Hugh Hefner, Playboy founder, dies at 91
LOS ANGELES - 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 best-selling 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
