PLAYBOY Identity

[Dan Stiffler]

PLAYBOY is a distinct aspect of my identity and has been since May 1962,
when I purchased my first issue, just before my fourteenth birthday.  Owning
that magazine was a rite of passage, perhaps the first on my own.  In that
sense, it was my first step into adulthood.  By myself, I took that issue of
PLAYBOY off the rack at Blind Georgeıs Newsstand and put down my fifty cents
at the counter.  I then climbed on my bicycle and raced back to the school.
It was lunch hour.  For the rest of the day PLAYBOY gave weight to my
PeeChee notebook.  After school, in the gymnasium of my junior high, on the
pull-out bleachers, some of my friends gathered as I opened the door of my
magazine.

This was not my first time opening the pages of PLAYBOY.  That had happened
at my grandmotherıs house, when I was ten or eleven.  My cousin and I had
discovered a copy in her basement, probably squirreled away by one of her
sons (she had four), one who had recently returned home from a broken
marriage.  It was the November 1958 issue; the cover mentioned Brigitte
Bardot.  I already knew about BB, had seen an article about her in one of my
parentsı magazines, maybe it was Life or Look.  I was pretty sure that I was
in love with her.  Here BB was, ³unexpurgated²!  In a few seconds, I figured
out what that word meant.

My cousin and I gave a quick and dirty look at the magazine...then we got
bold.  The centerfold seemed like something that needed to be pinned up.  I
donıt know for sure whose idea this was, but, if later life is connected to
the early in any meaningful way, it was mine.  Thus, Joan Staley went up on
the basement wall.  I didnıt know then that she was called Joan Staley, a
girl whose father was a Navy chaplain and who had appeared on Perry Mason.
I only knew that she was standing naked, facing me, looking directly at me.
Years later I would see that she was ³on set,² with a script modestly held
in front and with a CBS eye on the camera hovering in back.  Then, as a boy
who had thought he was in love with only Brigitte Bardot, I could only stare
back.

At some point, my cousin and I began to worry.  I do not remember why we
decided to build a fire in the basement fireplace and then throw the
magazine and the centerfold into the fire, but I remember doing it.  I
imagine that we were destroying the evidence.

My second experience with PLAYBOY was very quick, a matter of seconds
really.  A year or so after the fire, I was visiting the house of the same
cousin.  We had gone into his parentsı bedroom for some reason and I saw on
the dresser, in full view, the March 1960 issue.  That cover is
unforgettable, even if you have seen hundreds of others before first seeing
it.  Anyway, this was my second PLAYBOY cover, and I remember walking up to
the dresser and standing in front of it, looking at this magazine that was
out in the open, in the bedroom of a married man, who was my fatherıs
brother, and in the bedroom of my aunt, upon whom I was sweet.  I thought,
this is the way it should be: out in full sight.  It would be years before I
would see Sally Sarell, Miss March, but I knew then that PLAYBOY should be
on the dresser top, not stashed away in the basement.

Unfortunately, in the house of my uncleıs brother, I would have to stash my
PLAYBOYs.  My early issues have quite a history.  Our house did not have a
basement, but the bookshelves in my bedroom had sliding doors.  And in
Southern Oregon there are woods for burying treasures, woods only me and my
buddies knew about.  Well, maybe the Indians knew before us, but we were the
first white guys to find those woods.  Good places to bury a wood-shop box
filled with a beginnerıs collection.

When I went off to college, I lived my first year off-campus, at my
grandmotherıs house.  I was attending a liberal arts school that was too
expensive for me but I could save room and board by staying with my grandma.
One of the first things I did when I moved in was go to an art store and buy
one of those make-it-yourself frames.  It was wooden.  I put Dianne Chandler
into my frame and then on my bedroom wall.  Grandma teased me but didnıt
seem to mind too much.

The next year I moved on-campus.  In my fraternity house, I added framed
centerfolds to my new wall space.  I had seen the Playboy Clubs pictorials
and I liked the design of a wall with framed playmates.  You know that scene
in Animal House where Otter takes the deanıs wife up to his frat room and
seduces her?  There are framed playmates hanging on that wall.  I didnıt
have the bar, nor the deanıs wife, but I had the playmates.  That was my
room.

My first issue, the one at the bottom of a growing stack on my book shelves,
had a feature about plans for the Playboy penthouse, which would have been
built if Hef hadnıt found his Chicago mansion.  Itıs true that Cynthia
Maddox is quite simply the most remarkable feature of May 1962 and itıs also
true that Marya Carter was my ³first playmate,² but the Playboy penthouse
really got me to thinking.  I was already crazy about the E-type Jag parked
in the garage.  Boy, if I lived in a place like that and drove an E-type,
maybe I could get a girl like Cynthia Maddox to come on over.  I guess I
still think about that place sometimes.

Today, most of my wall hangings are pin-ups.  Alberto Vargas, Pompeo Posar,
Art Paul, Chuck Miller, and Marilyn, lots of Marilyn.  Itıs one thing to
leave PLAYBOY out on the dresser top; something else, I suppose, to put it
on the walls in the place where you live.  But then PLAYBOY is a part of my
identity, not one I have wanted to hide‹at least not since that day with the
March 1960 cover.

regards,

Dan Stiffler