The playboy who sold sex to America
Hugh Hefner 1926-2017
Shortly after the second of the two Kinsey Reports was published in 1953, Hugh Hefner launched Playboy – and a “new kind of American Dream entered the culture”, said The Atlantic. In Hefner’s world, “nude women – wholesome, unthreatening, uncomplicated – were part and parcel of the trappings of a modern masculine lifestyle”. No more would men be constrained by dreary, Eisenhower-era rectitude; instead, they could be polyamorous bachelors enjoying, in the booming postwar economy, fine wine, good food and beautiful women. Along with nude centrefolds, the magazine featured articles by the likes of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, John Updike and Gore Vidal, and by 1970 it was selling seven million copies a month.
Ensconced with his harem of Playmates in the Playboy mansion, Hefner presented himself as a great libertarian – a missionary for a permissive society, a proponent of free speech and equal rights: women as well as men should be free to enjoy their bodies. In addition to promoting hedonism in his magazines, he gave money to various progressive causes, said The Guardian, including the right to abortion, and to contraception on demand. Yet there was the suspicion that his support was at least partly self-serving: that he wanted to liberate women so that they would be more willing, and more able, to have no-strings sex with men. Asked in 1970 when he himself planned to go out with a fluffy bunny tail affixed to his rear end, Hefner could only look back in stunned silence.
Hugh Hefner was born in 1926 to Glenn and Grace Hefner, and grew up in what he described as “a repressed Midwestern Methodist home” in Chicago. (He liked to note that his father was a descendant of the Puritan governor of the Plymouth colony, William Bradford.) As a child, he enjoyed drawing and writing, but a defining moment came in his teens when he was rejected by a girl he’d been dating. At that point, he said, he transformed himself into a “Sinatra-like figure” – the urbane, breezy “Hef”. In his yearbook, he was voted the pupil most likely to succeed. Yet ten years on, he was married to the first girl he’d slept with, Mildred, had two children to support, and was working, unhappily, as a copywriter.
Inspired by the Kinsey Reports’ revelations about Middle America’s sexual habits, he began plotting a mainstream magazine that would portray the more liberated, sophisticated lifestyle to which he aspired. He thought of calling it Stag Party – until a men’s adventure magazine called Stag threatened legal action. With investors including his own mother (who, he said, didn’t believe in the venture, but did believe in her son), he produced the first issue of Playboy in December 1953. It included nude photos of Marilyn Monroe that he had bought for $500. “If you’re somebody’s sister, wife or mother-in-law,” the magazine declared, “and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to Ladies Home Companion.”
The print run of 51,000 sold out, said The New York Times; Hefner became famous overnight and, soon, the owner of a multimillion-dollar business, its rabbit-head logo recognised around the world. By then, he had an open marriage: Mildred had agreed to this because she’d been unfaithful to him during the War, and because she thought it would save the marriage. But in 1959, he left her and moved into the original Playboy mansion, in Chicago, where he ran his business from a round, revolving bed, wearing his trademark silk pyjamas and gown. A brass plate on the door read: “If You Don’t Swing, Don’t Ring.”
That year, he launched a TV series, Playboy Penthouse, featuring interviews with celebrities in a recreation of his home (complete with pneumatic young women milling around in the background). At a time when Jim Crow laws were still enforced in some US states, he lost sponsors by insisting on inviting African American stars such as Nat King Cole onto the show. His anything-goes Playboy parties became magnets for film stars and rock musicians (even more so when he moved to Los Angeles) and the first Playboy club, featuring young women trussed up in corsets, and wearing bunny ears and tails, opened in Chicago in 1960. There were also “bunnies” to serve him on his own jet, The Big Bunny.
Among the hostesses at the club in New York, however, was an imposter – the journalist Gloria Steinem, working undercover for Show magazine. In an article published in 1963, she described poor, ill-educated young women working long hours in painfully tight uniforms, being leered at by rude customers. Hefner was furious. “These chicks are our natural enemy,” he wrote in an internal memo in 1970. “What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.” He insisted that by “decontaminating” pre-marital sex, he had liberated women, and over the years countless high profile women agreed to pose (in varying degrees of undress) for Playboy, including Farrah Fawcett, Madonna and Sharon Stone.
The 1980s were a difficult decade for Hefner; he lost his casino licences in London and Atlantic City; and he lost readers to raunchier men’s magazines. In 1985, he suffered a minor stroke, apparently brought on, in part, by the negative publicity surrounding the murder of a former Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. The business bounced back in the 1990s, with his daughter at the helm; but Hefner’s image was by then dented by various accounts of life inside the Playboy mansion, which was not quite as glamorous as it might have seemed. Former Playmates claimed the house was falling into disrepair, with stained mattresses, dog faeces in the corners and furnishings that hadn’t been updated since the 1980s. In 2011, 120 people fell ill after taking a dip in his famous grotto. Members of his harem were given a weekly $1,000 “clothes allowance”, but were obliged to abide by a 9pm curfew and to dress in “sleepwear”. They were expected to line up to have sex with their ageing benefactor, and perform sex acts in front of him. In 2010, he revealed that he was taking “a lot” of Viagra.
Hefner claimed to have slept with 1,000 women over his lifetime, and with up to 12 at any one time. Yet he wasn’t the perpetual bachelor. In 1989, he married Kimberley Conrad, the 1989 Playmate of the Year. The couple had two children before separating a decade later. In 2012, he married Crystal Harris; aged 24 when they became engaged, she had previously appeared on a reality TV show about her life as a Playmate.
“He ran his business from a round, revolving bed, wearing his trademark silk pyjamas and gown”