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Hugh Hefner, Who Built the Playboy Empire And Embodied It, Passed Away at 91
The Last Word: Hugh Hefner
In 2008, the founder of the Playboy
empire sat down with The New York Times to talk about his influences,
his well-publicized lifestyle and his labor of love.
By ERIK OLSEN on Publish Date September 27, 2017.
Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.
Hugh
Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and
entertainment-industry giant — all the while, as its very public avatar,
squiring attractive young women (and sometimes marrying them) well into
his 80s — died on Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion, in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles. He was 91.
His death was announced by Playboy Enterprises.
Hefner
the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised
themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American
priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the
years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative and finally as
anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from the moment he
emerged in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.
He
was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr.
Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a
romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and
smoking jacket hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating
people.
The
first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27, a
new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept
with.
He
had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at
Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s
inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:
“We
enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little
mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a
quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
Hugh Hefner Created an Image, and Lived It
CreditPlayboy Enterprises, Inc
This
scene projected an era’s “premium boys’ style,” Todd Gitlin, a
sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties,” said
in an interview. “It’s part of an ensemble with the James Bond movies,
John F. Kennedy, swinging, the guy who is young, vigorous, indifferent
to the bonds of social responsibility.”
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Mr.
Hefner was reviled, first by guardians of the 1950s social order — J.
Edgar Hoover among them — and later by feminists. But Playboy’s
circulation reached one million by 1960 and peaked at about seven
million in the 1970s.
Long
after other publishers made the nude “Playmate” centerfold look more
sugary than daring, Playboy remained the most successful men’s magazine
in the world. Mr. Hefner’s company branched into movie, cable and
digital production, sold its own line of clothing and jewelry, and
opened clubs, resorts and casinos.
The brand faded over the years, its flagship magazine’s circulation declining to less than a million.
Mr.
Hefner remained editor in chief even after agreeing to the magazine’s
startling (and, as it turned out, short-lived) decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photographs. In 2016, he handed over creative control of Playboy to his son Cooper Hefner. Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive, Scott Flanders, acknowledged that the internet had overrun the magazine’s province.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
The
magazine’s website, Playboy.com, had already been revamped as a “safe
for work” site. Playboy was no longer illicit. (Early this year, the
magazine brought back nudes.)
Mr.
Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors
refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code
dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules
Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight
little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs.”
“You
couldn’t talk politically,” Mr. Feiffer said in the 1992 documentary
“Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time.” “You couldn’t use obscenities. What
Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”
Playboy
was born more in fun than in anger. Mr. Hefner’s first publisher’s
message, written at his kitchen table in Chicago, announced, “We don’t
expect to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths.”
Still,
Mr. Hefner wielded fierce resentment against his era’s sexual
strictures, which he said had choked off his own youth. A virgin until
he was 22, he married his longtime girlfriend. Her confession to an
earlier affair, Mr. Hefner told an interviewer almost 50 years later,
was “the single most devastating experience of my life.”
In
“The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments
that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message
was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights,
decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of
19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they
would be unexceptional.
“Hefner
won,” Mr. Gitlin said. “The prevailing values in the country now, for
all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that
basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was.
“It’s
laissez-faire,” he added. “It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let
the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s
significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”
The
Playboy Philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all its aspects, for
which Mr. Hefner won civil liberties awards. He supported progressive
social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his
televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow
laws.
Playboy in Popular Culture
Hugh Hefner, the creator and curator of the Playboy
empire, died Wednesday. Here’s a look back at what made Playboy magazine
and the media and entertainment empire it spawned so prominent.
The
magazine was a forum for serious interviews, the subjects including
Jimmy Carter (who famously confessed, “I’ve committed adultery in my
heart many times”), Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X. In
the early days Mr. Hefner published fiction by Ray Bradbury (Playboy
bought his “Fahrenheit 451” for $400), Herbert Gold and Budd Schulberg.
It later drew, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul
Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike and Joyce Carol
Oates.
Hugh
Marston Hefner was born on April 9, 1926, the son of Glenn and Grace
Hefner, Nebraska-born Methodists who had moved to Chicago. Decades
later, he continued to tell interviewers that he had grown up “with a
lot of repression,” and he often noted that his father was a descendant
of William Bradford, the Puritan governor of the Plymouth Colony.
Though
father and son reached an accommodation — the elder Mr. Hefner became
Playboy’s accountant and treasurer — neither changed moral compass
points. Glenn Hefner, who died in 1976, said he had never looked at the pictures in the magazine.
As
a child, Mr. Hefner spent hours writing horror stories and drawing
cartoons. At Steinmetz High School in Chicago, he said, “I reinvented
myself” as the suave, breezy “Hef” — a newspaper cartoonist and
party-loving leader of what he called “our gang.” At the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after serving in the Army, he edited the
campus humor magazine, Shaft, and started a photo feature called “Co-ed
of the Month.”
He
married a high school classmate, Millie Williams, and began what he
described as a deadening slog into 1950s adulthood: He took a job in the
personnel department of a cardboard-box manufacturer. (He said he quit
when asked to discriminate against black applicants.) He wrote
advertising copy for a department store and then for Esquire magazine.
He became circulation promotion manager of another magazine, Children’s
Activities.
He
was meanwhile plotting his own magazine, which was to be, among other
things, a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons. The first issue of
Playboy was financed with $600 of his own money and several thousand
more in borrowed funds, including $1,000 from his mother. But his
biggest asset was a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe. He had
bought the rights for $500.
Lindsay Lohan Looks So Much like Marilyn Monroe In Playboy 
Plenty
of other men’s magazines showed nude women, but most were unabashedly
crude and forever dodging postal censors. Mr. Hefner aimed to be the
first to claim a mainstream readership and mainstream distribution.
When
Playboy reached newsstands in December 1953, its press run of 51,000
sold out. The publisher, instantly famous, would soon become a
millionaire; after five years, the magazine’s annual profit was $4
million, and its rabbit-head logo was recognized around the world.
Mr.
Hefner ran the magazine and then the business empire largely from his
bedroom, working on a round bed that revolved and vibrated. At first he
was reclusive and frenetic, powered past dawn by amphetamines and
Pepsi-Cola. In later years, even after giving up Dexedrine, he was still
frenetic, and still fiercely attentive to his magazine.
His
own public playboy persona emerged after he left his wife and children,
Christie and David, in 1959. That year his new syndicated television
series, “Playboy’s Penthouse,” put the wiry, intense Mr. Hefner, pipe in
hand, in the nation’s living rooms. The set recreated his mansion on
North State Parkway, rich in sybaritic amusements, where he greeted
entertainers like Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, and
intellectuals and writers like Max Lerner, Norman Mailer and Alex Haley,
while bunches of glamorous young women milled around. (A later TV show, “Playboy After Dark,” was syndicated in 1969 and 1970.)
In
the Playboy offices, life imitated image. Mr. Hefner told a film
interviewer that in the early days, yes, “everybody was coupling with
everybody,” including him. He later estimated that he had slept with
more than 1,000 women. Over and over, he would say, “I’m the boy who
dreamed the dream.”
Friends
described him as both charming and shy, even unassuming, and intensely
loyal. “Hef was always big for the girls who got depressed or got in a
jam of some sort,” the artist LeRoy Neiman,
one of the magazine’s main illustrators for more than 50 years, said in
an interview in 1999. “He’s a friend. He’s a good person. I couldn’t
cite anything he ever did that was malicious to anybody.”
At the same time, Mr. Hefner adored celebrity, his and others’. Mr. Neiman, who sometimes lived at the Playboy Mansion,
said: “It was nothing to breakfast there with comedians like Mort Sahl,
professors, any kind of person who had something on his mind that was
controversial or new. At the parties in the early days, Alex Haley used
to hang around. Tony Curtis and Hugh O’Brian were always there. Mick
Jagger stayed there.”
The
glamour rubbed off on Mr. Hefner’s new enterprise, the Playboy Club,
which was crushingly popular when it opened in Chicago in 1960. Dozens
more followed. The waitresses, called bunnies, were trussed in brief
satin suits with cotton fluffs fastened to their derrières.
One
bunny briefly employed in the New York club would earn Mr. Hefner’s
lasting enmity. She was an impostor, a 28-year-old named Gloria Steinem
who was working undercover for Show magazine. Her article, published in
1963, described exhausting hours, painfully tight uniforms (in which
half-exposed breasts floated on wadded-up dry cleaner bags) and vulgar
customers.
Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner
on Dick Cavett’s television talk show, asserted, “The role that you
have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see
women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day
you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear
end. …”
Mr.
Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists, then
called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks
are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the
militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic
boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”
The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline
“Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue featured an
interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer
and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance
Hartke of Indiana.)
Mr.
Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent
rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We
are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment,
“in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in
conflict.” Of Americans’ fright over anything “unsuitable for children,”
he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult
tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our
lives in a make-believe children’s world.”
Many
questioned whether Playboy’s outlook could be described as adult;
Harvey G. Cox Jr., the Harvard theologian, called it “basically
antisexual.” In 1961, in the journal Christianity and Crisis, Dr. Cox
wrote: “Playboy and its less successful imitators are not ‘sex
magazines’ at all. They dilute and dissipate authentic sexuality by
reducing it to an accessory, by keeping it at a safe distance.”
In
a 1955 television interview, a frowning Mike Wallace asked Mr. Hefner:
“Isn’t that really what you’re selling? A high-class dirty book?”
Such
scolding sounded quaint by the time crasser competitors like Penthouse
and Hustler appeared in the 1960s and ’70s. Playboy began showing pubic
hair on its models, while the others doubled the dare with features on
kinkier sexual tastes and close-up photos that bordered on the
gynecological. Mr. Hefner would decide, after furious debate among the
staff, not to compete further.
Playboy Enterprises still prospered. In 1971 it went public to finance resorts in Jamaica; Lake Geneva, Wis.; and Great Gorge, N.J.; and gambling casinos in London and the Bahamas.
The
heady mood broke in 1974, when Mr. Hefner’s longtime personal
assistant, Bobbie Arnstein, committed suicide. Ms. Arnstein had just
been convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and Mr. Hefner said
bitterly that investigators had hounded her to set him up.
He
left Chicago for his second home in Los Angeles, an enormous mock-Tudor
house with a grotto and a zoo (Mr. Hefner loved animals), where he
could orchestrate the company’s move into films.
The
1980s brought a huge retrenchment for Playboy. The company lost its
London casinos in 1981 for gambling violations and was denied a gambling
license in Atlantic City, partly because of reports that Mr. Hefner had
been involved in bribing New York officials for a club license 20 years
earlier.
The
company shed its resorts and record division and sold Oui magazine, a
more explicit but less successful version of Playboy, while the
flagship’s circulation plunged. The Playboy Building in Chicago, its
rabbit-head beacon illuminating Michigan Avenue, was also sold, as was
the corporate jet with built-in discothèque. Bunnies were going the way
of go-go dancers, and the Playboy Clubs closed.
Mr.
Hefner relied more and more on his daughter, Christie Hefner, named
company president in 1982 and then chief executive, a position she held
until 2009. Mr. Hefner suffered a stroke in 1985, but he recovered and
remained editor in chief of Playboy, choosing the centerfold models,
writing captions and tending to detail with an intensity that led his
staff to call him “the world’s wealthiest copy editor.”
In
1989 Mr. Hefner married again, saying he had rethought Woody Allen’s
line that “marriage is the death of hope.” His second wife was Kimberley
Conrad, the 1989 Playmate of the Year, 38 years his junior. They had
two sons: Marston Glenn, born in 1990, and Cooper Bradford, born in
1991.
The
couple divorced in 2010, and Mr. Hefner plowed into his work, including
the editing of “The Century of Sex,” a Playboy book. When a New York Times interviewer
later prodded him about the rewards of marriage, he replied,
“Unfortunately, they come from other women.” Meanwhile, to widespread
snickering, he became a cheerleader for Viagra, telling a British journalist, “It is as close as anyone can imagine to the fountain of youth.”
The
re-emerged Hef reveled in the new century. In 2005 he began appearing
on television on the E! channel reality show “The Girls Next Door,”
although his onscreen role consisted mostly of peering in while his
three young, blond girlfriends planned adventures at the mansion. When
the three original “Girls Next Door” went their separate ways after five
seasons, he replaced them with three others, also young and blond — and
shortly afterward asked one of them, Crystal Harris, to marry him.
Five
days before the 85-year old Mr. Hefner was to marry the 25-year-old Ms.
Harris in June 2011 — the wedding was to have been filmed by the
Lifetime cable channel as a reality special — the bride called it off. Mr. Hefner, by this time a man of the 21st-century media, announced on Twitter, “Crystal has had a change of heart.”
But
Ms. Harris had another change of heart, and the two married on New
Year’s Eve 2012. On their first anniversary, Mr. Hefner tweeted to his
1.4 million followers, “It’s good to be in love.”
Mr. Hefner’s survivors include Ms. Harris and his four children.
Another
of the “Girls Next Door,” Holly Madison, offered a much more depressing
version of life in the mansion in a 2015 tell-all book. In the years
when Mr. Hefner was calling her his “No.1 girlfriend,” she wrote in
“Down the Rabbit Hole,” she endured a dysfunctional household of petty
rules, allowances, quarrels and backstabbing, all directed by an
emotionally manipulative old man.
Through those years, however, the Playboy brand marched forward. In 2011 Mr. Hefner took Playboy Enterprises private again.
Scott Flanders, after taking over as chief executive in 2009, focused
on the licensing business, shrinking the company and raising its
profits. The website, cleansed of any whiff of pornography, enjoyed huge
growth, while Mr. Hefner, who retained his title and about 30 percent
of the company’s stock, cheerfully tweeted news and pictures of the many
festivities at the mansion, along with hundreds of photographs from his
past, in the glory decades of the ’60s and ’70s.
Last
year the Playboy Mansion was sold for $100 million to Daren
Metropoulos, an investor. As a condition of the sale, Mr. Hefner was
allowed to continue living in the mansion for the rest of his life, with
Playboy Enterprises paying Mr. Metropoulos $1 million a year to lease
it.
Mr.
Hefner was to be buried in Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, in a
mausoleum drawer he had bought next to Marilyn Monroe’s.
Matthew Haag and Zach Johnk contributed reporting.
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