His credentials in these areas have cost him some money and trouble. His syndicated TV program "Playboy After Dark," which he owned and controlled, showcased mixed-race singing groups and blacklisted performers like Pete Seeger at a time when networks enforced a ban on both. It also showed black and whites dancing together on a set supposed to be "Hef's Penthouse." Some stations in the south refused to carry it. The show went on the air not long after Nat King Cole's show left NBC after failing to find advertisers who would buy into a "black" show.
In New Orleans, Hefner franchised one of the first Playboy Clubs, later to learn it was forbidden by law to mix black and white patrons. He bought back the franchise, and reopened it to club members of all races. It was in that club that a black comedian performed before whites for the first time in Louisiana (although black musicians were "legal"). He was a young man from Chicago named Dick Gregory. Gregory appears in the film, recalling that he was a replacement for a white comic, Dr. Irwin Corey, and the Playboy event turned out to be a private party for 300 white businessmen. "Three hours later, I was still talking," Gregory says. "Everything turned around on that day." For his career, it certainly did.
It became a old joke that people said they read Playboy because of the articles. But Hefner tried much harder than necessary to maintain a high editorial standard. His issues #2 through #4 serialized Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. He championed Vladimir Nabokov, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin and Jorge Luis Borges. His Playboy Interviews were newsworthy, and his editors must have smiled when they sent Alex Haley to interview the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. (Haley recalls, "I told him I'd been called 'nigger' many times, but this time I was being well paid to hear it.") "The Hurt Locker" was based on Playboy reporting.
