Hef

For a while it seemed like Hugh Hefner would never die. The man some other men considered the luckiest man in the world had made it into his tenth decade, still surrounded by beautiful women, puttering around his mansion, even after it was sold.

But Hef's time finally came this week, at age 91, and it's been interesting to read the commentary. There have been encomiums and brickbats, and that's only right, as Hefner's place in cultural history is a significant one, but also a controversial one.

I have been a reader of Playboy for about 45 years. I started like many boys, sneaking looks at my father's issues, wondering at the strange feeling I got looking at naked women. Unlike many men, though, including my father, my interest has not abated. I have purchased every issue of Playboy since 1979, and have continued to pore over each one like it was the Talmud.

It's well-known lore that Hefner created Playboy at his kitchen table with a loan from his parents. He became a multimillionaire, has reportedly slept with 1,000 women (I wouldn't doubt a higher number), and became the face of the sexual revolution. While there were many girlie mags in the '50s, Hefner did something more--he created a brand, and a philosophy to go with it. His pin-ups were the "girls next door," the modern man was a sophisticate (the bunny logo has always born black tie) and hedonism was the way to go. A famous line from his "Playboy Philosophy" was "We like our apartment. 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 ..." Frankly, I think discussing Nietzsche before sex would be off-putting, but over the years the magazine was a lifestyle bible for the man who wanted to be just like Hef. Gadgets, cars, clothes, stereo equipment--it was all there, with designs of the ideal bachelor pad frequently displayed.

Playboy and Hefner hit the big time in the sixties and  in the seventies the circulation hit seven million (it's less than a million now). He owned his own jet. Playboy Clubs flourished around the world. Despite his age, Hefner squired women young enough to be his daughter. He was like a modern-day Jay Gatsby, who remade himself into the perfect bachelor, with a rockin' mansion, working in a round, rotating bed, wearing a silk jacket and pajamas, smoking a pipe.

But then the Internet came along. Today a ten-year-old can watch free porn at anytime. Looking at Playboy is blase. For a while they even stopped printing nude pictures. Hefner continued to live his way, but became a parody of himself, an octogenarian with blonde bimbos on his arm, wearing a sailor cap, then finally, at 85, marrying a woman sixty years his junior.

Hefner is a bit like Janus--there are definitely two sides to him. His championing free speech and the work of black writers and artists is his defining legacy. His early television show, Playboy's Penthouse, featured black entertainers such as Nat King Cole, sitting right next to Lenny Bruce. This got the show banned in the South. Hefner didn't care. He ran interviews with Miles Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X (interviewed by Alex Haley, who later turned that into a legendary book).

The other side of him, and even though I'm a devotee, I recognize it, is reducing women to objects. It's one thing to like to look at beautiful naked women, it's another to make it a commodity. The editorial thinking at Playboy bent over backwards to make us think they were feminists, but I don't believe Hefner ever got over his puerile adolescent lust. I have something of the same problem--I'm attracted to much younger women, and it's probably because I never stopped looking at Playboy. It's arrested development. Does anyone believe anyone age 25 would marry Hefner if he weren't a publishing magnate?

Susan Brownmiller hit him hard and right when she was on a talk show and derided him for putting cottontails on his waitresses. Not only was he objectifying women, he was making them look like animals. To be a Playboy Playmate requires not high I.Q., not particular talent, but the proper proportions and facial structure. Some may be smarter than others, but it doesn't matter when they're trapped in the 2D of photographs. As Tony Roberts says in Annie Hall, of women he met at the Playboy Mansion, "They're just like the women in Playboy magazine, except they can move their arms and legs."

Hugh Hefner was a huge persona in the story of post-war America. He grew up oppressed, and was determined to let American let it all hang out. In most ways, he succeeded. His success ended up diminishing his empire, as nudity and sexual freedom became the norm.