Posted on 09/28/2017 3:59:12 PM PDT by heterosupremacist
Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment-industry giant — all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women (and sometimes marrying them) well into his 80s — died on Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion, in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles. He was 91.
The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.
He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:
“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
This scene projected an era’s “premium boys’ style,” Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties,” said in an interview. “It’s part of an ensemble with the James Bond movies, John F. Kennedy, swinging, the guy who is young, vigorous, indifferent to the bonds of social responsibility.”
Mr. Hefner was reviled, first by guardians of the 1950s social order — J. Edgar Hoover among them — and later by feminists. But Playboy’s circulation reached one million by 1960 and peaked at about seven million in the 1970s.
(Excerpt) Read more at shoebat.com ...
The brand faded over the years, its flagship magazine’s circulation declining to less than a million.
Mr. Hefner remained editor in chief even after agreeing to the magazine’s startling (and, as it turned out, short-lived) decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photographs. In 2016, he handed over creative control of Playboy to his son Cooper Hefner. Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive, Scott Flanders, acknowledged that the internet had overrun the magazine’s province.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” GRRR!
Sorry, Mr Peckinsniff, but it looks like the cure
for your pornography is more pornography.
Playboy magazine was a financial loser by the early 70’s.
It just couldn’t keep up with the times.
What kept Playboy Enterprises afloat was their casino in London and some of the clubs.
When the casino was shut down, they were in big trouble and barely survived until the 80’s when they were able to put up a cable tv channel using old footage they had shot over the years.
I recall reading where a movie director, maybe Roman Polanski, said that Hefner ruined a rising star and somehow led to her murder by her ex-husband.
When Polanski thinks you are bad then you must be really bad.
This can't all be blamed on Hefner in particular or "the Media/Academia" in general. Racy magazines, movies, and research (e.g. Kinsey, etc.) gave some people permission to lead more perverted lives than their peers would have supported. But then people took advantage of that permission and led more perverted lives. Then racier magazines, movies, etc. were more readily tolerated and the cycle continued.
If we want to blame anyone it's probably Gutenberg. Once it was easy to spread copies of good ideas it became equally easy to spread copies of bad ones as well. And people being people tend to like the bad ideas better than the good ones.
Was that Dorothy Stratten depicted in “Star 80”?
Now he's in his sixties, never married, has no family, and lives alone.
Oh, and he is a huge liberal. Hates DJT with a passion, hates Republicans, hates Christians, and feels the need to tell everyone he meets how he feels, even people he knows to be conservative.
Was it Roman Polanski or Peter Bogdanovich? Peter was dating Dorothy Stratten, who was killed by her ex-husband. I seem to recall that the portrayal of Hefner in “Star 80” was not flattering.
The Enemy is really chuckling about his new tenant.
Good. I see you overcame clumsy meter for once. LOL
OK, now I remember. It was Dorothy Stratten and it was Bogdanovitch.
My memory is going.
The only really bad actor in her story seemed to be her creepy boyfriend Snider.
Wasted life, poor guy.
Most men have that kind of mind poison floatin around...but he semilegitimized it by publishing and sellin it..men and women took the bait..bought the mag and tried to live it...and now hundreds of millions of vd infections..unwanted and/or aborted children..broken marriages, bodies,relationships, and minds later we stand stupefied. Did he help pave and widen the road or were we goin there anyways?
Hefner may have, used and abused multiple girlfriends but at least he lived long enough to see them speak out against him is all I can say. And women having that power doesn’t come down to only one or two factors. If everything was going so swimmingly before the revolutions of the 1960’s the world as we knew it wouldn’t have changed so dramatically.
Well, there are some nuances that come into play that prevent me from saying his is a wasted life, but certainly as far as leaving anything behind of himself, yes.
Very sad. Admired women greatly, but only as pictures. He used to talk and talk about one particular playmate a lot, a particularly pretty one.
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