Hefner leaves complicated legacy
Playboy magazine founder became a champion of sexual freedom — and a target of feminist anger
LOS ANGELES Hugh Hefner turned silk pyjamas into a work uniform, women into centrefolds and sexual desire into a global media empire that spanned generations.
With Playboy, he helped slip sex out of the confines of plain brown wrappers and into mainstream conversation.
In 1953, a time when U.S. states could legally ban contraceptives and the word “pregnant” was not allowed on I Love Lucy, Hefner published the first issue of Playboy, which he had created at his kitchen table, typing the articles himself. It featured naked photos of a thenunknown Marilyn Monroe and an editorial promise of “humour, sophistication and spice.”
The Great Depression and the Second World War were over and Playboy soon became forbidden fruit for teens and a bible for men with time and money, primed for the magazine’s prescribed evenings of dimmed lights, hard drinks, soft jazz, deep thoughts and even deeper desires. Within a year, circulation neared 200,000. Within five years, it had topped one million.
Hefner, the pipe-smoking embodiment of the lifestyle he touted, died at his home of natural causes on Wednesday night, Playboy said. He was 91.
Hefner and Playboy were brand names worldwide. Asked by The New York Times in 1992 of what he was proudest, Hefner said: “That I changed attitudes toward sex. That nice people can live together now. That I decontaminated the notion of premarital sex. That gives me great satisfaction.”
By the 1970s, Playboy magazine had more than seven million readers and had inspired such raunchier imitations as Penthouse and Hustler. Competition and the internet reduced circulation to less than three million by the 21st century, and Playboy cut the number of issues published annually to 11 from 12. In 2015, it ceased publishing images of naked women, citing the proliferation of nudity on the internet — but restored nudity earlier this year.
Hefner was an ongoing advertisement for his own product, the centre of an A-list, X-rated party. By his own account, Hefner had sex with more than 1,000 women, including many of those pictured in his magazine.
Hefner was host of a TV show, Playboy After Dark, and in 1960 opened a string of clubs around the world where waitresses wore revealing costumes with bunny ears and fluffy white bunny tails. In the 21st century, he was back on TV in a cable reality show — The Girls Next Door — with three live-in girlfriends in the Los Angeles mansion. Network TV briefly embraced Hefner’s empire in 2011 with the NBC drama The Playboy Club, which was cancelled after three episodes.
Censorship was inevitable. Playboy has been banned in China, India, Saudi Arabia and Ireland. It wasn’t just conservatives who condemned him. Many feminists regarded him as a glorified pornographer who degraded and objectified women with impunity.
Playboy proved both a scourge and a temptation. Drew Barrymore, Farrah Fawcett and Linda Evans are among those who have posed for the magazine. Several bunnies became celebrities, too, including singer Deborah Harry and model Lauren Hutton, both of whom had fond memories of their time with Playboy.
Canadian-born actress and former centrefold Pamela Anderson posted a tearful picture on Instagram, writing, “Goodbye #Hef.”
But some others had traumatic experiences, with several alleging they had been raped by Hefner’s close friend Bill Cosby, who has faced dozens of such allegations in recent years.
In 2014, Hefner said he “would never tolerate this behaviour.” But two years later, former bunny Chloe Goins sued Cosby for sexual battery, gender violence and other charges over an alleged 2008 rape by Cosby at Hefner’s mansion, and included Hefner in the lawsuit.
Feminist Gloria Steinem got hired as a bunny in the early 1960s and turned her brief employment into an article for Show magazine that described the clubs as pleasure havens for men only. The bunnies, Steinem wrote, tended to be poorly educated, overworked and underpaid. She regarded the magazine and clubs not as erotic, but “pornographic.”
Hefner said he was a strong advocate of First Amendment, civil and reproductive rights and that the magazine contained far more than centrefolds. Playboy serialized Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and later published fiction by John Updike, Doris Lessing and Vladimir Nabokov. Playboy also specialized in long and candid interviews, from Fidel Castro and Frank Sinatra to Marlon Brando. John Lennon spoke to Playboy in 1980, not long before he was killed.
Playboy’s clubs also influenced the comedy culture, giving early breaks to such entertainers as George Carlin, Rich Little, Mark Russell, Dick Gregory and Redd Foxx. The last of the clubs closed in 1988, when Hefner deemed them “too tame for the times.”
Hefner liked to say he was untroubled by criticism, but in 1985 he suffered a mild stroke and blamed on the book The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980, by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. The Playmate was killed by her husband, Paul Snider, who then killed himself. Bogdanovich, Stratten’s boyfriend, wrote that Hefner helped bring about her murder and was unable to deal with “what he and his magazine do to women.”
After the stroke, Hefner handed control to his feminist daughter, Christie, although he owned 70 per cent of Playboy stock and continued to choose every month’s Playmate and cover shot. Christie Hefner continued as CEO until 2009.
He stopped using recreational drugs and tried less to always be the life of the party. He tearfully noted in a 1992 New York Times interview: “I’ve spent so much of my life looking for love in all the wrong places.”
Not surprisingly, Hefner’s married life was also a bit of a show. In 1949, he married Mildred Williams, with whom he had two children. They divorced in 1958. In July 1989 at 63, Hefner married Kimberley Conrad, the 1989 Playmate of the Year, then 27. They also had two children.
They separated in 1998, but she continued living next door to the Playboy mansion with their two sons. They divorced in 2010 and in 2012 at 86 he married Crystal Harris, 26, a former Playmate.
“Maybe I should be single,” he said a few months later. “But I do know that I need an ongoing romantic relationship. In other words, I am essentially a very romantic person, and all I really was looking for, quite frankly, with the notion of marriage was continuity and something to let the girl know that I really cared.”
He was born in Chicago April 9, 1926 to devout Methodist parents he said never showed “love in a physical or emotional way.”
Hefner recalled that he first reinvented himself in high school in Chicago at 16, when he was rejected by a girl he had a crush on. He began referring to himself as Hef instead of Hugh, learned the jitterbug and began drawing a comic book, “a kind of autobiography that put myself centre stage in a life I created for myself,” he said in a 2006 interview with the AP.
He did it again in 1960, when he hosted the TV show, bought a fancy car, started smoking a pipe and bought the first Playboy mansion.
“Well, if we hadn’t had the Wright brothers, there would still be airplanes,” Hefner said in 1974. “If there hadn’t been an Edison, there would still be electric lights. And if there hadn’t been a Hefner, we’d still have sex. But maybe we wouldn’t be enjoying it as much. So the world would be a little poorer. Come to think of it, so would some of my relatives.” 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. It was horrible. There was nothing fun about it. By now, it’s hard to work up any anger about Hefner — he’s a pathetic self-parody. Imagine if I’d made him up — no one would believe it! Women are the major beneficiaries of getting rid of the hypocritical old notions about sex. Now some people are acting as if the sexual revolution was a male plot to get laid. One of the unintended byproducts of the women’s movement is the association of the erotic impulse with wanting to hurt somebody. I had done pinups and calendars and glamour shoots, but to be the first transsexual in Playboy, I felt absolutely honoured. I remember being invited to the mansion to meet Hugh Hefner. He looked into my eyes and I immediately knew he felt my story. I am me because of you, you taught me everything important about freedom and respect. Outside of my family, you were the most important person in my life. Hefner had an exceptionally narrow conception of female beauty, as fixed as Barbie dolls. That’s what made his pornography banal. One of the nicest men
I’ve ever known. Godspeed, Hugh Hefner.