Playguy
Waldemar's concept for a men's magazine was sound enough, but if a prince of his standing laid hands on it himself, he would only invite a torrent of abuse from family and relatives.
"It's not as if you lack for money—how could you sink your hands into something so vulgar!"
Even Queen Victoria, endlessly indulgent toward him, and his mother the Crown Princess Victoria would surely react that way.
But if one is determined, there's always a way.
Waldemar laid out his plans for the sex industry to John Connor and asked him to find someone who could take charge of the work.
Not long after, John Connor introduced him to Otto Schneider, a German-born British banker then working in England. Schneider came from the Grand Duchy of Hesse and harbored no particular ill will toward Prussia. Connor stressed that, being of German stock, Schneider could be expected to feel a deeper sense of awe toward the royal house.
Listening to Connor, Waldemar decided the man had chosen carefully. Satisfied with the candidate, he proved generous in the subsequent negotiations over the work itself.
In the course of bargaining with Waldemar, Schneider came to a clear understanding that he was dealing not with a little boy but with an employer. Once they had settled salary, performance bonuses, and working conditions, Waldemar stated his requirements.
"Mr. Schneider, I do not ask for much. I will spare no support—in return, I want my magazine to rule the zippers of men. Can you manage that?"
To the prince's ambitious demand Schneider answered with equal confidence.
"As first entrants into a market where competition does not yet exist, I believe our chances of success are more than adequate."
As Schneider said, anything dealing with sex still circulated only underground—erotic postcards and slim pamphlets. A sex magazine in the modern sense simply did not exist. Of course the magazine Waldemar intended to create would rely on black-and-white photographs and could hardly match a modern publication.
"Excellent."
Waldemar instructed Schneider to recruit models among Russians. The reason was simple: the beauties of future Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine were already world-famous. It was not, of course, the cheapness of Russian labor that attracted him.
Russian wages were low, true enough, but that was the story for ordinary folk. The cheapest Russian peasant's average monthly wage came to a mere twelve marks or so—nowhere near the hundred and fifty marks earned by a typical American laborer.
In this era the supreme beauties in Russian eyes—the top prima ballerinas of the Imperial Ballet—commanded salaries of over seventeen thousand marks a month. A woman of comparable standing would have to be at least a fallen aristocrat or a university student in St. Petersburg. Such women never sold their bodies cheaply. Bearing that in mind, Waldemar decided to invest heavily.
"We'll start with a capital of one million two hundred thousand marks."
He meant to pour every spare fund remaining from the summer into the venture. If more money were needed later, the gold mines and other income streams would simply feed it as profits arrived.
Once the discussion ended, Schneider established a magazine company in Berlin. He introduced the photogravure process developed by the Austrian photographer Karl Klič—converting a photograph's tones into minute recesses etched into a copper plate and printing from the inked recesses—so that the magazine could be produced on a large scale. Recruitment notices went out for the essential staff: printers, photographers, and the rest.
With every preparation complete, Schneider crossed to St. Petersburg in Russia and began hunting for women who could become models.
Our models must be girls willing to undress in front of a camera.
Finding such women in Russian high society proved not especially difficult. Contemporary Russian society was extremely loose; no one thought it strange for a man to engage in sexual acts with a partner he had met for the first time at a party. Schneider searched among fallen Russian noblewomen and university students and unexpectedly discovered suitable candidates.
Russia has more than just the Imperial Ballet companies, after all.
He turned his attention to the particularly striking young women working as actresses in provincial troupes—ballet, dance, theatre, opera. Many of them had never found the chance to catch the eye of the Imperial companies, yet their beauty lost nothing by comparison with the top actresses.
In Schneider's view their wages were absurdly low. He offered them salaries that by Russian standards were extraordinarily generous and proposed that they work as models for his firm.
"How much did you say?"
"Three hundred rubles a month—nine hundred marks."
Many actresses rose to the bait. For women earning an average of ten to thirty rubles a month in provincial companies, ten times that sum was irresistibly attractive. There was, in any case, no guarantee that building a career in a provincial troupe would ever lead to the Imperial Ballet or an aristocratic patron.
From among the beautiful actresses Schneider selected twenty models of especially outstanding allure and brought them to Berlin. Their combined wages came to roughly seventeen thousand marks a month; even a full year of employment would cost no more than around two hundred thousand marks.
Of course he did not pay them salaries alone. Schneider rented a decent house for their residence and assigned staff to help with daily life—another four thousand marks a month. All told, average annual expenditure exceeded two hundred and fifty thousand marks. Adding the wages of existing employees and the cost of machinery, first-year outlays were projected to surpass four hundred thousand marks.
With every expense in mind, Schneider fixed the magazine's price.
"The price we must charge is two marks."
Anything higher would be more than the average German, earning thirty to forty marks a month, could bear.
"Two marks."
Waldemar calculated how many copies would have to be printed to recoup the investment at that figure.
Allowing for printing costs, we'll need to sell at least fifteen thousand copies a month.
The real problem was how to promote and sell them. After long thought he hit upon a clever stroke.
If I scatter a few as gifts among bourgeois capitalists, that ought to create publicity.
He ordered the magazine printed at once.
"Your Highness, what shall we call our magazine?"
Schneider asked cautiously.
"Playguy. That name will do nicely."
Schneider followed Waldemar's instructions to the letter. The Russian beauties posed for the camera in the lewd costumes the company required, striking every seductive attitude demanded of them. Thus the first modern adult magazine, Playguy, went straight to press.
The very first consignment found its way into the hands of Friedrich Alfred Krupp, heir to the Krupp industrial empire. Friedrich had been idly leafing through the parcel that had arrived by chance when the cover—showing a woman in a suggestive pose—brought him up short.
This was no longer a matter of reason. He turned the pages in mounting excitement, unaware that saliva was spotting the booklet, so absorbed that he never even noticed when the maid came and went.
"This is a gift from God!"
Friedrich burned to show this astonishing novelty to his friends. Before long Playguy had made its name in high society through the heirs of great fortunes.
"Playguy? What on earth is that?"
"Oh, it's a magazine with girls appearing half-naked, you see."
"Not some pamphlet—an actual magazine full of such obscenity?"
The notables of society could not hide their shock at talk of Playguy.
"Looking at a magazine of half-naked girls is rather lewd, isn't it?"
"Only vulgar, low creatures would read such things."
They refused to utter the name Playguy aloud, declaring the subject far too indecent—yet behind closed doors they badgered their servants to hunt the magazine down and bring it home. Their furtive movements produced a promotional effect Schneider had never anticipated.
Originally he had been supplying Playguy only to Berlin bookshops and slowly expanding the distribution network by word of mouth; suddenly booksellers began seeking out the printing works themselves.
"We want a thousand copies for our shop."
"We'll pay a premium—serve us first!"
Schneider watched the orders explode overnight and was stunned.
At this rate even ten thousand copies this month won't be enough.
He threw every effort into expanding production.
"Lately people have been coming from England looking for stock as well."
That was only natural. Even in Britain, where moral austerity reigned, human lust could not be suppressed.
"Keep increasing the print runs."
Waldemar adopted a weekly system so that a fresh issue appeared every seven days.
"I particularly liked today's number. Bring me every new issue as soon as it comes out."
The high and mighty cursed the magazine as vulgar to its face, yet in private they made no secret of their affection for Playguy, which so perfectly fed their sexual fantasies. Even the noble Junker gentlemen who thundered that such obscenity must never enter the army kept several copies locked inside their office desks.
Waldemar foresaw a future in which Playguy would soon dominate all of Europe. That, however, remained a dream. Scarcely had the magazine made its reputation in Germany when imitations of every kind began flooding Europe.
"Your Highness, no magazine yet matches the finish of our product."
Finish was one thing; competition meant thinner margins.
I expected this.
People were not fools; they would never stand idle while money waited to be made. Of course Playguy was not going to fail. Its rate of growth had simply slowed.
Whatever doesn't sell in the Old World we'll sell in the New.
The robber-baron outlaws of the New World were men, after all.
"Any other problems?"
At Waldemar's question Schneider's expression grew awkward.
"There is one difficulty."
"Tell me."
Schneider hesitated over whether such a matter should be discussed with a young boy—then reflected that it would be stranger still to mince words with the very creator of an adult magazine.
"The truth is, several gentlemen of the upper class have been contacting us, wishing to meet our models privately."
Waldemar's brow furrowed.
Absolutely not.
He could not tolerate their approaches. If he allowed it, the mysterious, beautiful women who lived beyond the pages of the magazine would sink into common whores available to anyone. Who would buy the magazine then?
"You refused them?"
"Of course. Yet the demands keep coming, and it has been a headache."
Waldemar resolved to deal with the problem firmly.
"If they continue to make nuisances of themselves in Berlin society, move the company to Thuringia."
Elsewhere might be another matter, but the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in Thuringia was a place even Prussian nobles dared not lightly touch. The ruling house of that small state was the ancestral seat of the royal houses of Britain, Belgium, and Bulgaria; outwardly it stood for the entire Saxe-Coburg and Gotha clan, the most powerful family in Europe.
Waldemar meant to shelter the company under their prestige. Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was himself a liberal-minded ruler who could be expected to look with indulgence on the growth of Playguy. Of course, given the duchy's gradual drift toward conservatism, one could not be entirely sanguine—but if things went wrong, that problem could be faced when it arrived.
Schneider brightened at the decision.
"If Your Highness is prepared to bear the expense, I shall transfer operations at once."
"Then we are agreed—Playguy moves."
Waldemar accepted the temporary loss, yet he had no intention of forgetting the affair.
"Do you have a list of those who have been harassing us?"
"Of course."
He examined the names Schneider handed him with care. Every one of them wielded real influence in imperial politics. But the power they possessed meant nothing to a reincarnator.
The price for daring to challenge me with that dust-mote of authority will be paid in full when the time comes.
Any noble with an estate would find himself unable to sell so much as a single horse to the army; any factory owner would be crushed under the advanced bullying techniques of Apple, the absolute monarch of squeezing suppliers.
Ever since his reincarnation the prince had been the one doing the trampling. Now that he had tasted, for a moment, what it felt like to be the one harassed, a glint of pure venom lit his eyes.