As the Bunny Turns

Last month, Playboy magazine turned 50 and to celebrate, founder Hugh Hefner sold off half a century's worth of Playboy memorabilia at Christie's auction house . Among the items were nude pictures of Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and other supermodels and actresses; original manuscripts by writers like Jack Kerouac; interviews with Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, and Orson Welles; letters from William Saroyan, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury; Hef's little black address books with phone numbers of the rich and famous; his old Mercedes; and two invitations to the New Year's Eve party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Wow!

Needless to say, the items went for a pretty penny. Hefner has built an amazing, if graying, empire out of a pen, paper, the written word and a vast array of breasts. He presides over Playboy Enterprises -- whose chief executive is Hefner's daughter, Christie -- which has become a multimedia company, with TV channels in many countries and a great global brand: the black bunny head.

Clearly Hef gets the big picture. He understands branding, marketing and promotion like no other in the skin trade. However, the big picture in 2004 ain't the airbrushed glossy it was a decade or so ago. Playboy Enterprises just rode out several bad years of being in the red. First off, if you want to see hot babes and plenty of skin, there are enough quare inches of skin in non-porn men's magazines like Maxim and Stuff for you to get your flesh fix without having to even surf the free smut available online.

And despite the bankruptcy of Playboy's chief rival Penthouse, similar minded yet harder-core magazines are popping up left and right as the porn industry blossoms. As it does so, the demand for the next big things keeps getting more extreme. Now, in hard-core porn, it's not good enough to simply have sex with more than two people. You have to be like porn queen Belladonna and use a baseball bat, too.

Is the good-natured-grandfather Playboy willing to compete with the new breed of pornographers? Is Hefner willing to roll in the mud with the more-willing-change-with-the-times Larry Flynts or the extreme-by-anyone's-standards Max Hardcores of the world? Or will the Bunny lovin' legend finally roll over and let the younger, sicker, less classy kids take over? Playboy is "quietly" developing more perverse offerings with SpiceTV and its Internet operations. But it remains to be seen if it can continue to grow in that direction and still be the company that sponsors a jazz festival each year.