Bob Guccione

Learning of the death of Bob Guccione threw me for a bit of a loop last night. You see, for eleven years I was a cog in his empire and, in retrospect, those were some of the best years of my life. It was, without a doubt, the best job I've ever had, and almost every day, as I struggle to find a permanent job, I wistfully recall how well suited for it I was.

I never actually met him. I saw him a few times, as a shadowy royal figure at parties. He worked out of his home, called "the House," a townhouse on East 67th Street that, at the time, was the largest single-owned private residence in Manhattan. My boss, the editor of the magazine I worked on, was the go-between between him and me, although mostly the business was run by his wife, Kathy Keeton. Some of my colleagues did have the gumption to go up and introduce themselves, and I never heard a bad word about him as a person--he was courtly and for the most part generous with his employees--until things went bad.

I started working for General Media, Inc., the company that published Penthouse, Omni, and many other magazines (I worked for Penthouse Variations) in 1987, when times were still good. Our Christmas parties were lavish, we occupied three spacious floors above Tower Records on the Upper West Side, and there were plenty of employees, some of whom probably didn't have that much work to do. But, as time went on, it became apparent that working there was like being in Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery"--sooner or later your turn to get stoned would come up. We moved to smaller digs, then moved again (the company has moved twice since I've left). Parties became more modest--instead of at some swanky New York restaurant, we had chips and dips in the conference room.

Much of this surely had to do with the advent of the Internet, which hurt all print publishing outfits, especially those that were pornographic in nature. But, more than that, Guccione was a bad businessman. He had a $400 million fortune, and by the time his life ended last night it was almost all gone. He lost the townhouse. He sold off his country estate in upstate New York, he had lost the magazine that made him famous and rich. He had done this by making some colossally bad investments, and then throwing good money after bad--a casino in Atlantic City, some wild-eyed scheme to build a new kind of nuclear reactor--money down a rat-hole. They published an issue trumpeting nude photos of Anna Kournikova, only the pictures weren't of her, and they had to pull them off the stands. In a spectacular example of nepotism, his entire family worked there. Spin, the music magazine, was founded by his son as something of a gift. In the meantime, the work staff became smaller and smaller, and my time came in 1999.

After leaving I enjoyed a certain schadenfreude in Guccione's travails, but they have exceeded my imagination. He lost his fortune, but then lost his wife to cancer, and was living with family. Certainly he didn't deserve this, did he?

Guccione, in the long run, really isn't an important cultural figure, certainly not like Hugh Hefner, who today is seen by many as a cuddly sexual revolutionary and civil libertarian. The Rolling Stones to Hef's Beatles, Guccione was the dark, sinister twin. Playboy marketed its models as girls next door, while Penthouse did anything but. The models were heavily made up and costumed like women in a seraglio, the photography heavily filtered (there were a lot of jokes about Vaseline on the lens), the vibe exotic and just a little threatening. Of course, almost from the beginning Penthouse was more gynecologically revealing than Playboy, and ran pictorials with hard-core sexual activity. Many of the models that appeared in Penthouse were girls next door, but any aspect of that personality was scrubbed out of them during shoots. Today, nine times out of ten a Penthouse Pet is an adult-film star.

Over the years Guccione made desperate attempts to revive his fortunes. He started putting celebrities on the cover, but the issue with presidential candidate Jerry Brown on the cover must have been the lowest-selling ever. He went through a phase in which the models were urinating, and then introduced ejaculate, which further drove the issue behind the counter, if it was carried at all. We were constantly told, despite our shrinking staff, that good times were around the corner.

I think Guccione was a classic case of a man who, in some ways, was extremely lucky in that for a time, his fantasy captured the fancy of the public. He was new money--gaudy, gilded, brocaded, favoring women in costume (how often he had the models wearing bizarre headgear and thigh-high boots!), the epitome of bad taste. He carried it himself, with his silk shirts unbuttoned to his waist, leather pants, and gold chains dangling in his furry chest hair. But the fancy didn't last, and he spent years trying to grab it back, while spending at a furious pace, whether it was art work (his mansion was a treasure trove of modern art), or largess to the employees, which I was a beneficiary of. I used to get $600 for each set of "love copy"--the haiku-like text that accompanied pictorials, that were selected for publication.

In the end, Penthouse became a relic. It's still published, but on a much smaller level, and owned by the AdultFriendFinder people, an example of the tail wagging the dog (similarly, Playboy is still barely afloat because of its branding merchandise, not the magazine). His legacy, I would imagine, will be as a merchant of seediness, a man who should have had his own Turkish harem, and was undone by the march of time and his own crapulence.

Mostly, though, I remember the good times. When he could afford to be, he was good to his employees. Once, in 1993, he had the entire staff up to his country house, a marble, Italian-style palazzo on the Hudson River. He barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs, and we all had a good time. His four huge Rhodesian Ridgebacks patrolled the yard, as big as ponies. It occurred to me that there couldn't possibly be any place better to work.