Hugh Hefner obituary

Hugh Hefner obituary



One evening in 1967, Hugh Hefner, who has died aged 91, appeared on a TV special broadcast from the Playboy Mansion’s library. Puffing on his customary pipe, and flanked by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox and conservative editor William F Buckley, the billionaire porn magazine magnate and American men’s titillator-in-chief argued that the religious basis for morality was obsolete.



If America was to fulfil its manifest destiny and its citizens were to genuinely enjoy life, it needed to be liberated sexually. This, he said, was what Playboy Enterprises, of which he was the CEO and visionary founder, was patriotically supplying. In this, arguably, Hefner was fulfilling his mother’s wish that he become a missionary. True, his work involved more pool parties, voluptuous women pillow-fighting and wearisome boasts about sexual prowess (“I have slept with thousands of women, and they all still like me,” he told Esquire magazine in 2002) than previous missionaries found necessary, but he always imagined himself to be a proselytiser for hedonistic anti-puritanism.



In the foreword to The Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, 1900-1999, he wrote: “Sex is the primary motivating factor in the course of human history, and in the 20th century it has emerged from the taboos and controversy that have surrounded it throughout the ages to claim its rightful place in society.” Others saw his impact on human flourishing somewhat differently. The feminist writer Gloria Steinem, who went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 to write an exposé of working conditions, said of her experience: “I learned what it’s like to be hung on a meat hook.”



Whatever Hefner’s missionary pretensions, he certainly had business acumen. In 1953 he founded what would become a multi-billion-dollar industry with a few nude photos of Marilyn Monroe. The first issue of Playboy sold 50,000 copies nationwide. When, in 1963, he was arrested finally for selling obscene literature (after publication of an issue featuring nude shots of Jayne Mansfield), the jury was unable to reach a verdict.



His initial success fulfilled an adolescent fantasy. At high school he had written an essay criticising America for avoiding frank discussions about sex, and in his college newspaper he had hailed a study written by Alfred Kinsey called Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (aka the Kinsey Report, 1948), which shocked America for frankly discussing such issues as sadomasochism, homosexuality and the frequency of marital sex. By publishing a magazine with two transgressive breasts on its cover, Hefner started a revolution. “The magazine reflected hip, urban dissatisfaction with the stodgy conformism of the Eisenhower era,” wrote Steven Watts in the biography Mr Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream.



According to Salon.com’s Chris Colin: “America was seeing the advent of the urban single male who, lest his subversive departure from domestic norms suggest homosexuality, was now enjoying new photos of nude women every month.” That bachelor was seduced not just by nude women but Playboy’s post-austerity aura of sophistication. Not all of Playboy’s demographic had grotto hot tubs, nor could they be reasonably expected to be pawed hourly by scantily dressed Playmates like their favourite magazine’s publisher, but they could aspire. Hefner became a fantasy figure, a lucky guy who, unlike his readers, was probably having sex right now, possibly with four Playboy Bunnies on a revolving bed. His readers dreamed not just of emulating Hef sexually, but of the whole Playboy lifestyle, one premised on cashmere sweaters, good pipes, fancy cocktails, essays by Norman Mailer and – crucially – no balls and chains or bawling kids. The conservative group Concerned Women for America claimed Playboy “belittled marriage”. Naomi Wolf wrote: “A lot of men stay unmarried decade after decade because they bought the Hugh Hefner line that polygamist bachelorhood is ideal, and they lead largely empty lives.”



This irrepressible swinger and/or corrupter was born in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised by Grace and Glenn Hefner in what he later recalled as “a repressed midwestern Methodist home”. His father’s lineage was impeccably puritan: he was directly descended from the Plymouth governor William Bradford. Grace, whom the adult Hugh would describe as running an unimpeachably puritan household, instructed him and his friends on the facts of reproduction from an illustrated book. Hefner later complained she had only taught him about sexual biology, not its emotional aspe