Playboy founder Hugh Hefner dead at 91

US - Hugh Hefner -- the silk-robed Casanova whose Playboy men’s magazine popularized the term ‘centerfold’, glamorized an urbane bachelor lifestyle and helped spur the sexual revolution of the 1960s -- has died, his company said late Wednesday. He was 91.

Hefner founded Playboy in 1953 with $600 of his own money and built the magazine into a multimillion-dollar entertainment empire that at its 1970s peak included TV shows, a jazz festival and a string of Playboy Clubs whose cocktail waitresses wore bunny ears and cottontails. Over the years, the legend of ‘Hef’ only grew as he bedded hundreds of young women, married a few of his magazine’s ‘Playmates’ and cavorted on reality TV shows with a stable of girlfriends less than a third his age.

Some critics dismissed him as a relic of a sexist era, especially in his later years, when Hefner spoke openly of his Viagra-fueled sex romps at the Playboy Mansion. But many men envied his adolescent-fantasy lifestyle.

And his pioneering magazine, his biggest legacy, may have helped the buttoned-up America of the 1950s and early 1960s loosen up a little about sex.

“I would like to be remembered as somebody who has changed the world in some positive way, in a social, sexual sense, and I’d be very happy with that”, Hefner told CNN. “I’m a kid who dreamed the dreams and made them come true.” (CNN.COM)