http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-hugh-hefner-snap-story.html
Hugh Hefner, Playboy founder, dies at 91
Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner has died.
Elaine Woo
Hugh Hefner, the incurable playboy who built a publishing and entertainment empire on the idea that Americans should shed their puritanical hang-ups and enjoy sex, has died. He was 91.
He died of natural causes at his home, the Playboy Mansion, according to Teri Thomerson, a Playboy spokesperson.
Hefner was the founder of Playboy magazine, launched amid the conservatism of the 1950s, when marriage and domesticity conferred social status. Hefner pitched an alternative standard — swinging singlehood — which portrayed the desire for sex as normal as craving apple pie. He redefined status for a generation of men, replacing lawn mowers and fishing gear with new symbols: martini glasses, a cashmere sweater and a voluptuous girlfriend, the necessary components of a new lifestyle that melded sex and materialism.
Thus, in Playboy magazine, the upwardly mobile man could ogle pictures of naked women called Playmates, chosen personally by Hefner for their large busts and girl-next-door wholesomeness. Surrounding the titillating visuals were interviews with luminaries from Albert Schweitzer to Malcolm X; short stories by such leading writers as Ernest Hemingway and John Updike; and advice columns on such matters as how to prepare the perfect vodka gimlet or appreciate jazz — all of which lent credence to many men's claims that they bought the magazine for the articles.
This combination of flesh and intellectuality made Playboy the world's bestselling men's magazine and Hefner a millionaire many times over. The venture gave him a pulpit from which to preach the virtues of a postwar revolution in morality and propelled sex into the American mainstream.
“Hefner was the first publisher to see that the sky would not fall and mothers would not march if he published bare bosoms; he realized that the old taboos were going,” Time magazine said in a 1967 cover story. “He took the old-fashioned, shame-thumbed girlie magazines, stripped off the plain wrapper, added gloss, class and culture. It proved to be a sure-fire formula.”
The magazine reflected Hefner himself — or at least the invention that became known the world over as Hefner, or simply Hef. He was the personification of the Playboy ideal, the pajama-loving lord of the grandest bachelor pad on Earth.
“If you don't swing, don't ring,” read a brass doorplate at the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago, a 48-room abode where Hefner reveled with bevies of Playmates on a rotating, circular bed. Later, he moved the party to Playboy Mansion West, a six-acre compound above Beverly Hills with 30 rooms, an underground grotto, a staff of 70 and a round-the-clock kitchen attuned to his unconventional schedule — scrambled eggs at, say, 5 p.m., or fried chicken at midnight.
He shared the fantasy not only through the magazine but through a string of Playboy Clubs, where anyone able to pay a modest membership fee could be served food and drinks by “Bunnies” — well-endowed women costumed in rabbit ears, puffy tails and satin corsets so tight that sneezing burst the seams. The black-and-white Bunny logo that adorned the magazine and all manner of merchandise, from cufflinks to cocktail napkins, became a coveted mark of suavity.
Just what the Bunny really stood for — sexual freedom or sexist oppression — became fodder for the cultural wars of the 1960s and ‘70s. Feminist Gloria Steinem fired one of the first shots when she posed as a Bunny and wrote a scathing expose in Show magazine in 1963. “Reading Playboy,” she later said, “feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”
Despite such criticism, Playboy's sales zoomed to 7 million copies a month in the 1970s — but that was a high from which the magazine inevitably would fall. The 1980s brought AIDs, the end of the Playboy clubs, the rise of the religious right, the Meese Commission on Pornography, all of which had a deleterious impact on circulation. Hefner's image was tainted by the suicide of a trusted associate who overdosed on drugs and his indirect connection to the Dorothy Stratten tragedy, in which the 1980 Playmate of the Year was murdered by her estranged husband.
Then, in 1985, Hefner had a stroke. Though he made a full recovery, he decided, as he put it, to “put down some luggage.” In 1988, he turned over day-to-day operations of his enterprises to his daughter, Christie, while retaining the editorship of the magazine.
The next year, the Playboy-in-Chief did the unthinkable: He got married and settled into monogamy for the better part of a decade.
When the marriage collapsed in the late 1990s, the king of sybarites was reborn. He entered the new millenium with a harem of blonde, buxom lovelies all young enough to be his granddaughters. The aging swinger seemed delighted, boasting to a reporter that he had sex “one way or another” everyday, but some observers smirked. “He is so pathetic,” Steinem told the New York Observer in 2005. “Now he’s going around with four young women in their 20s instead of just one…. I feel sorry for him.”
Hefner insisted he was just a relentless romantic, the eternal teenager for whom nothing was sweeter than to have a passionate crush on a girl who liked him back.
“Much of my life has been like an adolescent dream of an adult life,” he told The Times in 1992. “If you were still a boy, in almost a Peter Pan kind of way, and could have just the perfect life that you wanted to have, that's the life I invented for myself.”
As Hefner often told the story, most of the credit — or blame — belonged to his parents, Grace and Glenn Hefner.
Grace, a former schoolteacher, and Glenn, an accountant whose job kept him away from home for long hours, were devout Methodists, morally strict and emotionally reserved. Such restraint was in the bloodline, their son would later point out. For Glenn Hefner was a direct descendant of William Bradford, one of the English Puritan Separatists who sailed to America on the Mayflower in the early 1600s. The irony was not lost on Hugh Hefner, who would routinely cite this lineage when explaining his rebellion.
“Our family was Prohibitionist, Puritan in a very real sense. Never smoked, swore, drank, danced Or hugged. Oh, no. There was absolutely no hugging or kissing in my family,” Hefner told the Chicago Sun Times in 2004.
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