FOR ME, ROGUE became an obsession. I realized it would always live in the shadow of Playboy, but at the same time I thought maybe it could become a runner-up. We carried fiction by Graham Greene and Charles Beaumont (under the pseudonym of C. B. Lovehill), most of which were Playboy rejects, though Ray Russell, fiction editor of Playboy at the time, admitted that some of our best “Lovehill” stories should have appeared in Playboy. And we published a number of offbeat stories by editor Harlan Ellison.
We ran articles by Arthur C. Clarke (he of 2001) and a few by Hunter S. Thompson before he became the Hunter S. Thompson we all knew and loved. Except for me. In a cover letter accompanying his first submission, Thompson wrote that his recreation included taking potshots with his BB gun at the gays going to the bathhouse at the bottom of his hill in Big Sur. (The article itself was a love story to Big Sur.) I had to grit my teeth when we accepted his second piece, a short story about murder at sea. The hero was no Travis McGee, but the story wasn’t bad. Thompson’s skill with a BB gun I chalked up to a reflection of American attitudes at the time, and besides, an editor should never let his personal life interfere with his professional one. (So much for embryonic gay liberation.)
We published articles by big names (for the period)—Ben Hecht, William Saroyan, and Philip Wylie, among others—but the articles I was proudest of were those that were in-your-face and that I thought Playboy would never publish. They were the ones that were both offbeat and showed great bravery by the writer. Jerry DeMuth, a staffer for Regency Books (Hamling’s legitimate line), wrote a first-person article on SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—when it was involved in registering black voters down South. Jerry was never shot at or roughed up, but that wasn’t because he wasn’t exposed; he was just lucky.
Despite the high quality—in my opinion—of our fiction and articles, we had two built-in handicaps. One was the size of the magazine. We had 80 pages, while Playboy was constantly increasing in size, to 120, 150, etc.
The other one were the centerfold girls we ran. Frankly, I was a little bit at sea in picking girls who would appeal to our presumably heterosexual and very masculine readers. Hamling was a happily married man (a handicap under the circumstances) and had a physical difficulty—he was addicted to wearing sunglasses. This was most apparent when we went to the printing plant to inspect the initial copies of our centerfolds just coming off the press. The object was to call for color corrections. Much to the hilarity of the printers, who hid behind the presses to smother their laughter, Hamling never took off his sunglasses while calling for corrections.
A younger and considerably more randy Hugh Hefner suffered from none of these handicaps. He loved women and was an expert at picking out those models who typified the girl next door in the first blush of youth. The public obviously agreed with him.
When Harlan left I inherited Lenny Bruce, who was almost always late with his column. One time I had made up his column by excerpting some of his comments about our gatefolds in his letters to Hamling.
Lenny Bruce was a man ahead of his time. The cops used to roust him at various clubs for routines they claimed were obscene (today you can see and hear much more obscene material on television and your computer—and without paying a cover charge). There was only one time when I saw Bruce at a loss for words. He had a gig at a nightclub in Chicago but the day before, its liquor license had been revoked. Bruce’s audience that evening were high school kids out for a night before their prom. Bruce knew he couldn’t use his usual routines, so he had to wing it. He flopped—badly. It was obvious then that he had worked on most of his routines beforehand and that this night his usual audience had been pulled out from under him.
We lost Bruce a few issues after that. He had sold his autobiography to Playboy—the same autobiography from which we had excerpted a column months before. What Playboy printed was exactly the portion that we had, word for word.
When I heard that Playboy had bought it, I told A. J. Budrys (formerly of Regency Books but who had defected to Playboy) that Rogue had published part of Bruce’s autobiography previously, but he didn’t believe me. When I finally saw it in Playboy I sent AJ the copy of Rogue and he in turn showed it to A. C. Spectorsky, head of the magazine division. The ever-phlegmatic Spectorsky simply shrugged and said, “I guess they’ll have to sue us.”
I never told Hamling about it—AJ was a friend.
Lenny Bruce died a few years later. The police found him sitting on the toilet, a needle still stuck in his arm. The word was that the police had put it there so the news photographers would know the cops were busy upholding the morals of the community.
Myself, I suspected that there wasn’t a more moral man in show business than Lenny Bruce.
(We ran a photo feature on Lenny Bruce and his ex-wife, Honey, in our December 1960 issue. Bruce had written the caption for a partial nude shot of Honey: “I still think that Honey can cut most of the Woolworth clerks you guys seem to favor.” He was absolutely right.)
Garry Marshall (a very popular film producer later on and an acquaintance from Northwestern) and his sidekick Fred Freeman both had articles on humor in the same issue. Years later, when Rogue was a fond memory, I dropped in on Marshall and Freeman at their offices on the Desilu lot in Hollywood—they were producing Hey, Landlord at the time—and applied for a writer’s job. I got turned down, but as second prize they give me several free tickets to I Love Lucy. It was an act of mercy—when it came to writing sitcoms I would have been horribly out of my depth.