Playboy founder Hugh Hefner dies

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Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who helped start a revolution with his groundbreaking men’s magazine and built a business empire around his libertine lifestyle, died on Wednesday at the age of 91, Playboy Enterprises said.

Hefner, once called the “prophet of pop hedonism” by Time magazine, peacefully passed away at his home, Playboy Enterprises said in a statement.

“I‘m never going to grow up,” Hefner said in a CNN interview when he was 82. “Staying young is what it is all about for me. Holding on to the boy and long ago I decided that age really didn’t matter.”

Hefner settled down somewhat in 2012 at age 86 when he took Crystal Harris, who was 60 years younger, as his third wife.

He said his swinging lifestyle might have been a reaction to growing up in a repressed family where affection was rarely exhibited.

That philosophy came to life at the legendary parties in his mansions – first in his native Chicago, then in Los Angeles’ exclusive Holmby Hills neighbourhood.

Hefner faced obscenity charges in 1963 for publishing and circulating photos of celebrities and aspiring stars but he was acquitted.

Hefner created Playboy as the first stylish glossy men’s magazine which also had intellectual appeal with top writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin and Alex Haley for men who liked to say they did not buy the magazine just for the pictures.

In-depth interviews with historical figures such as Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and John Lennon also were featured regularly.

Hefner proved to be a genius at branding. The magazine’s rabbit silhouette became one of the best-known logos in the world and the “bunny” waitresses in his Playboy nightclubs were instantly recognizable in their low-cut bathing suit-style uniforms with bow ties, puffy cottontails and pert rabbit ears.

Hef, as he began calling himself in high school, also was a living logo for Playboy, presiding over his realm in silk pyjamas and a smoking jacket while puffing on a pipe.

“What I created came out of my own adolescent dreams of fantasies,” he told CNN. “I was trying to redefine what it meant to be a young, urban unattached male.”

After writing copy for Esquire magazine, Hefner married and worked in the circulation department of Children’s Activities magazine when he began plotting what would become Playboy magazine.

The first issue came out in December 1953 – featuring explicit photos of actress Marilyn Monroe – and was a hit. As the magazine took off, it was attacked both from the rightists and the leftists for different reasons.

After suffering a minor stroke in 1985, Hefner made daughter Christie chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises and she gave the business a makeover before stepping down in 2009. Hefner’s son, Cooper, who was nearly 40 years younger than Christie, assumed a major role in the company in 2014.

In August 2016, one of Hefner’s neighbours, a private equity investor, announced he had bought the Playboy mansion for $100 million with the understanding Hefner could stay there until he died.