Party’s over for Playboy founder
UNITED STATES: Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, the pipesmoking hedonist who revved up the sexual revolution in the 1950s and built a multimedia empire of clubs, mansions, movies and television, symbolised by bow-tied women in bunny costumes, has died. He was 91.
Hefner died of natural causes at his home surrounded by family yesterday, the magazine said in a statement.
As much as anyone, Hefner helped to slip sex out of the confines of plain brown wrappers and into mainstream conversation. In 1953, a time when states could legally ban contraceptives, when the word ‘‘pregnant’' was not allowed on TV, Hefner published the first issue of Playboy, featuring naked photos of Marilyn Monroe (taken years earlier) and an editorial promise of ‘‘humour, sophistication and spice’'.
Playboy soon became forbidden fruit for teenagers and a bible for men with time and money. Within a year, circulation neared 200,000. Within five years, it had topped 1 million.
By the 1970s, the magazine had more than 7 million readers and had inspired raunchier imitations. Competition and the internet reduced circulation to less than 3 million by the 21st century, and the number of issues published annually was cut from 12 to 11.
In 2015, Playboy ceased publishing images of naked women, citing the proliferation of nudity on the internet.
Asked by The New York Times in 1992 of what he was proudest, Hefner responded: ‘‘That I changed attitudes toward sex. That nice people can live together now. That I decontaminated the notion of premarital sex. That gives me great satisfaction.’'
Hefner ran Playboy from his elaborate mansions, first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles, and became the flamboyant symbol of the lifestyle he espoused. For decades he was the pipe-smoking, silk pajama-wearing centrw of a constant party with celebrities and
Playboy models.
By his own account, Hefner had sex with more than a thousand women, including many pictured in his magazine.
Hefner was host of a television show, Playboy After Dark, and in 1960 opened a string of clubs around the world where waitresses wore revealing costumes with bunny ears and fluffy white bunny tails.
In the 21st century, he was back on TV in a cable reality show, The Girls
Next Door, with three live-in girlfriends in the Los Angeles Playboy mansion. Network TV briefly embraced Hefner’s empire in 2011 with the NBC drama The Playboy
Club, which failed to lure viewers and was cancelled after three episodes.
Drew Barrymore, Farrah Fawcett and Linda Evans were among those who posed for the magazine.
Several bunnies became celebrities, too, including singer Deborah Harry and model Lauren Hutton, both of whom had fond memories of their time with the Playboy organisation.
Hefner added that he was a strong advocate of First Amendment, civil rights and reproductive rights and that the magazine contained far more than centrefolds.
Playboy serialised Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 and later published fiction by John Updike, Doris Lessing and Vladimir Nabokov. It also specialised in long and candid interviews, from Fidel Castro and Frank Sinatra to Marlon Brando. The line that people read Playboy for the prose, not the pictures, was only partly a joke.