Hugh Hefner

Hugh Marston Hefner was an American businessman, magazine publisher and playboy. He was the editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, which he founded in 1953. He was also the chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises, which is the publishing group that operates the magazine. An advocate of sexual liberation and freedom of expression, Hefner was a political activist and philanthropist in several other causes and public issues.

Hefner was born during the Prohibition era in Chicago, Illinois, on April 9, 1926. He was the first child of Grace Caroline (née Swanson; 1895–1997) who worked as a teacher, and Glenn Lucius Hefner (1896–1976), an accountant. His parents were from Nebraska. He had a younger brother, Keith (1929–2016). Hefner's mother was of Swedish descent, and his father had German and English ancestry. Through his father's line, Hefner stated that he was a direct descendant of Plymouth governor William Bradford. He described his family as "conservative, Midwestern, and Methodist". His mother had wanted him to become a missionary.

He attended Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz College Prep, then served from 1944 to 1946 as a U.S. Army writer for a military newspaper. Hefner graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a double minor in Creative Writing and Art. He earned his degree in two and a half years in 1949. After graduation, he took a semester of graduate courses in Sociology at Northwestern University, but dropped out soon after.

In January 1952, Hefner left his job as a copywriter for Esquire after he was denied a $5 raise. In 1953, he took out a mortgage, generating a bank loan of $600, and raised $8,000 from 45 investors, including $1,000 from his mother, to launch Playboy, which was initially going to be called Stag Party. The first issue, published in December 1953, featured Marilyn Monroe from her 1949 nude calendar shoot and sold over 50,000 copies. Hefner, who never met Monroe, bought the crypt next to hers at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in 1992 for $75,000.

After the Charles Beaumont science fiction short story "The Crooked Man" was rejected by Esquire magazine in 1955, Hefner agreed to publish the story in Playboy. The story highlighted straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. After the magazine received angry letters, Hefner wrote a response to criticism where he said, "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too." In 1961, Hefner watched Dick Gregory perform at the Herman Roberts Show Bar in Chicago. Based on that performance, Hefner hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club; Gregory attributed the subsequent launch of his career to that night.

On June 4, 1963, Hefner was arrested for promoting obscene literature after he published an issue of Playboy that featured nude shots of Jayne Mansfield. The case went to trial and resulted in a hung jury.

During the civil rights era in 1966, Hefner sent Alex Haley to interview George Lincoln Rockwell, much to Rockwell's surprise because Haley was black. Rockwell had founded the American Nazi Party and would be later described by some as the "American Hitler". Rockwell agreed to meet with Haley only after gaining assurance from the Playboy writer that he was not Jewish, although Rockwell kept a handgun on the table throughout the interview. The interview was recreated in Roots: The Next Generations in 1979, with James Earl Jones as Haley and Marlon Brando as Rockwell; Brando won a Primetime Emmy Award for his portrayal of Rockwell. Haley had also interviewed Malcolm X in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966 for the newly established 1962 "playboy interview"; all three interviewees would be assassinated by 1968.
In 1970, Hugh Hefner stated that "militant feminists" are "unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes" and ordered a hit piece in his magazine against them.

In the 1993 The Simpsons episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled", Hefner guest-voiced himself. In 1999, Hefner financed the Clara Bow documentary, Discovering the It Girl. "Nobody has what Clara had. She defined an era and made her mark on the nation," he stated. Hefner guest-starred as himself in the 2000 Sex and the City episode "Sex and Another City". In 2005, Hefner guest-starred on the HBO TV shows Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. Hefner guest-starred as himself in a 2006 episode of Seth Green's Robot Chicken on the late-night programming block Adult Swim. In the 2007 Family Guy episode "Airport '07", Hefner guest-voiced himself. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for television and made several movie appearances as himself on the small screen. In 2009, he received a "worst supporting actor" nomination for a Razzie award for his performance as himself in Miss March. On his official Twitter account he joked about this nomination: "Maybe I didn't understand the character."

A documentary by Brigitte Berman, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, was released on July 30, 2010. He had previously granted full access to documentary filmmaker and television producer Kevin Burns for the A&E Biography special Hugh Hefner: American Playboy in 1996. Hefner and Burns later collaborated on numerous other television projects, most notably on The Girls Next Door, a reality series that ran for six seasons (2005–2009) and 90 episodes.

In 2012, Hefner announced that his youngest son, Cooper, would likely succeed him as the public face of Playboy.

Hefner died at his home in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California, on September 27, 2017, at the age of 91. The causes were cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, sepsis and an E. coli infection.

He is interred at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, in the $75,000 crypt beside Marilyn Monroe.