Publisher and founder of Playboy

Born: April 9 1926;

Died: September 27 2017

HUGH Hefner, who has died aged 91, founded the magazine Playboy which, by featuring pictures of naked or scantily-clad women and articles with explicit content, was seen by many as a central element in the “sexual revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s, and became the foundation of a multi-million dollar business.

Opposition to Playboy and its outlook came not only from conservative moralists – it was (unsuccessfully) prosecuted for obscenity in the USA, and remains banned in most majority Muslim countries – but, from the 1970s on, from feminist critics who otherwise supported what was then still called the “permissive society”, but who saw the magazine as a literal illustration of male objectification of women.

Either way, it was in its day a formidable commercial success. At the peak of its circulation, in November 1972, it sold more than seven million copies; the brand, meanwhile, spread far beyond the print magazine. Between 1960 and the mid-1980s, several dozen Playboy Clubs and Casinos were opened around the world, while the Playboy logo, a stylized rabbit’s head with a bow tie, was licensed to all manner of merchandise, from clothing to scent. It is now one of the world’s most recognised and valuable brands.

Hefner’s carefully constructed personality not only informed the attitudes which underpinned the magazine and its offshoots, which now include websites, television channels, event-management and even home furnishings, but was central to their promotion. He set himself up in the “Playboy mansion”, a preposterous 22,000-square foot Gothic-Tudor monstrosity near Beverly Hills, complete with tennis court, saunas, a grotto, three zoos, pipe organ and waterfall, from which he directed his empire, clad in silk pyjamas and a sailor’s cap, surrounded by legions of identikit blondes in lingerie.

Hefner veered between recognising that the image he, and his magazine, projected was a ludicrous adolescent fantasy, and claiming that he had been the agent of significant and worthwhile social change. He boasted of sleeping with thousands of women and being “the luckiest guy on the f*****g planet”, but also maintained that Playboy had been an instrument of women’s emancipation, and played a leading role in the legalisation of birth control and abortion.

What’s more, there was some justice in the claims of those who maintained that they “only read Playboy for the articles”. During the late 1960s and 1970s it was one of the foremost (and best-paying) outlets for short fiction, and for ambitious long-form journalism. Among the writers it published were Vladimir Nabokov, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac, John Updike, Saul Bellow, PG Wodehouse, and John Cheever. This ambition had been there from the outset: Ray Bradbury’s novel Farenheit 451 was first published in serial form in early issues of the magazine, while Alex Haley’s interviews with Malcolm X were later expanded as the black rights’ activist’s autobiography after his assassination in 1965.

Hugh Marston Hefner was born on April 9 1926, the elder son of schoolteachers, in Chicago, Illinois. He and his younger brother Keith were brought up in a household that Hefner later described as “conservative, Midwestern, Methodist”, though the fact that his mother was later to be one of the initial investors in Playboy hardly suggested that his upbringing had been excessively puritanical.

During his teens, he reinvented himself as “Hef”, a prototype of the persona he later adopted and which he thought embodied suave manliness. It then involved flannel shirts, corduroys and jive slang; the later incarnation centred on silk dressing gowns, a pipe and cocktails.

After Steinmetz High School, he spent two years in the US Army towards the end of the Second World War, working as a reporter on a forces’ newspaper. He then took a degree in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, graduating in 1949. The same year he embarked on postgraduate work in sociology at Northwestern University, but after his marriage to a fellow student, Millie Williams, whom he had been dating for several years, dropped out to become a copywriter.

He found work at Esquire, but found it unfulfilling. He had been “devastated” when his wife confessed, just before their wedding, that she had had an affair while he had been serving in the army. As compensation, she allowed him to see other women, and Hefner took full advantage of the opportunity.

Even so, he later confessed that he had contemplated suicide in his mid-twenties; when he was denied a $5 rise at Esquire, he snapped and walked out. He set up HMH Publications with his friend Eldon Sellers, who handled the money, and they scraped together $8,000 from various investors (including Hefner’s brother, and his mother Grace) and, at his kitchen table, set about producing a magazine of his own. His working title was Stag Party, but the owners of a magazine called Stag warned him that they would contest it, and Sellers eventually suggested Playboy.

Hefner’s canniest move was to have acquired the rights to nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe, taken for a calendar shoot in 1949; though the pictures were already well-known, he featured a previously unused picture as the centrefold of the magazine. Although Hefner had been so unsure of the magazine’s reception that the first issue, in December 1953, was unnumbered, it sold almost 54,000 copies at 50 cents a time.

In 1955, Hefner emerged as an early (and some thought) unlikely advocate of gay rights, when he published a science fiction story imagining a straight man persecuted in a world in which homosexuality was the norm. In response to complaints, Hefner published a statement that declared: “If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong too.”

In 1963, he was arrested and tried for obscenity after publishing naked photographs of the actress Jayne Mansfield, but the trial resulted in a hung jury. During the 1960s, Hefner presented himself as an ally of the new Zeitgeist, publishing interviews with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (as well as sending the black writer Alex Haley, who later wrote Roots, to interview George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party), and vocally supporting the Democrats and First Amendment rights.

Not all liberals were convinced, however. The writer Gloria Steinem, who wrote an article about working undercover as a bunny girl in one of Hefner’s clubs, compared the experience to “being hung on a meat hook”. Hefner himself, who had divorced his first wife in 1959, spent as much time as possible in his clubs, on television, and dating “perhaps eleven out of every twelve” Playmates of the Month.

By the 1980s Playboy was on the wane, and Hefner’s carefully cultivated persona became more and more absurd. He had a stroke in 1985 and in 1989 married Kimberley Conrad, a former “Playmate of the Year”. He was 63; she was 27.

Christie, his daughter from his first marriage, became involved in running the firm, and Hefner devoted himself to the Playboy Mansion, to which he had moved in the mid-1970s. His second marriage lasted nine years, and produced two sons; in 2009 he almost married Crystal Harris (then 23), but she got cold feet, suspecting that he might not be the monogamous type, and perhaps deterred by the 60-year gap in age between them. She gave in and married him in 2012.

In 2011, Hefner took Playboy’s publication company private again. In 2016, it dropped nude photographs, though it reintroduced them in March 2017. The magazine’s circulation is now around 650,000 copies.

Hugh Hefner is survived by his wife, by his son and daughter from his first marriage and the two sons of his second marriage. He had arranged to be buried in the crypt next to Marilyn Monroe.

ANDREW MCKIE