Hugh Hefner, visionary editor who created Playboy magazine, dies at 91quote:
As much as anyone, Hugh Hefner turned the world on to sex. As the visionary editor who created Playboy magazine out of sheer will and his own fevered dreams, he introduced nudity and sexuality to the cultural mainstream of America and the world.
For decades, the ageless Mr. Hefner embodied the "Playboy lifestyle" as the pajama-clad sybarite who worked from his bed, threw lavish parties and inhabited the Playboy Mansion with an ever-changing bevy of well-toned young beauties.
He died Sept. 27 at the age of 91. His death was confirmed by Playboy in a tweet.
From the first issue of Playboy in 1953, which featured a photograph of a nude Marilyn Monroe lounging on a red sheet, Mr. Hefner sought to overturn what he considered the puritanical moral code of Middle America. His magazine was shocking at the time, but it quickly found a large and receptive audience and was a principal force behind the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Mr. Hefner brought nudity out from under the counter, but he was more than the emperor of a land with no clothes. From the beginning, he had literary aspirations for Playboy, hiring top writers to give his magazine cultural credibility. It became a running joke that the cognoscenti read Playboy "for the articles" and demurely averted their eyes from the pages depicting bare-breasted women.
Few publications have so thoroughly reflected the tastes and ambitions of their creators as Mr. Hefner's Playboy.
"I'm living a grown-up version of a boy's dream, turning life into a celebration," he told Time magazine in 1967. "It's all over too quickly. Life should be more than a vale of tears."
The magazine's formula of glossy nudes, serious writing and cartoons, coupled with how-to advice on stereos, sex, cars and clothes, changed little through the years and was meant to appeal to urban, upwardly mobile heterosexual men. But Playboy also had a surprisingly high readership among members of the clergy — who received a 25 percent subscription discount — and women.
"Hefner was, first and foremost, a brilliant businessman," David Allyn, author of "Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History," told The Washington Post in an interview. "He created Playboy at a time when America was entering a period of profound economic and social optimism. His brand of sexual liberalism fit perfectly with postwar aspirations."
"Hef," as he was widely known, was in charge of editorial operations from the beginning and was known to work on the magazine for 40 hours without a break, driven by the deadline buzz of amphetamines, Pepsi-Cola and his ever-present pipe.
https://www.washingtonpos(...)773cd5a14_story.html[ Bericht 77% gewijzigd door Stabiel op 28-09-2017 05:55:32 ]