Reading Playboy for the articles: September 1972

The Troubles, Semi-Tough and drugs galore

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: Bernadette Devlin is not a name I recognized at first, or even second. Who was she? Well, in 1969 she was elected to the British House of Commons and on her 22nd birthday delivered a blistering speech decrying U.K. policies in Northern Ireland. A few months later she was throwing rocks at police in Derry and a year later she was in prison as The Troubles seethed and flared. I’m not Irish, so I only had a generalized awareness of the conflict until the 90s, when the Clinton administration managed to get all sides to agree to the Good Friday accords, which miraculously still hold. Devlin’s name isn’t one I remember from that time. I looked her up via The Google and it seems she’s fallen from the lofty heights she once attained, undone by personal animosities and selfish ambition. In short, what was once a breath of shockingly fresh air turned into just another run-of-the-mill politician. I may well be wrong about that, but what do you expect from my musings on a decades-old Playboy interview?

PLAYBOY: Despite frequent death threats and assassination attempts on your associates, you travel without a bodyguard. In the midst of all this violence, don’t you worry that your own life is in danger?

DEVLIN: I think about it from time to time, but it doesn’t worry me. That’s not mock heroics, just realism. Or maybe fatalism. In Derry on Bloody Sunday, when the British paratroopers were gunning down people all around me, sure, I thought about it. They murdered 13 unarmed people. As I saw them fall, I said to myself, “Christ! I’m going to die here!” But my parents taught me to enjoy life rather than fear death. And living in a society that’s characterized by violence and institutionalized brutality, you somehow come to accept the impermanence of your own life. If anyone’s a product of her environment, I am.

PLAYBOY: Let’s discuss that environment. What was it like growing up as a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland?

DEVLIN: Well, it was an education in more ways than one. I was born in Cookstown, in County Tyrone, a small farming community that’s sort of a microcosm of Ulster. It was originally a plantation, settled by the Scots Presbyterians the British imported in the 17th Century to take over the land from us restless natives. To this day, the town is divided almost evenly between the descendants of the original Protestant settlers and the Catholics they subjugated; both groups are still segregated in the geographical areas of the town where their ancestors lived 300 years ago. And attitudes haven’t changed much, either; the Protestants still have a sense of settler superiority and expect the Catholics to stay in their place and not get uppity, pretty much the way your own American colonists once viewed the Indians, or the way the many white Southerners still feel about blacks. And, like the Indian and the blacks, we were poor, virtually disenfranchised and very angry. We still are.

The interview also goes into her personal politics, which strike me as messy at best. In the excerpt below, she claims to have been misquoted about her thoughts on Cuba, but judging from her positions later in life, that may have been a lie of convenience to make herself more palatable to U.S. readers.

PLAYBOY: You’ve been quoted as saying that Castro’s Cuba is the model for your proposed Irish socialist state. Since this has prompted the charge that you advocate a Communist dictatorship for Ireland, perhaps you’d better define what you mean by socialism.

DEVLIN: All right. First, I was misquoted about Cuba. What I said was: Cuba is a case where the people put up a fine fight against overwhelming odds—against the Batista dictatorship, and then against the most powerful country in the world, your own country. I said I admired the Cuban people’s courage. But I also said that Cuba is no utopia. There are severe problems of bureaucracy and regimentation there. These must be dealt with.

To get to your larger question, the kind of workers’ state I envisage exists nowhere in the world. Russia is a sort of state capitalism; so are its satellites in eastern Europe. China has done many things for its people, but at a high price in terms of individual liberty. All the so-called socialist countries in the world are far better off than they were under their capitalist masters—Batista, Chiang Kai-shek or the czars—but they’re still a long way from genuine socialism. Genuine socialism is a society where the people control their own economy. Not a handful of capitalists—or bureaucrats, as in Russia—but all the people. In this sort of socialist society, you have both economic freedom and personal freedom.

Highlights: I’m not sharing it here, but on the second page there’s a Smirnoff ad declaring “It’s Yellow Fever season” with a man and woman cozying up to each other beside a mountain stream with a tin cup of what looks like urine to share between them. Rather than urine, the ad breathlessly informs the reader that this is “Yellow Fever,” the new cocktail sensation made from lemonade and vodka and… well, that’s it. Just lemonade and vodka, possibly the lamest, laziest excuse for a cocktail ever. Is it any wonder the 70s are regarded as the dark ages for cocktail culture?

For something less depressing, this issue features fiction by famed sportswriter Dan Jenkins. Said fiction? A excerpt from his first novel, out later that year, Semi-Tough, which was later turned into a mediocre movie starring Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson. It’s a long excerpt, taking up damn close to a dozen pages, but nowhere is it identified as an excerpt. Kinda odd to think about, but if Jenkins pocketed an extra $3,000 for recycling a chunk of his unpublished novel, good on him. What caught my eye—beyond the familiar title—was the even more familiar artistic style illustrating the piece. The one and only Neal Adams, famed comic book illustrator of Batman, Green Lantern and Green Arrow, and eventually Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, had a distinctive, bold style that just jumped off the page. It’s like Jack Kirby turned up to 11, with more finesse. I mean, just look at that page below! That said, you know how the saying goes to never meet your heroes? Adams wasn’t exactly a hero of mine, but I admired his work and as a lifelong Green Arrow fan I worshipped his costume design for the character. A number of years ago he was appearing at a San Antonio comics convention and my son, maybe 10 at the time, was a huge Batman fan. You know how excited kids can get at that age. Adams was alone at his table and we walked up and picked out a couple of prints to buy to have autographed. My son wanted to talk super-heroes and Batman. Adams… was kind of a dick. He just took my money and grunted out one or two word answers to my son, who was disappointed and confused by the exchange. So yeah, I still respect the artistic talent, but the man behind it? Not so much. When he died in 2022 I can’t say I was too broken up about it.

Other Thoughts: Okay, here’s an ad that caught my attention and is driving me nuts. As an advertisement it feels out of place in the pages of Playboy, which positions itself as an upscale periodical, whereas this ad is decidedly counterculture. The art is classic 1970s underground, something of a hybrid between the works of R. Crumb and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. I absolutely know I’ve seen this style before but for the life of me cannot remember the artist’s name and the ad has no signature. Can any of you loyal readers elucidate me?

This issue is also big on European sports cars. There’s the Capri, a nifty fastback designed in Europe for Lincoln-Mercury, but that’s a poor man’s substitute for the de Tomaso Pantera, also sold by Lincoln-Mercury. Ford was into the imports back then. The Pantera wasn’t exactly an Italian supercar, but it was trending that way. A luxury “halo” sports car, Ford imported them in comparatively low numbers for several until a falling out with de Tomaso in 1975. de Tomaso continued manufacturing versions of the Pantera until 1992. Roughly 7,000 Panteras sold over that span, with Ford accounting for a little more than 5,000 of those vehicles from 1971-75. Crazy!

There exists a bizarre thing in the U.S. known as the Rum Cover-Over. It’s complicated, but the too long, didn’t read version is that most liquor taxes on rums sold in the U.S. are redirected to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to spur those territories’ economic development. In practice, it acts as a massive subsidy to the distilleries even as a fraction of it finds its way to more generalized, non-brand-specific marketing. Case in point: the ad below promoting “Puerto Rican Rum.” There’s some good rum made on the island for sure, but guess which specific distiller benefits disproportionately from these general ads? Hint: There’s an ad elsewhere in this issue that makes the tongue-in-cheek claim that Coca-Cola became famous after the invention of the Bacardi-and-Coke cocktail. Which isn’t technically a cocktail and even if it were, everybody calls it rum-and-Coke or, if you actually know what you’re talking about, a Cuba Libre. I get that the tail-wagging-the-dog bit is a gag, but if you look closely enough you can see Bacardi giving a wink as if to say, “We know this isn’t true, but honestly, it really is.” The Rum Cover-Over can buy a lot of arrogance.

I expected “A Heady History of Beer” to be a breezy, irreverent jaunt. I was wrong. It really is a history of beer, if slightly abridged. It touches on medieval German rathskellers and church monopolies on monastery beer production. It chronicles the beer sacrifices Egyptian Pharaohs made to their gods and “clarified beer” listed by Babylonians as among provision carried on Noah’s ark. There’s a lot here. Too much, in fact. The entire article comes off as a relentless recitation of facts with little context or explanation attached to anything. It’s just short of a bullet point list, but only just. The author, Ronald Schiller, would’ve been better served by expanding this into a full-blown book on the history of beer. Alas, I don’t believe he ever did such a thing: The Google turns up no trace of such a volume by him. Pity. There are interesting factoids here I’d like to know more about.

On a more sober note, in the Playboy Forum there’s a letter from Steve Simon of Texas NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) bemoaning the fact that Texas was just one of two states that classified any possession of marijuana as a felony:

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held that 1/20th of one marijuana cigarette is enough to warrant incarcerating an offender for life. There are now 691 people in Texas prisons for possession, not sale, of marijuana. The next closest state is California with 169. Thirty of those in Texas prisons are serving sentences of over 30 years and 13 are in for life. One unfortunate is serving his life sentence for conviction in 1962 of possessing one penny matchbook full of grass.

The letter goes on to outline other disparities and egregious overreach of the law. I can’t help but reflect on the situation today, where rational science has shown weed to be far less menacing a drug than purported during the hyperbolic “Reefer Madness” era. While many states have moved to legalize and even the federal government has taken steps to reclassify it from the highly restrictive Schedule 1 category (alongside heroin and LSD to the lower Schedule 3 category (with codeine, ketamine and anabolic steroids), Texas has stubbornly resisted even so much as decriminalization. I wonder at this point if the powers that be even believe in their demonization of pot, or if it is a knee-jerk reaction of “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Following that letter, there’s a package of articles and sidebars headed as “The Drug Explosion” with an introduction by Joel Fort, M.D., accompanied by some seriously disturbed imagery (below). The articles delve into the inconsistencies of extant drug laws and the varying effects and dangers of different types of illicit substances. U.S. Senator Mike Gravel provides an article warning of corporate interests in the legal drug trade, foreshadowing the opiate crisis by three decades. The stark lack of resources for addicts looking to get into recovery is a problem as relevant in 1972 as it is now. At times naive, other times prescient, the package is a valiant yet flawed attempt to come to grips with an issue that continues to bedevil society with slim prospects for a resolution on the horizon.

Fashion on campus. What’s not to love? I’m baffled as to why plaid slacks have yet to make a comeback.

If the fashion scene above was hard on the eyes, how about this ad for socks? Is it me, or does the dude on the left look really uncomfortable? I like to think he’s coming up with increasingly painful ways to fire his agent. Contrast him with the dude on top in blue socks, who looks happy just to be there. The 70s were wild, man.

And a final cartoon. I laffed.