Hugh Hefner, Playboy founder who built his empire in Chicago, dies at ag...

Hugh Hefner, Playboy founder who built his empire in Chicago, dies at age 91



some years ago, sitting in his castlelike mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, Hugh Hefner was telling a visitor about the Halloween party taking place there in a few days. It would be — what? — the 7,435th party of Hefner’s exceptional charmed and successful life, a lavish bash for 1,000 or so of his closet and most comely friends.



“Now, this is a costume party,” said Hefner. “You will have to wear a costume.”　



“I was thinking,” said the visitor, “that, with all due respect, I might get some pajamas, a robe, a pipe, slippers and a Pepsi and going as, well, the young Hugh　Hefner.”



The then 73-year-old Hefner laughed. He gave a sly smile and said, “I’m sorry. That won’t work. I’m going as the young Hugh Hefner.”



Influential and controversial, admired and vilified, and seemingly forever young, the Chicago-born publisher of Playboy magazine and the Bunny-emblazoned empire that it spawned, Hugh Marston Hefner died peacefully at home Wednesday from natural causes. He was 91.



That life started on April 9, 1926, at Michael Reese Hospital, where he was born the first of the two children—younger brother Keith was born in 1929; he died in 2016 at 87 — of Grace and Glenn Hefner, she a schoolteacher and he an accountant and both originally from Nebraska.



The family lived in Chicago at 1922 N. New England Ave. in the Galewood neighborhood on the Northwest Side, where they attended Methodist church and the children went to Sayre Elementary School. When he was 8 years old, Hugh Hefner started a school newspaper called The Pepper, despite a warning from a concerned teacher that “if he continues to waste time on this, he will never amount to anything.”



“But I was a smart little boy,” he told a Tribune reporter in 1999.



He attended Steinmetz High School and later recalled, “The best time of my life before Playboy was my last two years at Steinmetz. It was a coming-of-age time. It was the first time I went steady. I was a class leader, writing and performing in plays and shows, working on the paper. The things I enjoyed were the things between classes.”



One of his passions was cartooning, and as a teenager he created a magazine called Shudder and had a Shudder Club for all of his pals. He also started a cartoon autobiography called “School Daze,” which he continued while serving two years in the U.S. Army infantry and later in college.　



His other early passion was the movies.　



“There is no way to underestimate the effect movies had on me as a boy,” Hefner　said. “My dreams came alive at the Montclare Theatre on Grand Avenue.” He remembered, as a child of the Depression, watching cinematic depictions of the roaring ’20s, “all those images of the Jazz Age, the flappers ... and thinking that I’d missed the party.”



He would not miss many parties the rest of the way.



In 1946, after a brief stint at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he took a summer art course in anatomy, Hefner enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By doubling up on classes, he graduated 21/2 years later with a bachelor of science degree, majoring in psychology. While at university, he edited the campus humor magazine, Shaft, introducing a feature he called “Coed of the Month.” He also drew cartoons for the campus newspaper, The Daily Illini. At the time, he began to develop a philosophy that linked freedom of speech and the press with individual rights and a rejection of what he called “our legacy of puritan repression.”



“For me, journalism isn’t just one more profession,” Hefner said years later, when donating $500,000 to endow student fellowships in the university’s school of journalism. “It is one that goes to the heart of democracy.”



His own professional path began in Chicago with a job as a promotion copywriter for Esquire magazine. When that publication decided to move to New York, Hefner asked for a $5 raise to his $60-a-week salary. When it was denied, Hefner decided to stay behind and start his own magazine.



He was married by then and a father. He had wed his high school sweetheart, Mildred Williams, in 1949, and they shared their small apartment in Hyde Park with baby daughter Christie, born in 1952.



“The marriage was not good from the outset,” Hefner would later say. “We both had serious doubts before getting married. But I had no other game plan except to get married and, somehow, live happily ever after. But very soon I started becoming afraid that I was turning into my parents. I started to see that happening to my peers. People who were so much fun in high school were going dull.　



“I would walk around looking at the lights of high-rises. I felt like an outsider. I would fantasize about the lives that were going on inside those apartments and wonder whether I would ever be a part of it.”　



He mortgaged his furniture and took out a loan for $600 and borrow