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Penthouse founder Bob Guccione dies aged 79
Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine and created an erotic corporate empire around it, only to see it crumble as his investments soured and the world of pornography turned toward video and the internet, has died. He was 79.
Published: 7:00AM BST 21 Oct 2010
Bob Guccione in 1972 Photo: REX FEATURES
Bob Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidize his art career and was the magazine's first photographer Photo: REUTERS
Guccione estimated that Penthouse earned $4 billion during his reign as publisher Photo: EPA
A statement issued by the Guccione family said that he died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Texas. He had battled lung cancer for several years. Penthouse reached the pinnacle of its popularity in September 1984, when it published nude pictures of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Williams, now a singer and actress, was forced to relinquish her crown after the release of the issue, which sold nearly 6 million copies and reportedly made $14 million.
A frustrated artist who once attended a Catholic seminary, Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidise his art career and was the magazine's first photographer. He introduced the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution.
Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Hugh Hefner's Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women, dubbed Penthouse Pets. "We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Guccione told The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. He added that he attained a stylised eroticism in his photography by posing his models looking away from the camera.
"To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen," he said. "That was the sexy part. That was the part that none of our competition understood." Guccione estimated that Penthouse earned $4 billion during his reign as publisher. He was listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people with a net worth of about $400 million in 1982.
Guccione built a corporate empire under the General Media Inc. umbrella that included book publishing and merchandising divisions and Viva, a magazine featuring male nudes aimed at a female audience. He also created Penthouse Forum, the pocket-size magazine that played off the success of the racy letters to the editor that began, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought I'd be writing you..." But he lost much of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures.
Probably his best-known business failure was a $17.5 million investment in the 1979 production of the X-rated film Caligula. Malcolm McDowell was cast as the decadent emperor of the title, and the supporting cast included Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole. Distributors shunned the film, with its graphic scenes of lesbianism and incest. However, it eventually became General Media's most popular DVD. Guccione's staff, which included family members, often described the publisher as mercurial.
"He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt," wrote Patricia Bosworth in a 2005 Vanity Fair article about Guccione, for whom she had worked as executive editor of Viva. "He hired and fired people - then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next."
