Tremendous increase in STDs during his lifetime. His readers had intelligence: in 1958 Pat Boone finished second in Playboy’s first “Jazz and Pop Poll” behind Sinatra and far ahead of Elvis Presley. Playboy didn’t much cover rock in their reviews until about 1967. Lots of jazz but the early 1960s may have been the golden age for jazz. I remember an issue a couple years ago railing against building a wall in Mexico. Yup, I am sure the Bunny Mansion was open to all with no walls or security guards. I used to get a “LaserDisc Newsletter” (anyone remember laserdiscs?) that when they reviewed “Playmate” LE would faithfully transcript the wisdom of the girl next door with the silicon implants.
I’ll miss Hef. Enjoy eternity next to Marilyn Monroe
The joke of course was about people claiming that they only read Playboy for the articles. I will freely admit to looking at the pictures but the articles and interviews were frequently top quality and featured some heavy hitters of the literary world. Kudos to the man for not settling for Playboy being just another skin mag.
The early 60s was a golden age in jazz. Miles, Coltrane, Dizzy, Bill Evans, Stan Gets, the legendary vocalists…Ella Sarah Dinah Washington. Playboy helped spread love of this music to many new places.
The radio news mentioned that he hired jazz bands to play at the Playboy Clubs long before it was considered a proper thing to do. Surprised the hell out of me.
He was a part of the huge changes that occurred in the 1960’s.
Wow, the man was clearly an icon. Sad to see him go, but he had long and full life. Let’s hide some bunny ears somewhere on his tombstone!
I had the fortune to be invited* to a party at The Mansion a few years back. It was a Charity event, and very pricey, but we had a great time. Very cool estate and although it did cost a fair penny, all the food and everything was top quality and you felt like you were getting a bang for your buck, even if not literally.
*Paid to attend, so not sure “invited” is exactly the right term.
I think I might be responsible for his death. Just last night we were watching the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Hugh in it. I commented something like “wow, he’s old…is he even alive?”. Oops. :smack:
Nitpicking to give credit where it’s due. Hefner liked sf but didn’t really know anything about it. Or any modern fiction. Ray Russell, who did, told him so and got hired as fiction editor. He was the one to put all the sf in the magazine, and Alice Turner continued that when she became editor. Asimov never published in Playboy, though he wrote a spoof of William Knoles’ spoof “Girls and the Slime God” called “Playboy and the Slime God” for Amazing. Knoles was one of the many writers who supported themselves by dozens of soft core sleaze novels. He’s best known as Clyde Allison who wrote the 0008 James Bond spoofs.
Playboy probably was one of the most important magazines in America for a decade or so. It saw the future when almost everybody else saw the past. Not the science fiction Future, though he ran plenty of that. (See 1984 and Beyond: The Playboy Panel in 1963.) He proselytized the liberal culture-is-changing future that came to overtake him by the millennium, and did it in the 1950s when it cost him dearly in time, money, and disapproval. Sure, he exploited the culture’s love of beautiful young women to make it happen. He’s an equivocal hero at best. (And the Pepsi drinker got lost in a cocaine nightmare in the 1970s.) Don’t put up statues to him. Just remember how really, really important he was for a while.
When I bought Playboy, I loved both the articles and the girls. It was a perfect magazine. Intelligent and witty and of course the beautiful girls. I had a subscription for a few years in my early 20s.
