Haresh Shah

From Only One Nipple To Pubic Wars And Back

How ludicrous the censorship can be isn’t  even worth discussing. The books that once considered to be obscene and pornographic are now hailed  classics. Just to name three: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. And Nabokov even went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

That Playboy launched in December 1953 will face continuous hounding of censorship was a given.  Hugh Hefner did fight many battles and endured incessant harassment from the self-appointed moral guardians of America and the world.  Even so, it wasn’t up until January 1971 – full eighteen  years after Playboy was born that he dared show a partial patch of pubic hair on that month’s Playmate, Liv Lindeland. Nothing for a few months after, until October when one got a glimpse of a dark bit peeking through an out of focus foliage on Playmate Claire Rambeau. And suddenly the shroud was lifted. Also with the arrival of Penthouse on the American shores from its initial launch in the Great Britain, what Hefner termed to be the “pubic wars” broke out between the two publications.  It was no longer just pubic hair, but what came to be termed among the editors and the photographers as explicit “crotch shots” began to appear in both magazines in an effort to outdo each other. Until at some point, Hefner decided to scale back by saying something to the effect that its silly, we are not going to imitate the imitator.

While the US Playboy would never dare show the frontal nudity on its cover even today, not even  breasts, there was no such restriction in Germany back in 1972 when the German edition was launched. In its very second issue it had a Polaroid layer peeling off a photograph of the  sleeping beauty with her fully exposed breasts staring right at you.  For none of the Western European editions, “to be or not to be” of  breasts or even pubic hair has ever been an issue. They don’t deliberately go out of their way to run explicit covers, because it is universally believed  and accepted that nothing makes one want to pick up a magazine more so than a friendly face making an “eye contact” with the readers.

Enter Japan – the edition launched in July 1975. Even before its launch, it was possible to buy the US Playboy in the country.  But the local laws dictated that no magazine showing pubic hair could be distributed in Japan. How do you get around that? Simple. The customs hire a bunch of teenagers,  throw  them together in a cramped room, pile huge stacks of imported magazines in front of them, hand them fat tipped black magic markers and make them go through each photo and scratch a big blob of  wet black ink in the pubic region. Voila, now the Japanese youth would be  saved from their carnal temptations and the corruption of their innocent minds.

But for the locally produced Japanese edition of Playboy, we would have to come up with a selection of photos that didn’t contain even a tiny wisp of hair. Since Playboy shoots thousands of photos for about a dozen they end up using, this normally wasn’t a big problem for someone to sit down and select fotos sin pelo pubico.  Even so, sometimes it was difficult to find enough usable photos  with right expressions on the girl’s face.  It was initially my job to go through those thousands of photos and do an edit for the Japanese.  Frustrated, sometimes I would accost the photographers and remind them that we needed ample non-pubic photos.  At times it was difficult for them – having just been freed from the shackles and having to go backward must have been psychologically daunting for them. So much so that when in 1987 we were producing a multi-girls pictorial, to complement the Miss Playboy International Beauty Pageant  broadcast live from Hong Kong’s Queen Elizabeth Stadium, when the Turkish candidate Arzum Cibir, showed up in the studio with her pubic region clean-shaved, the photographer Byron Newman and his wife/stylist Brigitte  were horrified.  A minor crisis ensued in the air. Of the solutions discussed and bounced around was also the possibility of giving Arzum an artificial patch of pubes, in the form of a custom-made, how can I say it – a pussy wig? In the end, the silliness discounted and sanity prevailed.  We decided that they would pose her in a way that would not require her to shoot full frontal.  There were thirteen more girls in the group. So…

But for the legal requirement of the countries, there was not much the photographers could do, because now we needed them not only for Japan but also for Brazil (launched in August 1976), and Mexico (November 1976), later added to the list would be Turkey (January 1986) and Taiwan (April 1990).

In the cases of Mexico and Brazil, we couldn’t even call the magazines Playboy, until years later. In Brazil it was called Homem (Man) and in Mexico Caballero, con Lo Mejor de Playboy (Gentleman, with the best of Playboy).  In Brazil, every nude layout that went into the magazine, had to be presented to the censor board and approved by the authorities before they could be put into the magazine. They required not only no-pubic, but also we were restricted to show only a single nipple in an image. And this is in the country of Samba and the wildest Carnival and the skimpiest dental floss bikinis running around Copacabana beach!

The most absurd thing to happen was in Mexico. One fine morning Eduardo Gongorra, the General Manager of the Mexican edition was called in by the authorities and told that their license to publish Caballero was suspended. Not only they couldn’t call the magazine Playboy under any circumstances, but the new law dictated that no publication can use a noun as its proper name. They couldn’t change it to Señor either, because Señor too was a noun. How about Signore? It meant the same, but in Italian and not in Spanish. Since they couldn’t come up with an immediate retort to that, after several harried phone calls between Chicago and Mexico City, it was collectively agreed to change the name immediately and continue publishing while we would appeal and fight the battle to eventually be allowed to call the magazine by its rightful name, Playboy.

Coming back to Japan, there were times when the Japanese editors in their creative frenzy would  want to include in their layout one of the photos published in the US edition. No matter a blob of curls plainly in sight. What do they do? Have it airbrushed out. They knew I would scream murder when the issue hit my desk a few days later. Then it would be too late to do anything about it. I would hear from other executives of the company – including once directly from Christie Hefner,  how horrible and unnatural airbrushed pussies looked?  I know! I know!! I would slap hands of the Japanese. They would apologize with a promise to never do it again – that is until they would some months later. Hoping that Shah-san won’t notice. But notice I did.  Dismayed, as I often sat at my desk staring at those bald as an eagle-head patches so expertly smoothed out and blended into rest of the skin, like them I too hoped that no one else would notice – Christie most of all.

Fast forward to 2007. After nine years sojourn in Prague and after fourteen years since I left Playboy, I have returned to Chicago to live. I am sitting in my guest room on a chair next to my floor to ceiling bookcases filled with the issues of more than forty-five years of Playboy.  Sitting across from me on the edge of the bed are my neighbor Melissa and her younger sister Andrea. They want to see the issues of the months  and the years they were born. I hand Melissa the bound volume containing the first four issues of 1974. She quickly flips through and zeros in on February Playmate Francine Park’s pictorial. The opening spread doesn’t get her attention as much, but as she turns the page, at the bottom of the next page is a shot of reclining Francine with her eyes dreamily closed, her torso lifted slightly by the pillow underneath and rest of her body seductively sloping downward. Her right hand reaches up above framing her head, the left hand resting down by her thigh. And staring right at Melissa is her ample tuft, dark and dense, bushier than a bird’s nest. And I see Melissa pointing at it and then hear her screaming exclamation:   Oh my God! Those girls had pubic hair!!!.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

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Next Friday: January 11, 2013

TELEVISION, VCR, CAMCORDER & ME

I have been incessantly and relentlessly pelted by e-mail, mail orders and even over the telephone, companies offering me package deals for satellite/cable services. When I tell them, I own no television to start with, they are left with a speechless Oh!