The era of the playboy is coming to an end, thank goodness
Playboys. Remember them? When I was growing up, playboys were glamorous figures. You could never hope to meet them, but you knew everything about them – or thought you did – because their pictures were in the papers and the glossy magazines, and on Pathe News in the cinema, every day of the week.
The thing about playboys was, of course, that they weren’t boys. They may have started out young, but, having served their apprenticeships, they only really came into their own at the age of 40, carrying on until they died of pleasure, or flatulence, at some point in their eighties.
Generations of journalists and paparazzi made handsome livings recording the goings-on of this exotic breed, who hardly ever stepped out in public without dark glasses and a twenty-year-old beauty on their arm, the latter sporting full lips, “pouting” breasts and teeth that looked as if they might glow in the dark.
The assumption was that playboys had sex with a variety of nubile women every day of the week, either singly or two at a time or, when the mood took them, in the course of week-long, drug and champagne-fuelled orgies. And, fundamentally, this was true.
How we envied them? If we were men, that is. If only we were rich and carefree, that was how we, too, would live.
Money was no object to the Playboy generation. Wealth, measured at the time in millions of dollars, not billions, led automatically to celebrity. It helped if you were aristocratic, or a movie star, or impossibly handsome. But hard cash, and buckets of it, was what bought you in to Playboy society. From then on, having worked your ticket, you had your choice of women and girls and could more or less do with them what you chose, pausing only to have lunch, ski, sail, shop and attend movie premieres. Winters were spent in St Moritz, summers in Cannes or Monte Carlo, and the rest of the year in New York, Malibu, Paris, Rome and London.
La dolce vita was the phrase they dreamed up to cover the playboy lifestyle, which, though it always included a generous spread of Americans, was initially centred in Europe, particularly the Mediterranean, where decadence, stretching back as far as the Romans, had long been considered a respectable life choice for those who could afford it. Today, playboys are everywhere, not only in Hollwood and Wall Street, but in Dubai, Moscow, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Sydney and all points in between where money and desire combine to bring out the worst in men.
Hugh Hefner was the undisputed patron saint of playboys. As the founder and publisher of Playboy magazine and owner of a string of Playboy Mansions, he demonstrated that it was possible to make a brilliant career out of sexual exploitation – so much so that when he died in 2017 at the age of 91, he was mourned almost as a national treasure. It was “Hef”, more than anyone else, who normalised the idea of older men with money having sex with young women and girls without even the appearance of commitment or the stigma of prostitution. It was fun and, hey, whataya gonna do?
Since then, largely as a result of the Me Too movement, the tide has turned. Recent scandals, the latest of which led to the suicide, while in custody, of Jeffrey Epstein, the New York financier and property magnate, have revealed what we all surely knew already – that the epithet “playboy” covered a multitude of sins centred on the sexual abuse of women and under-age girls.
Epstein was a serial abuser, among whose past friends and associates can be numbered such luminaries as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and the Duke of York. Other prominent predators, according to their many accusers, include the movie impresario Harvey Weinstein, the actor-director Kevin Spacey and the late Roger Ailes, a former CEO of Fox News. But they are all around us – powerful men for whom morality ends at the bedroom door or, just as often, the moment an attractive young woman steps into their office.
Which brings me to an important point. There have always been playboys who didn’t have to work for a living. Playtime for those born to wealth and power or who were the beneficiaries of great good fortune, was pretty-well a full-time occupation. But there has equally always been a sub-set of playboys who divide their time between the ruthless pursuit of wealth and the equally ruthless exploitation of women.
Epstein was one of these. He worked hard and partied harder. In his case, it was important to draw other important men into his orbit – men who are now terrified of being found guilty by default of abusing women and girls. Epstein, rather like Trump, had celebrity without charisma, He could afford to do as he liked. He could play the villain or the Sultan of Sin. But only through being seen with, and photographed with, true celebrities – household names across the country – could he feel that he had arrived socially as well as financially.
If Epstein had spent more time at the office and less time despoiling young women, he might, as it happens, have done himself real favours. He was rich, but not that rich. Like Trump, he had more the appearance of a multi-billionaire than the portfolio to prove it. America’s Richest – men like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Google, to say nothing of the Sage of Omaha, 88-year-old Warren Buffett – have devoted themselves full-time to the development of their companies, apparently undisturbed by the lure of a playboy existence. It is the fringe billionaires, the duckers and divers, who are most susceptible to the lure of a 15-year-old girl procured for their pleasure by an underling retained for the purpose.
Do I sound holier than thou? Probably. But, even as an atheist, I consider myself holier than those legions of rich men who throughout my lifetime (and I am 70) felt they could do what they liked with whoever they fancied without ever having to face the consequences – without, indeed, ever having to feel that what they were doing was wrong. Men have behaved badly towards women since the Stone Age, and probably before that. But it was as Playboys, smiling at the camera, appearing to be both genial and generous (if a little over the top), that the pretence and the hypocrisy reached its peak. We know now what was really going on. At long last, the chickens are coming home to roost.