Not to be sidelined in the comically competitive world of we-can-sink-lower-than-you culture, Playgirl magazine announced this week that it's planning a "Men of Enron" photo spread, a transparent attempt to keep pace with Playboy, which last week issued an open call for "Women of Enron."
Playboy's inspiration is equally transparent. It obviously needs to sustain random little jolts of publicity until Hugh Hefner goes smiling into the hereafter, at which point the great machinery of celebrity culture will slam into overdrive to give Hef the kind of send-off that will leave the impression he was Winston Churchill, and perhaps prop up his goofy empire for eons to come.
"Men of Enron" and "Women of Enron" won't likely see daylight until midsummer at the earliest, by which time every other impulse-driven periodical on the mostly intellectually bankrupt newsstand will have a chance to catch up. Dog Fancy magazine can prepare its "Lap Dogs of Arthur Andersen" issue, Enron's purported partnership prestidigitator Andrew Fastow can snare the centerfold in Weasel World, and on and on.
Playgirl will ultimately be running the riskiest project. When you consider that the men who appear in Playgirl traditionally negotiate the extent of their nudity and their fee, and factor in the sickening ability of Enron executives to bring windfalls from minimal personal risk, Playgirl could wind up paying millions for seven guys wearing burqas.
At least that will keep Maxim from having to scare up "Women of the Taliban." Who would know the difference?
Enron's alarming cachet doesn't need the nation's periodical smutmeisters to sustain itself. Fortune's annual ranking of top 500 companies saw the imploded Texas energy giant climb two spots to No. 5 despite being the largest bankruptcy case in American history, putting thousands of trusting employees out of work and shamelessly squeezing every willing politician for the kind of systemic deregulation that made it all possible.
Not to be critical.
I suppose we're to be thankful Playboy didn't just go right to the top of that list and bring us "Women of Wal-Mart." Don't think Hef's pockets aren't deep enough to get Thelma out of that blue vest.
But it's probably not the bottom lines of these mega-corporations that have the titillation industry clicking, it's more the whiff of controversy. Though it resisted "Women of Whitewater" and "Girls of the Savings and Loan Scandal," the appetite for scandal babes has always been one of smut's more refined tastes.
Any "editor" can see the utility of a Gennifer Flowers, a Paula Jones or a Donna Rice, but even complex dry-as-toast scandals such as Iran-Contra brought a $500,000 bid from Penthouse pest Bob Guccione to the stoic Fawn Hall, the head shredder for Reagan operative Oliver North. Hall declined but might have sparked the appetite for glamorous shredders, which makes "Women of Arthur Andersen" virtually a foregone conclusion for some rag.
It says something significant that these magazines used to embody scandal and now they can barely keep up with it. Micha Makowsky, 33, a former Enron employee quoted last week on whether she'd be interested in Playboy's overture, said, "For the right price, and the right circumstances, yeah, absolutely. Hey, you have to do things to pay the bills."
Funny, that's probably what her bosses were thinking when they somehow turned a $112 million tax liability in 2000 into a $278 million refund. You have to do things, right? Maybe you've got to devise a partnership scheme that allows only certain clued-in employees to turn $6,000 into more than $1 million in a short period.
Such were the ideas hatched by the Men of Enron, who might now turn up in the pages of Playgirl posing with what, a strategically placed printout of the Fifth Amendment?
"We've heard a lot about the men of Enron," Playgirl spokesgirl Michele Zipp told a wire service the other day. "And we've heard they're wild, so we'll see."
I wonder if Michele's heard that the wild bunch figured out a way for Enron to pay no income tax in four of the past five years? I rather doubt it.
No good can come of all this, save for the validating moment when "Men of Arthur Andersen" are forced to view a full-color totally nude spread of "Men of Enron" and, asked about it later, say, "What, they were nude? We didn't notice."
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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