Playboy's editor leaving the chase
For the past 30 years, Arthur Kretchmer, 61, has been editorial director of Chicago-based Playboy magazine, an amazingly long ride in such a bumpy sector of the publishing universe. He has announced that he'll retire after he shepherds the 50th-anniversary issue, January 2004, into print. In the intervening year, James Kaminsky, formerly executive editor at Maxim magazine, will share editing duties. Kaminsky, however, will be based in Playboy's Manhattan offices.
Playboy occupies two sleek, art-filled floors in what once was the American Furniture Mart in Chicago. Kretchmer's spacious office on the 16th floor has both a desk and a work table with high stools, the latter a place to fine-tune layouts. Behind the desk are pictures of his wife and two sons. Two portraits of women, not naked, visually dominate the room. They are original works by artist Peter Sato used to illustrate the Playboy Advisor column.
Kretchmer is tall, soft-spoken and erudite, an anthropology or literature professor you might think if you chatted with him at a party. Although he did the magazine's interview of Jesse Jackson in the November '69 issue, he almost never endures being an interview subject.
Nonetheless, in slacks and a logo shirt (not the Playboy logo), Kretchmer is not just consenting but is talking with growing enthusiasm as he discusses good writing, writing built on direct, smart, adverb-free (he hates 'em) sentences. The fact that he remains passionate about grammar and usage in an era that mostly isn't was one signal that it was time to step aside, to let someone else (at 41, Kaminsky is exactly a generation younger) quest for the print-media grail of 18- to 34-year-old readers.
Another signal, the one he focused on that day, was Weezer.
"I decided to retire," he said, emphasizing that the decision was wholly his, "because I didn't care who Weezer is anymore. That's not fair to (rock band) Weezer and that's not fair to the magazine. I felt I had lost the chops for chasing everything that's new."
Kretchmer has been charged with chasing the new since becoming editorial director in 1972.
"I spotted that the 'Sopranos' would become a phenomenon as fast as any magazine could," he said. "When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House in '95, I predicted that Clinton would be re-elected the next year." Both predictions became Playboy articles.
He carries lingering regrets over chases broken off. In his first year as editorial director, "I supported a story on how lesbianism would ruin the women's movement. My staff said it was too sensitive a subject for Playboy, and I let the decision be a committee one. I still kick myself for not going with it."
More than skin
In 1951, Hugh Hefner was hired at $60 a week to write promotional copy for Esquire magazine in Chicago. When, that same year, Esquire announced it was moving to New York, Hefner asked for a $15 raise and was refused. He quit, determined to start his own publication.
Two years later, Hefner, 26, married and starting a family, and having raised money from backers and from getting a loan against his furniture, spent $500 of it on nude calendar photos of Marilyn Monroe. He built the first issue of Playboy around those pictures and published it in December 1953. From that tiny seed grew the international, multimedia empire, Playboy Enterprises. Designed for the second issue by founding art director Arthur Paul, the Playboy bunny logo became, at the height of the magazine's popularity in the '70s, and second only to Coca-Cola, the most recognized corporate logo in the world.
Hefner graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studied for a while at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (anatomy drawing, of course) and later took graduate-level courses in sociology at Northwestern.
The combination of those studies may have helped him to be stunningly astute in tailoring a magazine to young men. In addition to skin, the magazine also presented a cornucopia of great fiction and nonfiction from such heavyweight contributors as Arthur C. Clarke, Len Deighton, Alberto Moravia, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eric Hoffer, William Styron, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones and so on. And that was just one 1968 issue.
"Without you," Hefner told Playmates gathered for a 1979 reunion, "I'd be publisher of a literary magazine."
The magazine, Kretchmer said, is driven by a philosophy — not just the Playboy Philosophy that became the manifesto of the sexual revolution — but an older, far more condensed one: Hard work pays off. Hefner, at home in a 30-room mansion filled with girls and games, was the proof.
"You work hard, and that gets you a certain lifestyle," Kretchmer said. "You get to decide where you live, and you get to choose the surroundings in which you live. It gets you female companionship too.
"Hef never has gotten enough credit for inventing the modern world, for creating the post-WWII civilized society. Here was a finger-snapping hipster who spotted where society was going better than the sociologists or politicians of the time."
In 1972, the magazine reached its peak paid circulation at 7.2 million copies each month. The circulation is a little more than 3.2 million a month for the six months ending this June. While subscriptions are up lately at 2,829,502, newsstand sales dropped 26 percent in the first half of this year to 387,767 copies a month. The median reader age is 31.6 years, same as it has been for a decade, Kretchmer said. Twelve percent of Playboy readers are women.
Kretchmer grew up in New York City. In the late '50s, when he was a teenager, he stumbled upon an article in Playboy titled "Things We Can Do Without."
"The list included Bad Martinis, Boston and Virgins," Kretchmer said. "Every girl I knew was a virgin, and here was a magazine saying they could do without virgins. I thought these must be the coolest guys in the world."
After the University of Pennsylvania and then City College of New York where he studied journalism and creative writing, he got a job as an assistant editor at the men's magazine Cavalier and later became managing editor. Playboy's then-editorial director, A.C. Spectorsky, sought him out at Cavalier in 1966 and talked him into moving to Chicago and coming aboard as associate editor. In the mid-'60s, Chicago was a far different place from what it is now and a far, far different place from New York as a base for a magazine.
"New movies came here six to eight weeks after they opened in New York," Kretchmer said. "This wasn't a restaurant city. After the Bakery up on Lincoln Avenue or Chez Paul, or the Blackhawk with its spinning salad bowl, there wasn't much."
Also, there was a vast gulf between the Playboy Penthouse and Mayor Richard J. Daley's Bridgeport bungalow.
"I think the city was embarrassed by the magazine," Kretchmer said. "If Mayor Daley personified Chicago then — and to me he did — you can see the friction."
In 1972, while on a yachting vacation in the Caribbean, Spectorsky died. "For whatever reason," Kretchmer said, "Hef picked me to be editorial director."
The Mansion in Chicago
Reached by phone in California, Hefner, 76 now, said, "Kretchmer was one of what I've called 'the young Turks' that Spec (Spectorsky) brought in the '60s. That was a decade when the magazine went from 1 million circulation to 7 million. He wasn't the most senior editor or the highest-ranking. He didn't have the New York literary connections that Spec had. But after I talked with the other editors, he seemed to be the right choice, and he certainly has proven that he was. He's also learned the literary side of the business on the job."
As the new editorial director, Kretchmer would have monthly meetings with his boss and other staffers at the Mansion that would begin around 4 in the afternoon and end at 5 or 6 the next morning.
"They were nights in editorial purgatory," Kretchmer said. "The staff members and I had already put in a full day, and, as Hef would point out, 'I have an advantage over you. I got up at 3.' We would be fueled by lavish dinners — cold lobster, spring rolls, roast beef, fine wines. Hef didn't eat with us. He never ate in front of others then, though later he sometimes would. He was fueled by tiny, tiny, 5-milligram Dexedrine pills. They helped him focus, and he was a terrifically obsessive, detail-oriented man."
The meetings were wide-ranging, everything from specific cartoons to strategic planning. Hefner would debate with his editors for an hour over the relative importance of a prospective interview subject. He'd lay out 10 seemingly identical photos and ask which was best. He already knew the answer. "Invariably," Kretchmer said, "it would be the one containing the most information."
Over the course of his dealings with his hedonistic hermit boss, Kretchmer got the sense that Steinmetz High grad Hefner was bothered by the failure of his hometown to recognize the stature of the magazine he founded.
"I think it led to his reclusiveness," Kretchmer said, "in which he substituted the world he made for the city outside."
Hefner pretty much hid out in his bedroom with the round bed and mirrored ceiling, living in pajamas, a robe and slippers and subsisting on fried chicken, pork chops and Pepsi. Then, in 1976, he left the Mansion to spend full time at the Los Angeles estate he had bought earlier. He got rid of the Chicago property, which changed hands a few times and now is devoid of any sign of the worldly mecca it once was.
Everything changes
When Hefner moved to Los Angeles, Kretchmer would fly there 12 to 18 times a year. In the past six or seven years, though, the meetings have been on the phone, with diminished agendas.
The '80s saw a lot of change, a lot of shuffling of the cards as to what would be profitable and would not. Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter by his first wife, became Playboy's president in 1982 at age 30. In 1988, she was designated chairman and chief executive officer. Her father remained editor and publisher and chairman emeritus. The last of 23 Playboy Clubs worldwide closed in 1988 in Lansing, Mich. Playboy moved from the Playboy Building on Walton to somebody else's building on Lake Shore Drive.
Chicago changed, too.
"This is a real town, now," Kretchmer said. "The mayor is way more sophisticated than his father. But it's still a newspaper town.
"You go into a New York spot, and there'll be a table of agents and a table of writers and so on, and everyone will be talking about American Ground (the three-parter in The Atlantic by William Langenweische about the demolition of the World Trade towers). That just doesn't happen here."
That's why the editorial focus of Playboy is sidling toward New York, to get the writers, to be in on the buzz.
"I want to be on the morning shows and the '20/20s,' " new-hire Kaminsky has said.
Flesh likely will be de-emphasized, while the fiction and nonfiction will ascend. Kretchmer said that with visual sex absolutely accessible and pervasive via the Internet, "the playing field for men's magazines is, in that area, pretty much level."
"If you look at the magazine in the '70s," Kaminsky told USA Today before he stopped giving interviews, "what you would see is a remarkable mix of very topical stories, journalism that reached out and grabbed the reader. What we need to do is take that great template and present it in a way that a modern reader — a guy 18 to 34 — will feel more comfortable accessing."
Kretchmer, with the March cover lines on his desk, said readers will see changes in the spring.
The lingering question is whether or not the changes will be enough to create what Samir Husni, journalism professor and head of the magazine department at the University of Mississippi, called "a big media for a product that is frozen in time. Playboy's problem is that, for readers and retailers, the brand has become bigger than the magazine. It needs to convince people that it has changed to the point that it is no longer the antichrist. Then Wal-Mart and Kroger and 7-Eleven will put it on their shelves."
The newest plan seems to be to have the editorial director, some other editors and staff based in New York while other editors and staff will stay in Chicago. Playboy has 646 employees, with the majority in Chicago and Southern California. Only 84 employees are currently New York-based. "New York will no longer be a satellite," Kaminsky has said.
Kretchmer and his replacement have begun to work together, though at a distance. Production lead-time doesn't allow Kaminsky's name to appear on the masthead until February.
"I talked with Hef about how to identify him," Kretchmer said. He suggested 'associate editorial director,' but I argued we didn't hire him to be that. Here's what I came up with," he said laying a dummy of the February masthead page on the worktable.
The solution is typical of Kretchmer — forthright and punchy. It says, "Arthur Kretchmer, editorial director" and below that, "James Kaminsky, the new guy."