Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who helped
usher in the 1960s sexual revolution with his groundbreaking
men’s magazine and built a business empire around his libertine
lifestyle, died on Wednesday at the age of 91, Playboy
Enterprises said.
Hefner, once called the “prophet of pop hedonism” by Time
magazine, peacefully passed away at his home, Playboy
Enterprises said in a statement.
Hefner was sometimes characterized as an oversexed Peter Pan
as he kept a harem of young blondes that numbered as many as
seven at his legendary Playboy Mansion. This was chronicled in
“The Girls Next Door,” a TV reality show that aired from 2005
through 2010. He said that thanks to the impotency-fighting drug
Viagra he continued exercising his libido into his 80s.
“I’m never going to grow up,” Hefner said in a CNN interview
when he was 82. “Staying young is what it is all about for me.
Holding on to the boy and long ago I decided that age really
didn’t matter and as long as the ladies … feel the same way,
that’s fine with me.”
Hefner settled down somewhat in 2012 at age 86 when he took
Crystal Harris, who was 60 years younger, as his third wife.
He said his swinging lifestyle might have been a reaction to
growing up in a repressed family where affection was rarely
exhibited. His so-called stunted childhood led to a
multi-million-dollar enterprise that centered on naked women but
also espoused Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy” based on romance,
style and the casting off of mainstream mores.
That philosophy came to life at the legendary parties in his
mansions – first in his native Chicago, then in Los Angeles’
exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood – where legions of male
celebrities swarmed to mingle with beautiful young women.
Long before the Internet made nudity ubiquitous, Hefner
faced obscenity charges in 1963 for publishing and circulating
photos of disrobed celebrities and aspiring stars but he was
acquitted.
Hefner created Playboy as the first stylish glossy men’s
magazine and in addition to nude fold-outs, it had intellectual
appeal with top writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol
Oates, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin and Alex Haley for men
who liked to say they did not buy the magazine just for the
pictures.
In-depth interviews with historic figures such as Fidel
Castro, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and John Lennon also
were featured regularly.
“I’ve never thought of Playboy quite frankly as a sex
magazine,” Hefner told CNN in 2002. “I always thought of it as a
lifestyle magazine in which sex was one important ingredient.”
Hefner proved to be a genius at branding. The magazine’s
rabbit silhouette became one of the best known logos in the
world and the “bunny” waitresses in his Playboy nightclubs were
instantly recognizable in their low-cut bathing suit-style
uniforms with bow ties, puffy cotton tails and pert rabbit ears.
Hef, as he began calling himself in high school, also was a
living logo for Playboy, presiding over his realm in silk
pajamas and a smoking jacket while puffing on a pipe.
“What I created came out of my own adolescent dreams of
fantasies,” he told CNN. “I was trying to redefine what it meant
to be a young, urban unattached male.”
After writing copy for Esquire magazine, Hefner married and
worked in the circulation department of Children’s Activities
magazine when he began plotting what would become Playboy
magazine.
The first issue came out in December 1953 – featuring nude
photos of actress Marilyn Monroe – and was a hit. As the
magazine took off, it was attacked from the right because of the
nudity and from the left by feminists who said it reduced women
to sex objects.
Hefner once declared sex to be “the primary motivating
factor in the course of human history” and, using that as a
business model Playboy flourished during the sexual revolution
and into the 1970s with monthly circulation hitting 7 million.
He ran into trouble in the 1980s with competition from
Penthouse and Hustler – magazines that had much more explicit
photos – and Playboy’s social impact faded considerably by the
21st century. The Playboy Clubs closed in 1991 but would be
partially revived.
After suffering a minor stroke in 1985, Hefner made daughter
Christie chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises and she
gave the business a makeover before stepping down in 2009.
Hefner’s son, Cooper, who was nearly 40 years younger than
Christie, assumed a major role in the company in 2014.
Playboy magazine, starting with its March 2016 issue, did
away with full frontal nudity in a rebranding that would have
been unimaginable in the publication’s heyday.
Playboy resumed nudity a year later as Hefner’s son Cooper
announced a new philosophy for the company.
In August 2016, one of Hefner’s neighbors, a private equity
investor, announced he had bought the Playboy mansion for $100
million with the understanding Hefner could stay there until he
died.
Before Playboy, Hefner married Millie Williams in 1949 and
they divorced in 1959, starting a period in which he became the
ultimate bachelor. The many women who shared his round,
motorized, vibrating bed included models who posed in his
magazine and in 1989 he married one of them, Playmate of the
Year Kimberly Conrad.
They had two sons but Hefner’s experiment with traditional
domesticity ended in divorce after 10 years. Conrad moved into a
home next to Hefner so he could stay close to their sons.
In 2008 after one of his girlfriends, Holly Madison, broke
up with Hefner, he said he had hoped to spend the rest of his
life with her. Shortly afterward he added 19-year-old twins to
his group before turning to marriage again with Harris.
