Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese Page B

Steinborn of Capitol News became concerned about police raids on his warehouse. He moved to a new location, obtaining a larger warehouse but displaying a smaller company sign above the door. Steinborn was making money for the first time in his life, he had ten trucks operating in the city, and more newsstands than ever were now quietly accepting girlie magazines. With the sale of each fifty-cent magazine, the newsstand owner earned a dime, and so did HenrySteinborn. Thousands of magazines were selling each month in Chicago, and various publishers were hiring lawyers as advisers, hoping the lawyers knew how much of the female body could legally be shown in pictures. Some lawyers expressed opinions, others shrugged and said that a definition of obscenity depended on which judge was defining it; and so Steinborn’s panel trucks pluckily continued their deliveries to various newsstands, and eventually to a small bookshop located first on Dearborn Street, later on Van Buren Street.
    In the front window of the store was a selection of current hardcover and paperback books that could be found in an ordinary bookshop, but near the back of the store, and under the counter, were books and magazines that could only have been supplied by a secondary.
    In time, many customers became aware of the full variety of the merchandise, and they stopped in often, eventually getting to know the counter clerks well enough to gain flipping privileges with the girlie magazines without having to buy one. But most customers bought at least one magazine, tucking it into their coat or putting it into a bag; and two customers, perhaps the best patrons of the store, purchased copies of nearly every girlie magazine that was available for sale. One of these customers was Hugh Hefner. The other, a younger man, was named Harold Rubin.

FIVE
    A S HUGH HEFNER sat at his desk in the Playboy office on this wintry day in 1955 deciding which of Diane Webber’s nude photographs would be the centerfold in the May issue, he could hear a church bell ringing from the Holy Name Cathedral across the street. It was the 6 P.M. Angelus bell reminding the faithful, as it did thrice daily, of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that, through a miracle of sexual uninvolvement, she would become the mother of the Messiah.
    Thus did Catholicism dishonor sex by denying its necessity to those most virtuous; and this doctrine of denial would continue for centuries during which the Church demanded celibacy of its clergy, expected chastity of its unmarried parishioners, sanctified conjugal copulation mainly for the propagation of the faith, and canonized such women as St. Agnes because, rather than submit to male lust, she preferred death as a virgin martyr.
    This asceticism was, to say the least, substantially at variance with the life-style being advocated across the street at Playboy magazine, and had Hefner initially given more thought to it, he might have located his offices further from the gigantic Gothic cathedral that dominated the block and cast a disapproving shadow down upon the gray four-story Playboy building at 11 East Superior Street.
    But since great cathedrals cannot be constructed and maintained without great sinners to justify them, perhaps Hefner belonged where he was. Like most unrepentant sinners, however, he could expect no benediction from the believers, and he had already aroused the cardinal’s wrath months before by reprinting in Playboy a medieval tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron that describes the carnal life of a convent gardener constantly seduced by sexually aggressive nuns.
    The Church that had condemned this story in the mid-1500s had no higher opinion of it following its reappearance in the Playboy issue of September 1954, and after a recriminating call from the chancellery Hefner asked his distributors at Capitol to withdraw the issue from the Chicago newsstands, although these magazines were redistributed in other cities. Hefner