On Wednesday, Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner died at the age of 91.
Born on April 9, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois, Hefner joined the U.S. Army as a writer for a military newspaper. He later became a promotional copywriter at Esquire magazine. Offering his furniture as collateral for a loan and borrowing from friends, he spent $10,000 to publish the first issue of Playboy in December of 1953, which included a naked Marilyn Monroe. The issue sold more than 50,000 copies.
Years later, Hefner told CNN, “Esquire was always for older guys, but … it was very much devoted to male bonding and outdoor adventure. And I wanted to read a magazine that was a little more sophisticated and was focused really on the romantic connection between the sexes from a male point of view.”
In 1967, Hefner said of using the bunny as Playboy’s symbol, “The rabbit, the bunny, in America has a sexual meaning; and I chose it because it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping — sexy.”
By the 1970s the Playboy empire included TV shows, a jazz festival and a string of Playboy Clubs; in 1971, Hefner purchased the legendary Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, where he lived the rest of his life. By the 1980s, Playboy’s popularity started ebbing.
Playboy was famous for its nudity, but the magazine also included writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, John Updike, Ian Fleming, Joseph Heller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut.
Hefner was married three times; to Mildred Williams (1949-59), Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad (1989-2010, although they separated ten years into the marriage), and Crystal Harris, whom he married on Dec. 31, 2012. He was 86; she was 26.
But in between his marriages Hefner was a sexual profligate, by his own admission; he told Esquire magazine in 2013, he had slept with a myriad of women: “over a thousand, I’m sure,” adding, “There were chunks of my life when I was married, and when I was married I never cheated. But I made up for it when I wasn’t married.”
Hefner suffered a mild stroke in 1985, leaving his daughter Christie in charge of the company.
In recent years, Hefner starred in The Girls Next Door, a reality TV series about his life with three of his young blonde girlfriends. By late 2015, Playboy‘s circulation had plunged to roughly 800,000. In 2016, the Playboy Mansion sold for $100 million, the most expensive home ever sold in Los Angeles; the deal enabled Hefner to stay there for the remainder of his lifetime.
Hefner stated in a 1974 Playboy issue, “If you don’t encourage healthy sexual expression in public, you get unhealthy sexual expression in private. If you attempt to suppress sex in books, magazines, movies and even everyday conversation, you aren’t helping to make sex more private, just more hidden. You’re keeping sex in the dark. What we’ve tried to do is turn on the lights.”