The magazine had no date on the cover, in case copies struggled to sell, according to the Times obituary. "FIRST TIME in any magazine FULL COLOR the famous MARILYN MONROE NUDE," it trumpeted. The cover of that first issue of Playboy, in December 1953, featured a photo of Monroe riding an elephant at Madison Square Garden, one arm stretched high. He drove out to the suburbs and bought the rights for $500. In the fall of 1953, a young Hugh Hefner, living in Chicago with a dream of starting a new kind of men's magazine, heard that a local company owned the photos. The photos were sold to Western Lithograph Co., which made a calendar called "Golden Dreams" out of them. She said she made Kelley promise that she wouldn't be recognizable in the photographs, and she was paid $50 for the two-hour shoot. She did the shoot because she was broke and needed to make a car payment, according to an account in a book by her friend and photographer George Barris. Arts & Life Monroe's Legacy Is Making Fortune, But For Whom?
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