The Itch for Kitsch

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, September 09, 2018

Playboy Enterprises, which sometimes publishes a little magazine you may have seen, has announced plans to open a new Playboy Club in New York City, a dozen years after closing down the last of its clubs, which had been located at the Palms in Las Vegas. Las Vegas was probably the most obvious place on Earth for a Playboy night spot.

Manhattan? On 42nd Street? Less obvious.

In fact, it is not entirely obvious what purpose such a club would serve anywhere in these United States, from sea to shining sea. The Playboy empire was built on pornography, however much Hugh Hefner et al. tried to dress it up, and peddling Playboy’s relatively mild brand of pornography in these United States in Anno Domini 2018 must be like trying to sell Bayer aspirin in a New Orleans heroin market: There’s nothing wrong with the product, per se, but there’s stronger stuff readily available, if you’re looking for it.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I probably should mention here that I have written for Playboy, though my piece seems to have been purged from its website. Apparently, there’s something in my style that conflicts with the more elevated aesthetic of the new Playboy, with its transgender centerfolds.)

This might have made a little more sense in, say, 2007, when New York was mad for Mad Men, and the Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue was doing brisk business in its limited edition, thousand-dollar “Mad Men” suit, a collaboration with Janie Bryant, who designed the show’s costumes. There was a brief burst of nostalgia for the twilight of the Eisenhower years: narrow lapels, casual adultery, alcoholism, tax evasion, etc. That moment seems to have passed. And even if it hadn’t, the new Playboy, with its social-justice sensibilities, is poorly positioned to scratch that itch.

Whatever retro appeal Playboy might have is complicated by the fact that Playboy in its heyday already was an exercise in nostalgia — and kitsch — in spite of its modernist sexual politics: Hugh Hefner lounging around in a scarlet dressing gown like a slightly less butch Noel Coward, the clubs hearkening back to prewar men’s clubs and Paris burlesque revues of the Twenties, etc. Even the faux-Gothic architecture of the Playboy Mansion — near Beverly Hills, but not quite in Beverly Hills — represented a strain of self-conscious atavism. In 2016, the mansion was sold, at half the asking price, to Daren Metropoulos, who is the money mind behind Hostess, which is poetic: Playboy is the Twinkies of sex.

The new club, as described by the New York Times, sounds like it will be . . . something:

“The floor will be made of tile mosaics, herringbone-patterned walnut and blends of white Carrara and Nero marquina marble; the walls fashioned from black beveled Bendheim glass.” (I’d like to do a house in Lubbock, Texas, in approximately that style.) But even that slick interior will be backward-looking: The furniture will be midcentury modern — which is to say, right out of Mad Men — and the walls will be adorned with old Playboy photographs and magazine covers. Keeping, perhaps unconsciously, with the retro theme, the Times even managed to wheel out Gloria Steinem, a former Playboy bunny herself, to denounce the new club, which is almost reason enough to stop by for a drink.

There is, I think, a hunger in the marketplace for a more refined social space, and for a model of modern masculinity that is not defined by beer and televised sports. (We all know where that leads.) A few years ago, I suggested to a Las Vegas businessman that somebody should open a casino that looks and feels something like what people who know casinos only from James Bond movies assume a casino is like, as opposed real-world casinos, with their repetitious and mind-numbing adult video games, stale cigarette smoke, and tourists in athletic wear. Make it black-tie only, import some celebrity cocktail artist from Brooklyn, and charge a $100 cover at the door, or whatever it takes to discourage the Hard Rock crowd. Once he was done laughing at me, he summarized the realities — financial and political — of the union-dominated gaming racket in Las Vegas, which essentially mandates a high-volume, commodity model of business. Still, it seems to me that there is an opportunity there, somewhere.

But Playboy probably isn’t the answer to that gap in the market. The brand has one too many cases of grotto-born L. pneumophila in its jacket for that. Cocktails and waitresses who would have been considered scantily clad in 1957: fun. Legionnaires’ disease: less fun.

What Playboy lacks in genuine refinement it used to make up for in naughtiness — and that, of course, is the problem for such enterprises in our time. The “Playboy philosophy” is regnant — it is the law of the land, our moral constitution. Hugh Hefner won. And, having won, Playboy nullified its own raison d’être. Playboy Enterprises does not make very much money, but the amazing thing — a real testament to its management, I think — is that it makes any money at all, being, as it is, in the business of selling what’s available everywhere else at no cost.

No economic cost, anyway.