King’s “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” Cameron Crowe’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” Among the works that first appeared in Playboy were excerpts from Alex Haley’s “Roots,” Larry L. He commissioned articles by some of the world’s most celebrated writers - Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and Joyce Carol Oates, to name a few. Hefner was, as Esquire magazine once decreed, “the most famous magazine editor in the history of the world.” For many years, the magazine was produced in his home town of Chicago.īefore he turned 50, Mr. He hired a large staff of editors and artists who brought literary sophistication and visual dash to the pages of Playboy, but there was never any doubt that the guiding vision behind Playboy was Mr. “Hef,” as he was widely known, was in charge of editorial operations from the beginning and was known to work on the magazine for 40 hours without a break, driven by the deadline buzz of amphetamines, Pepsi-Cola and his ever-present pipe. His brand of sexual liberalism fit perfectly with postwar aspirations.”
“He created Playboy at a time when America was entering a period of profound economic and social optimism. “Hefner was, first and foremost, a brilliant businessman,” David Allyn, author of “Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History,” told The Washington Post in an interview.
But Playboy also had a surprisingly high readership among members of the clergy - who received a 25 percent subscription discount - and women. The magazine’s formula of glossy nudes, serious writing and cartoons, coupled with how-to advice on stereos, sex, cars and clothes, changed little through the years and was meant to appeal to urban, upwardly mobile heterosexual men. Life should be more than a vale of tears.” “I’m living a grown-up version of a boy’s dream, turning life into a celebration,” he told Time magazine in 1967. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)įew publications have so thoroughly reflected the tastes and ambitions of their creators as Mr. Publisher Hugh Hefner looks over proof sheets for his magazine Playboy, in Chicago, Ill., on June 20, 1961. It became a running joke that the cognoscenti read Playboy “for the articles” and demurely averted their eyes from the pages depicting bare-breasted women. From the beginning, he had literary aspirations for Playboy, hiring top writers to give his magazine cultural credibility. Hefner brought nudity out from under the counter, but he was more than the emperor of a land with no clothes. His magazine was shocking at the time, but it quickly found a large and receptive audience and was a principal force behind the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Penthouse magazine video code#
Hefner sought to overturn what he considered the puritanical moral code of Middle America. but the cause was not disclosed.įrom the first issue of Playboy in 1953, which featured a photograph of a nude Marilyn Monroe lounging on a red sheet, Mr. His death was announced by Playboy Enterprises Inc. 27 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles at age 91. Hefner embodied the “Playboy lifestyle” as the pajama-clad sybarite who worked from his bed, threw lavish parties and inhabited the Playboy Mansion with an ever-changing bevy of well-toned young beauties. As the visionary editor who created Playboy magazine out of sheer will and his own fevered dreams, he introduced nudity and sexuality to the cultural mainstream of America and the world.įor decades, the ageless Mr. As much as anyone, Hugh Hefner turned the world on to sex.
0 kommentar(er)
