Read Thy Neighbor's Wife for Free Online

began to move like a ballet dancer, her arms slowly reaching, her body turning, twirling on her toes as she heard interior music and the camera click, and she was no longer aware of the professor’s presence. She was aware only of her body as an inspired instrument that she artfully controlled, and with which she could rise beyond her limitations. Though nude, she did not feel naked. She felt internalized as she danced, private, alone, deeply involved with emotions that might be projected externally in her movements or expressions, but she did not know, she did not contemplate, what effect she was having on the professor behind the camera. She could barely perceive his fuzzy gray figure in the distance. Diane had her glasses off, and she was quite myopic.
    Returning to Los Angeles after completing the nightclub engagement, Diane took the initiative and telephoned various fashion photographers who were listed in the classified directory, asking for an appointment. She called such men as David Balfour and Keith Bernard, Peter Gowland and Andre de Dienes, William Graham and Ed Lange, among others. Nearly all were attracted to her and were impressed by the fact that a young woman of such wholesome appeal would so willingly pose in the nude—she was at least ten years ahead of her time.
    By 1954, when she was twenty-one, her photographs began to be seen in nudist and camera magazines all over the country. And by 1955, after a series of color photographs of her were sent to Playboy magazine in Chicago, the young publisher, Hugh Hefner, examined them in his office and he was immediately impressed.

THREE
    H EFNER WAS twenty-eight years old when he first saw the pictures of Diane Webber, and his magazine was in its second year of publication. He had edited the first issue of Playboy in 1953 on the kitchen table of an apartment he shared with his wife and infant daughter, but now he and a staff of thirty occupied a four-story building near downtown Chicago, and he sat in his large office on the top floor behind a modern white L-shaped desk, the photos of Diane Webber before him.
    As he casually examined each picture he gave no indication of how shy he had once been by any sign of nudity, or how embarrassed he had been as a teenager by the erotic dreams he had had in the boyhood bedroom of his puritanical home. Now as a prosperous publisher of a sex-oriented magazine, separated from his wife, and sleeping with two young women on his staff, Hugh Hefner’s fancied eroticism had achieved reality. The magazine that he had created had re-created him.
    He virtually lived within the glossy pages, slept in a small bedroom behind his office, and worked all hours of the day and night on Playboy’s color and design, the cartoons and captions, the fact and fiction, reading every line as carefully as he was now examining, under a magnifying glass, the photographs of Diane Webber.
    In the first picture, she was dancing bare-breasted in a ballet studio, wearing opaque black tights that revealed the strengthand grace of her thighs, her calves, her round buttocks. Her stomach was flat, her smooth, strong back was not marred by the knotty muscles that dancers often develop; and, although she was in motion, her skin did not glisten with perspiration. This impressed Hefner, who during his youth perspired freely, particularly when his hand touched a girl’s waist at school dances or when his arm was around her shoulder in movie theaters.
    Slowly, he followed the line of Diane Webber’s breasts, which were large and firm, and her nipples, which were pink and erect. He marveled at their perfect size and shape and imagined how they would feel in his hands, a thought that he knew would occur to thousands of other men once these pictures had been published and circulated in his magazine.
    Hefner identified strongly with the men who bought his magazine. He knew from the letters he received, and from Playboy’s soaring sales figures, that what appealed to