Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Author D.R. Haney traces the history of Playboy magazine, provides a character sketch of founder Hugh Hefner, and charts the fortunes of a number of Playmates in this 9,000-word essay. A fascinating bit of cultural history.

At the same table, Hefner wrote a sketch of his target reader, the sort of young urban bachelor who enjoyed “mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” This fantasy figure had been a stock character of Hollywood movies since the silent era, the aristocratic rake often found in drawing rooms, where he wore a smoking jacket, or exclusive nightspots, where he wore a tuxedo. His wealth and wit made him irresistible to naïve young women and shady at best to audiences enamored of the hardworking, plainspoken, outdoorsy type; but in Stag Party, Hefner, a movie fan since childhood, would rescue the rake from villainy as the male counterpart of the femme fatale and position him as a hero. A cartoonist drew an anthropomorphic stag to serve as the magazine’s mascot, and when Stag Party became Playboy, the stag became a rabbit still dressed in the stag’s smoking jacket and raising his fizzy drink in a firelit den.

STAR 80, Bob Fosse’s film about the murder of Playmate Dorothy Stratten, is available in full on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfnzFMmdKa4