Playboy boss Hugh Hefner’ slef ta toxic legacy for women
‘He was a legend, one of a kind’ Hailed a champion of free speech
FRIENDS and foes were battling over the legacy of the colourful but controversial Playboy founder Hugh Hefner last night as it was claimed that his young widow has been left out of his £32 million ($43 million) fortune.
Some hailed Hefner as a far- sighted champion of free speech and sexual freedom. Others blamed him for making pornography acceptable, dubbing him ‘America’s most famous dirty old man’.
Hefner, who died of natural causes aged 91 at his Playboy mansion in Los Angeles, had claimed only three years ago that he was a ‘very lucky cat’ to have found Crystal Harris, a former Playboy model — born in Arizona of British parents — who was 60 years younger than him.
However, despite insisting that after two failed marriages ‘this is the real deal’, the lothario, who claimed to have slept with more than 2,000 women, reportedly never changed an ‘iron-clad’ pre-nuptial agreement leaving her out of his will when they married in late 2012. There has been no indication this agreement was changed.
mr Hefner has left his money instead to his four grown- up children, the University of Southern California film school and various charities.
The once mighty Playboy business empire will be taken over by his 26- year- old son, Cooper. Yesterday, celebrities paid tribute to the man who — for better or worse — became one of the most influential cultural figures in America.
Star Wars star mark Hamill wrote that he was a ‘thoughtful, loyal friend’, while socialite Paris Hilton said: ‘ He was a legend, innovator and one of a kind . . . I will miss him dearly.’
meanwhile, the Reverend Jesse Jackson thanked Hefner for his civil rights work.
But while Hefner’s claims to have helped inspire the sexual revolution and sweep away buttoned-up Fifties prurience has some truth to it, Hefner’s great failing was that he never knew when to call it a day.
When, in his 80s, he was still trying to act the playboy with a coterie of live- in girlfriends young enough to be his greatgrandchildren, some of the aspiring glamour models broke ranks to describe the sordid reality of the Playboy mansion.
They portrayed a dictatorial, dirty old man who never took off his dressing gown, desperately popping Viagra pills to ‘perform’ for a harem who had to step over dog mess to get to his bedroom. It was a humiliating final act for someone who for years strove to be his fellow men’s idea of the ultimate bachelor.
It started when Hefner, a young psychology graduate, used a family loan of $600 to create a magazine that carried pictures of naked women aimed, he said, at educated men like himself.
He had a lucky break — marilyn monroe graced the front of Playboy’s first edition in december 1953 and also provided its first nude centrefold.
Within weeks the issue had sold more than 50,000 copies.
At its peak of success, that figure had soared to seven million. It helped that much of the content was not only respectable but literary — from stories by Arthur Conan doyle and P. G. Wodehouse to interviews with Bertrand Russell and black rights leader malcolm X.
Hefner said his magazine was about ‘breaking down barriers, starting a cultural conversation and standing up for social justice’. But principally it was about naked ladies.
Hefner — whose strict methodist parents in Chicago banned drinking, dancing or swearing in the family home — was a fierce critic of Fifties sexual mores.
He was a virgin until he was 22 and married his long-time girlfriend, millie Williams, with whom he had two children. But after she admitted to an earlier affair, he launched into a series of infidelities, including with his brother’s wife, as well as a oneoff homosexual tryst.
His divorce in 1959 removed any barrier to a lifetime of frenetic fornication for Hefner, who didn’t try marriage again for 26 years, when he wed Kimberly Conrad — a former Playboy Playmate 36 years his junior. He divorced nine years later having had two sons with her.
most famously, he was the host of outrageous parties to which generations of celebrities flocked at the Playboy mansion, first in Chicago and, later, LA.
The Chicago parties drew stars such as Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. After the move to LA, it was the turn of a new generation of leading men — including Leonardo diCaprio, Colin Farrell and Charlie Sheen.
Today, the mansion has been sold and the preparations for Hefner’s funeral have begun.
Having bought the mausoleum neighbouring that of marilyn monroe at LA’s Westwood memorial Park, he will be buried next to the woman who started it all for him.