Hef, Trump and the degrading of America

HUGH Hefner and Donald Trump had much in common – and not just because the US president was once a Playboy cover boy, albeit a fully clad one. Both self-made men, whose gilded empires may stand as models of the aspirational tug of the American Dream, they were pioneers of a brash and clever marketing style that cast them as inseparable from their brands.

Whether decked out in a smoking jacket, with a cigar between his teeth (‘Hef’, as he was known ) or perched on a thronelike Louis XV chair (The Donald), they were instantly recognisable.

They flaunted their wealth and virility, sprawling estates and opulent mansions, kept private jets and fast cars, dabbled in beauty pageants and casinos.

In their pursuit of wealth, power and status, they saw themselves as the embodiment of the masculine dream, the focal point of their own narcissistic home movie or realityTV show, where they sat in eagleeyed judgment of supplicants, pitching for their patronage.

Hefner grew up in the Chicago suburbs, the son of straight-laced, Methodist parents from Nebraska farming stock.

His father was an accountant during the Great Depression; his mother was a teacher before she married.

Hef was a dreamy child, so lost in his own little world that his mother brought him to the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research to be assessed.

A series of tests showed that he was gifted but socially immature and it was suggested to his emotionally restrained mother that she should display more warmth and understanding around the house.

ENCOURAGED by the reports of her son’s intellectual superiority, Mrs Hefner become more indulgent of him, so much so that she even tolerating nude pin-ups on his bedroom walls. He left school intending to become a cartoonist, writer or editor. By the time he married in his mid-20s, Hefner’s interest in sex had become an obsession.

He struggled to hold down regular jobs and gravitated towards top-shelf mags, working in their circulation or advertising departments.

He saw a gap in the market for a more upscale men’s magazine, serving the fantasies of the ‘urban bachelor’ who, like him, was sceptical of marriage.

In 1953, he launched Playboy, which caught on immediately and became the fastest-growing magazine in America.

It was an astonishing success. But while the Playboy empire grew, so too did revelations of its seedy underbelly. Disenchanted models and bunny girls lifted the lid on the lecherous Hef in his hot-tub grotto.

There were scandals. Increasingly, people saw Hefner as a glorified pimp who expected sexual services from young women in return for lodgings at the Playboy mansion.

The internet turned the industrial-scale pornographer into an anachronism. Later, he became an ironic figure.

Even at this remove, it is unlikely that the all-American heroes imagbuilt ined by America’s founding fathers are personified by either Trump or Hefner.

Trump based his presidential campaign on reviving the American Dream – but in the process, he hung that dream out to dry.

THE mythical promise of hard work and enterprise as a path to happiness and social mobility becomes, in his hands, a recipe for destroying much that is decent in life. Trump’s railing against democratic institutions, such as the legal system, and his contemptuous attitude to women and minorities, make for a harsh and fearful climate.

Hefner’s bringing of pornography into the mainstream has degraded us all.

His legacy exposes how the toll in human misery increases under the influence of unchecked ego and capitalism.