Playboy was a serious publication
It was trail blazing. Its interviews were famous they interviewed
John Lennon
Pres. Carter
Miles Davis
Arafat
Castro
Malcolm X
Kurt Vonnegut
Martin Luther King and every big movie star including Brando
It published stories by
Saul Bllow
John Updike
James Dickey
Bernard Malamud
John Irving
Joyce Carolyn Oates
Michael Crichton
J.P. Donlevy
and many others.
It had the best cartoons in the business .
Don’t slam what you don’t know about. Hefner was a serious man who as he aged became a caricature of himself. But he was once a headliner in pushing culture, music and the arts.
The girls were also very pretty.
Both qualities are on display during this discussion between Hugh Hefner and William F. Buckley on Firing Line from 1966. (Buckley once stated, while his son Christoper was away at college, that he wrote works for publication in Playboy because it was the only way he had of communicating with his son. :D)
I must say it’s nice to see Hef as he once was - and to see this side of him as well. I disagree that Hef has become a caricature of his old self, but I do think The Girls Next Door portrays him in a shallow way that lends itself to that view. I’ve often wished that Hefner would do a show similar to TGND but which focused on the artistic and business side of his life instead. Such a program would get nowhere near the ratings, of course, but in my opinion it would be much more interesting - and Hefner would come off a lot better too. People would see the intelligent, resouceful, shrewd and commanding Hugh Hefner -the one he really is - rather than the amiable but doddering little old man in a yachting cap pretending that the relationships he has with most of the girls who share his bed are based on romance. He’s still quite sharp mentally and it would be fun to watch as he runs the company, tries to take it private, and attempts to cope with the ever-changing impact of digital technology upon the magazine business. That’s when you’d see the real Hef, and he would be a considerably different and more impressive one than the one who appears in TGND.
I was referencing Two Many Cats post earlier in this thread:
Hef’s lifestyle isn’t terribly imaginative. It’s the feverish fantasies of boring and unhappy suburban fathers. It’s all so shabby.
Sounds like the First Girl in every harem scenario out there.
Hef is manufactured cool. He is cool because we are told to think he is cool. That is sad, in my opinion.
Unless you’re taking the Comedy Central Roast as gospel, I’m interested in how you know this.
Frankly, to hell with all the Hef hate. I hope I’m banging 25-year olds when I’m 80.
I’m just curious what people expect Hef to have in his mansion. I mean, maybe I’m unimaginative too (I thought the highlight of moving out of the dorms was having my own bathroom and kitchen), but I’m not sure what supremely inspired different thing Hef is expected to have in his mansion. Private harrier jump jet in a hangar under the back yard?
As for Hef being cool because we’re told he’s cool… no duh, isn’t that pretty much how “Cool” works? I think it’s funny how people tell us we shouldn’t think Hef is cool just because everybody says so, yet we’re supposed to agree that Hef is sad and pathetic… just because a bunch of people are saying so. 
Are you speaking from first hand experience? Maybe you could share some amusing anecdotes, ideally in “Letters To Penthouse” style. Specifically, what sorta “stuff” did you have to do to get him off.
I just think that the kind of people who unironically use terms like “banging chicks,” and those of us who don’t, have radically different ideas of what it is to be cool.
I have been unimpressed by Hef since I read about him in Newsweek and one of the details mentioned was that there were bowls of M&Ms in every room. “Well, big deal, M&Ms. I can buy M&Ms; I just can’t buy as many of them as Hef can. Now, if they were hand-dipped chocolates shaped like breasts, that would be impressive. Or even medallions with the Bunny logo.” Basically, I think it’s that Hef had all those toys, like the round bed and the hi-fi built into the wall, at a time when most people’s homes were just functional. Now that home theaters are the norm, BFD.
I’m sure that Hef has a lot more rooms in his house than I do. But I could buy more than enough M&Ms to keep about 10 bowls of them hanging around in every room in HIS house. M&Ms are really pretty cheap. They aren’t bottom of the barrel, but they don’t impress me. Hell, with his “classy” lifestyle, I expect him to keep a much better grade of chocolate around. Even if you limit your choices to what you can get in a grocery store, there’s Dove chocolates, for instance, which are really worlds better than M&Ms. I’d expect Hef to keep bowls of chocolate shaped like the famous Playboy bunny head logo. That, at least, would be consistent with the branding that he likes.
I just did a second of Googling, and found penis and boob and butt molds for chocolate, which also work for other candies. Also adult themed lollipop molds. If the molds are available to consumers, then I imagine Hef could get the chocolates made, too.
I really think that Hef lacks imagination when it comes to luxury. His idea of high living is having hot and cold running Bunnies, and that’s about it.
Hell, there’s at least two “rabbit with a penis” lollipop molds that one company offers. Maybe I should make my own Halloween treats this year…
Hefner is very open about using Viagra (…and triplets), I haven’t heard of anything beyond that.
From the NY Times.
I’ve also read him as saying (very approximately) that Viagra not only supplies hardness but it makes sex feel the way it’s should ideally feel.
As for whether Hef is in some way “cool”, well, I think of him as a “Divine Asshole.” It’s a set that also includes Ted Nugent and Joe Namath.
So, he’s not classy because he likes M&Ms, and your idea of classy is chocolates shaped like boobs and penises?
Really? I got nothing against the guy, but to my view he’s basically made his entire life into a piece of performance art in order to sell magazines. Its the opposite of not caring what other people think. He’s as much a prop of his business as the playmates.
So I agree with the other posters who said he always strikes me as kinda sad. He’s stuck in a twenty-year-olds version of a fantasy lifestyle at age 84, mainly in order to fulfilll other peoples image of him. Its the opposite of cool.
Hef doesn’t need imagination. That’s for most of the rest of us guys.
He likes leggy, large breasted blondes and M&Ms. What the HELL is wrong with Hef?
There is a segment of the population who think he’s the coolest motherscratcher on the Planet. The Glenn Quagmire types. Most men probably fantasize about being Hugh Hefner, maybe not.
I am fairly neutral about the man. He seemed like a man who was at the right place at the right time with the right product. He taught me a lot about the female anatomy. He seems to be a person who likes to party and live handsomely off of his fortune. Good for him.
Personally, I am not into Playboy models. Most are plastic and phony. Some are literally plastic. The smart ones are materialistic and cunts while the dumb ones consider cooking as to throwing a Lean Cuisine into a nukebox.
I think a lot of people are turned off by the fact that he is over 80 years old and is supposedly partying and fucking 21 year chicks with plastic breasts. Society has this weird thing about old people and sex.
I would think that it would be a lonely life not to have a wife, but he has been married before and it has not worked out for him, and what he has been doing is working well for him.
I can’t believe that Playboy is still in business. Why buy a magazine when you can get porn for free? And yes, I have read the stories in there. It’s something to do after masterbation. My favorite mag as a kid was Hustler. What made Hustler great was Larry Flynt and those comic strips he had. That was a crazy ass magazine back in the day. I would love to come across those old back issues, does someone sell them on E-Bay?
I have seen that Larry Flynt opened a chain of strip bars. I never cared for strip bars, and the only way you would catch me in there is if I was pretty loaded with some friends with promises of free tequilia.
Well, my thinking is that M&Ms is really a kid’s chocolate. They’re acceptable for adults, but they certainly aren’t classy. My objection to them is the quality of the chocolate itself. I don’t eat any chocolate of that low quality, because it’s not worth it. As I said, it’s possible to buy a better chocolate even at a grocery store. The reason that performer riders specify things like “bowl of M&Ms in the dressing room” is because M&Ms ARE available everywhere, so the craft services people can buy them at the local convenience store if needed. And many pop performers are not noted for their excellent taste and high class.
As for the chocolate shaped body parts, no, that’s not classy, either, unless they’re served at an adult party as a joke…and they’re still not classy, just funny. I think of Nanny Ogg serving something like this, for giggles. My point was, he should have a better quality of chocolate, and it’s possible to get chocolate custom molded. He puts that Playboy bunny logo on everything else, so I’m rather surprised that he DOESN’T have custom candy/ice molds in that shape. The fact that he considers having an abundance of mediocre chocolate in every room speaks volumes to me. Now, if he had bowls of Godiva or other high end chocolate, that would be another thing.
There is a new book about the Playboy life style and history that I skimmed at the bookstore.
It really shed light on a very interesting time, that I was too young to remember. According to the book in the late 50’s there was a crisis of manhood, men felt the women were taking over and “womanizing” the country. The slight gains women made in the workforce during and after the war gave rise to “careerer girls” that a lot of men just could not accept and was a very real threat to the ideas of masculinity. Marriage and family life were seen as a burden a new phrase called togetherness was coined to include the wife as an equal partner in the the household. Hugh Hefner believed men and women were completely different and monogamy was what women trapped men into ruining their fun, this is what the Playboy life style was created to fight.
As I have said this was before my time, were there huge gender wars in the 50s, what was so objectionable about women in the work force?