Diamonds are not a girl’s best friend.
Attention: Hugh Hefner
I understand from the media blitz going on right now that full nudity will be a thing of the past in your print magazine.
At 89 you might not care.
The true story, Diamonds are not a girl’s best friend, would however, shock Marilyn Monroe to her core and cause her to think twice before unrobing without first demanding a King’s Ransom, but then there would be no guarantee she wouldn’t be “put to the question”.
Platinum King, German-American Charles W. Engelhard Jr. didn’t own TIME MAGAZINE when they published his story on January 27, 1961, titled, Corporations: South Africa Invader but he had enough influence to shut their doors if they got one word wrong with what he wanted printed, including the line, “All this has earned him a title he hates: the Platinum King.”
No one ever crossed The Platinum King because he had every politician on the left, right and in-between bought; and those he didn’t win over with his untraceable diamond bribes he would send in his Cavalry In Arms [CIA] which was rare because he simply had his US President make the necessary, and mostly inappropriate call.
You cannot keep a secret from the people you are bullying who know that you show your weakness when first having to bully. The smart people don’t talk and bide their time knowing that no one lives forever which the spouse, lovers and children of the King of Kings don’t simply know, they fixat one.
Nothing has to rhyme but there should always be a search for each of our purpose in this rather short life.
Mr. Jones, your CEO said of the decision to dispense with nudity, “Don’t get me wrong, 12-year-old me is very disappointed in current me. But it’s the right thing to do.”
Your one competitor, Penthouse’s most notable stripper, was Kathy Keeton who started out at the Butterworth Hotel in my birth city, Durban, South Africa and not long after was running the entire show at Penthouse. She would have remembered my mother Zena not so much because my mother was a much bigger South African household name, but because all the “people in the know” knew that my mother was one of the 3 founders of Oil of Olay, but moved on to better things including her weekly radio show, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING A WOMAN, which every hot-blooded male and every woman wanting to marry rich listened to, including of course The Platinum King as well as his court jesters.
By the time Kathy and Bob Guccione hooked up in 1965, the same year she appeared as a stripper in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I was 8 years old.
I could have died the other evening from a blow to the back of my head that was self-inflicted as I misjudged the back headrest of my and my most beautiful F-C [French-Canadian] wife Marie Dion, very comfortable king size bed, and that would have meant Keeton and I would have died at the same age.
Kathy, were she alive today and knowing what I will shortly be sharing with a big name former BBC player, would publish my story, at least the first episode, and that would assume that at age 76 she would still be calling the shots.
My one sister’s first name is Kathy-Louise, and she like my two elder brothers would remember Kathy Keeton, although possibly not as well as me given how my mother spent more time sharing the ways of the world with me because my quick study mother picked up quickly that I was a good listener as I only began speaking at the age of 3. Plus my mother felt that I was very special as she persisted through 8 miscarriages between my middle brother Melvin and me.
I wouldn’t bother contacting Bob Guccione because he has been dead since October 20, 2010.
When you ran your first edition, so the story goes, there was no date on the cover because you didn’t know if there would be a second.
You have spent a bunch of time and money on focus groups to see how this change in removing nudity, which surely cannot be to move more into the suggestive pornographic end because you know that is what caused Penthouse to bomb, will improve your bottom line.
At your age you can surely afford to think outside the box; and nor can it be all about the money especially if it turns out that the money is as worthless as diamonds.
I guarantee you that I could get each and every member of your focus groups as well as the management orchestrating them to get the results they think will best further their careers, to go stone cold silent.
The world is heading backwards. It is time for revolutionary thinking.
The point of writing this is that it is highly conceivable that the diamond market will collapse quicker than most would have thought, and you might have picked it up from the recent run up in fine antique furniture sales.
Gary S. Gevisser
PS – Read the interesting, non-fiction, The Diamond Invention book – CLICK HERE – written in 1978 by Edward Jay Epstein, and if you cannot figure out which section DeBeers officials would have pointed Warren Buffett to had he chosen to drive too hard a bargain when purchasing Ben Ridge Jewelers in May 2000, you would know who to ask, but there is nothing stopping you from asking Mr. Epstein yourself assuming he has recovered sufficiently since I first wrote him on January 13, 2004:
I came across in Chapter 18 reference to “Engelhard arranged for Oppenheimer to buy a controlling interest in his far-flung empire, since he had no male heirs to take over.” It so happens that my father’s first cousin, David Gevisser, was, I believe, the sole executor of Charles Engelhard’s worldwide estate.
There is talk that the James Bond 007 actor Craig says that he would prefer to slit his wrists than do another Bond movie, and maybe that is because he has been talking to my buddy Gary Barber, co-chairman and co-CEO of MGM or simply reading what I have been sharing with Barber who I have known intimately since he and I played cards together back in 1972 when on Ulpan-Gadna training at Mossad head, David Ben-Gurion’s kibbutz Sde Boker, Negev Desert, Isael.
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