Hugh Hefner Born: Playboy's Controversial Publisher

Hugh Hefner launched Playboy in December 1953 with $8,000 borrowed from friends and a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe that he purchased for $500. Born on April 9, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, to conservative Methodist parents, he served in the Army as a writer during World War II and studied psychology and creative writing at the University of Illinois. He worked briefly as a copywriter for Esquire magazine before deciding to start his own publication. He didn't know if there would be a second issue, so he didn't put a date on the first one. The gamble paid off immediately. The first issue sold over 50,000 copies. By 1959, Hefner was living in the Playboy Mansion, rarely leaving it, working from a circular bed in silk pajamas. The magazine published Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, and Alex Haley alongside the photographs. Haley's interview with Malcolm X for Playboy in 1963 was one of the most important pieces of American journalism that decade. The Playboy interview format, which ran for hours and was published in full, became a venue where public figures spoke more candidly than anywhere else. Hefner positioned himself as a champion of First Amendment rights and sexual liberation, funding legal challenges to obscenity laws and supporting civil rights causes at a time when both positions were commercially risky. His critics, who grew louder from the 1970s onward, argued that the magazine objectified women and that Hefner's lifestyle was exploitative rather than liberating. The debate about his legacy never resolved and probably never will. He married three times and had four children. He died on September 27, 2017, at age 91, in the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. He was buried next to Marilyn Monroe, having purchased the adjacent crypt decades earlier.