The Secret Sisterhood of Female 'Playboy' Editors

From ELLE

When asked, I will always tell people the best job I've ever had as a writer was working for Playboy magazine in 2008. At the time, I was just starting out as a online media reporter, penning eight posts a day for $12.50 per post, a position I felt lucky to have landed. Like nearly every other person working in media that year, I was caught up in the all-encompassing excitement of the 2008 election and the simultaneous rise of online journalism. I was familiar with Playboy's illustrious journalism history - its "read it for the articles" bylines are a veritable who's who of New Journalism heavyweights.

One day, I cold-pitched the then editor-in-chief Chris Napolitano the idea of doing a political blog. Playboy had next to no Internet presence at the time, and I thought it would be smart to have a woman covering an election in which a woman was running for president. After months of back and forth-ing - Playboy had sold their web domain years before (a decision that would soon contribute to their near ruination) and was only then in the process of getting it back - my proposal was green-lighted.

Shortly before leaving for the Democratic convention in Denver, I went up to Playboy's swanky midtown New York office to sign the papers. It was heady stuff. For two weeks of work (it was later extended) I would make more money than I'd made in the three months prior. I would also work with one of the top print magazine editors in the Chicago office (my "editing" until that point had consisted mostly of commenters yelling at me about my dreadful grammar and spelling). I could not believe my luck.

As I left the office practically exploding with excitement, Chris handed me a stack of the most recent issues of the magazine, which I happily took. I didn't look at them until after I'd boarded the crowded subway back to Brooklyn. I'm not sure what I expected. I obviously knew what I'd find in a Playboy magazine, and yet the sight of all those gleaming pussies (there's really no other way to say it) made my stomach drop. This is what I'd signed on to contribute to? I felt a bit sick.

My misgivings lasted about as long as my subway ride. Good writing jobs were not easy to find, and this one was excellent - I'd landed in a place where my words and thoughts would be treated as valuable commodities, not merely a way to generate clicks. I also loved the idea of infiltrating a magazine full of nipples and bushes with stories about smart, powerful women. The election that year had been rife with sexism, and there was something about occupying the belly of the beast that made me feel powerful and subversive in equal measure. And the name recognition alone was dazzling. If there is a better opening line for a journalist on the road than "Hi, I work for Playboy magazine," I have yet to encounter it. I spent the next two weeks mingling with all the powerful players in the media world (at that time, anyway), people whose attention was not easy to land, and every one of them was immediately hooked by my association with the Playboy brand. I loved it. Not once did I give any more thought those spreads that had turned my stomach just a few weeks before. Nor have I in the years since. It remains one of the best professional experiences I've ever had.

This may not be entirely surprising when you take into consideration how much the media world has shifted since then. Newspapers are a thing of the past. Well-paid writing gigs are few and far between. Since I was there, Playboy has, like so many magazines, gutted its staff and seen its circulation plummet. In what feels like a last ditch effort to revitalize itself, the magazine announced the unimaginable late last year: it was going to cover up. No more nudes!

As the last naked issue sits on stands and we prepare for a world in which Playboy is no longer synonymous with exposed ladies, I spoke with women who'd worked at Playboy over the decades to find out what it was like to be the women behind the naked women. Their answers left me deeply envious.

"It was a truly wonderful place to work," says Barbara Nellis who started at Playboy in 1970 and stayed for more than three decades, rising to the position of editor, and working with such luminaries as William Styron. "Whatever hostility was directed at Hefner, bunny ears and tails and all of that stuff, had absolutely zero impact on working there."

Patty Lamberti, who worked as an editor from 2000-2005 and is now a college professor, concurs. "What I remember is how much fun it was. I teach journalism now, and that spirit of funness is gone, and even the students know it. Those days are gone."

"Playboy really spoiled me," she continued. "The job was really intellectually satisfying. I worked with great people. I was shocked by how boring my jobs after that felt. And I kept going from job to job thinking there has to be another place that's just as interesting."

"The Playboy "mentality" was very different from the people who worked there," says Heather Haebe, who worked in the editorial department from 2000-2008, quickly stamping out assumptions that "intellectually satisfying" might be a secret code for wild parties at the Playboy Mansion.

"The people there were extraordinary," one former editor told me. It was a characterization that was repeated to me again and again by every woman I spoke with. And there were, as it turns out, a lot of women.

Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter and onetime president, chairman of the board, and CEO of Playboy Enterprises, as well as a well known advocate for progressive issues, was long the most prominent woman working in the company. But she was far from the only powerful lady walking the Playboy corridors.

"I was surprised," said Jennifer, a former cartoon editor in the New York office, "how many women were all in the different departments."

Recalled Lamberti: "When you looked up it was predominately women."

"It was a sisterhood," says Haebe. "There was a smaller secret sorority of women who worked there. If I ever had any sort of problem in the office I'd go to any one of the women who worked there. It was very supportive."

Outsiders may be surprised to hear that that support reached all the from the top to the bottom. In fact, from the sounds of it, Playboy was leaning in before Sheryl Sandberg was in kindergarten.

"When I arrived, there was only one female editor" says Nellis. "More came after that obviously, but when my daughter was born in 1977 there was no maternity policy at Playboy. They worked it out with me so that I could take three months off and not become impoverished, and my daughter had a crib in my office. So when I had to come to work to move copy, she could come too."

It also extended to career paths, in ways that may seem unheard of to today's generation of workers who are accustomed to leaping from job to job every few years.

"I did everything," says Nellis. "When I started, I was 25, and I'd never had a full-time job."

Before you read further, be warned, Nellis' story is the stuff media fantasies are made of, and not because it involves Bunnies. Six months after starting out in Playboy's college marketing department, where she would advise the department on what not to sell to college students, she was fired ("it was a ridiculous job"). Instead of packing up, she simply went down three floors in the Playboy building to the editing department and was given a job as the first primary research person that they'd ever had at the magazine. "All the writers going from East to West and West to East, came to see us."

Nellis wasn't the only one who came in and stayed. "I floated for a while in the different departments," says Jennifer. "This is how great it was back in 1999, you could float until you meshed with one of the departments. They had that luxury of hiring people and seeing where they fit best."

"You have to understand," says Nellis, "there was so much money then that they could do anything. The money was pouring in there."

The money was pouring in. It's been so long since that phrase has been uttered in relation to anything to do with writing it's tempting to consider this the greatest fantasy ever perpetuated by Playboy. It becomes even more unbelievable when you consider how that money was put to use. Certainly, by all accounts there were Mad Men levels of free liquor and food - "They would give me an unlimited expense account," said Lamberti with notable nostalgia - but it also went back to the employees in ways that are difficult to conceive of in this day and age.

"Playboy encouraged you to go back to school," says Jennifer. "In Chicago some of the low level secretaries when they started they didn't have a college degree so Playboy paid for their degrees."

Was there any downside? It can be easy to get caught up in the nostalgia for a world that both valued its writers and paid well, but the public perception of Playboy also had its drawbacks.

"The stigma was ridiculous," Jennifer, who asked that I not use her last name for this very reason, told me. "They would see Playboy on your resume and you just wouldn't get any calls."

"When I first started, they said you can't have any qualms about it, and if you do it's probably not going to work out. And they were right," says Lamberti.

Even so, she was not without her concerns: "I was really worried when I got into higher education that working at Playboy would harm me. Even now when I speak to my students I go out of my way to stress that I worked in the political part of the magazine more than the girl parts that they're famous for."

And yet, Lamberti is the first to note those "girl parts" were accompanied by very smart brains.

"They used to send me to take out playmates for this one page in the magazine, where I'd try to get them to talk about their sex lives and open up. I did this 30 or 40 times, and there were just two times where I was sad for them, where things had gone really badly in their life, but not because they'd posed, It was even before they'd had anything to do with Playboy. I was always really aware of the fact that they wanted to do it. They were for the most part pretty smart women, and they knew what they were getting into."

Says Haebe: "Whatever sort of reservations I had about working for Playboy initially fell away very quickly once I got into the actual day to day function of working there. It wasn't very often that I would go home and sit down and read the magazine after it had been published."

And what about Nellis, whose time at the magazine coincided with the height of the Second Wave feminist movement?

"I came to Playboy from a very political college experience. I went to jail in a civil rights demonstration, I marched on Washington against the Vietnam War. Here is how I thought about feminism: I thought that what feminism meant was that we could all make our own choice. If you wanted to take off your clothes so that you could pay for college or to get a degree as a dental hygienist or whatever, or not, that was feminism."

Nellis also noted that many well-known feminists of the time, including Betty Friedan, whom she interviewed for the magazines front of book section in the 1970s, wanted to be in the magazine. It's not hard to understand why. In 1971 the college issue sold more than 7 million copies. Even Jimmy Fallon's free viral video clips would be pleased with numbers like that.

And then, of course, there was Hef, who, whatever one thinks of his media persona, was personally involved in every part of the magazine and fostered a work environment open to all ideas, regardless of the source. "It was a completely non-hierarchical environment, says Nellis. "If you were manning the receptionist desk in the front of the 10th floor at 919 North Michigan and you had a good idea, they were happy to have it."

Said Patty Lamberti: "Hugh called me when he heard I was leaving to say that he was sad to see me go, and I'd done a great job. To get a call like that from Hugh Hefner is one of the highlights of my career. When I left my other jobs, no one in charge ever said goodbye, and they were no Hugh Hefners."

As anyone who's tried to make a living as a writer can tell you, much like the naked centerfolds, for better or worse, those days are gone. As Nellis said to me more than once: "We're living in a different world now."