Rogue (magazine)
Other contributors included J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Graham Greene, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Frederik Pohl, William Saroyan, Philip Wylie, and, while still in high school, Steven E. de Souza.
His wife, science fiction author Frances Deegan Yerxa Hamling, worked closely with him in the early years of his publishing company.
The first fellow employee to befriend Hamling was von Rosen's promotion director, Hugh Hefner, who had already decided to quit and start a magazine of his own.
I had been buying fantasy cartoons from him for several years (they were so bad I never published them but he needed the money and to this day we have a running routine where I threaten to issue them as a nostalgic bonanza but defer to his pleadings of personal embarrassment) and one evening he and his charming wife, Millie [Mildred "Millie" Williams], visited Fran and me, and I responded to his suggestion of Playboy with the remark, 'Hef, you can't sell sex to the American public.'
While I refused financial participation in Playboy (the greatest economic error in publishing history) I helped him secure authors and artists and indeed over the early years provided a training school for his editorial and art personnel.
After a young Hugh Hefner sought out the experienced publisher, his fellow ex-von Rosen employee, and offered him a significant stake (50%) to partner with him at the time of its startup on a new idea he had for a magazine for men.
[9] Greenleaf, then, published Rogue and a photographic magazine in book form called Model Art, as well as different numbers of science fiction publications.
[9] Editors (at one time or another) at Greenleaf Publishing—the parent company—included Harlan Ellison, Algis Budrys, Larry Shaw, and Bruce Elliott.
Rogue had higher than average production standards and the early covers painted by Lester W. Bentley, Hans Zoff, and Lloyd Rognan, with the libidinous Wolf mascot were quite eye-catching.
Coupled with the recent liquidation of the major US distributor for magazines, American News Company, Hamling ceased publication of his science fiction digests and began to concentrate solely on Rogue.
This left his old distributor with no "sophisticated" men's magazine unless Rogue was upgraded, which it was—to slick paper, full color, full-page cartoons, and a centerfold.
[22] In mid-1959, Frank M. Robinson, having recently left his job at Science Digest, went back to work for Hamling as associate editor on the revamped, now slick magazine.
[25] In 1959 Hamling began to publish two lines of adult books under the false front name of Blake Pharmaceutical Company, in offices housed at the back of the same building as Rogue.
Beginning in 1960 Hamling began to visit friends and family in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills and decided to move his home and business to that state.
Never one to dodge political controversy, Rogue published a first-person article on SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—by a staffer for Regency Books, Jerry Demuth.,[30] and "Balladeers & Billy Clubs", an article about the so-called "Beatnik Riot" (a police assault upon a peaceful Greenwich Village protest by folksingers led by Izzy Young) by Ted White, Rogue music critic.
By early 1961, when Earl Kemp was hired on at Blake Pharmaceutical and while Ellison was still there, they were working in a 4-room office suite in the Graphics Arts Building and there was no name on the door.
And Frank M. Robinson stole Bruce Glassner (who wrote under a couple of bylines—Robert Courtney and Mike Williams—as well as his column, "Bruce’s Bag"), now twenty, and had him transferred to the Rogue staff, initially as an assistant editor, later associate editor, as was Frank's new hire David Stevens who wrote the Rogue About Town column for the next two years—their starting salaries were $100 a week!
The staff played, rather than devoting their time to Rogue, while Hamling was in San Diego, setting up his move to Palm Springs, and the new revamped adult book enterprise.
Elliott returned to New York City and committed suicide by walking into heavy rush hour traffic in November 1972, lapsing into a coma and dying four months later.
[39][40] When Bruce Elliott, Terry Rose, and business manager Art Johns and his crew of ad salespeople failed after six issues of Rogue to increase revenues, they were all fired.
However, he recommended David Stevens, who stayed at Playboy for more than thirty years, writing non-fiction accounts of his far-flung adventures.
The last issue contained Fred Pohl’s "Day Million" (Feb. 1966) which won a Hugo Award, and George Bamber’s "The Man Who Could Not Feel."
[48] The existence and influence of Rogue have had a powerful effect on American culture due to the broad editorial, artistic, and writing talent it utilized.
Bill Hamling not only founded Rogue, one of the early US men's magazines but went on to develop a pornography publishing empire that eventually ran him afoul of President Nixon and the FBI in the 1970s and landed him in jail, along with Earl Kemp, his long-time friend, managing editor of his various enterprises and vice-president of Greenleaf.
[18] In New York City, popular young science fiction writer Robert Silverberg discovered adult paperback publisher Bedside Books.
[18] Harlan Ellison, along with his wife Charlotte [Stein], was preparing to move to Evanston, Illinois, to work for William Hamling as an associate editor for Rogue.
[18] Harlan Ellison went straight to Robert Silverberg to report on his success with Hamling in the initial set-up phase of the operation.
In those days, despite the popular acceptance of hard-core pornography in movie theaters all across the country, an operation like Blake Pharmaceuticals was at the very least frowned upon and was kept, as much as possible, completely under cover.
[18][54][51] Producing Nightstand Books turned out to be more work than Harlan Ellison had originally expected to be involved with while operating Blake Pharmaceuticals.
[56][51] Finally, after years of patiently waiting, Earl Kemp inherited the crown of the King of Pornography by default; he was the only one Bill Hamling could trust to hang around for a while.
