Hip social gathering spot for the friends and fans of Jay Lynch
At Playboy
When I heard that my defacto boss, Robert Baldi, had been shot dead by Chicago cops one thought crossed my mind. Unemployment.
So I called my friend Bob Post, an art director at Playboy, and arranged to meet him and Roy Moody for lunch. Lunch with these two guys was always a challenging experience. A perilous hike into uncertain territory handicapped only that we are, out of the gate, drunk as skunks. Bouts of drinking that lead to bouts of drinking that lead to heated discourse on the sad state of Art. Followed by slamming back shots of Wild Turkey. Followed by rant and counter-rant, each louder and more obstreperous than the previous. Followed by rounds of Long Island Ice Teas, followed by wracking sobs and guilt-laden reproach and singing (loudly) along with Merle Haggard and Tammy Wynette on the jukebox. And on and on until the afternoon turns to evenings of abominate self-indulgence, quickly forgotten thanks to benevolent alcoholic stupor and Nature’s protective and thoughtful blackouts. Lunch with these guys tests the mettle of one’s liver and explodes brain cells as quickly as a cigarette carelessly dropped into the M-80s bin at a Mexican fireworks factory. Back from lunch you return stronger for it but with several years shaved off your lifespan.
Before the games began I asked them if there was an opening in Playboy’s art department. Both of the guys nodded yeah, and said the department was a man short. The next day Roy Moody interrupted my hangover with a call and said I should come on down to the office. “Be sure to bring along your portfolio” Roy said. I had an appointment with Arthur Paul, the legendary founding Art Director of Playboy magazine.
Art Paul was the consummate Art Director and he knew print design better than anyone in the business. He believed in white space and clever resolution. He understood type forms and pacing. His job was to take Man’s most salacious instincts and present them elegantly. He had a fetish for women’s feet in high heels and, appropriate to his status in the industry, he was inducted into the Art Director’s Hall of Fame along with Walt Disney and Saul Bass.
***
I waited outside Arthur Paul’s office for about half-an-hour –- a short wait I was to find out. Art directors hustled layouts under his nose hoping for his initials but knowing, in their heart-of-hearts, that he would make major changes.
Art Paul’s executive assistant was Barbara Hoffman, a white-blonde efficiency expert in high heels, showed me into the great man’s office. He had the whole corner of the building, paintings by Schnakenberg and Warhol on the walls, a bank of light boxes splayed with hundreds of transparencies (35mm, 4x5s, 8x10s) of naked women gazing provocatively at the lens. He was a tailored man in his shirtsleeves, but his tie remained unloosened. He had an impish face surrounded by white wool. Bearded, balding with curly fringe, a pipe clenched between his teeth. Gold cuff links. Gold Rolex. He pumped my hand, happy to see me. He pulled out an illustration I did for Playboy back in 1972.
“It still holds up”, he said. “The hallmark of a good piece of art is that it holds up over time. I think this piece you did for us still meets the mark.”
He flipped through my portfolio without much comment and asked me how soon I could start work.
“Next Monday”, I bleated.
“Welcome aboard”, he said as he clasped my hand with both of his hands and led me to Tom Stabler’s office, the office next to his. Stabler was second in command in the art department and, as such, it had fallen to him to take me around and introduce me to the staff.
I was hauled around the 10th floor and introduced to editors, copy editors, proofreaders, associate editors and, the most important editorial link, the editorial assistants. In earlier times they would have been called secretaries. They were the glue that held it all together. They knew everything and kept it all straight for their errant and often absent bosses.
I was hustled into Arthur Kretchmer’s office. Kretchmer was the Editorial Director of Playboy. He was where the buck stopped before it went on to Hef. He was in sour spirits and preoccupied. He grunted a “hello” in my general direction. It wouldn’t take me long to learn that sour spirits and preoccupation was Kretchmer on a good day, and that he meant nothing personal. He and Shel Wax were going over some fucked up editorial predicament. Sheldon Wax, the Managing Editor, was smoking a pipe locked between angry clenched teeth. When I was introduced he scowled in my direction, and it was personal. His body language was disdainful and his attitude was contemptuous. I would say he was icy if there hadn’t been so much fire in the presentation. He was not pleased to meet me and he wanted me to know it. To Shel Wax I represented the antithesis of Playboy. The fact that I was actually on staff was a scar on Playboy’s sophisticated urbanity.
The editors who most appreciated my company and glib mockery were not the honchos, but those with subordinate power yet more polymorphous pizzazz. Like of Bill “Mad Dog” Helmer, Bob Shea, Robert Anton Wilson and Kate Nolan.
***
The general perception is that I edited the “Playboy Funnies” section. I was in on the inception but I didn’t edit. I was willingly exploited as a cartoon personality in order to generate contributors to the project.
I received a call from Michelle Urry, the magazine’s cartoon editor. “Cartoon editor” is a bit mis-leading, though. It was more like a reconnaissance position. After throwing out the obvious dead-wood Urry – on a monthly basis -- hauled a stack of submissions to Hef who then decided what would be published.
So Urry summoned me to New York in order to put together a stable of artists for the “Funnies”. On the one hand, it was cool being put up at the Waldorf Astoria and treated like a big shot by all the New York artists. On the other hand, it was frustrating because I had no say as to who would appear in the section. My purpose was to produce a cattle call but it was up to Hefner to decide who made the cut. And, after my initial stint as solicitor, I was hardly more than a layout, paste-up guy. Monthly, Michelle would send me Hef’s selections and even instruct me in which order they should run. There were many great cartoonists I futilely championed to be in the section even as mediocre talent was selected. I mean, who could explain why someone with the immense talent of Spain Rodrigues was rejected? Or Wally Wood?
There was talent in the section: Jay Lynch, Art Spiegelman, Randy Enos, Lou Brooks, Mark Alan Stamaty, Howard Cruze, just to drop a few names.
Early on Howard Cruze contributed some wonderful parodies of existing comic strips but when the cartoon office received letters from newspaper syndicates threatening lawsuits Hefner not only discontinued the parodies but, distressingly, also stopped using Howard altogether.
As to my own work, most of it was nothing more than simple jokes and puns. I managed to sneak in a few passable pages, but examination shows I wasn’t having a lot of cartooning fun. It was frustrating if only because publishing cartoons in Playboy had been a pipe dream since adolescence. In fact, I was in such a malaise about the “Funnies” that, toward the end of my time at Playboy, I stopped submitting comic strips to the section.
But the bulk of my job had nothing to do with cartoons.
My specialties became die-cut, special-stock features, the annual Year-in-Music package and humor features. Eventually I became Special Projects Art Director, where I was in a position to self-generate projects. Over the years the day-to-day work was conceptualizing illustrations, communicating ideas with artists and photographers, hiring models and stylists, directing shootings, correcting proofs and directing on location.
One of my first assignments was to direct a nighttime photo shoot of a vintage Wurlitzer rainbow-tubed jukebox all lit up at in the middle of a two-lane blacktop in a forest of Saguaro cacti in the southwestern desert. And, oh yeah, there needed to be a full moon.
Those were the days before Photoshop. So I caught a flight to Tucson, wrangled the Wurlitzer from the game room of an Arizona jukebox aficionado, hauled it out to the Saguaro National Park where we cleverly diverted the local state patrol with an attractive doe-eyed accomplice, hooked the jukebox up to a generator, got the shot (under a full moon) and received an art direction award for the image.
***
After awhile things slipped into routine. I'd roll in around 10am and work until noon. Then it was off to lunch with one of my fellow art directors, usually Bob or Roy or Norm. We'd try to get back to the tenth floor by 3pm. Invariably I'd bring back a six-pack that I'd whittle back throughout the remainder of the work day. I had a sign prominently displayed on my office door that said "No Beer, No Work!" And also a reproduction of the Revolutionary War war banner that featured a snake and the slogan "Don't Tread on Me." Mine had the snake but the legend read "Don't Fuck With Me!"
And, for the rest of the afternoon I'd roll and smoke.
My office was the first stop after the reception desk, where the elevator deposited anyone doing business with editorial and the art department. The entire reception area stank daily of reefer smoke. It pissed-off a couple of the editors, and they complained to Hefner about my flagrant drinking, dope smoking and grab-ass during business hours.
Hefner said "Leave him alone. He's a exception to the rule."
Hefner's fairly rigid guy , but he understands the anarchic character of the creative soul. He knew artists, writers and editors were an unruly and harebrained lot. It made sense to tolerate peccadillos like drug addiction, or an open display of psychosis, in order to harvest more blissful product from the sociopathic and thin-skinned artiste in his employ.
It was an efficient machine. The art department was large enough to transcend it own misbehavior and regularly harvest major awards from professional associations. We could abuse our kidneys and livers with reckless alacrity --and disregard the clock-- as long as we produced high-quality work.
Remember, these were the 70s. We were admired for our excesses.
***
Bob Post stuck his head into my office. "Wanna do lunch today?"
"Sure" I said. Where y' wanna go?"
We ended up and a small restaurant around the corner from the Playboy building. There was a thick-glass entrance door right off the sidewalk. Once through the doorway you were in a confined area facing a coat-check area. Immediately to the right was a steep stairway leading to her bar. Directly behind the bar was the food-service area. We never made it past the bar.
Earlier in the week Bob, drunk out of his mind, missed a curb, tumbled into the gutter and broke his leg in a couple of places. So he was on crutches, his right leg encased in a plaster cast. We strolled (He hobbled.) around the block to the restaurant. Bob lurched through the door and thumped up the steep staircase. He plunked with a thud and a clank into one of the barstools and ordered his first drink.
The lunch for this day would be Black Russians. Over the course of the next three hours he ordered 14 Black Russians. I tried to keep up, but I could only manage 10.
Bob's horrific life experiences bubbled up like demonfire as he drank. First, his eyes would go shifty, nervously darting, sinking back into his face, receding into darkness. His hair would start drooping in humid rivulets as he sweated buckets from his scalp. Then his Jesuit despair hemorrhaged and spilled into the surrounding landscape.
By the end of "lunch" he was a burbling wreak. Sobbing and wailing inter-spliced with drunken rage and incoherent conniption. Dangerously venomous at one moment, cheerful dipsomaniacal at the next. Schizophrenia on parade.
"Gawhda gi back t' werk" he slurred. We settled up with bartender, who was happy to see us go.
Bob lurched off the barstool and zigzagged toward the stairway, his crutches akimbo, his heavy cast thudding asymmetrically.
He reached the top stair and attempted to balance his descent with his crutch. But he missed the stair completely and rolled into the air head-over-heels. There was a beauty to his fall, as if it had been choreographed. Two-hundred and seventy-five pounds, six-foot five somersaulting in a perfect arc, torso over cast over crutches. Again and again and again. Thumpity thud, thumpity thud, thumpity thud. Finially he arrived with a clatter and a boom at the bottom of the staircase, startling the coat-check girl.
But intertia would not be thwarted. We have laws! Still at full throttle he hit the landing and flipped a perfect left right angle through the door way, and came to rest --in the blinding afternoon sunlight -- speadeagled on his back on the sidewalk. A crippled aberrant mass, random chaos in the city center, sent alarmed shoppers and terrified officeworkers skittering away in all directions.
I said "Bob. Let's get you a cab and get you home."
Bob said "Nawrrr..I gaah go werk. Goaarr backawerk."
So I put my arm around him and, bearing 275 lbs of deadweight, I hauled him two blocks back to the Playboy building. I deposited him like an elephantine sack of meat him into the elevator, starling those attempting to go about their business in a civilized manner. I was gregarious and friendly with my fellow elevator passengers, which only seemed to unnerve them more.
With a bit of difficulty I got him up to the tenth floor, around the corner, into his office and into his office chair. He collapsed face-down onto his cluttered desktop and began snoring loudly. I closed the door to his office and went across the hall, past the elevators and into my office and closed my door. I could still hear him snoring. Unrelenting, loud and cacophonous, rhythmically echoing across the art department.
About a half an hour later I heard the Gretchen Mc Neese, one of the editors, stomp into the art area demanding that something be done.
"We can't get any work done in Editorial. CAN'T YOU GUYS SHUT HIM THE FUCK UP?!!!"
Enraged, she stomped back to the Editorial department at the remote far side of the tenth floor, as Bob continued sawing logs.
***
Because I was a cartoonist I came to Playboy with an advantage as an art director. If you look at Playboy magazine today you won’t see an illustration that pivots with vivid lucidity, a visually intellectual fulcrum, like back in the day. It was the Arthur Paul style, clean layout, clever denouement.
I received a manuscript titled “Fear of Fagottry”, a dissertation about homosexuality in the monastery. I hired Kinuko Craft to paint, in medieval style, St. Sebastian tied to a post, generously impaled with the medical icon designating “male”.
There was an article entitled “The Manly Arts”, really an etiquette guide for the modern CroMagnon. I called Boris Vallejo, peerless illustrator of heroic mythos, and had him produce a painting of a beefy “Conan the Barbarian” type character, atop a craggy precipice, muscles taunt and rippled, opening a bottle of vintage Bordeaux with a corkscrew.
I had Sandra Hendler illustrate an article on frozen foods with a painting of an intrepid Arctic explorer chipping away a glacial chunk of ice containing, not a mastodon, but a giant box of frozen enchiladas.
Eraldo Carugati illuminated a profile of impetuous actor, David Carradine, for me -a photo-realistic portrait of Carradine, eyed impish and full of mischief, turning up “The Fool” from a deck of Tarot cards.
For a humorous piece called “Can Easy-Listening Music Cause Mass Suicide?” I visualized a Holiday Inn lounge combo entertaining passengers on the barge crossing the Styx.
And for a thing about a slump in the music business I concepted a bunch of music execs in a hobo jungle, huddled about a fiery barrel for warmth, passing around a mirror splayed with lines of cocaine.
The approach I employed as an art director was correspondent to the process I’d used to create a cartoon. Inventive witticism.
***
The late Buck Brown called me several years ago . Buck was the cartoonist at Playboy who’s best known for his perpetually horny “Granny” character. I hadn’t talked to Buck for 16 or 17 years. He said Barb Hoffman gave him my number. He ran into her at a Playboy old-timers party. He said Kerig Pope wasn’t there. Kerig couldn’t bring himself to attend because he was still feeling bad about being let go.
"They let Kerig Pope go?!"
He was the art department. He was the creative nexus for Playboy’s illustrators and artists. He rode herd over a covey of angels, maniacs, gods and anarchists. He held them to deadlines while engaging their lunacy in the direction of editorial objective. But this is a new day. Who needs a splendid helmsman when you can have a servile geek writing graphic code for pennies on the dollar? Who cares about Art these days anyway? Art is so retro.
“I don’t even go down there anymore”, Buck said. “It costs too much to park. I just mail my shit to the New York office instead of going in. They don’t even know who I am anyway. The receptionist told me deliveries were in the rear. “Kretchmer’s gonna be leaving at the end of the year.”
It’s the end of an era. It’s the twilight of the ‘boy.
So I called my friend Bob Post, an art director at Playboy, and arranged to meet him and Roy Moody for lunch. Lunch with these two guys was always a challenging experience. A perilous hike into uncertain territory handicapped only that we are, out of the gate, drunk as skunks. Bouts of drinking that lead to bouts of drinking that lead to heated discourse on the sad state of Art. Followed by slamming back shots of Wild Turkey. Followed by rant and counter-rant, each louder and more obstreperous than the previous. Followed by rounds of Long Island Ice Teas, followed by wracking sobs and guilt-laden reproach and singing (loudly) along with Merle Haggard and Tammy Wynette on the jukebox. And on and on until the afternoon turns to evenings of abominate self-indulgence, quickly forgotten thanks to benevolent alcoholic stupor and Nature’s protective and thoughtful blackouts. Lunch with these guys tests the mettle of one’s liver and explodes brain cells as quickly as a cigarette carelessly dropped into the M-80s bin at a Mexican fireworks factory. Back from lunch you return stronger for it but with several years shaved off your lifespan.
Before the games began I asked them if there was an opening in Playboy’s art department. Both of the guys nodded yeah, and said the department was a man short. The next day Roy Moody interrupted my hangover with a call and said I should come on down to the office. “Be sure to bring along your portfolio” Roy said. I had an appointment with Arthur Paul, the legendary founding Art Director of Playboy magazine.
Art Paul was the consummate Art Director and he knew print design better than anyone in the business. He believed in white space and clever resolution. He understood type forms and pacing. His job was to take Man’s most salacious instincts and present them elegantly. He had a fetish for women’s feet in high heels and, appropriate to his status in the industry, he was inducted into the Art Director’s Hall of Fame along with Walt Disney and Saul Bass.
***
I waited outside Arthur Paul’s office for about half-an-hour –- a short wait I was to find out. Art directors hustled layouts under his nose hoping for his initials but knowing, in their heart-of-hearts, that he would make major changes.
Art Paul’s executive assistant was Barbara Hoffman, a white-blonde efficiency expert in high heels, showed me into the great man’s office. He had the whole corner of the building, paintings by Schnakenberg and Warhol on the walls, a bank of light boxes splayed with hundreds of transparencies (35mm, 4x5s, 8x10s) of naked women gazing provocatively at the lens. He was a tailored man in his shirtsleeves, but his tie remained unloosened. He had an impish face surrounded by white wool. Bearded, balding with curly fringe, a pipe clenched between his teeth. Gold cuff links. Gold Rolex. He pumped my hand, happy to see me. He pulled out an illustration I did for Playboy back in 1972.
“It still holds up”, he said. “The hallmark of a good piece of art is that it holds up over time. I think this piece you did for us still meets the mark.”
He flipped through my portfolio without much comment and asked me how soon I could start work.
“Next Monday”, I bleated.
“Welcome aboard”, he said as he clasped my hand with both of his hands and led me to Tom Stabler’s office, the office next to his. Stabler was second in command in the art department and, as such, it had fallen to him to take me around and introduce me to the staff.
I was hauled around the 10th floor and introduced to editors, copy editors, proofreaders, associate editors and, the most important editorial link, the editorial assistants. In earlier times they would have been called secretaries. They were the glue that held it all together. They knew everything and kept it all straight for their errant and often absent bosses.
I was hustled into Arthur Kretchmer’s office. Kretchmer was the Editorial Director of Playboy. He was where the buck stopped before it went on to Hef. He was in sour spirits and preoccupied. He grunted a “hello” in my general direction. It wouldn’t take me long to learn that sour spirits and preoccupation was Kretchmer on a good day, and that he meant nothing personal. He and Shel Wax were going over some fucked up editorial predicament. Sheldon Wax, the Managing Editor, was smoking a pipe locked between angry clenched teeth. When I was introduced he scowled in my direction, and it was personal. His body language was disdainful and his attitude was contemptuous. I would say he was icy if there hadn’t been so much fire in the presentation. He was not pleased to meet me and he wanted me to know it. To Shel Wax I represented the antithesis of Playboy. The fact that I was actually on staff was a scar on Playboy’s sophisticated urbanity.
The editors who most appreciated my company and glib mockery were not the honchos, but those with subordinate power yet more polymorphous pizzazz. Like of Bill “Mad Dog” Helmer, Bob Shea, Robert Anton Wilson and Kate Nolan.
***
The general perception is that I edited the “Playboy Funnies” section. I was in on the inception but I didn’t edit. I was willingly exploited as a cartoon personality in order to generate contributors to the project.
I received a call from Michelle Urry, the magazine’s cartoon editor. “Cartoon editor” is a bit mis-leading, though. It was more like a reconnaissance position. After throwing out the obvious dead-wood Urry – on a monthly basis -- hauled a stack of submissions to Hef who then decided what would be published.
So Urry summoned me to New York in order to put together a stable of artists for the “Funnies”. On the one hand, it was cool being put up at the Waldorf Astoria and treated like a big shot by all the New York artists. On the other hand, it was frustrating because I had no say as to who would appear in the section. My purpose was to produce a cattle call but it was up to Hefner to decide who made the cut. And, after my initial stint as solicitor, I was hardly more than a layout, paste-up guy. Monthly, Michelle would send me Hef’s selections and even instruct me in which order they should run. There were many great cartoonists I futilely championed to be in the section even as mediocre talent was selected. I mean, who could explain why someone with the immense talent of Spain Rodrigues was rejected? Or Wally Wood?
There was talent in the section: Jay Lynch, Art Spiegelman, Randy Enos, Lou Brooks, Mark Alan Stamaty, Howard Cruze, just to drop a few names.
Early on Howard Cruze contributed some wonderful parodies of existing comic strips but when the cartoon office received letters from newspaper syndicates threatening lawsuits Hefner not only discontinued the parodies but, distressingly, also stopped using Howard altogether.
As to my own work, most of it was nothing more than simple jokes and puns. I managed to sneak in a few passable pages, but examination shows I wasn’t having a lot of cartooning fun. It was frustrating if only because publishing cartoons in Playboy had been a pipe dream since adolescence. In fact, I was in such a malaise about the “Funnies” that, toward the end of my time at Playboy, I stopped submitting comic strips to the section.
But the bulk of my job had nothing to do with cartoons.
My specialties became die-cut, special-stock features, the annual Year-in-Music package and humor features. Eventually I became Special Projects Art Director, where I was in a position to self-generate projects. Over the years the day-to-day work was conceptualizing illustrations, communicating ideas with artists and photographers, hiring models and stylists, directing shootings, correcting proofs and directing on location.
One of my first assignments was to direct a nighttime photo shoot of a vintage Wurlitzer rainbow-tubed jukebox all lit up at in the middle of a two-lane blacktop in a forest of Saguaro cacti in the southwestern desert. And, oh yeah, there needed to be a full moon.
Those were the days before Photoshop. So I caught a flight to Tucson, wrangled the Wurlitzer from the game room of an Arizona jukebox aficionado, hauled it out to the Saguaro National Park where we cleverly diverted the local state patrol with an attractive doe-eyed accomplice, hooked the jukebox up to a generator, got the shot (under a full moon) and received an art direction award for the image.
***
After awhile things slipped into routine. I'd roll in around 10am and work until noon. Then it was off to lunch with one of my fellow art directors, usually Bob or Roy or Norm. We'd try to get back to the tenth floor by 3pm. Invariably I'd bring back a six-pack that I'd whittle back throughout the remainder of the work day. I had a sign prominently displayed on my office door that said "No Beer, No Work!" And also a reproduction of the Revolutionary War war banner that featured a snake and the slogan "Don't Tread on Me." Mine had the snake but the legend read "Don't Fuck With Me!"
And, for the rest of the afternoon I'd roll and smoke.
My office was the first stop after the reception desk, where the elevator deposited anyone doing business with editorial and the art department. The entire reception area stank daily of reefer smoke. It pissed-off a couple of the editors, and they complained to Hefner about my flagrant drinking, dope smoking and grab-ass during business hours.
Hefner said "Leave him alone. He's a exception to the rule."
Hefner's fairly rigid guy , but he understands the anarchic character of the creative soul. He knew artists, writers and editors were an unruly and harebrained lot. It made sense to tolerate peccadillos like drug addiction, or an open display of psychosis, in order to harvest more blissful product from the sociopathic and thin-skinned artiste in his employ.
It was an efficient machine. The art department was large enough to transcend it own misbehavior and regularly harvest major awards from professional associations. We could abuse our kidneys and livers with reckless alacrity --and disregard the clock-- as long as we produced high-quality work.
Remember, these were the 70s. We were admired for our excesses.
***
Bob Post stuck his head into my office. "Wanna do lunch today?"
"Sure" I said. Where y' wanna go?"
We ended up and a small restaurant around the corner from the Playboy building. There was a thick-glass entrance door right off the sidewalk. Once through the doorway you were in a confined area facing a coat-check area. Immediately to the right was a steep stairway leading to her bar. Directly behind the bar was the food-service area. We never made it past the bar.
Earlier in the week Bob, drunk out of his mind, missed a curb, tumbled into the gutter and broke his leg in a couple of places. So he was on crutches, his right leg encased in a plaster cast. We strolled (He hobbled.) around the block to the restaurant. Bob lurched through the door and thumped up the steep staircase. He plunked with a thud and a clank into one of the barstools and ordered his first drink.
The lunch for this day would be Black Russians. Over the course of the next three hours he ordered 14 Black Russians. I tried to keep up, but I could only manage 10.
Bob's horrific life experiences bubbled up like demonfire as he drank. First, his eyes would go shifty, nervously darting, sinking back into his face, receding into darkness. His hair would start drooping in humid rivulets as he sweated buckets from his scalp. Then his Jesuit despair hemorrhaged and spilled into the surrounding landscape.
By the end of "lunch" he was a burbling wreak. Sobbing and wailing inter-spliced with drunken rage and incoherent conniption. Dangerously venomous at one moment, cheerful dipsomaniacal at the next. Schizophrenia on parade.
"Gawhda gi back t' werk" he slurred. We settled up with bartender, who was happy to see us go.
Bob lurched off the barstool and zigzagged toward the stairway, his crutches akimbo, his heavy cast thudding asymmetrically.
He reached the top stair and attempted to balance his descent with his crutch. But he missed the stair completely and rolled into the air head-over-heels. There was a beauty to his fall, as if it had been choreographed. Two-hundred and seventy-five pounds, six-foot five somersaulting in a perfect arc, torso over cast over crutches. Again and again and again. Thumpity thud, thumpity thud, thumpity thud. Finially he arrived with a clatter and a boom at the bottom of the staircase, startling the coat-check girl.
But intertia would not be thwarted. We have laws! Still at full throttle he hit the landing and flipped a perfect left right angle through the door way, and came to rest --in the blinding afternoon sunlight -- speadeagled on his back on the sidewalk. A crippled aberrant mass, random chaos in the city center, sent alarmed shoppers and terrified officeworkers skittering away in all directions.
I said "Bob. Let's get you a cab and get you home."
Bob said "Nawrrr..I gaah go werk. Goaarr backawerk."
So I put my arm around him and, bearing 275 lbs of deadweight, I hauled him two blocks back to the Playboy building. I deposited him like an elephantine sack of meat him into the elevator, starling those attempting to go about their business in a civilized manner. I was gregarious and friendly with my fellow elevator passengers, which only seemed to unnerve them more.
With a bit of difficulty I got him up to the tenth floor, around the corner, into his office and into his office chair. He collapsed face-down onto his cluttered desktop and began snoring loudly. I closed the door to his office and went across the hall, past the elevators and into my office and closed my door. I could still hear him snoring. Unrelenting, loud and cacophonous, rhythmically echoing across the art department.
About a half an hour later I heard the Gretchen Mc Neese, one of the editors, stomp into the art area demanding that something be done.
"We can't get any work done in Editorial. CAN'T YOU GUYS SHUT HIM THE FUCK UP?!!!"
Enraged, she stomped back to the Editorial department at the remote far side of the tenth floor, as Bob continued sawing logs.
***
Because I was a cartoonist I came to Playboy with an advantage as an art director. If you look at Playboy magazine today you won’t see an illustration that pivots with vivid lucidity, a visually intellectual fulcrum, like back in the day. It was the Arthur Paul style, clean layout, clever denouement.
I received a manuscript titled “Fear of Fagottry”, a dissertation about homosexuality in the monastery. I hired Kinuko Craft to paint, in medieval style, St. Sebastian tied to a post, generously impaled with the medical icon designating “male”.
There was an article entitled “The Manly Arts”, really an etiquette guide for the modern CroMagnon. I called Boris Vallejo, peerless illustrator of heroic mythos, and had him produce a painting of a beefy “Conan the Barbarian” type character, atop a craggy precipice, muscles taunt and rippled, opening a bottle of vintage Bordeaux with a corkscrew.
I had Sandra Hendler illustrate an article on frozen foods with a painting of an intrepid Arctic explorer chipping away a glacial chunk of ice containing, not a mastodon, but a giant box of frozen enchiladas.
Eraldo Carugati illuminated a profile of impetuous actor, David Carradine, for me -a photo-realistic portrait of Carradine, eyed impish and full of mischief, turning up “The Fool” from a deck of Tarot cards.
For a humorous piece called “Can Easy-Listening Music Cause Mass Suicide?” I visualized a Holiday Inn lounge combo entertaining passengers on the barge crossing the Styx.
And for a thing about a slump in the music business I concepted a bunch of music execs in a hobo jungle, huddled about a fiery barrel for warmth, passing around a mirror splayed with lines of cocaine.
The approach I employed as an art director was correspondent to the process I’d used to create a cartoon. Inventive witticism.
***
The late Buck Brown called me several years ago . Buck was the cartoonist at Playboy who’s best known for his perpetually horny “Granny” character. I hadn’t talked to Buck for 16 or 17 years. He said Barb Hoffman gave him my number. He ran into her at a Playboy old-timers party. He said Kerig Pope wasn’t there. Kerig couldn’t bring himself to attend because he was still feeling bad about being let go.
"They let Kerig Pope go?!"
He was the art department. He was the creative nexus for Playboy’s illustrators and artists. He rode herd over a covey of angels, maniacs, gods and anarchists. He held them to deadlines while engaging their lunacy in the direction of editorial objective. But this is a new day. Who needs a splendid helmsman when you can have a servile geek writing graphic code for pennies on the dollar? Who cares about Art these days anyway? Art is so retro.
“I don’t even go down there anymore”, Buck said. “It costs too much to park. I just mail my shit to the New York office instead of going in. They don’t even know who I am anyway. The receptionist told me deliveries were in the rear. “Kretchmer’s gonna be leaving at the end of the year.”
It’s the end of an era. It’s the twilight of the ‘boy.
Tags: Art, Brown, Buck, Cruze, Hefner, Howard, Hugh, Jay, Lynch, Playboy
Comment
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Comment by Skip Williamson on October 30, 2009 at 12:34am -
Playboy's headquarters was in Chicago. Elder and Kurtzman worked out of NYC. I never met Wiily Elder, but -- over the years at Playboy and before I was at the magazine -- I had the pleasure knowing and hanging out with Harvey quite a few times.
I've written the story of a bizarre evening at the Playboy mansion with Jay Lynch, Robert Crumb and Harvey Kurtzman. I'll post it here.
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Comment by Alan Page on October 29, 2009 at 8:18pm - Fascinating stuff, Skip. Could you say a little more about the set-up there, for example, did you cross paths with Kurtzmann and Elder? Or were they somewhere else at the time?
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Comment by Pat Moriarity on October 29, 2009 at 7:31pm - Great read! Wow, so that's what it must have been like to work for Playboy....for better or worse.
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