KING OF PLAYBOYS:
HUGH HEFNER APRIL 9, 1926 - SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 The tycoon, who has died aged 91, transformed America’s attitude to sex via a magazine that mixed naked pin-ups with celebrity interviews and slept with 1,000 women in the process
HE WAS the ultimate hedonist. Whatever the time of day or the social mores of the time, Hugh Hefner felt comfortable wearing a robe and silk pyjamas: he owned 200 pairs. It was a provocative wardrobe and was intended as such.
“You have no idea how comfortable it is to lie around wearing pyjamas and I realised I could get away with it. Then people were disappointed if they didn’t find me in pyjamas,” said the man who once admitted he liked to spend 12 hours a day in bed entertaining women at his sprawling home.
The Playboy mansion was the setting for serious debauchery. The “Elvis room” was named in honour of the night when Elvis Presley entertained eight Playboy bunnies at the same time.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Colin Farrell and Charlie Sheen are among the stars who have allegedly enjoyed romps there and according to the memoirs of one former bunny, stars just needed to “click their fingers” to seduce women at these soirées.
“When you are young there are a lot of pressures to conform. I think a best life is where one pursues one’s own dreams,” explained Hefner of his decision to make his rapacious appetite for sex the guiding focus of his existence.
The advertising copywriter turned his interest in partying and women into a career in 1953 when he mortgaged his furniture to launch Playboy – which was originally going to be called Stag Party.
The intention was to produce just one issue, featuring nude photos of Marilyn Monroe. No one was more surprised than Hefner to discover he had tapped into a lucrative new market and created “a phenomenon that would change the world” as he put it.
But it wasn’t enough to be a media pioneer, he wanted to become its living embodiment, an enticing prospect for a young man brought up in a Methodist household and in an unhappy marriage.
He reinvented himself as “Hef”, throwing off the shackles of his upbringing and becoming, as he wrote in 1942, “a Sinatra-like guy with loud flannel shirts… A very original guy”. And the image overhaul worked – his classmates voted him “most likely to succeed”.
But it took a while. Shortly before launching his risqué magazine, Hefner had been contemplating suicide as a way out of his first marriage. He had married Mildred Williams in 1949 at the age of 22 when he was still a virgin but was distraught when she then admitted to having had a previous sexual relationship.
Fifty years later he was still describing the discovery of Mildred’s prior sexual liaison as “the single most devastating experience of my life”.
INSTEAD of killing himself, however, the 27-year-old took out a loan and raised £5,000 from investors to set up his magazine, including £600 from his mother who did it, he said, “not because she believed in the venture but because she believed in her son”.
With its iconic mix of naked pinups, interviews and fiction, Hefner built a lucrative brand that helped shape the sexual culture of the second half of the 20th century.
On a personal level it provided him the power finally to call the shots in his relationships with women. Hefner was nothing if not a case study in defiant reinvention and sexual self-determination.
And before too long he saw to it that life and art were fully intermingled. “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,” he wrote in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue.
By 1959 Hefner and Mildred, mother of his daughter Christie and son David, had divorced and Hugh set about breathing life into his manifesto.
Inevitably he was reviled by guardians of moral behaviour as well as J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who disliked him. Hefner was also condemned by feminists for his commodification of women. But controversy only added to the magazine’s cachet.
By 1960 circulation had reached a million before peaking at seven million in the 1970s. The most successful men’s magazine in the world soon branched into movie production, fashion design and resort, casino and club openings.
In recent years cover stars have included models Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, socialite Kim Kardashian and even Donald Trump on the March 1990 edition.
Meanwhile Hefner’s determination to maintain the upper hand in relationships continued with swinging success as he merged art and life at his party Playboy palace, which has its own pyrotechnics licence.
The publishing magnate claimed to have had sex with more than 1,000 women, many of them models who had appeared in his magazine. One of them, Kimberley Conrad, 38 years his junior, became his second wife in 1989. They had two sons, Cooper, now chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises and Marston, before divorcing in 2010.
Between marriages his domestic life was positively bacchanalian and he was a huge fan of Viagra, telling one journalist: “It is as close as anyone can imagine to the fountain of youth.”
WHETHER the rumoured secret tunnels beneath the 21,989 square foot mansion exist or not – they are said to have been excavated in the 1970s to enable stars including Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas, Jack Nicholson and James Caan to walk undetected to private parties from their own houses – Hefner’s 29-room home has always offered unrivalled sexual revelry for his famous friends.
Every Friday morning Hef’s bevy of live-in girlfriends would queue up in his bedroom suite to receive their £600-a-week “allowance”, counted out in “crisp $100 bills from a safe in one of his bookcases”, according to a kiss-and-tell memoir by former girlfriend Izabella St James.
Hefner would also use the occasion to berate his ladies. “Most of the complaints were about the lack of harmony between the girlfriends – or your lack of sexual participation in the ‘parties’ he held in his bedroom,” wrote St James in her book, Bunny Tales.
But work and pleasure continued to be combined. The internal telephone directory next to every bedroom phone was observed by one party guest to contain three numbers for “scrapbooking” should Hefner feel the need to look at a back issue of his magazine or gaze at a published image of wife number three, Crystal Harris, a former Playboy cover star, who is 60 years his junior and whom he married in 2012 when she was 26.
Crystal called off their wedding in 2011 over concerns that he was still sleeping with other women only for the pair to reunite and marry a year later.
But despite the six-decade age gap, it seems that Crystal brought him a kind of happiness he had long craved.
“I saved the best for last,” he said of their union.
However, it is next to his iconic first cover girl that Hugh Hefner will spend eternity. At Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles he has bought the mausoleum next to Marilyn Monroe.