On Nov. 12, Netflix bares all with Mrs. Playmen, starring Carolina Crescentini as the legendary editor Adelina Tattilo, whom TIME magazine dubbed “the Hugh Hefner of Italy” in 1971.
Over seven episodes, it follows the Catholic mother of three as she manages an erotic magazine in conservative Rome after her husband disappears.
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Here’s what to know about Mrs. Playmen and the real magazine that inspired the show.
The real Mrs. Playmen
As the show illustrates, the magazine Playmen was known for its daring photographs. It launched in 1967 because Playboy was banned in Italy. Boasting a mix of erotic photos and intellectual articles, the magazine reached a circulation of 450,000 in less than four years.
While it had a “Girl of the Month” pullout, the magazine purported to have a more sophisticated focus than its American counterpart Playboy, influenced by the tastes of its editor Hugh Hefner. “Hefner’s girls giggle and eat ice cream; Tattilo’s taste centers on women who might smile over a Campari,” TIME wrote in a 1971 article on the publications.
At Playmen, Tattilo called the shots—like picking cover girls and greenlighting paparazzi pictures of Brigitte Bardot sunbathing. Unlike Playboy’s Hefner, she did not dole out sexual advice to readers, according to TIME.
When TIME asked whether Playmen is potentially hurting the women’s liberation movement with its graphic content, Tattilo replied: “It is possible that Mr. Hefner considers the women in his magazine ‘objects’ instead of individuals. This is certainly not my way. In our concept of eroticism, the woman is the ‘subject’ as much as the man. I think that the American woman should first think of liberating herself from herself, from her own myth that threatens to crush the American male. I am surprised that in America there is no men’s liberation movement.”
How Mrs. Playmen starts
Tattilo (Crescentini) has to take over the magazine because her husband and fellow co-founder, Saro Balsamo (Francesco Colella), has disappeared. When he finally calls her, he reveals that he had to go into hiding because he’s afraid of being investigated for embezzlement.
“Porn is going to save us,” he tells his wife, encouraging her to keep publishing.
It’s true that, from time to time, Balsamo did go into hiding because of problems running the business. But the first two episodes center around a fictional photographer Luigi (Giuseppe Maggio), eager to impress Playmen editors, who took glamour shots of his friend Elsa (Francesca Colucci), a waitress (also a fictional character). Tattilo likes the idea of publishing pictures of an attractive ordinary woman.
Copies fly off newsstands, and the woman is irate, claiming that she didn’t know he’d be publishing naked photos of her, even though she had signed a contract. She claims that after the magazine spread came out, she was raped by a male acquaintance and is being pressured to marry him so that he’s absolved of his crime. Tattilo offers her a job working for her as an assistant so that she doesn’t have to marry him.
At the same time, Tattilo is presented with an opportunity to print racy pictures of a marchesa shot by her husband—the talk of the town in Rome—alongside excerpts from her diary. After reading it, Tattilo believes publishing the excerpts is important because “people need to see her for who she was…she was his prisoner there and her husband, he murdered her to stop her from getting away.”
Controversies over Playmen
Police in some Italian cities were ordered to seize the magazine due to its graphic content. As TIME reported, “Each month there is a race between the readers and the cops,” noting that readers were usually faster than the cops and bought up all of the copies in less than 48 hours.
Tattilo made the pages of TIME magazine again, shortly after the Italian issue of Playboy debuted in November 1972. That month’s issue of Playmen featured 14 nude photos of President John F. Kennedy’s widow Jackie Kennedy Onassis lounging on her second husband Ari’s isle of Skorpios.
Photographers took them from a motorboat in the summer of 1971. TIME reported that she “saved them for the rainy day of Playboy’s Italian appearance.”
Tattilo had no regrets, arguing, “If [Jackie] didn’t want to be photographed, she should not have exhibited herself.”
In 2001, with the advent of internet porn, the magazine folded, according to the Italian newspaper La Stampa. Tattilo died in 2007 at the age of 78.