Playboy Goes West
“The end of Playboy in Chicago has been a long time coming. In 1975, following the death of his longtime secretary Bobbie Arnstein, Hef moved to LA for good. By 1980, the empire had begun to decline. The brutal murder of Playmate Dorothy Stratten by her husband, a petty thug, made it seem as though the magazine was more like those smutty magazines Hef had tried to escape in the 1950s. Subsequently, during the Reagan administration, the attacks of the government-funded Meese Commission on Pornography sought to connect Playboy to crime, deviance and, most controversially, child abuse. At the same time, the appearance of hardcore pornographic magazines like Screw, Hustler, and Penthouse had made Playboy’s Girls Next Door seem positively Victorian.
