Playboy Founder, Hugh Hefner, Dies At 91

Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy Enterprises, has died of natural causes at the age of 91 in his home, the famed Playboy Mansion, in Beverly Hills, according to a statement from Playboy Enterprises.

For over six decades, Hefner served as the iconic leader, and later the figurehead, of the magazine that he founded in 1953 at age 27 with some $600 of his own cash and a few thousand dollars in borrowed funds.

Known for its mixture of lifestyle content, high-profile interviews (Jimmy Carter, Malcolm X and Miles Davis, among them) and, of course, nude women (the first issue featured a partially clothed Marilyn Monroe), the liberal magazine quickly became a great success. Its first issue sold out, and the magazine was soon widely read by grown men and sneaky teenage boys, alike. His timing didn’t hurt: The golden age of Playboy coincided with the sexual revolution, and in the early 1970s, circulation peaked at around 7 million copies sold per month.

“Playboy is a personal image. What’s important to me is our product,” Hefner told FORBES in 1971. “The part that interests me most is the ideas, not the dollars.”

But dollars followed. The magazine morphed into a business empire, with clubs, licensing deals–the Bunny lent its name to everything from clothing to toy cars–and a television network. Though the publication has declined in recent years–mainly due to the rise in competition from free, online pornography and dwindling circulation–the business is still alive and well, and was recently valued at $500 million.

At the center of it all was Hefner, a larger-than-life personality—and a playboy, himself. Criticized by feminists but adored by his friend, Hefner garnered strong opinions. Known for hosting lavish parties and dating a slew of younger, beautiful women, Hefner, often clad in silk pajamas, touted sexual freedom.

“We like our apartment,” Hefner wrote in the editorial for the first issue of his magazine. “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 for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

This decadence is best reflected in the Playboy Mansion, a 29-room estate with a zoo, the infamous grotto, Hefner’s extra-large round bed and, it seems, an ever-present group of scantily-clad women. While Hefner continued to live there until his death, the mansion was actually sold in 2016 for $100 million, making it the most expensive home ever sold in Los Angeles at the time.

Source: Forbes