy Hoffa (his final interview prior to his disappearance) and the future President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, who made world headlines for the magazine as well as himself in admitting: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something God recognizes I will do and God forgives me for it.”

Hefner’s decision in 1976 to install as his chief operating officer a top newspaper executive named Derick J. Daniels, hired away from the thirty-two-paper Knight-Ridder chain, would also prove to be a wise move; for Derick Daniels, possessing the special clarity of mind that an outsider can often bring to solving the problems of a somewhat muddled management, discovered ways to cut costs beyond what Victor Lownes had already done without greatly disturbing staff morale or undermining the gains the company was already making. The most conspicuous gains were in
Playboy
magazine’s advertising revenue, which, although the monthly circulation had now settled at the 5 million mark, would soon approach a record $50 million a year, double that of its closest competitor,
Penthouse
. The company’s other magazine,
Oui
, also began to show profits, while the hotel-club losses gradually lessened. Although nearly one hundred employees were either fired or retired during Daniels’ first two years in charge, as certain departments and subsidiaries were consolidated or eliminated, Daniels did not espouse a policy of conservatism or defensiveness. Recognizing that a vital organization must at times take risks in the interest of high profits, Playboy Enterprises, Inc., under Daniels’ direction announced plans for the building and opening in late 1980 of a multimillion-dollar hotel casino in Atlantic City, where gambling had recently been legalized by the
New Jersey legislature. Partly because the first casino established by Resorts International proved to be a bonanza, and reinforced by Playboy’s gambling success in England, the Playboy company stock rose to $16 a share.

Among the decisions for which Daniels claimed full credit was the elevation of Christie Hefner to vice-president; and, while serving as her regent, he put her in charge of the Playboy Foundation (which contributed several thousand dollars annually to civil libertarian causes and medical-sexual research) and the publicity-promotion department of Playboy Enterprises, Inc., which involved her in such duties as speechmaking before advertising groups, appearing on television talk shows, and traveling around the nation giving interviews to the press.

The question she was most often and curtly asked by women journalists, in view of her claim to being an ardent feminist, was how she could justify working for a male chauvinist organization that had made its fortune through demeaning the female body. Christie Hefner denied that the depiction of women as sexual beings was in any way demeaning, and she declared that sexuality was just as much a part of a woman’s self as her intelligence and her independence. When interviewers cited
Playboy
photographs showing a nude woman with a finger on her clitoris, and asked if
that
was not exploitative of women, Christie responded: “I do not think that masturbation is a bad thing,” and she pointed out that “for the first time women are shown involved with their bodies, which is what the women’s movement is all about.”

Emphasizing that Playboy does not display women with chains, whips, and other kinky accoutrements—which, curiously, she discovered in such women’s high-fashion magazines as
Vogue
—Christie Hefner recalled: “As the women’s movement took hold, there was a feeling for a while that if you were a feminist you wore jeans and combat boots. So all of a sudden, nudity and eroticism were exploitative, and there was in the movement a little bit of anti-sexual, anti-male bias that came down very hard on
Playboy
, because
Playboy
is obviously very pro-heterosexuality
and very pro the sexual relationship between men and women.” But, she went on, she saw no inherent incompatibility between
Playboy
and feminism; to her, feminism represented having vast opportunities and options in life, and to tell women that they should not appear in the nude—as certain puritanical feminists were now urging, and as male censors and priests have been urging for ages—was, she insisted, contrary to the goals of independence and self-determination sought by a majority of women liberationists. While she conceded in an interview in the New York
Times
that
Playboy
offered a limited perspective on womanhood, she stressed that it was a man’s magazine, and its mission was not concerned with the varied complexities of being a woman any more than the women’s magazines in America dealt with the complexities of being a man. Most women’s magazines, in fact, “don’t even deal with the complexities of being a woman,” she said, adding that she was a lot more eager to change the way women were being presented in
Family Circle
magazine than in
Playboy

In December 1978
Playboy
magazine celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in publishing; and during the next several weeks—in Chicago, in Los Angeles, and in New York—there were a series of parties and dinners, disco dances and banquets and other extravaganzas costing the company more than $1 million, all of which were organized under the supervision of Christie, who clearly was now the most important woman in Hugh Hefner’s life. Barbi Benton was still a friend, but, at twenty-eight, she felt she was stagnating in his Jacuzzi-land and decided to live full-time in her Beverly Hills apartment and to date other men. Karen Christy, who after returning to Texas had visited Hefner in Los Angeles in 1976 and 1977, had recently written him a note telling him that she had just married, in Dallas, the Baltimore Colts linebacker Ed Simonini. Hefner’s former wife, Mildred, having happily cohabitated for years with the young Swiss-born hairdresser named Pierre Rohrbach, also decided to
get married; while Hugh Hefner, at fifty-two, courted his newest chatelaine, Sondra Theodore,
Playboy
’s twenty-two-year-old Miss July who was a blond blend of Barbi Benton and Karen Christy and other girls-next-door who inexorably aged and changed in real life but never in Hefner’s mind.

In the 410-page anniversary edition that contained photographs of every playmate in the magazine’s history, Hugh Hefner in the publisher’s page editorial recalled: “When I conceived this magazine a quarter of a century ago, I had no notion that it would become one of the most important, imitated, influential and yet controversial publishing ventures of our time. The early Fifties was an era of conformity and repression—of Eisenhower and Senator Joe McCarthy—the result of two decades of Depression and war. But it was also a period of reawakening in America—with a re-emphasis on the importance of the individual, on his rights and opportunities in a free society—a period of increasing affluence and leisure time. I wanted to publish a magazine that both influenced and reflected the socio-sexual changes taking place in America but that was—first and foremost—fun. Playboy was intended as a response to the repressive antisexual, anti-play-and-pleasure aspects of our puritan heritage. Big dreams for a young man only recently graduated from college, who quit his $60-a-week job as a promotion copy writer for Esquire when refused a request for a five-dollar raise….”

On January 11, 1979, at the anniversary finale before hundreds of guests gathered at the Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant in New York’s Central Park, one of the speakers, a representative of
Esquire
, stood up and presented Hugh Hefner with a blown-up replica of a five-dollar bill in recognition of the raise that had been so adamantly denied him decades ago.

G
IVEN THE
transformation of Betty Dodson from a dependent housewife into a liberated individual, it was not surprising that her days and nights as a visitor to Sandstone would be compatible with her evolution as a self-proclaimed Phallic Woman. Although the definition of “phallus,” as Ms. Dodson dis
covered long ago in her dictionary, referred equally to the clitoris as well as to the penis, this fact had little chance of popular acceptance in a world where, in her view, the “denial of the women’s phallus has for centuries been the essence of male dominance and female subjugation.” Partly in compensation, and partly because it appealed to her emerging erotic nature, Betty Dodson in recent years had dedicated herself, as a painter and writer, to exposing female sexual imagery to a society that preferred to conceal it.

Even before she visited Sandstone, where she would meet feminists as phallic as herself, Betty Dodson had conducted seminars for women in her New York apartment, consciousness-raising sessions in which the participants were encouraged to scrutinize their own and each other’s genitals without shame or diffidence. Using mirrors for self-examination, and then taking turns spreading their legs for observation by others, the women were amazed at how varied were their genitals’ shapes, designs, textures, patterns: Some were heart-shaped, others resembled shells, wattles, or orchids; and when the pubic hair and foreskin above the vagina was pulled back, fully revealing the clitoris, many women saw clearly for the first time the feminine center of arousal, and they were surprised to discover that clitorises could vary in size and shape from recessed pearls to protruding bullets.

The women learned, too, that the position of the clitoris with regard to the vaginal opening differed from one woman to the next, as did the coloring of the outer and inner lips, ranging from dark brown to light pink. At Ms. Dodson’s suggestion, the women not only observed but also touched, smelled, and tasted their own genitals, and sometimes those of their friends, in an attempt to overcome their childhood inhibitions and Bible-based traditions that marked this physical area as evil, unclean, the site of the curse.

On the walls of Betty Dodson’s apartment were hung several of her artful drawings of female genitalia, and occasionally she projected on a screen for her groups’ edification and admiration color slides showing nude women untimidly revealing themselves
and exhibiting an attitude that Betty Dodson called “cunt positive.” Most of the women who attended her sessions were, like herself, middle-class heterosexual or bisexual women in their thirties or forties who were divorced or still married, and, while supportive of the feminist movement, they did not share the asexual or antimale inclinations of some of their activist sisters. As an artist whose drawings and paintings had been called pornographic, Dodson had been criticized by a few feminists for contributing to the degradation of women; but, never apologetic about her work, she commented: “If a woman has had nothing but sex-negative experiences, then looking at pictures about sex will understandably make her feel degraded.”

Attractive and energetic, with gamine-styled dark hair and a short athletic body that was often nude when she greeted guests at her door, Betty Dodson was born in 1929 in the Kansas Bible Belt region of Wichita and had been reared with idealistic notions about marriage and fidelity. As a teenager she masturbated to images of her anticipated wedding night, and she visualized herself as an elegantly groomed woman wearing an exquisite lace peignoir and walking across a bedroom with poise and confidence toward a faceless obscure male figure reclining on her marital bed; and as she dropped her long gown to the floor, exposing her naked loveliness, she achieved her desired orgasm.

Such solitary pleasure, while she privately acknowledged its wickedness, was beyond her will to resist during her adolescent years, even though she suspected that her habitual masturbation was deforming her vaginal lips. She arrived at this conclusion one day when, behind the closed door of her bedroom, while borrowing her mother’s large ivory hand mirror, she sat with her legs spread near the window light and examined her genitals. With feelings of horror and fear, she noticed that the inner lips were extended, and the sight of these small folds of jagged tissue hanging out convinced her that she was the victim of self-abuse. Immediately she took a vow of lifelong autoerotic abstinence, which lasted for little more than a week; but she nonetheless did modify her masturbatory technique: Having observed that the vaginal
lips on her left side were shorter than on the right side, she restricted her stroking thereafter to the left, hoping that in time her vaginal lips would even up. And although the condition remained unchanged, she persisted in this manner of masturbation throughout her young womanhood in Kansas, where she worked as a newspaper artist, and she continued to touch only her left side after she had moved to New York in 1950, where she would study at the Art Students League, at the National Academy, and at Columbia University.

Following her marriage, in which she would remain monogamous during its five-year duration, she neglected her career as an artist while trying to please her husband as a full-time homemaker; but her connubial relations with a premature ejaculating spouse were rarely fulfilling, and thus masturbation continued to be her primary source of pleasure. However, after her divorce in 1965, Betty Dodson was finally able to enjoy complete satisfaction with male lovers; and in a book that she published in 1974, entitled
Liberating Masturbation: a Meditation on Self-love
, she recalled one episode that was central to her sexual emancipation:

Encouraged by her new sexual confidence, her art became increasingly sensual, and in 1968—the year when nudity was much in vogue in the avant-garde theater, films, and the counterculture—she was featured in a one-woman show at the Wickersham Gallery on Madison Avenue, an event that attracted during its two-week run more than 8,000 visitors who viewed with rapt attention and blushing appreciation her lusty depictions of several heroic nude figures touching or kissing one another and, in some instances, making love. This show appealed to those who thought themselves
engagé
in uptown Manhattan, the art patrons and brownstone liberals and parents of flower children, and she was praised by critics for her classic draftsmanship, her creative authority and flair. She was further gratified by the many sales to her unabashed admirers and by the fact that a few samples of her work were scheduled to be reproduced in art anthologies.

And if she was not so successful during a subsequent two-week exhibition at the Wickersham, a show that drew only 3,000 visitors, she was far from dismayed, for this second presentation was closer to her heart and emotions, was artistically more relevant
and uncompromising, dwelling as it did on sexuality in isolation and acts of deviation. Among the thirty pictures that she prepared for the Wickersham were drawings and paintings of naked figures engaged in autoeroticism, of men participating in mutual fellatio, of a solitary black male fondling his enlarged penis, of white women with erect citorises tenderly touching one another’s genitals, of women bedded with men in body but not in spirit. There were expressions on some of the female faces that suggested dispassion, anguish, even rage, and Dodson was clearly saying, as dramatically as any contemporary novelist or playwright, that there was in the contraceptive society still a continuing war between the sexes and much alienation in the bedrooms of America. Not only was she convinced that this was true but it was confirmed for her frequently in the comments she overheard among the crowds gathered around her pictures, or in what she had been told by people, most of them women, who spoke to her quietly in a corner of the gallery. Although some women confessed to being rarely if ever orgasmic in their marital relationship, they also admitted that they were too embarrassed to masturbate, or feared that if they tried using a vibrator they might become “hooked.” Some of the men, in studying the pictures of the masturbating women, admitted that they had no idea that women ever masturbated, while a few men were prompted to making hostile remarks, particularly after they saw Dodson’s six-foot drawing of a blond woman lying on her back with her eyes closed and masturbating with a vibrator. “If that was my woman,” said one man, “she wouldn’t have to use that thing.”

Rather than being deterred by the negative reaction to her show, Dodson and her feminist followers became more convinced than ever that the acceptance of masturbation, and the guiltless practice of it, was essential to the sexual liberation of women. “If I had any doubts about it before I started, the two weeks I spent in the gallery made it very clear that repression relates directly to masturbation,” Dodson wrote in her book. “It follows then that masturbation can be important in reversing the process and achieving liberation. Seeking sexual satisfaction is a basic drive,
and masturbation, of course, is our first natural sexual activity. It’s the way we discover our eroticism, the way we learn to respond sexually, the way we learn to love ourselves and build self-esteem…. When a woman masturbates, she learns to like her own genitals, to enjoy sex and orgasm, and furthermore, to become proficient and independent about it. Our society is made uncomfortable by sexually proficient and independent women.”

Betty Dodson asserted that it was very significant that a woman gives up her surname when she marries, adding: “It is really her identity she is giving up” and the sex-negative conditioning in which most middle-class women were reared, and which they often reinforced in their daughters, tended to perpetuate the double standard and to deny to a majority of married women the “reclamation of the female body as a source of strength, pride and pleasure.” Betty Dodson also insisted that the social pressure on women to conform to male-defined standards of respectability—lest these women encounter the social ostracism that befalls the “prostitute or tramp,” the very females that are patronized by many male moral hypocrites—resulted too often in women becoming “crippled” sexually: “Our pelvises are severely locked. Our shoulders are frozen forward. Our genitals are made repulsive to us and a source of constant discomfort. Our bodies lack muscle tone and often are armored with fat. The insidious thing about this system is that we end up accepting the self-serving male definitions of ‘normal’ female sexuality. We vehemently or sullenly put down masturbation and overt displays of healthy female sexuality. At this point we embellish our own pedestals and become the keepers of Social Morality…sexless mothers and house-slaves.” Conversely, Dodson declared, in a magazine interview in the
Evergreen Review
: “If we women all got together and became one unified ‘yes’ for sex, it would show us [that] men are just as uptight about sex as we are, only they don’t have to confront that. Since women act out all of their sex fears and reservations, men get to act and feel very sex-positive. Unconsciously they depend upon our saying ‘no’ or being hesitant, fearful, or passive.” And when men failed to satisfy women
in bed, Dodson wrote in her book, they rationalized their failures by assuming that the women were frigid, even when these women were capable of satisfying themselves through masturbation. “If a woman can stimulate herself to orgasm, she is orgasmic and sexually healthy,” Dodson declared. “‘Frigid’ is a man’s word for a woman who cannot have an orgasm in the missionary position in five minutes with only the kind of stimulation that is good for him. We must no longer cling to the notion that we ‘should’ have orgasm from intercourse alone. And we must not be intimidated by chauvinists in white coats who still refer to ‘coital inadequacy’ in women when their own laboratory and statistical evidence clearly contradicts this male concept of female response. The truth is very few women ever consistently reach orgasm in intercourse without additional stimulation. To be liberated a woman must be free to choose and state her preference in sexual activity without prejudice or judgment when it is her turn.”

At the sexual gatherings in Betty Dodson’s apartment, to which male friends and husbands were often invited, and where the activities might include anything from yoga to group sex, the women were generally uninhibited and fully capable, in Dodson’s words, of “running the fuck.” Dodson’s women had developed through attendance at her seminars the confidence and ability to take the sexual initiative, to tell their male lovers how they wished to be touched, how much pressure they enjoyed, what positions they preferred, going so far as to straddling a man’s face and controlling the movements, and discovering in the process that men often welcomed the opportunity of switching the traditional roles and becoming the passive partner. And the “cunt positive” attitude that many of Dodson’s female friends assumed enhanced not only their sexual lives but also their entire sense of self-worth. One woman, who, like Dodson years ago, believed that her genitals were deformed and ugly, was persuaded by Dodson’s color slides of female genitalia that she was as attractive as most other women; and the next day in her office, reassured and confident, she demanded a raise—and got it.