Reading Playboy for the articles: August 1977
Fonzie, kit cars of the 70s and A Bridge Too Far
My wife, Lisa, has acquired a large collection of vintage Playboy magazines. I'm flipping through those issues that catch my attention and offering my thoughts on the non-photographic content that filled its pages. You know, the articles.
The Interview: This intro is for the non-Gen Xers in my reading audience: Kids, back in the day there was no human being on Earth that was cooler than Henry Winkler. He played Arthur Fonzarelli, aka Fonzie, aka “The Fonz” alongside Ron Howard’s Richie Cunningham on Happy Days, a long-running sitcom set in an idealized 1950s Milwaukee. The show began as a failed pilot that was repackaged into an episode of Love, American Style, then subsequently picked up for series as a mid-season replacement when George Lucas’ American Graffiti (also starring Ron Howard as a 1950s teen) became an unexpected monster hit in 1973. Winkler’s Fonzie looked like a biker gang thug, but he wasn’t actually violent, looked out for the nerdy kids, had women hanging on his every move and was so cool he could get the jukebox to play simply by bumping it with his fist. Needless to say, every kid in the U.S. wanted to be as cool as Fonzie. This interview, conducted by Lawrence Grobel, took place four years into the series’ run with no hint of “Fonzie mania” abating (and it wouldn’t begin to abate until well after the infamous September 20, 1977 episode where Fonzie literally jumps the shark).
PLAYBOY: What seems also extraordinary is the fact that you have overshadowed the original star of Happy Days, Ron Howard, and are paid more money per episode than he is, and yet the two of you apparently maintain a good relationship.
WINKLER: One of the major factors in the success of the character is Ron Howard’s generosity. That is absolutely the truth.
PLAYBOY: His generosity in being able to accept your growth in the part?
WINKLER: Absolutely. He allows me to go, when we’re acting together, in any direction I choose. He is totally open to my character.
PLAYBOY: Has he ever zinged you while you were acting?
WINKLER: Ron Howard is not a man for zingers. Ron Howard is a very quiet man, who also rumbles underneath.
PLAYBOY: But certainly the other actors on the show are only human. Don’t they feel some envy?
WINKLER: It’s the one thing I try to ignore. When I’m at work, we almost never bring it up and I hate it when it’s brought up. I’ll leave the conversation immediately. But the fact is, they are very aware of what has happened to me. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I just did my work.
After an interesting discussion about the creative bankruptcy of the various television studios that continuously strive for the lowest common denominator to make a quick buck with advertising rather that make quality programming their overall goal, the conversation turns to Winkler’s effort to avoid being typecast as Fonzie for the rest of his career:
PLAYBOY: The next chapter in your life story will involve two feature films. Are you nervous about being able to work in a new medium?
WINKLER: What you do to yourself, Oy, Got in Himl! I fucking punch myself from here to Timbuktu. I’m bloody inside. All I want to do is be a good actor. I am in the middle of an anxiety attack. This is my first major motion picture and I am just scared shit. My underwear is brown. I don’t know what I’m doing. I always think whatever I’m doing is the hardest thing I’ve done in my whole life. I truly believe, when I’m doing it, that birth—squeezing through that small crevice—was a snap compared with this.
PLAYBOY: Is that hyperbole or real fear?
WINKLER: There’s a fear of showing yourself, of being found out. Am I a fake? Am I good? I don’t like to fail. I am scared. But you cannot let that kind of fear paralyze you. You’ve got to take the risk and see what happens.
PLAYBOY: Have you managed to break the typecasting syndrome with these two movie roles?
WINKLER: Well, the two roles are diametrically opposed. One, in the movie that doesn’t have a title yet, is an actor, an outrageous wise guy who becomes a wrestler just to be in front of the crowd; and the other, in Heroes, is a deranged veteran from Vietnam.
And, this being the late-1970s incarnation of Playboy, the conversation inevitably turns to sex:
PLAYBOY: And, presumably, a lot of your friendlier fans have been women.
WINKLER: Yeah, and it’s been very flattering. In the past, I’ve always done the asking and women have said yes or no. I now know what it is to be a woman, to be bombarded like that. Women, especially beautiful women, go through an incredible trip. It’s nothing to be taken lightly.
PLAYBOY: So you’re being treated like a beautiful man?
WINKLER: At this moment. Which is real strange, because I never thought of myself as good-looking. Now, all of a sudden, I’m told that I’m very good-looking by women of all shapes and sizes. The Men Watchers of America picked me as one of the Ten Most Desirable Men of the Year. Which is really a trip! I can’t even believe it.
PLAYBOY: What are some of the things women say to you?
WINKLER: “I want to see you later.” “Give me your hotel key.” You know, “I want to sit on you.” But what happens is that you can’t go for it. It’s very empty. I’ve had my share, you understand. I’m not saying that I cannot do it. There have been times on the road when I’ve lived the sort of life I used to read about in the orthodontist’s office when I was 13 years old. You know: chicks knocking on my door at six in the morning; I open it up and there’s this beautiful girl going, “Hi, are you asleep?” “No, actually, I’m writing out the Magna Charta from memory.” Am I asleep? It’s six o’clock in the morning! So I just go, “Now that you’re here, why don’t you just come in?”
Highlights: Okay, this is delightfully bonkers, a four-page spread featuring kit cars from the 1970s. I’m not kidding—these are as weird as they are wonderful. Take the vehicles pictured below. The first is SportsVan, a $3,995 kit from Mini-Van, Inc., based in Canoga Park, Calif. I know what you’re thinking—snazzy minivan before minivans became uncool. Well, sort of. This is a kit, after all. The buyer has to supply the chassis, which in this case is that of a VW Bug. You read that right. This one literally puts the mini in minivan! The next one it even more baffling—a Model A replica with a small-block Chevy V8 engine for $14,500 (way, way more than a restored, vintage Model A would run at this time). If you really, really have more money than sense you can spring for Jaguar suspension for an additional $3,200. Then there’s the lime-green Sterling, a $3,100 for the European supercar on a budget set. The fiberglass kit uses wither Capri, Proche, Mazda, Corvair or Buick V6 engines and mounts to—you guessed it—the ever-popular VW Bug chassis. My, oh my. Will spare you the Corvette GT Wagon on the following page, an abomination in any era (one may Google it, were one so inclined). I wonder how many of these strange cars are still on the road 45 years later?
Ah, and then we have THIS ad. A decade before Renault abandoned the U.S. market entirely, it seems the French automaker saw an opening to market Yugo cars before the Yugo even existed. I’m sorry, but everything about this ad is terrible—and representative of ads throughout this issue. From the 1950s through the early 1970s, Playboy’s content was aspirational. The ads were sophisticated, luxurious. Even the advertising for inexpensive Japanese motorcycles I highlighted in the August 1966 issue were sexy and stylish, eve if they were targeting an audience on a budget. Le Car? This ad, with its clunky lines and drab earth tone palette (not to mention the utilitarian bike rack) is only appealing to those who’ve given up on caring, the chronically uncool who have finally abandoned any pretentious dreams they may have once harbored of being worthy of Fonzie’s leather jacket. Even the inset photo of Le Car on the beach is uninspired, barely going through the motions. If you want to pretend Le Car is cool, then stick some surfboards on the roof and get a high angle shot of guys and girls in baggies and bikinis (to quote the Beach Boys) having a beachy blast on a bright, colorful day. Instead, the inset presents the car in almost the exact same 3/4 view with a dull post-sunset scene even more monochromatic than the first photo. And it looks like they even used the same stock vehicle—did Le Car only come in taxi cab yellow? Judging from this ad, yes.
Just not caring anymore seems endemic amongst the ads in this issue. There are a lot of cigarette ads, but they’re not glamorous or sexy, just “Our cancer sticks are best.” There are ads for tires, deodorant, jeans and even “The Loop” FM 98 in Chicago. None of these are particularly creative or inspiring. They seem to say, as a group, “Buy our stuff, or not. We really don’t care.” That’s just strange.
And speaking of strange, we have “Kill Them and Eat Them” by Jules Siegel. In this piece the author posits the best way to deal with alien first contact is to literally kill and eat said aliens. It is a satirical position along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and Siegel does a good job of bolstering his case with historical examples of more technologically advance cultures obliterating the more primitive indigenous societies that come into contact with them. But beyond that it’s not particularly clever nor particularly funny. Weirdly, Siegel makes reference to fictional alien landings on Earth that purportedly received wide media coverage, which would make this fiction rather than opinion. I immediately thought of Terry Bisson’s delightful “They’re Made Out of Meat” but despite a promising start, Siegel never approaches that level of straight-faced lunacy. Sadly, he doesn’t approach much of anything beyond the one-note premise that fails to provoke outrage, contemplation or mirth. I can only conclude Playboy’s editors had a content hold a couple pages long that “Kill Them and Eat Them” just happened to fill perfectly.
Other Thoughts: Okay, this issue is all over the place, and not in a good way. There’s a ad here for Oui that effectively sums up Playboy’s “lost in the woods” phase (I’m not sharing the ad because I choose not to include nudity in my “For the Articles” posts). Following the launch of Bob Guccione’s more sexually explicit Penthouse in the late 1960s, Playboy struggled to come up with a viable strategy to stem the loss of subscribers to its rival. One attempt involved buying the U.S. rights to the French magazine Lui. Renamed Oui and featuring nude models from around the world, the magazine was not as graphic as Penthouse but more risque than Playboy. It was an attempt to split the difference and undercut Penthouse by stealing back subscribers. Playboy published Oui from 1972-1981 and, simply put, it was a failure. Oui never turned a profit and actually stole more subscribers from Playboy than Penthouse, which isn’t surprising considering the fact Playboy constantly ran house ads for the junior publication.
Which brings me to this ad. I mean, really? “How to Make Love to a Single Woman” and “How to Pick Up Girls!” is not exactly highbrow content. I’m hard-pressed to produce an ad of similar lowest-common-denominator quality from the pages of Playboy even five years prior. The advertising overall is more crass, more exploitative and generally of lower quality. I’m sure someone has done a deep dive into the Playboy/Penthouse wars and come up with an insightful meta-analysis, but from my selective sampling the outcome is merely grim.
As long as we’re discussing lowest common denominators and simply not caring anymore, we might as well look at this odd mash-up ad from Jim Beam and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I’ve bemoaned the 1970s as being the start of the cocktail dark ages, with prepackaged syrups and mixers replacing fresh, premium ingredients in drinks, and Jim Beam is a prime offender in this ad. Now I get that bourbon was in freefall at this point in time, with the entire industry producing a never-ending parade of “collectible decanters” just to move product. Vodka absolutely dominated and the marketing teams for distilleries turned to all sorts of gimmicks to appeal to the consumer. Here, the “Sunday Punch” cocktail suggests combining Jim Beam with fruit sherbet and ginger ale. No offense to anyone who is a fan of this particular concoction, but yuck! The specs in this ad produce a cloyingly sweet, dessert-like sludge that looks grossly imbalanced in any era. I know ice cream drinks were all the rage in the late 1970s, but just… no.
On the fiction front, John Le Carre is back with a first-look from his forthcoming novel, “The Honourable Schoolboy.” I’ve never read much Le Carre so I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it’s nice to see Playboy is still a top market for fiction.
There’s a notable article here by Marjorie Rosen, “A Movie Too Far,” about the excess that went into making the epic WWII film “A Bridge Too Far.” Although it seems to me that Rosen wants to expose the massively expensive production as an ill-conceived trainwreck of enormous egos, the overall tone is closer to quiet admiration for a film that could’ve gone off the rails in a million different ways, but never did.
Sound engineer Simon Kaye teases [Anthony] Hopkins about poor enunciation, warning that he’ll have to redub all the dialog. Hopkins, whose breathless voice quality is as velvety close to Richard Burton’s as anybody’s in the business, counters with the question: “What’s Connery’s diction like?”
Sound man Kaye: “Perfect. Fine. Scottish.”
“Burton?”
“Fine.”
“Olivier?”
“Fine.”
“Ah.” Hopkins responds, then shrugs, leans back into the window seat and pulls his helmet down over his face.
The illustration below caught my eye. My wife was active in La Leche League for many, many years and amassed a wealth of breastfeeding knowledge through her voracious intellect. Although it’s pretty clear here that Playboy only includes this news tidbit as a form of mockery, I can confirm that this is 100% true. Male breasts are fully functional, lacking only the hormonal cues that come with pregnancy and birth. Male lactation can, and has been, historically induced by hormonal and physical stimulation. Having witnessed first hand the discomfort many women experience while nursing, however, leads me to suspect not a whole lot of new dads will ever volunteer for nursemaid roles.
And a final cartoon. I laffed because it’s true.
