Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Empire Proved to be a Mixed Bag

Sixty Playboy bunnies celebrating the magazine’s 60th anniversary in Los Angeles, Jan. 16, 2014. (Rachel Murray/Getty Images for Playboy)

When the news arrived last week that Playboy founder and publisher Hugh Hefner died at 91, no doubt with a smile on his face, some people around here remembered the old Playboy Club on Light Street.

I remembered Sharon Peyton.

She was Sharon Bernstein back in the ‘60s, just a kid out of Forest Park High School and the Maryland Institute College of Art, caught between wanting to look like Joan Baez (which she did, a little bit) and making pretty good money (which she did, quite a bit) as a Playboy bunny.

“I was probably the only Jewish bunny they had,” she said.

We were friends going back to the 1970s, when she and her ex-husband owned a popular dance club at Charles and 25th streets called The Bluesette. A few years back they had a Bluesette reunion, and we talked about her Playboy Club time.

She still had mixed feelings about it. Hefner and his empire helped un-zip the American libido when it was pretty repressed. Playboy magazine sold about seven million copies a month at its peak, and there were Playboy clubs all over the globe.

But all that flesh peddling helped turn females into sex objects and created impossible physical role models for young women. What jump-started the sexual revolution, in the immediate post-war years, evolved into a world where the rawest, crudest sexual images can be summoned at the push of a computer button. At last count, Playboy’s circulation was only about half a million copies a month.

Like a lot of women half a century ago, Sharon had her misgivings about the whole enterprise. But she needed a job.

“I was living in a bohemian kind of world,” she said. “But I saw this ad in the newspaper saying they were taking applications. So I took my bikini, and I went to this hotel room. The Southern Hotel, I think it was.

“It was a real cattle call, just standing in this room with other women in our bikinis. I had hair down to my waist, because I wanted to be Joan Baez. That wasn’t the look they wanted. And I wore sandals. Can you imagine? I didn’t even own a pair of high heels. The only time I ever got dressed up was the High Holidays, to go to Beth Jacob.

“So it was glitter versus beatnik. Trying to be artsy, but needing to make a living. And they hired me. And it was like being a glorified cocktail waitress.

“But it wasn’t for me. I was supposed to wear fake eyelashes and makeup, but I couldn’t stand the eyelashes. It was like looking through cobwebs. And they told me I wasn’t wearing enough makeup.

“I hung on for nine months. The average girl stayed six months. The high heels ruined my feet. I couldn’t take the pain. What I liked was the tips. I averaged about $50 a night. My parents weren’t making that much combined.”

So she and Art Peyton married, started The Bluesette in the late ‘60s, had a couple of kids, got divorced, and Sharon and her boys ultimately moved to California. She died a couple of years ago.

To the very end, Sharon was a beatnik at heart. But she was a Playboy bunny for a while. It was her little walk-on role in Hefner’s sexual revolution.

Top photo: Playboy bunnies celebrating the magazine’s 60th anniversary in Los Angeles, Jan. 16, 2014. (Rachel Murray/Getty Images for Playboy)

Michael OleskerA former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Also see: 7 Jewish Playboy Playmates from 62 Years of Nudity

 

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