An American Outlaw
Playboy Australia|June 2018

An incident over supposedly indecent photos transformed Hugh Hefner into a tireless defender of free speech

An American Outlaw

It was late afternoon, June 4, 1963, and Hugh Hefner lay asleep in bed in his Chicago mansion. The then 37-year-old had stayed up into the early hours of that day, working on the August instalment of his sprawling Playboy Philosophy, and he desperately needed sleep. But it was not to be: Hefner’s housekeeper awakened him with the ominous news that four members of the Chicago Police Department’s vice squad were downstairs wielding a warrant for his arrest. Hefner kept them waiting for more than an hour, until his two attorneys arrived. Finally, the PLAYBOY editor in-chief and publisher emerged, wearing a pink cardigan, white sports shirt and dark slacks. He requested and was granted permission to change into a suit, whereupon Chicago’s finest placed him under arrest and drove him to the central police building five miles down the road. The charge? Publishing obscenity. The offending material? The Nudest Jayne Mansfield, PLAYBOY’s June 1963 full-colour pictorial and behind-the-scenes peek at the buxom actress’s latest movie, in which she would appear in the buff.

Like defamation and so-called fighting words, obscenity was then (and still is) classified as unprotected speech — that is, not covered by the protections granted under the First Amendment. The definition of obscenity had been laid out in 1957’s Roth v. United States: An “average person,” the Supreme Court decided, would be able to recognise it when “the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.”

This story is from the June 2018 edition of Playboy Australia.

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This story is from the June 2018 edition of Playboy Australia.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.