Hugh Hefner Dies At 91

Hugh Hefner, who became both a cultural icon and a catalyst and reflector of vast social changes, has died at the age of 91.

Hugh Hefner Playboy

Hugh Hefner, who became a symbol and a driver of massive cultural change in the United States and around the world when launched Playboy magazine in 1953. has died at the age of 91:

Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment-industry giant — all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women (and sometimes marrying them) well into his 80s — died on Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion near Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 91.

His death was announced by Playboy Enterprises.

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27 years old, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

This scene projected an era’s “premium boys’ style,” Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties,” said in an interview. “It’s part of an ensemble with the James Bond movies, John F. Kennedy, swinging, the guy who is young, vigorous, indifferent to the bonds of social responsibility.”

Mr. Hefner was reviled, first by guardians of the 1950s social order — J. Edgar Hoover among them — and later by feminists. But Playboy’s circulation reached one million by 1960 and peaked at about seven million in the 1970s.

Long after other publishers made the nude “Playmate” centerfold look more sugary than daring, Playboy remained the most successful men’s magazine in the world. Mr. Hefner’s company branched into movie, cable and digital production, sold its own line of clothing and jewelry, and opened clubs, resorts and casinos.

The brand faded over the years, and by 2015 the magazine’s circulation had dropped to about 800,000 — although among men’s magazines it was outsold by only one, Maxim, which was founded in 1995.

Mr. Hefner remained editor in chief even after agreeing to the magazine’s startling decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photographs. Mr. Hefner handed over creative control of Playboy last year to his son Cooper Hefner. Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive, Scott Flanders, acknowledged that the internet had overrun the magazine’s province: “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” The magazine’s website, Playboy.com, had already been revamped as a “safe for work” site. Playboy was no longer illicit. (Early this year, the magazine brought back nudes.)

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs.”

“You couldn’t talk politically,” Mr. Feiffer said in the 1992 documentary “Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time.” “You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”

Playboy was born more in fun than in anger. Mr. Hefner’s first publisher’s message, written at his kitchen table in Chicago, announced, “We don’t expect to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths.”

Still, Mr. Hefner wielded fierce resentment against his era’s sexual strictures, which he said had choked off his own youth. A virgin until he was 22, he married his longtime girlfriend. Her confession to an earlier affair, Mr. Hefner told an interviewer almost 50 years later, was “the single most devastating experience of my life.”

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said in a 2015 interview. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was.

“It’s laissez-faire. It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

The Playboy Philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all its aspects, for which Mr. Hefner won civil liberties awards. He supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow laws.

The magazine was a forum for serious interviews, the subjects including Jimmy Carter (who famously confessed, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times”), Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X. In the early days Mr. Hefner published Ray Bradbury (Playboy bought his “Fahrenheit 451” for $400), Herbert Gold and Budd Schulberg. It later drew, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.

Hugh Marston Hefner was born on April 9, 1926, the son of Glenn and Grace Hefner, Nebraska-born Methodists who had moved to Chicago. Decades later, he still told interviewers that he grew up “with a lot of repression,” and he often noted that his father was a descendant of William Bradford, the Puritan governor of the Plymouth Colony.

Though father and son reached an accommodation — the elder Mr. Hefner became Playboy’s accountant and treasurer — neither changed moral compass points. Glenn Hefner, who died in 1976, said he had never looked at the pictures in the magazine.

As a child, Mr. Hefner spent hours writing horror stories and drawing cartoons. At Steinmetz High School, he said, “I reinvented myself” as the suave, breezy “Hef,” newspaper cartoonist and party-loving leader of what he called “our gang.” At the University of Illinois, after serving in the Army, he edited the humor magazine and started a photo feature called “Co-ed of the Month.”

He married a high school classmate, Millie Williams, and began what he described as a deadening slog into 1950s adulthood: He took a job in the personnel department of a cardboard-box manufacturer. (He said he quit when asked to discriminate against black applicants.) He wrote advertising copy for a department store, and then for Esquire magazine. He became circulation promotion manager of another magazine, Children’s Activities.

Meanwhile he was plotting his own magazine, which was to be, among other things, a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons. The first issue of Playboy was financed with $600 of his own money and several thousand more in borrowed funds, including $1,000 from his mother. But his biggest asset was a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe. He had bought the rights for $500.

Plenty of other men’s magazines showed nude women, but most were unabashedly crude and forever dodging postal censors. Mr. Hefner aimed to be the first to claim a mainstream readership and mainstream distribution.

When Playboy reached newsstands in December 1953, its press run of 51,000 sold out. The publisher, instantly famous, would soon become a millionaire; after five years, the magazine’s annual profit was $4 million and its rabbit logo was recognized around the world.

Mr. Hefner ran the magazine and then the business empire largely from his bedroom, working on a round bed that revolved and vibrated. At first he was reclusive and frenetic, powered past dawn by amphetamines and Pepsi-Cola. In later years, even after giving up Dexedrine, he was still frenetic, and still fiercely attentive to his magazine.

His own public playboy persona emerged after he left his wife and children, Christie and David, in 1959. That year his new syndicated television series, “Playboy’s Penthouse,” put the wiry, intense Mr. Hefner, pipe in hand, in the nation’s living rooms. The set recreated his mansion on North State Parkway, rich in sybaritic amusements, where he greeted entertainers like Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, and intellectuals and writers like Max Lerner, Norman Mailer and Alex Haley, while bunches of glamorous young women milled around. (A later TV show, “Playboy After Dark,” was syndicated in 1969 and 1970.)

In the Playboy offices, life imitated image. Mr. Hefner told a film interviewer that in the early days, yes, “everybody was coupling with everybody,” including him. He later estimated that he slept with more than 1,000 women. Over and over, he would say, “I’m the boy who dreamed the dream.”

Friends described him as both charming and shy, even unassuming, and intensely loyal. “Hef was always big for the girls who got depressed or got in a jam of some sort,” the artist LeRoy Neiman, one of the magazine’s main illustrators for more than 50 years, said in an interview in 1999. “He’s a friend. He’s a good person. I couldn’t cite anything he ever did that was malicious to anybody.”

At the same time, Mr. Hefner adored celebrity, his and others’. Mr. Neiman, who sometimes lived at the Playboy Mansion, said: “It was nothing to breakfast there with comedians like Mort Sahl, professors, any kind of person who had something on his mind that was controversial or new. At the parties in the early days, Alex Haley used to hang around. Tony Curtis and Hugh O’Brian were always there. Mick Jagger stayed there.”

The glamour rubbed off on Mr. Hefner’s new enterprise, the Playboy Club, which was crushingly popular when it opened in Chicago in 1960. Dozens more followed. The waitresses, called bunnies, were trussed in brief satin suits with cotton fluffs fastened to their derrières.

One bunny briefly employed in the New York club would earn Mr. Hefner’s lasting enmity. She was an impostor, a 28-year-old named Gloria Steinem who was working undercover for Show magazine. Her article, published in 1963, described exhausting hours, painfully tight uniforms (in which half-exposed breasts floated on wadded-up dry cleaner bags) and vulgar customers.

Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on a television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

Mr. Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists then called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks are our natural enemy. 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.”

The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline ”Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue contained an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana.)

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, ”in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright of anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

Whatever one thought of his magazine, or of Hefner as a person, it’s hard to deny the role that both he and Playboy played in the vast cultural changes that occurred over the years during which he was perhaps the best known. These include changes on just in sexual mores and in the public’s attitude when it comes to issues such as birth control, abortion rights, women’s rights, and a whole host of other issues that are too numerous to mention. In hindsight, of course, it seems clear that these changes were likely to come regardless of whether or not Hefner had begun publishing his magazine, but it’s hard to deny the role that Playboy played in promoting not only the libertine-ish lifestyle that Hefner projected but also in helping to propel public discussion of issues and ideas that were formerly swept under the rug, suppressed, or quite simply not discussed at all. Hefner and his empire not only helped to promote the discussion of those issues, but also to push public opinion in a specific direction that reflected not just Hefner’s personal beliefs, but also a vision of a world where previously taboo topics like sexuality and gender roles could be discussed openly. For that at least, he deserves a strong degree of credit both for prompting the debate and advancing a point of view that was far more liberal, or perhaps the better word in libertarian, in a social sense than what America was experiencing the post-war world of the 1950s.

One way that the magazine helped to promote those ideas was through the publication of interviews, essays, and works of fiction by a wide range of authors who were not able to find an outlet among the more tradition-bound media of the time such as that controlled by media giants like Time-Life and other large publishers. This included figures that would like become famous in their own right such as Ray Bradbury and Vladimir Nabakov. In time, the magazine became as well known for its monthly interviews and fiction as it was for its nude pictorials. The magazine also featured content from or about people who had spoken out against its philosophy or even its very existence, such as William F. Buckley Jr. In time, it became a common joke to say that one was reading Playboy just for the interviews.

In the end, though, it was the centerfolds and the photographs that made the magazine famous, and that’s why the announcement in October 2015 that the magazine would be dropping nude photographs in favor of a more soft-core format similar to what appears in competing magazines such as Maxim was such big news. After all, it was that famous photograph of a young, nude, Marilyn Monroe that marked the magazine’s first issue, which was published on October 1, 1953, that defined the magazine for more than a generation. The fact that Playboy, which was essentially the last of the classic men’s magazines still being published, was taking this step was seen by many as a huge cultural shift of its own, although as I noted at the time the decision was based more out of a desire to protect the Playboy brand, which had gone beyond the magazine long ago, than it was a reflection of any real cultural change. That experiment didn’t last very long, though, and by February of this year, the magazine had announced that nude photographs would be returning to the pages of the magazine. It wasn’t as big a marketing mistake as New Coke, but it was a mistake nonetheless.

How you judge Hugh Hefner may depend in the end on how you feel about the issues he and his raised during the height of its influence. This includes not only one’s point of view on issues such as sexuality and freedom of speech but also one’s point of view on the appropriateness of even the soft-core brand of pornography that Playboy represents. Viewed from today’s point of view, the magazine was and is decidedly tame compared to what one can easily find on the Internet or even on television shows such as Game of Thrones. The fact that such material remains taboo in most respects at least in some people’s eyes reflects the fact that the debate that Hefner helped start has had negative consequences. Additionally, the magazine came under fire from women’s rights activists who saw it as reflective of sexism and a promoter of the idea that women were little more than sex objects, a view that became somewhat ironic when Hefner’s daughter took over management of the company. Whatever one’s view on those issues, though, it’s clear that Hefner and his magazine played a significant role in leading and reflecting massive social changes, most of which have been for the better.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Hal_10000 says:

    Hef was also big on LGBT rights, civil rights, free speech and promoting women into positions of management. He walked the walk on all those issues. Hard to mourn a man who died wealthy at age 91, but I think it would be fine to have a drink in his honor.

  2. MBunge says:

    In many ways, Hefner makes a great avatar for the last half century of so – a largely benign force for overall positive social change that was accompanied by more malicious hangers on and who leaves behind a world better in ways he intended but also worse in ways he didn’t.

    Mike

  3. grumpy realist says:

    Ah yes, the Great Satan according to too many social conservatives. You should hear Rod Dreher fulminate about The Sexual Revolution over at TAC. (This is, of course, the same man who moans about how Ockham and all those other wicked, wicked Nominalists back in the 13th century sent Western Civilization off track.)

    What never fails to amaze me is none of those squawking about the ‘orrid, ‘orrid Sexual Revolution have ever noticed that it was the little darlings growing up in the cozy, Leave-it-to-Beaver cocoon of the 1950s who turned into the rebels of the 1960s.

    A utopian culture that can’t even manage to last for one generation doesn’t seem to be that laudable to me.

  4. Paul Hooson says:

    Part of his political impact was the rise of George McGovern in 1972 and the eventual legalization of marijuana as well as the larger acceptance of pornography as entertainment. Although he was far more liberal socially than most of society, he had an impact making society more liberal socially. His magazine was a really well-rounded men’s magazine with many well-written features in addition to some high quality nude model pictorals. Today, most of the other surviving men’s magazines such as GALLERY and GENESIS are owned by a small group of owners, printed in Canada, and mostly hardcore picture books compared PLAYBOY being an actual magazine sometimes 300 pages big! – PLAYBOY was a quality product from a bygone era…

  5. Mister Bluster says:

    I was all of twelve years old and had just advanced from the grade school Cub Scout Den to the local Boy Scout Troop. Had to be summer of 1960 in Webster, New York. To raise money the troop
    organized paper drives on Saturdays. We would get all decked out in our uniforms and go house to house knocking on doors and collecting any newspapers that the neighbors might have saved for us.
    Some of the dads of the scouts would drive down the suburban streets and we would throw the papers in the open trunk of the car as we went. Don’t remember where they were discovered but by the time the papers were being dropped off at a schoolyard to be loaded on to a truck several Playboy magazines had slipped out of one of the bundles!
    Talk about manna from heaven!
    I ended up with a centerfold that I folded up even more just to get it in my pants pocket. When I got home I folded it up again and somehow crammed it into my wallet so that I could carry it around.
    Don’t know how many times I went down in the wooded ravine behind our house to gaze on my prize and smoke cigarettes that one of my friends had stolen from his mom’s pack of Salems. All that folding and unfolding took a toll on Miss Playmate of the Month. Probably burned it and buried the ashes when the portrait wore out.
    Wouldn’t want to catch the wrath of my parents if they ever discovered my evil pleasure!

    Thanks Hef
    RIP

  6. al-Ameda says:

    Hefner is responsible for the incredible post-war growth in the
    Breast Enhancement industry. Hefner created thousands of high-paying jobs in cosmetic surgery, lingerie, and modelling businesses.

  7. dazedandconfused says:

    @grumpy realist:

    Re: “Great Satan”

    I don’t think Satan is all that great myself. Contract has been on the table for my entire life with my signature in blood, notarized and everything on it….and He won’t sign. It’s for the same deal Hef got.