Playboy's Rearview

1950s

History unfolded in the March 1956 PLAYBOY with the three-page photo of nightie-clad Marian Stafford—the magazine’s first literal Centerfold. Although Stafford captivates as a Playmate (above), the talent behind the lens is equally notable: Ruth Sondak (below), who had been a World War II photojournalist. After the war Sondak became an agency photographer and later a freelancer, shooting portraits of such luminaries as Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt, among other assignments, across a decades-long career. Sondak’s photos of antiwar protesters swarming the Pentagon in 1967 are perhaps her best known—excluding, of course, her pictorial of Stafford.

1960s

Frequent PLAYBOY contributor Alex Haley (above) phoned George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, and asked him to sit for the April 1966 Playboy Interview. “After assuring himself that I wasn’t Jewish, he guardedly agreed,” Haley reported. “I didn’t tell him I was a Negro.” Upon Haley’s arrival to the interview in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell produced a pearl-handled revolver, displaying it on the arm of his chair. He needed it for protection from assassins, he insisted. Haley tolerated Rockwell’s hostility with backbone and humor (“I’ve been called ‘nigger’ many times, Commander, but this is the first time I’m being paid for it,” Haley said) to get his story—a fascinating and nearly 12,000-word conversation. Haley went on to pen the groundbreaking book Roots in 1976; Rockwell, it turns out, did need protection—an American Nazi shot him to death in 1967.

1970s

In January 1970, the Dear Playboy section was ablaze in reaction to the article that had sparked the PLAYBOY cover line A MEDICAL AUTHORITY CALLS FOR THE LEGALIZATION OF POT. Dr. Joel Fort had argued just that in Pot: A Rational Approach, setting in motion a deluge of letters from across the country. Reader response to the then controversial idea came from medical doctors, the assistant secretary of the Department of Health and even a former U.S. narcotics commissioner. Three members of the U.S. House of Representatives also wrote in—all supporting loosened drug laws. Fifty years later, most states allow some degree of usage, but marijuana remains illegal at the federal level.

1980s

Dick Gregory (above) is best known as a comedian—he got his big break at the Chicago Playboy Club in 1961—but he was also a committed activist, often using hunger strikes to draw attention to issues such as tribal rights, police brutality and apartheid. In 1980 he traveled to Iran, where the shah had recently been overthrown and 52 Americans had been captured, to “fast and pray for the safe resolution of the hostage crisis.” Gregory, a convert to Islam, got an unexpected introduction to the Ayatollah Khomeini and even met with some of the revolutionaries who were holding the captives, presenting a three-stage plan under which he thought they could be freed. Nothing came of the proposal, but he walked away with an amazing tale he recounted in the December 1980 PLAYBOY feature Inside Khomeini’s Iran (co-written with reporter Barbara Reynolds).

1990s

Porn and feminism are not mutually exclusive, argued Nadine Strossen in the February 1995 Forum. Strossen (above)—the youngest president and first female leader of the American Civil Liberties Union and author of Defending Pornography— discussed censorship, sexuality and more with assistant editor Dorothy Atcheson. “If my so-called equality doesn’t include freedom of expression, how am I equal?” Strossen asked. “And, if freedom of expression doesn’t include the right to talk about sex, to look at pornography, to pose for it, to perform in it, to defend it, how do I have free speech?” Strossen, who led the ACLU for 17 years, is now a New York Law School professor; her work paved the way for today’s sex-positive feminists.

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