Hugh Hefner

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1992, Hugh Hefner paid $75,000 for a burial crypt in Los Angeles, and the neighbor he wanted was Marilyn Monroe. He never met her. In 2009 he told the Los Angeles Times, "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to pass up." Hefner was born in Chicago in 1926 and became an American magazine publisher and businessman. He founded and edited Playboy, a magazine that paired revealing photographs with fiction, articles and long interviews. His robe and his mansion became nearly as famous as the magazine itself. How did a young copywriter turn one publication into a network of clubs, television shows and a household name? What did he believe, and where did he put his money? And why did people who lived closest to him describe a very different place from the one he presented to the world?

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• 2. Midwest Beginnings

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  Hugh Marston Hefner was born in Chicago on the 9th of April 1926, the first child of Glenn Lucius Hefner and Grace Caroline Swanson Hefner. His father was an accountant and his mother was a teacher. Both parents came from Nebraska. A younger brother, Keith, arrived in 1929.

  Hefner traced his father's line back to William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth. He described his family in three words: "conservative, Midwestern, Methodist." His mother had hoped he would become a missionary. He was also distantly related to the presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

  Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High School came first. From 1944 to 1946 he served in the United States Army as a writer for a military newspaper. He then finished a Bachelor of Arts in psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1949, with a double minor in creative writing and art. He earned the degree in just two and a half years. In the spring of 1950 he took a semester of graduate sociology courses at Northwestern University, but he dropped out soon after.

  By January 1952 he held a copywriting job at Esquire, and he was about to lose it over a very small sum.

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• 3. Birth of Playboy

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  A raise of $5 was all Hefner asked for in January 1952, and Esquire refused. He left the job. The refusal sent him toward a venture of his own.

  In 1953 he took out a $600 mortgage loan and gathered $8,000 from 45 investors. His mother put in $1,000. Hefner told E! in 2006 that she did it "not because she believed in the venture," but "because she believed in her son." The magazine was first going to be called Stag Party.

  The first issue of Playboy appeared in December 1953. Its centerpiece was Marilyn Monroe, pictured in photographs from a 1949 nude calendar shoot that she had done under a pseudonym. The issue sold more than 50,000 copies. Neither Playboy nor Hefner paid Monroe for the photographs.

  The magazine's nerve was tested again in 1955, when a rejected short story landed on Hefner's desk.

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• 4. Interviews and Controversy

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  Charles Beaumont's science fiction story "The Crooked Man" was rejected by Esquire in 1955, so Hefner agreed to publish it. It imagined a world where homosexuality was the norm and straight men were persecuted. Angry letters arrived. Hefner answered, "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too."

  In 1961, Hefner watched Dick Gregory perform at the Herman Roberts Show Bar in Chicago. He hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club. Gregory later credited that night with launching his career. Hefner's "private key" clubs of the 1960s were racially diverse.

  The Playboy interview, established in 1962, gave the magazine a serious reputation. Alex Haley interviewed Malcolm X for it in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966. In 1966, Hefner also sent Haley to speak with George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was shocked that the interviewer was black. He agreed to the meeting only after being assured that Haley was not Jewish, and he kept a handgun on the table throughout. The scene was recreated in Roots: The Next Generations in 1979, with James Earl Jones as Haley and Marlon Brando as Rockwell.

  On the 4th of June 1963, Hefner was arrested for promoting obscene literature. The issue in question showed Jayne Mansfield in bed with a man present. The trial ended in a hung jury.

  In 1970 Hefner said that "militant feminists" were "unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes." He ordered an article against them. By then he had also become a television host, which put the lifestyle itself on screen.

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• 5. Robe and Mansion

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  Playboy's Penthouse aired from 1959 to 1960, and Playboy After Dark ran from 1969 to 1970. Hefner hosted both. They promoted the bon vivant life he had built for himself, a role he held alongside his job as chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises. Friends and family called him simply "Hef." A robe became his signature look.

  In 1949 he had married Mildred Williams, a Northwestern University student. Before the wedding she told him about an affair she had while he was in the army. He called it "the most devastating moment of my life." The couple had a daughter, Christie, in 1952 and a son, David, in 1955. A 2006 E! True Hollywood Story profile said Mildred allowed him to see other women, out of guilt and in hope of saving the marriage. They divorced in 1959.

  Afterward Hefner joked that in some years he was involved with maybe eleven out of twelve months' worth of Playmates. Barbi Benton, Shannon Tweed and Carrie Leigh were among his many partners. Leigh filed a $35 million palimony suit against him. In 1971 he acknowledged that he had experimented with bisexuality. That same year he acquired Playboy Mansion West in Los Angeles, and in 1975 he moved there permanently from Chicago.

  On the 7th of March 1985, Hefner had a minor stroke at age 58. He rethought his habits and toned down the all-night parties. In 1988 his daughter Christie took over the operation of Playboy's commercial side. In 1989 he married Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad, who was 36 years younger. Their sons Marston Glenn and Cooper were born in 1990 and 1991. The mansion became a family-friendly homestead. The couple separated in 1998, and Conrad moved into the house next door. Hefner filed for divorce in 2009 and it was finalized in 2010.

  Twins Mandy and Sandy Bentley were among the young women who moved in afterward. At times Hefner dated as many as seven women at once. Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson all left the mansion in October 2008.

  In January 2009 he began seeing Crystal Harris. He became engaged to her on the 24th of December 2010. She broke it off on the 14th of June 2011, five days before the planned wedding. The July issue of Playboy, already printed, carried her on the cover under the headline "Introducing America's Princess, Mrs. Crystal Hefner." The two reconciled and married on the 31st of December 2012.

  In January 2016 the mansion was listed at $200 million, on condition that Hefner could keep living there. Later that year it sold for $100 million to Daren Metropoulos of the private equity firm Metropoulos & Company. He planned to join it with a neighboring estate he had bought in 2009, creating a 7.3-acre private compound.

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• 6. Screen Cameos

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  Hefner voiced himself in the 1993 Simpsons episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled." As his influence in publishing faded, he became a reliable guest star. He appeared as himself in Sex and the City in 2000. In 2005 he turned up on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. A 2006 episode of Robot Chicken followed, and in 2007 he voiced himself again on Family Guy in "Airport '07." He earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for television.

  In 2009 he received a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Supporting Actor for playing himself in Miss March. He joked on Twitter, "Maybe I didn't understand the character."

  He also put money behind a project he cared about. In 1999 Hefner financed Discovering the It Girl, a documentary about silent film star Clara Bow. "Nobody has what Clara had," he said. "She defined an era and made her mark on the nation."

  Documentary maker Kevin Burns received full access to Hefner for the 1996 A&E Biography special Hugh Hefner: American Playboy. The two kept working together, most notably on The Girls Next Door. That reality series ran for six seasons, from 2005 to 2009, and 90 episodes, following Madison, Wilkinson and Marquardt at the mansion. Brigitte Berman's documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel was released on the 30th of July 2010. Hefner made a voice-only appearance in the 2011 film Hop. In 2012 he announced that his youngest son, Cooper, would succeed him as the public face of Playboy.

  The Amazon series American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story arrived in April 2017, with Matt Whelan in the title role. Its ten episodes mixed interviews, archival footage and re-enactments, and it was filmed in Auckland. In October 2017, a feature biopic was announced with Brett Ratner directing and Jeff Nathanson writing. It was put on hold indefinitely the next month after sexual harassment allegations against Ratner.

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• 7. Causes and Giving

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  In 1964, Hefner established the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation to "facilitate individual rights in our democratic society." Among the projects it funded was Marty Goddard's prototype of the rape kit. Christie Hefner later created the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for people who protected and strengthened First Amendment rights.

  On the 12th of September 1966, Hefner debated The Playboy Philosophy with William F. Buckley Jr. on Firing Line, in Episode 26. He gave money to the Democratic Party and raised more for it. By 2011 he called himself an independent, unhappy with both major parties. Even so, he backed Barack Obama's reelection in 2012.

  The Hollywood Sign owes him two debts. In 1978 he hosted a gala at the Playboy Mansion and bought the letter Y at a ceremonial auction for $27,000, one ninth of the restoration cost. On the 26th of April 2010 he gave the last $900,000 a conservation group needed to buy land and stop development of the sign's vista.

  His views on faith were blunt. In a 2000 interview with Playboy he said, "It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth." Christian author Lee Strobel, who interviewed him, later called his outlook a "very minimalistic, deistic view of God."

  The University of Southern California received $100,000 from Hefner to create a course called "Censorship in Cinema." He gave $2 million to endow a chair in American film. In 2007 the university's audiovisual archive at the Norris Theater was renamed the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive.

  He also threw fundraisers for Much Love Animal Rescue and for Generation Rescue, a group that campaigns against vaccination and is supported by Jenny McCarthy. An endangered marsh rabbit subspecies, Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, is named after him for his financial support. On the 18th of November 2010, Lois Lee of Children of the Night gave him that organization's first Founder's Hero of the Heart Award.

  Hefner also supported same-sex marriage. He called it "a fight for all our rights" and warned that without it, "we will turn back the sexual revolution and return to an earlier, puritanical time."

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• 8. Death and Reckoning

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  In May 2017, Eugena Washington became the last Playmate of the Year that Hefner announced at the Playboy Mansion. The year had already brought loss. His brother Keith had died on the 8th of April 2016, one day before Hefner's 90th birthday, at age 87.

  Hefner died at the Playboy Mansion on the 27th of September 2017, aged 91. The immediate causes were cardiac arrest and respiratory failure. He had developed sepsis from an E. coli infection.

  Criticism followed him, and it grew sharper after his death. Suzanne Moore wrote in The Guardian that Hefner threatened to sue her for calling him a pimp. She argued that "he was a man who bought and sold women to other men." Julie Bindel wrote in The Independent that he turned porn into a legitimate business. In the Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian quoted Wendy Hamilton saying he probably did more than any other American figure to mainstream the exploitation of women's bodies.

  Holly Madison, his former girlfriend, said he encouraged competition and body image issues among the women living with him. Ed Stetzer wrote in Christianity Today that Hefner had the residence cleaned whenever his daughter Christie visited, to keep the realities from her. Stetzer also mourned the cultural consequences of the sexual revolution that Hefner helped lead.

  On the 24th of January 2022, A&E broadcast the 12-part series Secrets of Playboy. Former employees and partners alleged systematic sexual misconduct, manipulation, drug use, spying and assault by Hefner and his guests at the mansion and elsewhere. The now publicly owned PLBY group distanced itself in a statement just before the first episode: "Today's Playboy is not Hugh Hefner's Playboy." The company said it trusted and validated the women and their stories.

  In January 2024, his widow Crystal, who had earlier brushed aside criticism, published a memoir. She alleged that she lived in a hostile environment at the Playboy Mansion and even claimed she was "imprisoned" there.

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