Tributes pour in for Hefner
LOS ANGELES — High-profile figures from the media world and beyond are paying tribute to Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner.
Since the sad announcement, celebrity tributes began to pour in, led by Hollywood A-listers Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.
Kardashian tweeted: “RIP to the legendary Hugh Hefner, I’m so honored to have been a part of the Playboy team.”
Katie Price added to the tributes, sharing an old photo of himself with Hefner.
Paris Hilton posted a picture of a message and three photos of herself with Hefner on Twitter.
“So sad to hear the news about Hefner. He was a legend, innovator and one of a kind,” Hilton said.
Although Hefner never lacked women in his life, having been married three times and bedded over a thousand, he said that at age 85, he never found his soulmate. 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.”
Hefner also told a film interviewer that he slept with more than 1,000 women. Over and over, he would say, “I’m the boy who dreamed the dream.”
Friends described Hefner 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,” 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.”
Hefner’s other enterprise, the Playboy Club, 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 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 Hefner on a 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. ...”
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 contained an interview with William Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Sen. Vance Hartke.)
Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy.