The life and death of the pyjama lama

Tall Texan and ace songwriter T-Bone Burnett wrote a song called Hefner and Disney.

Told as a fairy tale, it cunningly transposes the two. Disney is the pipe-smoking cod-philosopher who sells photos of naked go-go girls and Hefnerland is a place where stories of myth and magic are reduced to elaborate moldedplastic scuptures. Each man still makes sense presiding over the other’s fantasy world and the song judges them with equal stoniness as dupes of a wicked king ‘‘who wanted to rob the children of their dreams’’.

Hefner, who has died of natural causes, deserves acknowledgment as a publishing pioneer, an assailant of repressive times, and a goat who confused gratifications with happiness. Much will be made of the number of outstanding authors whose work he championed. He recognised talented writing and had the money and the readership (or viewership, anyway) to be able to commission it. He did oppose racist practices in the US and could make a claim to philanthropy.

But there’s no getting around it that, essentially, he made his fortune out of the frustrations of many a lonely male. In the end, the barbarians at the gate of the Playboy Mansion who robbed him of pretty much any social relevance, and a great deal of his income, weren’t the forces of repression at all.

They were just pornographers of greater diligence and less pretension. It turned out that Hefner’s ’’Playboy philosophy’’ really wasn’t such an essential part of his commercial success. As the more shamelessly sleazy publisher of Hustler magazine was quoted in The People vs Larry

Flynt: ’’Eight million people buy it, and no one reads. Gentleman...

Playboy is mocking you’’.

But the time Internet porn had rendered glossy girly magazines largely redundant Hefner, who could rationalise like a good’un, figured that he had liberated society as much as he could.

It was a case, in his mind, of job done. Yet the sense remains that what he portrayed as sophistication, and his more purse-lipped opponents condemned as debauchery, was eventually found out to be something of a grinding bore.

He denied that. He seemed at peace with the condemnations of those he saw as prudish but wanted the rest of the world to recognise his as a rewarding life. Yet he never seemed to allow the women who surrounded him to age conspicuously, even as he did so himself.

There’s resonance to reports of him, in later years, as a man medicated to retain a sense of personal potency, and similarly trying but failing to stay stimulated by the constant partying and tasteless opulence around him.

And of course, he was happy to have his own daughter be the CEO of Playboy Enterprises. But not to pose in his magazine.