← The New Yorker Radio Hour
The New Yorker Radio Hour
My Mother’s Career at “Playboy,” and the Politics of N.F.L. Protest
00:28:24
The death last month of Hugh Hefner reopened a conversation about the “Playboy” founder and the world he created. Hefner said that his magazine’s pictures of naked or near-naked women were an empowering blow against puritanism; his critics argued that they normalized the degradation of women. Janice Moses was just nineteen and in desperate need of a job when she started in the magazine’s photo department, eventually rising to become a photo editor. Empowered as a professional woman, she became increasingly uncomfortable with the content, especially as “Playboy” began competing with more explicit rivals such as “Hustler.” After Hefner died, Janice’s daughter, Michele Moses—a member of the The New Yorker’s editorial staff—had a few questions about her mother’s years making centerfolds. Also: The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb talks with Bill Rhoden, a writer-at-large for ESPN’s “Undefeated,” about the fifty-year history of black athletes embracing politics on the field. Is it ti...
Loading summary
Transcript104 lines
- [00:04]
Janice Moses
Floor 38.
- [00:06]
David Remnick
These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.
- [00:10]
Bill Rhoden
I think it'd be interesting to really.
- [00:12]
David Remnick
Try to unravel what his ties.
- [00:14]
Michelle Moses
There's this sort of country city divide.
- [00:16]
Bill Rhoden
Their own convenient ends, and it's not clear where it goes next.
- [00:20]
Narrator/Announcer
From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:30]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we'll hear a heart to heart talk, mother to daughter, about working for Playboy magazine, all back in its heyday under the late Hugh Hefner, you know.
- [00:42]
Janice Moses
And Hef had his finger on the pulse. The world was ready for a change, otherwise it wouldn't have followed him off a cliff. Right.
- [00:51]
David Remnick
That's all coming up later. But we begin the hour with football. And this season, the player on everybody's mind hasn't set foot on the field yet even once. Colin Kaepernick, formerly of the 49ers, is an unsigned free agent. But the silent protest against police brutality that he began last year taking a knee during the national anthem now has a life of its own. We can thank the President of the United States, of course, for reigniting a protest that was not very popular in the first place and had kind of lost its momentum after Kaepernick left the 49ers.
- [01:23]
Bill Rhoden
Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, get that son of.
- [01:31]
David Remnick
A bitch off the field right now.
- [01:33]
Bill Rhoden
Out. He's fired. He's fired.
- [01:38]
David Remnick
The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb recently sat down with Bill Rhoden, late of the New York Times, now a contributor to ESPN's website, the Undefeated. Rhoden is also the author of the book $40 million slaves about black athletes in professional sports.
- [01:54]
Jelani Cobb
The first time we met was at a restaurant in Harlem and you had a group of people there. Roman Obin from the Giants was there. Yeah, right. Yeah.
- [02:06]
Bill Rhoden
This is the little restaurant on.
- [02:10]
Jelani Cobb
Yeah, yeah, it was on 8th Avenue. Yeah, I think.
- [02:13]
Bill Rhoden
Oh, wow, man.
- [02:14]
Jelani Cobb
So we had this interesting conversation then, though, about the ways in which the American anxieties, if we could call it that, around race, are so consistently refracted through sports. And I wonder if we could just start by talking about why do we always seem to find sports being the arena in which American attitudes, especially around race, become front and center?
- [02:42]
Bill Rhoden
Yeah, and I've thought about that, obviously, for decades, and two things I've kind of Changed my nomenclature. Because our problem, we talk about race. And our problem in the United States is not race, it's racism. That's the problem. And it's no longer a intersection. That intersection is now a collision. And I think that. And I was, you know, so the president's in Huntsville, Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama, at football season Saturday afternoon. Half of them are going to be at Auburn, you know, front and center. The other half's going to be at Tuscaloosa and Alabama. Cheering. Two teams, by the way, that when you look at the primary players, the starting teams, you could be looking at.
- [03:26]
Jelani Cobb
Howard and Alcorn talking about two historically.
- [03:28]
Bill Rhoden
Black colleges, all these young black men who are the object of mass incarceration, police violence. This is a demographic. Black folks are in your face, front and center. For a lot of people, this is the only time they really get to see a lot of young, young, virile black people in positions of age, positive and controlled. What's happening now is that this young generation, now these guys are saying, wait a minute. You know, you gotta make a choice. Cause I now am a feeling wealthy black man, and I'm just not gonna go out and play ball.
- [04:07]
Jelani Cobb
But there's a question, though, I think that I guess warrants some discussion, which is that we've had a great deal of conversation about kneeling during the national anthem. We've had a lot less conversation about the issue that Colin Kaepernick. That led Colin Kaepernick to kneel in the first place. As you watched this unfold, did it seem like something got lost in translation? Because we were not really talking about police violence. We were talking about the national anthem.
- [04:36]
Bill Rhoden
Jelan not only law hijacked, it was hijacked. You know, they hijacked the message. And to me, the height of when I knew that the thing had come totally been hijacked was, I guess, when the Dallas Cowboys and Jerry Jones and all the Jerry Jones had all his players and they knelt before the national anthem. I said, well, that defeats the whole purpose. Imagine if Tommie Smith and John Carlos would have raised their fist in the tunnel, or Dr. King would have given his I have a Dream speech in.
- [05:07]
Jelani Cobb
The hotel, at a barbecue somewhere.
- [05:10]
Bill Rhoden
The whole point of doing these things is to make people uncomfortable.
- [05:15]
Jelani Cobb
But it also has a kind of echo of history, because this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Cleveland Summit. And I know you've written about this, and I wonder if you could just talk about what exactly the Cleveland Summit was and why it was significant.
- [05:31]
Bill Rhoden
So the Cleveland Summit Came about. I think it was 1967. You said 50, right. English major. So it was 67. So.
- [05:42]
Jelani Cobb
You should have a segment. English majors do math. Do minor math problems.
- [05:48]
Bill Rhoden
You know, math, English, you know, but, you know. So Jim Brown called the meeting. This was in 1967. And Jim Brown, who had just retired from the NFL, kind of stunning everybody because he was like, at that point, maybe the greatest running back ever. And he just walked away from the game, you know. But there were all these things that were going on in 67. Ali Major among them was Muhammad Ali said that he wasn't going to the draft. And so Jim Brown called a meeting of some of the top athletes, black athletes in the country. Lew Alcindor, who had later changed his name. I think he was maybe a South.
- [06:30]
Jelani Cobb
One college junior who later became Kwim Abdul Jabbar.
- [06:36]
Bill Rhoden
And he called all the athletes to Cleveland, where his office was based. And basically these athletes met with Muhammad Ali the night before because a lot of these guys, including Jim Brown, had been in the army or in the Air Force. And finally, after a very, you know, sort of a very pointed conversation, they realized that this guy was standing on principle. They came the next day and they held a press conference, which is now. It's a famous picture of all the athletes. And they held a press conference saying that we support Muhammad Ali. Now, a lot of people point out that this was 67. A lot of those guys didn't have agents. None of. They didn't have agents back then.
- [07:22]
Jelani Cobb
Endorsements weren't as big a part of the picture then.
- [07:25]
Bill Rhoden
No part. Yeah, there's no part. And so that, to me, became my standard of what a black man was or woman or what a black athlete could do in this limelight. How you could use your podium, your stand, your arena, the way Ali did, the way Curt Flood did, the way Smith and Carlos did, the way Jim Brown did. And I think that we went through this point of wilderness as the money started becoming so great that I think a lot of a couple generations culminated probably with Michael Jordan, when in the.
- [07:58]
Jelani Cobb
80S, okay, famous Republicans buy shoes. To comment.
- [08:03]
Bill Rhoden
Yeah, yeah. Whether he made it or not.
- [08:04]
Jelani Cobb
I mean, there's some debate about whether he said this, but.
- [08:07]
Bill Rhoden
Yeah, but it's close enough. Your actions speak louder than.
- [08:10]
Jelani Cobb
Well, the basic ethic that money was more important than any kind of political or social stand.
- [08:16]
Bill Rhoden
Right. And that set the tone, I think, for generations, a couple generations of black ads. If we just don't kind of rock the boat, we can make it. But then you see, and I think that's where we are now. So, you know, that's not a way to live. I mean, and just because you don't rock the boat doesn't mean they're not going to deal with you. What did Dick Gregory say? Just because you think somebody's after you doesn't mean you're not.
- [08:39]
Jelani Cobb
Oh, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that nobody's after you. So you've heard, as have I, the commentary from a number of different quarters that, well, athletes would just keep politics out of sports. And, you know, many conservatives have said this in particular. What's your estimation of that? The likelihood of it? Is politics. Is sports ever apolitical?
- [09:10]
Bill Rhoden
You know, Jelani, listen, man, as soon as you play the national anthem, you politicize the sport. As soon as you do that, I mean, we, you know, I'm a jazz guy. You go to concerts, there's no national anthem, you know, for a jazz league. There's no, you know, go in, hit them, you sit down. As soon as you play the national anthem, you politicize it. That horse has left the barn a long time ago. I mean, going back to Jack Johnson, it's always been. It's always been politicized. Always been politicized. What people are saying. Also, it depends on what your politics are. If the politics suits you, then it's okay. You know, it's okay. But so I think that that conversation, really. That's not, to me, a debatable issue. It's already. And also, I think what it is is that it's disturbing. What they're trying to say is that we don't want our hypocrisy to wash up on us.
- [10:00]
Jelani Cobb
What happens to Kaepernick? We've seen this before. This is even kind of maybe akin to that period where Ali was kind of in the wilderness in his career for refusing to go to Vietnam. How does this end for him?
- [10:14]
Bill Rhoden
I would love for it to end with him being on the roster or at least getting an opportunity to play. But you think about it, Jelani, what happened right now, Colin has become this symbol. If he doesn't play another down, his name will probably go down, I don't know, for the next 20, 30, 40 years as somebody who's triggered this thing. Now, if he gets on a roster, suddenly, he throws five interceptions.
- [10:40]
Jelani Cobb
Oh, my God, that becomes the story now.
- [10:41]
Bill Rhoden
That's because, hey, that's why you talk, you know, so you kind of lose this. You lose this veneer of kind of sainthood or martyrdom when you get on there and you throw five interceptions, the team can be 55 to nothing, you know, as opposed to just staying and becoming this figure.
- [11:01]
Jelani Cobb
Is it better for him to not come back?
- [11:05]
Bill Rhoden
I mean, cynically, what I just painted was a cynical thing. But the backup quarterback is always the most popular person on the team till you kind of come in and get signed. But I think as a show of good faith, for example, the owners are asking to play a secret. What can we do? So, okay, first thing, first thing, sign Kaepernick. One of you sops, sign Kaepernick. Guarantee you we'll all say, okay, now, the issues that he raised will still be with us. But you as owners have made a statement, said, you know what? Maybe we did blackball this guy and it wasn't right and we're going to bring him back and give him a shot.
- [11:45]
Jelani Cobb
So should we do away with playing the anthem altogether?
- [11:48]
Bill Rhoden
Yeah, I think so, and I've thought so for a while. And by the way, anybody who's been to a football, basketball, baseball game, go to the corridors while during the national anthem, people are buying popcorn and beer. They're standing. They're not standing for the national anthem. They're doing everything, you know, what do you do at home when you're watching the game? People aren't, you know, so again, this is this sort of hypocrisy that we built a whole. We've built a whole five week news cycle on about the flag and the national anthem. Give me a break with this stuff, you know, but it's. Again, it's probably not going to happen. But, yeah, I think that they should just stop it. Just come in and play Grand Funk or something. Just, you know, play. So what, you know, maybe make that so.
- [12:37]
Jelani Cobb
I do not think that people are going to replace the national anthem with Funkadelic. It would be, it would probably be the most interesting development. One nation underground groove.
- [12:48]
Bill Rhoden
Right? That's right.
- [12:49]
Jelani Cobb
That might actually be unifying. That could be a unifying.
- [12:52]
Bill Rhoden
This is a new national answer. You heard it here. First.
- [13:00]
Janice Moses
Of our constriction Call the Beat.
- [13:04]
David Remnick
Freaking up and Down. Bill Rhoden, a former New York Times columnist and a contributor to the ESPN website called the Undefeated. He spoke with staff writer Jelani Cobb. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. The death last month of Hugh Hefner reopened a debate about the Playboy founder and the world he created when pornography was still a kind of secretive enterprise. Hefner put naked and near naked women in full color right into the respectable households of America. Hefner thought he was an instigator of the sexual revolution and he was making a great blow against puritanism.
- [14:23]
Unknown Expert/Commentator
It's an attempt to replace the old legalism. It's certainly not a rejection of monogamy as such, but very much an attempt to. In the case of premarital sex, there really hasn't been any moral code in the past, except simply a thou shalt not. Well, that's a code, isn't it? Well, perhaps I don't think it's a very realistic one.
- [14:45]
David Remnick
Not everyone saw it in such high minded terms. Some thought women were being exploited. And that divide is still present in how people think about Playboy's legacy. Janice Moses was just 19 when she took a job in the photography department at Playboy and she rose through the ranks to become a photo editor. Janice left Playboy before her daughter Michelle was born and didn't really talk with her much about the experience. Michelle followed her mother into the magazine business, although she works here at the New Yorker, where you don't get all.
- [15:15]
Michelle Moses
That much nudity when you were 19 and you entered that environment for the first time. Like, had you ever seen pictures of naked women before entering into that environment?
- [15:26]
Janice Moses
You know, it's interesting. That was one of Vince's questions during our interview. You know, have you ever been around nude models before? And quite honestly, I so badly needed a job that of course I had to tell a lie and say, yeah, oh yeah, I've been around new models before in art class, but truly I hadn't. And you know, at that time, Playboy was a much broader based magazine. So it's not like there were naked ladies running around the studio all day.
- [15:58]
Michelle Moses
And actually, I would love to hear a bit more about your personal interactions with Hefner. I know that when you became a photo editor, you were presenting your work to him on a very regular basis. What was he like to interact with?
- [16:12]
Janice Moses
He was intimidating for sure. In fact, thankfully, I found these few pictures of what it was like to meet with him. And that's me sitting right next to me.
- [16:25]
Michelle Moses
All right, so what's going. There's a picture that I'm looking at. My mom is a blonde bombshell.
- [16:31]
Janice Moses
Look how we're looking at each other.
- [16:33]
Michelle Moses
And he's holding, he's holding his pipe in hand, wearing silk pajama shirt. Always, always. And they have the mock up of the magazine in front of them.
- [16:42]
Janice Moses
It looks like, yeah, that was, you know, what we Called, I think we called it the Blue Book or the black book or something. It was a pasted up book. That's how magazines were done in those days. Oh, we have one, the brown book. It was a pasted up version of the book. And, you know, we went over it page by page, line by line, picture by picture. And when you think about how he was so involved in every detail and for him, money was no object. It was all about perfection, whether it was re editing the copy or reshooting the pictures to the sometimes the great frustration of some of the people that work for him, because he was very challenging and he had his view of perfection, of everything.
- [17:24]
Michelle Moses
Like, did you all feel like there was a mission that Playboy was on that you were a part of? Can you tell me, like, how that felt from the inside?
- [17:36]
Janice Moses
You take me back to a memory of a photo shoot that we did very early in my career. And we were on the campuses of the top five colleges, or what we thought were the top five colleges. And so we went to Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and we got there and the kids were so upset and a group of them literally stole the boxes of clothing that we had shipped from the fashion department to put on the models. And they said, we want to confront you and we want to have a conversation with you. So they sat us down in a room in their student union. And these were the earliest days of demonstrations on campus. And so these kids, the boys did a nude in demonstration and clusters of boys came through the windows, running naked across this panel. Of course, I was terrified for my life. I wanted to get out of there.
- [18:39]
Michelle Moses
Did you understand their objections to Playboy? Did you understand what their grievances were?
- [18:44]
Janice Moses
Well, they thought we were the establishment, but that's.
- [18:47]
Michelle Moses
And not to simplify it, I don't.
- [18:49]
Janice Moses
Want to simplify it, but for me, I must confess, I could only scratch my head because I was on the inside where I had so much freedom to do and be and work and express myself, that I was like, what's so conservative about us? What are they seeing? I mean, I'm just here.
- [19:09]
Michelle Moses
Did you hear from the students? Did they describe to you or did they give you a good sense of what they were objecting to?
- [19:15]
Janice Moses
As we walked out of that student union, this young college girl came up next to me. We were very close in age at the time, actually. And, you know, there she was, braless in her little kind of hippie top and being oh, so bold. And, you know, she just was. She was upset because she thought we were taking Advantage of women. And yet she was standing there braless and free to be who she was because we gave women the freedom to do that. So it was confusing for me.
- [19:50]
Michelle Moses
Did you. You know, that's a great story. She's like, you're a foil. She's like, the life you could have led.
- [19:55]
Janice Moses
In some ways, yeah.
- [19:57]
Michelle Moses
Did you feel any envy for her to be so bold?
- [20:00]
Janice Moses
Of course I did. Here I am in my quilted top, because. Let's describe this picture. I'm in a quilted tapestry jacket. You know, God forbid anybody should see me braless.
- [20:11]
Michelle Moses
Is that how you felt in the office? God forbid anyone should see me braless.
- [20:15]
Janice Moses
No, I have pictures here.
- [20:16]
Michelle Moses
Well, you don't need to show them, but I mean. I mean, like, how did you feel about your own body in that setting where women's bodies were the centerpiece?
- [20:25]
Janice Moses
Well, you know, let's go back to why women.
- [20:29]
Michelle Moses
Did you get a lot of sexual attention?
- [20:31]
Janice Moses
Let's go back to why women burned their bras. At that moment, it was Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan who came on the scene and made us powerful. And I was not attracted to what the girls in the secretarial pool wanted to do and wanted to talk about. I wanted to go out and be with the guys and test the film and search for the light and help set up the productions. And it was all there for me. They were like, sure, show up. Anything you want to do. Here, take this, do that, be responsible for that. And, you know, by 21, I had a lot of responsibility. By 23, I was running the photo studio. By then, we had six staff photographers, five staff stylists, painters, carpenters, electricians, and I was running this whole little section of the business of the photo studio. The logistics, the production, the set building. You know, it was. It fell on my desk at a very young age because I felt this freedom to be able to do these things.
- [21:38]
Michelle Moses
If you imagined your career, if you imagine it happening again and you had that much responsibility and that much freedom at a place that wasn't playboy, that didn't have the same social or political mission or influence, do you think that would have changed the whole thing for you? Do you think that it could have been a religion somewhere else, or was there something really playboy specific for you that made it what you believed in, that made it what you wanted to work for?
- [22:10]
Janice Moses
That's a difficult one to answer simply. You know, I landed this job as a kid and just stayed. And, you know, I've told you there were times long before I Left that I was very unhappy there, that I didn't like what the magazine was about. I didn't think some of it was funny. I didn't endorse it philosophically. I didn't want to see it on the pages. I didn't want to ask, you know, for people to do the things I was asking them to do.
- [22:42]
Michelle Moses
What kinds of things? What kinds of things made you uneasy?
- [22:45]
Janice Moses
I didn't like seeing two girls together in a sexual context.
- [22:49]
Michelle Moses
Well, that's, that's me.
- [22:50]
Janice Moses
That's my opinion.
- [22:52]
Michelle Moses
I also don't like that answer.
- [22:53]
Janice Moses
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that's just right, you know, that sounds kind of homophobic, Mom. Well, hmm, interesting. I didn't think of it as homophobic at that point. I thought of it as for the entertainment of the viewer.
- [23:10]
Michelle Moses
The entertainment of the male viewer.
- [23:12]
Janice Moses
Uh huh. Yeah.
- [23:13]
Michelle Moses
So that's what you were starting to notice.
- [23:17]
Janice Moses
Yeah, that's what bothered me. That was when it all came together at the same moment, when it was Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler trying to compete for attention and sales. And so we wanted to push the envelope on how explicit or how suggestive. And it just went to a place that I wasn't comfortable with. And that's when I became unhappy with being there and doing this work. And so then I would just focus on what my job was. You know, when you're unhappy in a job, you don't leave the next day. You have to let it wear at you for a very long time until one day you go, I need out. I can't live my life. I remember the day that the guy in the next office got a raise and he was a guy and he got more than me and we did the same job. I did more than he did. I thought. I produced seven centerfolds that year and he produced some pictorials and I never thought that was fair. So for me, my rights as a woman were always very important. And it turned out to be the very best decision. You know, I have you, I have my own wonderful business and it's all good.
- [24:39]
Michelle Moses
And you know, I was remembering, you know, when I was 6 years old and Britney Spears came out with the album Hit Me Baby One More Time, I remember wanting it so badly, asking for it, and you got me the cd. But I know that you were sort of uncomfortable with the way she presented herself in this like, skimpy schoolgirl outfit for an audience of young people. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where maybe that sense of discomfort and came from for the kind of media that I was consuming and how it differed from what you thought about the work that you did then.
- [25:18]
Janice Moses
This has more to do with me as a woman than me as an employee of Playboy. It has to do with the me inspired by Gloria Steinem. And I felt not Britney Spears particularly, but there was a moment in time around that time when there was a. In my childhood, in your childhood, when there was a bevy of female singers who came on the scene in very provocative clothing. There's another one who was competing, Christine Aguilera. Thank you. Beyond provocative, who I thought were taking us, we women backwards. So the way we dressed the women in the magazine was not the way we walked around the office. There were no nude women walking around the office. In fact, there was actually nobody walking around in low cut dresses with cleavage. Everybody was pretty buttoned up. In fact, if I pulled out enough pictures, you would see how really buttoned up everybody was. But I just felt that at the time of the Christina Brittany era, there was a shift in female behavior in the everyday world and offices and just on the street that I didn't think was going to forward them getting more respect and equal pay for the work that they did or have a voice that was going to be rewarded or be heard or be respected.
- [26:51]
Michelle Moses
So what was shown in the pages of the magazine entered into our everyday world and inspired the behavior of people outside of the realm of entertainment.
- [27:02]
Janice Moses
This is true.
- [27:07]
Michelle Moses
It's been really special for me to hear these stories I'd never heard before. So I'm really glad we did this.
- [27:12]
Janice Moses
Thank you so much.
- [27:16]
David Remnick
Janice Moses in conversation with her daughter Michelle. Janice managed the photography studio at Playboy and was a photography editor. Michelle is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker. That's it for today's show. I'm David Remnick and next week we'll hear an interview with Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence analyst who served seven years in prison after sending a huge haul of military and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. I hope you'll join us for that. Until then, have a great week.
- [27:48]
Narrator/Announcer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Maitha Lee Rao and Steven Valentino with help from Sarah Sandbach. Jessica Henderson and Terence Bernardo. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment.