Mix of flesh, intellectuality a winner
HUGH HEFNER, who died of natural causes this week , aged 91, was an incurable playboy who built a publishing and entertainment empire on the idea that Americans should shed their puritanical hangups and enjoy sex.
Hefner was the founder of Playboy magazine, launched amid the conservatism of the 1950s, when marriage and domesticity conferred social status.
Hefner pitched an alternative standard — swinging singlehood — which portrayed the desire for sex as normal as craving apple pie. He redefined status for a generation of men, replacing lawn mowers and fishing gear with new symbols: martini glasses, a cashmere sweater and a voluptuous girlfriend, the necessary components of a new lifestyle that melded sex and materialism.
Thus, in Playboy magazine, the upwardly mobile man could ogle at pictures of naked women called Playmates, chosen personally by Hefner for their large busts and girlnextdoor wholesomeness.
Surrounding the titillating visuals were interviews with luminaries from Albert Schweitzer to Malcolm X; short stories by such leading writers as Ernest Hemingway and John Updike; and advice columns on such matters as how to prepare the perfect vodka gimlet or appreciate jazz — all of which lent credence to many men’s claims that they bought the magazine for the articles.
This combination of flesh and intellectuality made Playboy the world’s bestselling men’s magazine and Hefner a millionaire many times over. The venture gave him a pulpit from which to preach the virtues of a postwar revolution in morality and propelled sex into the American mainstream.
The magazine reflected Hefner himself. He was the personification of the Playboy ideal, the pajamaloving lord of the grandest bachelor pad on Earth.
‘‘If you don’t swing, don’t ring,’’ read a brass doorplate at the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago, a 48room abode where Hefner revelled with bevies of Playmates on a rotating, circular bed.
Later, he moved the party to Playboy Mansion West, a 2.5ha compound above Beverly Hills with 30 rooms, an underground grotto, a staff of 70 and a roundtheclock kitchen.
He shared the fantasy not only through the magazine but through a string of Playboy Clubs, where anyone able to pay a modest membership fee could be served food and drinks by ‘‘Bunnies’’ — wellendowed women costumed in rabbit ears, puffy tails and satin corsets so tight that sneezing burst the seams.
The blackandwhite Bunny logo that adorned the magazine and all manner of merchandise, from cufflinks to cocktail napkins, became a coveted mark of suavity.
Just what the Bunny really stood for — sexual freedom or sexist oppression — became fodder for the cultural wars of the 1960s and ’70s.
Feminist Gloria Steinem fired one of the first shots when she posed as a Bunny and wrote a scathing expose in Show magazine in 1963. ‘‘Reading Playboy,’’ she later said, ‘‘feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.’’
Despite such criticism, Playboy’s sales zoomed to seven million copies a month in the 1970s — but that was a high from which the magazine inevitably would fall. The 1980s brought AIDs, the end of the Playboy clubs, the rise of the religious right and the Meese Commission on Pornography, all of which had a deleterious impact on circulation.
Hefner’s image was tainted by the suicide of a trusted associate who overdosed on drugs and his indirect connection to the Dorothy Stratten tragedy, in which the 1980 Playmate of the Year was murdered by her estranged husband.
Then, in 1985, Hefner had a stroke. Though he made a full recovery, he decided, as he put it, to ‘‘put down some luggage’’. In 1988, he turned over daytoday operations of his enterprises to his daughter, Christie, while retaining the editorship of the magazine.
The next year, the PlayboyinChief did the unthinkable: He got married and settled into monogamy for the better part of a decade.
When the marriage collapsed in the late 1990s, the king of Sybarites was reborn. He entered the new millennium with a harem of blonde, buxom lovelies all young enough to be his granddaughters.
The ageing swinger seemed delighted, boasting to a reporter that he had sex ‘‘one way or another’’ every day, but some observers smirked. ‘‘He is so pathetic,’’ Steinem told the New York Observer in 2005. ‘‘Now he’s going around with four young women in their 20s instead of just one . . . I feel sorry for him.’’
Hefner insisted he was just a relentless romantic, the eternal teenager for whom nothing was sweeter than to have a passionate crush on a girl who liked him back.
As Hefner often told the story, most of the credit — or blame — belonged to his parents, Grace and Glenn Hefner.
Grace, a former schoolteacher, and accountant Glenn, were devout Methodists, morally strict and emotionally reserved.
Born in Chicago, Hugh Marston Hefner was an introverted youth who loved to chase butterflies. Fond of drawing and writing, he published his own neighbourhood newspaper when he was 8 or 9.
He was drafted into the US Army and served stateside from 1944 to 1946. He attended the University of Illinois on the G.I. Bill and majored in psychology while contributing articles and cartoons to the campus paper.
In 1949 he married Mildred Williams, a college sweetheart with an appealing wholesomeness, but the union was hobbled from the start. It lasted 10 years, until their divorce in 1959.
Although he wanted to be a cartoonist, Hefner was unable to sell any of his strips to newspapers. He also wanted to start his own magazine, but he lacked capital.
In 1951, he applied to Esquire magazine and was hired as a promotional copywriter at $40 a week. When Esquire moved most of its operations to New York, he quit and took a sales job at a firm that published trade and ‘‘nudie’’ magazines.
He began the HMH Publishing Co with $600 borrowed from two banks and $3000 from friends and family. Working out of his apartment with a minimal staff Hefner laboured around the clock to assemble the first issue of Playboy magazine. A big chunk of his meagre budget was consumed by the pictorial: He paid a Chicago calendar maker $500 for photographs of Marilyn Monroe with ‘‘nothing but the radio on’’. That first issue, in December 1953, also featured a cartoon by Hefner, party jokes and blackandwhite pictures of nude sunbathers in California.
He quickly sold out the complete run of 70,000 copies. By the fourth issue, production had moved from Hefner’s apartment to a rented office across the street from a Catholic cathedral. By the first anniversary, Playboy’s circulation was a healthy 175,000 copies. By the fifth anniversary, it had surpassed Esquire, with nearly 900,000 copies sold each month. In the early 1970s circulation would peak at seven million.
It took more than a year for Hefner to devise the most popular feature of the magazine — the photo layout that would christen 12 women a year Playmates of the Month.
Hefner would not show everything in the magazine’s pictures, believing some modesty would bolster his magazine’s chances for success. Thus, he banned pubic hair and genitalia, airbrushing away all traces. He held to these strictures until 1971, when competition from Bob Guccione’s Penthouse persuaded him to allow more graphic poses of Playmates. The field grew more crowded and explicit with Larry Flynt’s Hustler, which began publishing in 1974.
A jazz aficionado, Hefner held the first Playboy Jazz Festival in Chicago in 1959 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the magazine. Seventy thousand attended the concert at Chicago Stadium, where the lineup included Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.
In 1988 Hefner married former Playmate Kimberley Conrad and had two children with her, before they divorced in 2009.
He featured three of his ‘‘rotating girlfriend supergroup’’ for the 2005 debut of an E! channel reality show called The Girls Next Door, which one critic called ‘‘a spectacularly brainless excursion’’ into life at Playboy Mansion West, the Los Angeles estate where he lived for more than three decades.
He kept his medicine cabinet stocked with Viagra, the frequent use of which he believed caused some hearing loss. But he apparently regarded that side effect as a small price to pay for the libertine lifestyle he popularised.
‘‘I’m one of a handful of people who most represent the sexual revolution,’’ Hefner once said.
‘‘Not that I invented sex, of course, but I’ve done more than almost anyone to promote the idea of sexual freedom.’’
Hefner will be laid to rest in a Los Angeles crypt beside Marilyn
Monroe, whose nude pictures helped launch Hefner into history. As he told the Times in 2009, ‘‘Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.’’