![]() It later drew, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. Hefner published fiction by Ray Bradbury (Playboy bought his “Fahrenheit 451” for $400), Herbert Gold and Budd Schulberg. The magazine was a forum for serious interviews, the subjects including Jimmy Carter (who famously confessed, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times”), Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.” “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional. His causes - abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws - were daring at the time. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner told an interviewer almost 50 years later, was “the single most devastating experience of my life.” A virgin until he was 22, he married his longtime girlfriend. Hefner wielded fierce resentment against his era’s sexual strictures, which he said had choked off his own youth. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.” Feiffer said in the 1992 documentary “Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time.” “You couldn’t use obscenities. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs.” Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. (Early this year, the magazine brought back nudes.) The magazine’s website,, had already been revamped as a “safe for work” site. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” ![]() “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive, Scott Flanders, acknowledged that the internet had overrun the magazine’s province. In 2016, he handed over creative control of Playboy to his son Cooper Hefner. Hefner remained editor in chief even after agreeing to the magazine’s startling (and, as it turned out, short-lived) decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photographs. The brand faded over the years, its flagship magazine’s circulation declining to less than a million. Hefner was 27, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with. The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people. ![]() He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from the moment he emerged in the early 1950s. Both were derided over the years - as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative and finally as anachronistic. ![]() Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. His death was announced by Playboy Enterprises. Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment-industry giant - all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women (and sometimes marrying them) well into his 80s - died on Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion, in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles.
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