Derick Daniels died Feb. 5 in Miami, and I couldn’t believe how dull some obituaries made him sound. Former president of Chicago-based Playboy Enterprises Inc. Distinguished news executive with Knight-Ridder Inc. Scion of prominent North Carolina publishing family. Cancer victim at age 76.
Bloodless all. Not even a mention of his gold lame jumpsuit.
I had covered Playboy as the media reporter for the Tribune long ago and became acquainted with Daniels in the latter half of his nearly six years, 1976 to 1982, at Playboy.
He was all Carolina charm and Manhattan flash. Blondish curls topped a thin, lined face that betrayed high-life ways. A former Tribune colleague, Clifford Terry, wrote of Daniels’ “cosmopolitan gauntness” — that’s what four packs of cigarettes a day, periodic fasting and a steady diet of drinking and womanizing will do by the time you’re in your early 50s.
I knew of his reputation as a great, inspiring newspaper editor. He had led devoted city rooms at The Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press. He was executive editor of the Free Press when it won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1967 race riots in Detroit.
By 1976, Playboy was trying to shed its frat-house management style, which had led to bad business investments and put the company into a tailspin. At consultants’ urging. Hugh Hefner, the company’s founder and majority owner, decided he needed more professionalism in the Chicago headquarters, and he hired Daniels as president, offering him a princely (for the time) salary of $250,000 a year.
Daniels was then corporate vice president for news at Knight-Ridder and working at its Miami headquarters. The hiring by Hefner seemed to unleash the libertine in him. He threw a wild going-away party at which his wife at the time reportedly went topless but for two star-shaped pasties and he wore that gold lame jumpsuit.
“He was attracted by Playboy because it had the three things in the world he enjoyed most: drinking, gambling and women. And you scored pretty well with all three with Playboy,” said Daniels’ cousin Frank Daniels in one of the more revealing obituaries.
Nat Lehrman had been recently promoted to associate publisher at Playboy magazine when Daniels arrived in Chicago in 1976. Now retired in Sarasota, Fla., Lehrman recalled this week how Daniels tried hard to endear himself to the top people at Playboy. Daniels got respect for ridding the firm of a lot of extraneous investments, but in other ways he remained the outsider.
“We just resented it whenever he tried to interfere in editorial decisions,” Lehrman said. “His knowledge of editing did not translate to magazines.”
Lehrman also suggested Daniels might have tried too hard to impress Hefner as a swinger whenever he visited Hefner’s pleasure theme park, the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles.
“Hef liked guys like me who were happily married and worked hard,” Lehrman said.
Daniels eventually was undone by licensing problems in Playboy’s lucrative casino businesses. By 1982, Playboy had been forced out of its casino in London and was about to lose its one in Atlantic City.
Lehrman said the pressure began to show on Daniels, especially at an annual shareholders meeting when his rambling worried others in the company.
In April 1982, he was let go. The spin at the time was that he had been grooming Hef’s daughter, Christie, to succeed him, and she was ready for the president’s job. Today Christie is the firm’s chairman and chief executive.
The last time I saw him was in November 1983. I interviewed him about a magazine he had started publishing, One Woman.
The first issue was exclusively about Morgan Fairchild: interviews with and coy photos of the sexy actress. Daniels thought the magazine might be the basis for a “communications mini-empire,” but it was a dreadful idea quickly abandoned.
He never seemed to regain or even seek the spotlight he had in Chicago. In 1993 he told the Miami Herald, “I spent the first half of my life as a newspaper editor trying to save the world from itself. I failed miserably at that. The second half of my life I’m going to save myself from the world — and enjoy doing it.”
In that 1983 interview with me, Daniels neatly explained his approach to life: “I believe you should try everything once. Maybe twice, to make sure you don’t like it.”
