Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Playboy not much of a literary playmate

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 1998 | 9:40 a.m.

Of course I read Playboy for the pictures -- you mean there's another reason? Oh, sure, I've seen pages of words between the pix, but when I've tried to read them, zzzzz. For years now, I've been wary of being seen looking at the magazine, lest I risk the disapproval of my literate peer group: Sheesh, Dickensheets, why are you looking at that?

One hates to see one's beloved cultural institutions wither and lose their bite with age -- getting longer in the tooth while getting shorter on teeth, as it were -- but it's worse to see them go senile. Playboy -- once a cultural force and a fine magazine -- has gone soft in the head on both counts. Such pronouncements as it's made on the most pressing sexual issue of the time, the Lewinsky affair and the Starr investigation, are -- well, does anyone recall what they are? They certainly haven't made their way into the larger debate.

Worse, it's become a dull magazine. Now, when I check it out on the newsstand, I first scan the table of contents, shrug in disappointment, then flip to the back page for a preview of next month, vainly hoping things will look up. They rarely do.

"I do not read or look at it too often," writes Bill Steigerwald, veteran magazine columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in response to my e-mail query. "I have noticed that Playboy's nonpictorial content is virtually worthless ..."

And it's not just us hardnosed journalists, either. I know of one subscriber who flips indifferently through every new issue and, barring any layouts of famous women that might lend the issue some collectible value, gives it to his 12-year-old son, so uninvolving are the contents, so tame are the photos.

I confirmed this with a look through the magazine's current Christmas Gala issue, a year-ender that in the good old days would be liberally stocked with diverting reading. This time I was excited to see ... to see ... um ...

Actually, there are one or two inadvertent signs of editorial life: for instance, an account of a scary sea voyage that looks almost promising enough to read. But then there's a ho-hum package on haywire weather and an essay recycling the old conceit that spouses should keep their sexual secrets from each other. And does anything speak more to the magazine's decline than this: The famous Playboy Interview features mildly interesting actor David Duchovy, while the brief 20 Questions is with hugely interesting writer Gore Vidal. "The old days of hard-hitting, news-breaking Q and As have been gone for a long time," Steigerwald notes. Nice triplet Playmates, though.

It wasn't always this way, of course. After Hugh Hefner started the magazine with a few thousand bucks, some nudes of Marilyn Monroe and an inclination to be a thorn in the cardigan'd side of '50s America, top writers and journalists docked often in its pages. What I remember most from my youthful days of smuggling copies from my dad's stash are the stories and interviews (sadly, pictures of naked women start to look alike, even to a teenager with fuel-injected hormones). Imagine my 15-year-old self reading a massive Q and A with Goldwater strategist-turned-libertarian thinker Karl Hess. Imagine Playboy of the 1990s running such an interview ("What movie was he in?"). Then there was, say, the magazine's memorable account of "Sex and Sin in Sheboygan" which cast an eye-opening light on the country's destructive hypocrisy.

But it's been a long time since Playboy was the alpha male among men's magazines. Compare the Christmas Gala to current editions of other guy's publications. Esquire has a varied and interesting package on "New American Heroes" with pieces on the everyday heroism of Mr. Rogers, the life-after-notoriety of Richard Jewell, and a Denver woman paralyzed after intervening in a hate crime. Nowhere does such gritty reality smudge Playboy's pages. Esquire's cultural coverage includes a bracingly heretical attack on that publishing darling, Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain." Meanwhile, Playboy profiles over-profiled indie filmmaker Kevin Smith.

Over at GQ, once you get past the trite "Men of the Year" package, there's a batch of fine, quirky pieces: on troubled bowling great Pete Weber; on the South's enduring secessionist movement; on real-life pet detectives; on taxidermy hobbyists (including a 7-year-old girl). Good luck finding such slices of wonderful weirdness in Playboy. But it does have "Phil Hartman's Guide to the Holiday Office Party" (posthumous, of course).

Even Playboy's direct competitor/imitator, Penthouse, while having sunk from "tastefully nude" images to depictions of outright sex, can still flex a little editorial muscle. "While Penthouse was and may still be able to turn out a biting, investigative or interestingly angled piece," Steigerwald writes, "I have no sense of Playboy being able to do that."

More damningly, compare Playboy to its own history. I have in my hands the Christmas Gala issue from 1973. The interviewee: Bob Hope, who is certainly no David Duchovny. The articles: a double-barreled blast of Las Vegas -- a funny piece on the sex lives of showgirls paired with an excerpt from John Gregory Dunne's notable "Vegas: Memoir of a Dark Season"; an anatomy of Watergate; a thought-provoking look at the Bible as "the most dangerous book in the world"; and an examination of Disney's imperial aspirations. Good stuff all. Over the years, Hugh Hefner has come to be considered a bathrobe-decked lion of the First Amendment. Alas, his magazine rarely displays enough bite to invoke it.

"I may be getting too old," Steigerwald writes, "but I don't think Playboy can last too long; I don't know how it still does ..." Rest assured, mister, it's not you who's getting old.