Masters of Sex by Thomas Maier

Author:Thomas Maier
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In Hefner’s mind, what took them beyond Kinsey was the very presence of Virginia Johnson as an equal partner. Unlike the tanned, nubile blondes on display au naturel elsewhere in the magazine, here was a remarkably well-informed forty-three-year-old woman with her dark hair clipped tightly off her face, wearing little makeup and dressed in the same clinical white jacket as she had appeared in Life, Time, and Newsweek magazines. She argued passionately for the sexual equality of women, not as objectified Barbie-like dolls but as loving, active participants in the bedroom. “All the names on the Kinsey book were male, but the fact that Masters and Johnson—the male and the female—were involved in the studies and the research, the results turned into more than just a male’s point of view,” Hefner realized. Johnson’s willingness to sign on with Masters as Playboy consultants provided a degree of journalistic ballast that pleased Hefner, which he happily rewarded. “In 1965, I founded the Playboy Foundation and, because the magazine and the company was doing very well in the 1960s, we started funding all sort of things, including Masters and Johnson,” he explained. “They became good friends.”

Despite her practiced calm and sophisticated manner, Gini could barely contain her amazement inside the Playboy Mansion. “There was a blue and a red room—all the rooms were different colors,” she remembered. “Hef was terribly bright and accomplished. I liked staying at the mansion. What I loved about it was that the chefs were on duty twenty-four hours a day. At three o’clock you could count on wonderful new cookies being baked because Hef stayed up almost all night and slept into the day. He was wonderful to us.” Even though she and Masters would regularly sleep together on out-of-town trips, Johnson specifically asked for two adjoining rooms. “I was always very concerned about my public image and my family,” she recalled. “I just didn’t want to be known in that way.” During their stay, Lehrman was impressed with how enthusiastically Hefner lavished attention on them. “There was a joke about him being up for five days and then, when he went to sleep, he’d say ‘Don’t wake me unless it’s a call from Frank Sinatra or Lyndon Johnson!’” Lehrman recalled. “He was very difficult in those days, very difficult to reach. He rarely saw people, but he was there for them and very proud that they considered him a peer.”

Masters and Johnson realized the magazine’s cultural impact in the 1960s, particularly with millions of young male readers. “Playboy is probably the single most important source of sex information in America today,” Masters proclaimed. “We’re glad to help them make it accurate information.” Along with popularizing their own advice, Masters and Johnson’s chronically underfinanced research clinic received a big boost from their Playboy alliance. During the next decade, the Playboy Foundation contributed a total of $300,000 to the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation “to develop a comprehensive training program for health care professionals in the treatment of sexual dysfunction.”

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