News Features

Playboy founder, sex revolutionary, and American social reformer Hugh Hefner dies at the age of 91

by Mike Usinger on September 27th, 2017 at 10:23 PM
    1 of 1 2 of 1

      Hugh Hefner—who helped kickstart the American sexual revolution as the founder of Playboy magazine—has died at the age of 91. His family is reporting that he died of natural causes at home. 

      The son of parents that he would describe good people but repressed prohibitionists, Hefner got his start in newspapers and then graduated to writing promotional copy at Esquire magazine. It was while working in the publishing industry that he got the idea for Playboy. 

      After selling off almost everything he owned, and raising $10,000 from various investors, he published the first edition of Playboy in 1953. 

      Marilyn Monroe graced the cover of the first issue, and —thanks to a old pinup photo—was the first of hundreds of women to appear nude in the magazine’s centerfold. 

      Nudity made Playboy an out-of-the-gates success, the magazine’s first edition selling 50,000 copies—many of them purchased by teenage boys who claimed to be buying them for an article inside.

      But, as chronicled in the excellent documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, Hefner saw Playboy as a magazine that was about much more than sex. 

      He was also one of America’s foremost social reformers, determined to take on everything form McCarthyism to racism to anti-abortionists. In the early years of the magazine he provided a platform for both beginning writers as well as legends like Ray Bradbury and John Updike. Hunter S. Thompson was published in Playboy, as was Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Kerouac. 

      In a 2010 interview with the Straight, Hefner said the following: “I said a very long time ago that my life is, by its nature, like a Rorschach test, an inkblot test. People project their own particular dreams, fantasies, and prejudices on my life. What a person thinks about me is often a reflection of who they are."

      A savvy businessmen, he would turn Playboy into a global brand, opening clubs across America in the ’70s, and licensing its famous Bunny Logo for everything from perfume to jewelry. 

      Famous for both his lavish parties, and for his bed-hopping (he claimed to have slept with thousands of women), Hefner parlayed his lothario-in-pajamas persona into an empire. The crown jewel of that the empire was the fabled Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, which Hefner sold for $100,000 last year on the condition he be allowed to live in it until he died. 

      Here's what some of those who crossed paths with the man known as Hef are saying about him this evening:

      https://www.instagram.com/p/BZlw_kxjWwl/?hl=en&taken-by=shannonleetweedsimmons

      Comments