In light of a lengthy new profile of Hugh Hefner, a former editor muses on Hef’s passage from icon to ghost.
Having worked as an editor at playboy.com during its late ’90s heyday when dot-com IPOs were popping up like erections in a sophomore Spanish class, I read Charles McGrath’s profile of Hugh Hefner with particular relish. I’d experienced firsthand how Hef and his daughter Christie managed their employees, his magazine and its Playmates, and seen the difference between the Playboy of the Collective Imagination (quaaludes, all-night sex parties, balling in the break room) and the Playboy of my W-2s (meetings, political skulduggery, meetings).
McGrath’s is a sort of Hugh Hefner puff piece that’s been spontaneously regenerating itself for decades, a Playboy-branded Mad Libs that goes something like this:
- Start with a historic/creepy anecdote about Hefner’s tenuous relationship with Marilyn Monroe and, by extension, a lost era of Hollywood royalty: “Hugh Hefner already has his final resting place picked out and paid for: a crypt next to Marilyn Monroe’s in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.”
- Fail to note that the already established Monroe’s pin-up photos elevated 1953’s debut issue of Playboy from a pack of similarly themed swank spank competitors; Playboy did not “make” Marilyn.
- Remark on the curiosity of an octogenarian who lives “the life of an invalid, or even of a cosseted mental patient: wearing pajamas all day; rarely venturing out of the house; taking most of his meals in his bedroom.”
- Quickly double back to proclaim that Hef is in “otherwise enviable shape…One former girlfriend has said that in the bedroom, with his clothes off, he practically glows in the dark.”
- Profile his Faustian market longevity by referencing the reality show The Girls Next Door (which never explained if the girls in question were his Playmate “girlfriends” Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson or their D-cup sweater puppies) and, of course, the continued existence of Playboy magazine itself.
- Reframe the wincing absurdity of an 84 year-old getting engaged to a 24 year-old centerfold (again) by dubbing him a “benign and indulgent paterfamilias, a kind of fairy godfather.”
- Don’t forget Hef’s relevance to modernity! (Mention that he tweeted news of his engagement!)
- Pull in the “newsy” hook: in this case, that Hef wants to buy back Playboy. (Previous incarnations have included “Hef’s Beautiful/Intelligent Daughter Runs Playboy as Hef Settles Down,” “Hef’s Beautiful/Intelligent Daughter Still Running Playboy” and “Hef Not Dead Yet.”)
- Describe the magazine’s lustrous history while documenting its decline in the face of competitors ranging from lad mags to bangbros.com.
- Reiterate that Hef is “not a sleazebag” by comparing his mien to the primary attributes of his archetypal competitors: “Bob Guccione’s oiliness” and “Larry Flynt’s leering vulgarity.”
- Meld the Playboy brand and Hef into one megalithic entity that will, in the words of Hef himself, “be easier to perpetuate…when I’m not around, because then nobody will be pissed off that I’m still getting laid.” (Because his Viagra-fueled orgies are what really gets Gloria Steinem’s panties in a bunch.)
Like most articles about Hef, McGrath’s piece makes no mention of Playboy’s various associations with hard drug use, including the overdose of former Playboy Bunny Adrienne Pollack in 1973, the suicide of Hefner’s long-term executive secretary after conviction on drug smuggling charges in 1975, and the 1985 testimony for Ronald Reagan’s largely discredited Meese Commission on Pornography from Playmate Miki Garcia and former bunny Brenda MacKillop that drug use and venereal disease were rampant at Playboy Mansion parties. Hef is on record stating that he gobbled amphetamines, ostensibly to keep up with his magazine’s production schedule, but more than one Playmate told me about the copious drugs that floated around the Mansion, often sotto voce during interviews for some corporate mission or another. One of the video editors I worked with missed a week of work because he was arrested at the Mexican border with Valium he’d picked up from a pharmacia. I was shocked he wasn’t fired until I heard scuttlebutt that he was supplying editors at the magazine with pills.