As the founder of Playboy Magazine, Hugh Hefner was one of the icons of the sexual revolution
in the 1960’s.
Opinions about Hefner are very polarized- you either love and admire the man, or completely
disapprove of the multi-million dollar empire he created.
But no matter how you feel about Hugh Hefner, there is no arguing that he was truly a genius
when it came to business, and a one-of-a-kind publisher, writer, and entrepreneur.
Early Life
Hugh Marston Hefner was born in Chicago in 1926.
He grew up in the middle of Prohibition, and his parents were conservative Methodists.
His mother was a teacher, and his father was an accountant.
During the Great Depression, his father was under a lot of pressure to work as hard as
he possibly could in order to keep his job.
He would leave the house before Hugh and his brother Keith woke up for school, and worked
late into the night.
He was a very timid and shy little boy who preferred to read comic books and watch movies.
Most of the Hollywood starlets in the 1920’s and 30’s just so happened to be buxom blonde
girls with an hourglass figure, and he grew up escaping into a fantasy world of romance
and adventure, wishing he could live inside of those movies.
In elementary school, Hugh did not talk very much, and he didn’t seem to be paying attention
in class.
He spent most of his time drawing in his notebooks with his mind in the clouds.
He was unresponsive to his teacher’s questions as well, so they thought that he may have
some kind of learning disability.
His mother took him to a child psychologist, and it turns out that he had a 152 IQ, which
makes him a genius, and his intelligence made him bored with what he was learning in class.
When Hugh started going to High School, he had his heart broken when a girl he had a
crush on started dating another boy.
He was still shy and had trouble communicating, but the perceived rejection from this girl
was a wakeup call.
From that moment on, he realized that he needed to reinvent himself if he ever wanted to get
a girlfriend.
He asked his friends to start calling him “Hef” instead of Hugh, and he began to
wear nicer clothes, cologne, and style his hair.
Underneath all of these outward improvements, however, he was still a hardcore film nerd.
Hugh wrote school plays for the theater department, and he filmed his own horror movies with a
home video camera and his friends.
He worked on the school newspaper, and drew comic books in his spare time.
When he was 15, he created his own zine that he fully illustrated called “Shudder”,
where he wrote articles about horror movies.
He met up with a group of friends after school called the “Shudder Club” where they got
together to watch films and talk about them.
He finally came out of his shell, and was popular enough to be elected student body
president.
From 1944 to 1946, Hugh Hefner served in the US Army.
He used his talent in writing to work for the military’s newspaper.
Since he did not have a combat position, he lived out the adventures in his mind by drawing
comic books about fantasy missions, like one where he and a group of friends break prisoners
out of a Nazi concentration camp.
During World War II, illustrations and photos of pin-up girls were extremely popular to
boost soldier’s moral.
There were even paintings of Miss America on the side of airplane bombers.
Instead of staring at scantily clad strangers in his bunk, Hugh Hefner gazed at photos and
letters from his fiance, Mildred Williams.
He was very much in love with her, and they planned to get married when the war was over.
After being discharged from the army, Hugh Hefner went to the University of Illinois
and double-majored in Psychology and Creative Writing.
He excelled in school, and he was able to earn his Bachelor’s Degree in just two and
a half years.
He also wrote for the college’s newspaper and magazine.
He was eager to marry Mildred after graduation.
But the idea that he was getting to live out the plot of a Hollywood romance came crashing
down.
Before the wedding, Mildred confessed that she had an affair while he was away in the
army.
Hugh forgave her, though, and he lost his virginity on his wedding night.
They went on to have two children together, Christie and David.
Hugh was very much in love with Mildred, and even though it broke his heart, he believed
in the old traditional way of doing things.
During an interview with the New York Times, Hefner explained how he felt on his wedding
day.
“The magic was gone from the very beginning...How would it have turned out without the affair?
Was I well-suited for marriage?
I don’t know.
But I was truly crushed.”
Playboy is Born After serving in the army and graduating from
college, Hugh Hefner got a job at Esquire Magazine making $60 a week.
With modern-day inflation, that’s more like $645 a week.
After working there for several years, Hefner knew that he was good at his job, so he asked
his boss for a $5-a-week raise.
This doesn’t sound like a lot to ask, but they still said no.
At this point, he was starting to have a bit of a quarter-life crisis.
Up until that point, he had followed all of the rules of living the so-called “American
Dream”, but he was unhappy with his job, and in an unfaithful marriage.
He decided that he truly had nothing left to lose, so he quit his job, and worked on
starting his own magazine.
Hugh Hefner knew from being in the army that men loved looking at pictures of pinup girls.
When they came home from the war, many men did not have access to it anymore, because
it was illegal to send anything that could be considered pornographic through the mail.
At that time, men’s magazines were mostly about hunting, fishing, camping, and cars.
Hefner saw this as a golden opportunity to start his own publication.
The only issue was that he was completely broke.
He borrowed $1,000 from his mother, mortgaged out his furniture to the bank for $600, and
convinced several investors to help him raise a total of $8,000 to get the first issue of
Playboy started.
At first, he thought about naming the magazine “Stag Party”, but decided against it,
since there was already a magazine called “Stag”.
Hugh Hefner was able to buy Marilyn Monroe’s nude photos from a calendar company who owned
the rights.
Those photographs were famous, but since this was decades before people could easily share
photos on the internet, very few people had actually seem them.
For just $200, he bought the rights to the pictures and published them in the very first
issue of Playboy.
Since Marilyn Monroe was one of the biggest celebrities at the time, he couldn’t have
picked a better woman to place on the cover.
Magazines were flying off the shelves, and they sold 50,000 copies.
The money they made from that issue was just enough to make the second, and after a few
months, they were turning a profit.
Soon enough, they began selling over a million copies a month, and Playboy was an overnight
success.
It sounds like a joke when people say that they read Playboy for the articles, but there
is actually a lot of truth to that statement.
Hugh Hefner was always against censorship in the media, and he ran one of the very few
publications where writers could express themselves without holding back.
Some of the greatest authors in the world got their start by writing for Playboy.
Ian Fleming would go on to publish the James Bond series, and Ray Bradbury serialized chapters
of Fahrenheit 451 in the magazine before publishing the complete novel.
Even Margaret Atwood published several short stories in Playboy before writing her feminist
dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale.
In the 1950’s, Hugh Hefner was defying all rational convention, and actually promoted
feminism and women’s sexual liberation, as well as racial equality.
In 1959, a series called “Playboy’s Penthouse” aired on television.
For the first time, women were shown on TV as more than just housewives who were staying
home to make dinner and take care of the children.
The premise of the show was that the viewer followed around Hugh Hefner as he had a classy
party in his penthouse apartment.
Women wore elegant dresses, and men wore suits as they drank cocktails and had interesting
conversations while they listened to live jazz music.
It was sophisticated, and that lifestyle became an aspiration for many men and women who watched
the series.
At this point, Hugh Hefner’s marriage was crumbling, and he and his wife Mildred had
agreed to allow one another to sleep with different people.
They officially called it quits in 1959, and got a divorce, which left him free to live
the bachelor lifestyle to match the Playboy brand.
That same year, he bought his first mansion and opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago.
Soon enough, he would open dozens of clubs all over the country, so that men could experience
the “Playboy’s Penthouse” lifestyle first-hand.
By the time he turned 35, the Playboy empire had expanded to a lifestyle brand that was
worth $20 million.
As time went on, the magazine would be published in over 180 countries, and it became one of
the top 20 brands in the world.
Scandal and Controversy Right-wing conservatives were against Playboy
from the very first issue, because they considered the magazine to be sinful trash.
He also got a lot of criticism from the left, as well, because feminists saw this was objectifying
and over-sexualizing women, rather than liberating them.
After receiving so much criticism, Hugh Hefner published a book called The Playboy Philosophy
in 1962, where he explains his ideas about sex in modern culture, and attempts to explain
his thought process behind running the business.
In 1963, a journalist named Gloria Steinem went undercover for Show Magazine to work
as a waitress in one of the Playboy Clubs.
She found out that these girls were being underpaid, and they were charged fees whenever
they committed even the smallest infractions, like not smiling enough.
They were also being treated very badly by the customers, and in the end, women hardly
made any money in order to be sexually objectified.
Clients were given special keys that allowed them to have total access to the Playboy bunnies,
which made the club a glorified brothel.
Steinem wrote about her experiences, and she was seen as a hero for feminism by exposing
what was going on behind closed doors.
Hugh Hefner took this criticism seriously, and responded by making sure that the women
working in his clubs were being treated fairly and paid a proper wage.
But, as they say- even bad press is good press, and despite all of the controversy, the Playboy
brand continued to thrive.
The Playboy Mansion Era Today, it’s difficult to imagine Playboy
without the mansion filled with beautiful girls, but Hugh Hefner did not buy the iconic
house in Los Angeles until 1974.
The mansion sits on 5 acres, and comes with a movie room, a massive wine cellar, a gym,
tennis courts, and even a zoo with exotic animals.
Hugh Hefner began hosting some of the biggest parties in history at the Playboy Mansion,
with celebrity guests visiting on a regular basis.
He was still the most popular guys around, even well into his old age.
In the year 1980, he personally paid for the repair of the iconic Hollywood sign, and the
city of Los Angeles gave him a star on the celebrity walk of fame as a thank-you gift.
In the 1980’s, Playboy began to struggle as a brand after it became a publicly shared
corporation.
They were competing with the likes of Penthouse magazine, so their peak in popularity was
over.
Hugh Hefner handed control over the company to his daughter, Christie, who became the
new CEO.
Hefner tried to give a normal domestic life another chance, and he got married to his
second wife, Kimberly Conrad, in 1989.
She gave birth to two sons, Marston and Cooper, and they got to have a fantasy childhood growing
up in the Playboy Mansion.
Their relationship did not last, though, and they seperated in 1998, and became officially
divorced in 2010.
After the separation, Hugh Hefner began to invite his girlfriends to live in the house
with him, and he even experimented with bisexuality.
He had a polyamorous lifestyle where he had multiple girlfriends at one time, and but
always had a “number one girl” by his side.
He later admitted that he slept with roughly 11 out of 12 of the monthly Playboy cover
models.
In 1999, one of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend, Carrie Leigh, said that living in the Playboy
Mansion was “almost like a cult”, because it was so easy to get caught up in the lifestyle
and the drama with the multiple girlfriends.
She got so caught up in the Playboy lifestyle, she forgot what was considered normal in the
outside world.
However, unlike a real cult, the girls living in the house were free to come and go as they
pleased.
They still had their own personal relationships, and kept in touch with their families.
Some of them even went to college classes full or part-time, and their work with Playboy
helped pay for their tuition.
In 2005, the reality TV series Girls Next Door premiered, and it gave people a look
into the lives of the people living and working in the Playboy Mansion.
It revealed Hugh Hefner’s new lifestyle with a team of employees to take care of all
of his needs.
The girls he lived with were all given an allowance to buy whatever they wanted, as
well.
Of course, though, living in the mansion came with the understanding that Hugh Hefner only
wanted to be involved in an open relationship where he could sleep with whoever he wanted,
but the girls were not allowed to have another boyfriend.
Even though this may seem like a dream scenario for some men, the arrangement was not always
a walk in the park for Hefner.
Some of the women who once lived with him sued him for “palimony” after their breakup-
which is like alimony for people who are living together, but not married.
During an interview, one of Hefner’s ex girlfriends, Holly Madison explained that
women were competing with one another for the privilege of being in Hugh Hefner’s
inner circle.
Dozens of small-town-girls would see their careers skyrocket after modeling in Playboy,
and they were desperate to become apart of it all.
Almost every girl who was involved with the brand moved on to either have a big modeling
career, or marry a millionaire.
For some, having sex with Hugh Hefner was a very small price to pay for guaranteed fame
and fortune.
As he got older, Hugh Hefner knew better than to expect any of these young women to be his
true love.
He said during an interview with the New York Times that having seven girlfriends was actually
a much easier lifestyle to manage than having just one wife.
In 2012, he was 86 years old, and he decided that it was finally time to settle down.
He married Crystal Harris, who was just 26.
On the reality TV show Girls Next Door, Hugh’s girlfriends showed off their happy lifestyles
living in the Playboy mansion.
But Holly Madison came out with a tell-all-book in 2015 saying that she had actually been
manipulated into staying with Hugh Hefner for so many years.
She said that she truly was in love with him at first, but when she finally got the exclusive
relationship that she was looking for, she was no longer in love with him.
She eventually married a millionaire event organizer named Pasquale Rotella.
Hugh Hefner responded to all of Holly Madison’s allegations in her book as an attempt to “rewriting
history” for the sake of staying relevant in the media and making money on a book deal.
Death and Legacy In 2016, it was clear that Hugh Hefner’s
health was declining, so he decided to sell his mansion in Los Angeles for $100 million
to a man named Daren Metropoulos.
In 2018, Metropoulos convinced the city of Los Angeles to add protections to the house
so that it can never be torn down.
The Playboy Mansion has essentially been turned into a historical landmark.
Hugh Hefner died peacefully in September of 2017 surrounded by his friends and family
when he was 91 years old.
Even though he never got to meet Marilyn Monroe, he still credited her nudes for all of his
success, which is why he purchased the burial plot next to hers.
Love him or hate him, Hugh Hefner is still an icon that will be remembered forever.
Before he passed away, he said this about his career: “I’ve never been in it for
the money.
Playboy isn’t a business for me.
It has been, from the very beginning, a labor of life.
And, that’s pretty easy to say, because if you don’t love all of this, you’re
a fool.”