Playboy’s Hefner dies
1926-2017
HUGH HEFNER, the silk-robed Lothario who founded Playboy magazine and built a business empire around the debauchery of his lavish lifestyle, died Wednesday. He was 91.
Hefner died of natural causes at his home surrounded by family on Wednesday night, Playboy said in a statement.
The Chicago native, who began his career as a copywriter at Esquire, created a media empire that embraced the risqué and perennially pushed the envelope after publishing the first issues of Playboy in 1953.
The high-brow dirty magazine, founded in Hefner’s kitchen with just an $8,000 loan raised from 45 investors, quickly became a success, earning millions of subscribers and a permanent place in pop culture.
The magazine, with its distinct bunny logo, featured iconic covers and centerfolds who stripped down to their birthday suits including Pamela Anderson, Anna Nicole Smith, Barbra Streisand, Mariah Carey, and, in the very first issue, Marilyn Monroe.
Celebrated writers including Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut wrote for the magazine.
It also featured candid interviews with the likes of Fidel Castro, Frank Sinatra and, shortly before his death, John Lennon.
Behind the rise of Playboy, the bunnies and playmates, its cult following, and its editorial promise of “humor, sophistication and spice,” was Hefner.
“My father lived an exceptional and impactful life as a media and cultural pioneer and a leading voice behind some of the most significant social and cultural movements of our time in advocating free speech, civil rights and sexual freedom,” Hefner’s son Cooper Hefner said in a statement.
“He defined a lifestyle and ethos that lie at the heart of the Playboy brand, one of the most recognizable and enduring in history.”
Throughout his six decades in the spotlight, Hefner was the pipe smoking, silk robe-wearing embodiment of his own brand.
He hosted opulent parties at his Playboy mansions, first in Chicago and later in Los Angeles, with scantily clad women and celebrities.
He helmed the TV show “Playboy After Dark,” opened a string of clubs where waitresses wore revealing costumes with bunny ears and fluffy white bunny tails, and, well into his 70s, starred in “The Girls Next Door,” a reality show that featured his three live-in girlfriends.
He claimed to have slept with thousands of women.
Hefner married three times, twice to much younger women who bared all for Playboy.
In 1949, he married Mildred Williams, with whom he had two children before they divorced. In 1989, at 63, Hefner married Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad, who was then 27. The couple also had two children. They divorced in 2010, after separating a decade earlier.
In 2012, Hefner married 24-year-old Crystal Harris, another former Playmate.
While critics complained that Hefner’s hedonistic ways were exploitative of women, the magazine publisher insisted he was helping their cause.
“Playboy fought for what became women’s issues, including birth control,” He told Vanity Fair in 2010. Hefner attributed his decadent lifestyle to rebellion against his Puritanical roots.
“My folks are Puritan. My folks are prohibitionists,” he told The Associated Press in 2011. “There was no drinking in my home. No discussion of sex. And I think I saw the hurtful and hypocritical side of that from very early on.”
Hefner sold his famed Playboy Mansion in August for $100 million, under the stipulation that he be allowed to live out his days under its roof.
He’s survived by four children, Christie, David, Marston and Cooper, and wife Crystal.
While Hefner bought the crypt next to Monroe’s burial plot in L.A.’s Westwood Memorial Park in 1992 for $75,000, no funeral plans have been announced.