The Playboy and The James Bond

2 The literary Bond

Playboy has claimed the honour of having been the first American magazine to publish a Bond story. When Ian Fleming’s short story ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ was printed in the March 1960 issue, not only did Playboy begin its long-standing association with James Bond, but the magazine also played a vital role in extending Bond’s popularity internationally to the US. Like Playboy, Bond was a product of the 1950s, but they both came to prominence in the 1960s. In America Playboy’s newsstand sales thrived, and among other developments, Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy clubs. Having become a household name in 1950s Britain, James Bond’s fame and reputation grew further in the period between the late 1950s and the early 1960s: Fleming’s Bond novels made it on to the bestseller lists, and the Bond character was successfully brought to the big screen.

Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott observe that between the end of the 1950s and the mid-1960s, James Bond changed from being ‘virtually unknown outside Britain’ to become an international icon.1 Certainly, the many appearances that Bond made in Playboy were an essential part of this process. In the early 1960s though, it is significant that Playboy favoured Fleming as much as Bond, and the author of the Bond thrillers was presented as a literary celebrity and pen friend of Playboy until after his death in 1964. During this time, Fleming and his writing made regular appearances in Playboy, and there began a direct relationship between the author, the literary Bond and Hefner’s men’s magazine that blurred the lines between real life and fiction. This chapter considers how Fleming and the Bond novels endorsed Playboy, and how Playboy endorsed Fleming and Bond novels, against the backdrop of James Bond’s introduction into American popular culture.

Significantly, these acts of endorsement predated the first cycle of Bond films in the 1960s, but soon developed to include Sean Connery’s screen incarnation when the film series became popular with cinema audiences worldwide.

Playboy fiction

 

There are essentially two ways of approaching the beginning of the formal relationship between Playboy and James Bond. First, when approached by way of Hefner and Playboy, the start of the relationship with Fleming and the literary Bond in 1960 would appear to come out of the magazine’s much broader pursuit of quality, respectability and critical acclaim. The previous chapter discussed how Hefner had deliberately set Playboy’s standards for editorial and design high. Even at the magazine’s startup when money was tight, Hefner resolved that the elements of its content should support the Playboy lifestyle ideal. This included the articles, photographs, advertisements and features, and Hefner was as selective as possible about what formed part of the aspirational lifestyle package that Playboy promoted to its growing readership.2

From the first Playboy issue, Hefner regarded literary fiction as important to the upscale concept of his new magazine for men. Like much of the Playboy formula, this was a strategy already well used by Esquire, which had previously built up a strong literary reputation. Leading authors published in Esquire in the 1930s include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Erskine Caldwell. In the context of male consumerism created by Esquire, Tom Pendergast notes that where the cartoons and the female nudes satisfied ‘men’s ever present sexual urges’, the fiction ‘appealed to men’s more intellectual side’.3 The same can be said of Playboy, and in a Time article reflecting on the history of the magazine on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Richard Corliss claims that men ‘bought the magazine to look; often they stayed to read’.4 This is a reference to the main reason that men supposedly gave for buying Playboy (by now so well-rehearsed that Bill Osgerby elsewhere comments that it has ‘become a standing joke’ in popular culture and in criticism): ‘I buy it for the articles’.5 That Corliss picks out Playboy’s publication of ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ in his article as an example of this literary appeal is further suggestive of the important