FROM MARILYN TO MOSS – AND THE BUNNIES WHO LEFT FEMINISTS HOPPING MAD
THE FIRST COVERGIRL
MARILYN MONROE graced the front cover of Playboy’s first edition in December 1953 and also provided its first nude centrefold. The picture of her against a red velvet background had been taken for a 1949 calendar.
Hugh Hefner, a former promotions manager of Children’s Activities magazine, had produced the first issue in his Chicago kitchen with money from his mother and brother. Costing 50 cents, within weeks it sold more than 50,000 copies.
In its heyday in the 1950s to the 1970s, the ‘P’ in Playboy on the cover would be decorated with anything from zero to 12 stars. A story grew that the number of stars reflected Hefner’s rating of that issue’s Playmate of the Month (as the centrefold model is known), or even how many times he had slept with her. In truth, they referred to print runs.
Hefner never forgot his debt to Marilyn and has bought the crypt next to hers at the Los Angeles cemetery where she is buried.
A VERY PUBLIC PLAYBOY
AS THE ‘public face’ of Playboy, Hefner has always tried to epitomise a sophisticated man-about-town. But what started out as glamorous bachelorhood long ago descended into the queasy seediness of an 89-year-old wearing his dressing gown all day and surrounding himself with girls young enough to be his great-grandchildren.
He is estimated to have slept with thousands of women, presiding over orgies in his Los Angeles mansion and particularly its grotto, a man-made rock cave complete with whirlpool spa. At his original Playboy Mansion, in Chicago, a brass plate next to the door bell read: ‘If you don’t swing, don’t ring.’
Hefner has insisted he is not a fan of hard drugs, although he used to use amphetamines so he could stay awake and smoke marijuana to enhance his sexual pleasure. He would hand out the powerful tranquilisers Quaaludes to girlfriends, confiding to one that they made women more amenable to sex.
MRS HEFNER (X 3)
HEFNER’S first wife, Mildred, with whom he had two children, started the ball rolling on a lifetime of frenetic fornication by allowing him to sleep around out of guilt for her own infidelity. After they divorced in 1959, he played the field with abandon.
In 1985, aged 59, he had a minor stroke and decided he had to slow down. He even tried married life again, with Kimberley Conrad, 36 years his junior. They had two children but separated after nine years of marriage.
His third wife, Crystal Harris, is 60 years his junior and the standardissue blonde former Playboy Playmate. They married in 2012, despite Ms Harris previously jilting him at the altar and admitting she had not seen him naked in the two years they had spent together.
She admitted she finally said ‘I do’ to give herself ‘more security’.
. . . AND HEF’S HAREM
BETWEEN wives, Hefner has typically had between three and 15 live-in ‘girlfriends’. One is chosen as ‘Girlfriend No 1’ and shares his bedroom, while the others are visitors. Many have complained of the conditions, with Hefner enforcing a 9pm curfew in exchange for free plastic surgery and pocket money.
Although Hefner is now said to be far too doddery to do anything in the sex department, girlfriends recall in recent years having to attend ‘sex parties’ in his bedroom, where they lined up in pink pyjamas. One said the ancient Hefner ‘just lay there like a dead fish’.
as the rather grubby Penthouse. There were others, too, everywhere — with Paul Raymond building himself a London property empire on sexy mags.
The barriers had been smashed to smithereens. But soon, the rival publications around the world would have to go to ever greater lengths to be noticed. And they did. Soon Hefner’s magazine wouldn’t even try to compete with the vulgar, sometimes semi-gynaecological photographs found on the top shelf in many newsagents. Even the milder ones, such as Loaded, were far more provocative than Playboy had ever been.
Gradually the revolution in sexual attitudes, and in what is allowable and appropriate in print, began to consume its creator. The rise and rise of i nternet pornography completed the act. Yesterday, Playboy surrendered.
Unable, and unwilling, to compete with the galaxies of porn available on t he i nternet, where every imaginable sexual position is brutally available for any boy with a smartphone, 89-year-old Hugh Hefner has decided that from March next year there will be no more nudity in Play- boy. Whether he’s happy with that, we don’t know. He holds only a 30 per cent stake in his creation, and the magazine itself hasn’t made money for years, with its U.S. sales down to 800,000 a month. Indeed, most of the Playboy income comes from licensing its brand for bath products, clothing and other merchandising. In all likelihood, it was probably a decision forced on him. Advertisers, it seems, no longer want their products appearing in a girly, if slightly old-fashioned, magazine.
Strange to think that Hugh Hefner, the anti- establishment figure who took on the prudes of America, should now be seen as old-fashioned.
Even stranger to imagine Playboy without a pretty, smiling, pneumatic centrefold of a naked girl to look at.