Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,542

This is the grave of Hugh Hefner.

One of the grossest people in American history was born in Chicago in 1926. He grew up in a middle class household. His father was an accountant and his mother a teacher. They were a conservative Methodist family who took church very seriously. I guess that didn’t stick. Wish it would have. One more boring midwestern conservative would not have hurt the world as much as this guy. Hefner was in the Army at the very end of World War II and wrote for a newspaper, so no real action there. He came back, went to the University of Illinois, and graduated with a psychology degree in 1949. He started a PhD program in sociology at Northwestern, but dropped out.

Hefner took a job writing with Esquire, but quit in 1952 after he was denied a raise. He decided to start a new magazine to represent his ideal lifestyle, one which he fully intended to embody. This was of course Playboy. He started this in a typical fashion–he bought a bunch of nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken back in 1949 and displayed them in his magazine. Marilyn received nothing for this. In fact, this son of a bitch would exploit Marilyn for his whole life. Spoiler alert: Marilyn Monroe is buried right next to him. We will get to Marilyn’s day in the grave series soon. In 1992, Hefner bought the slot in order to be buried next to her because he wanted to be near her. I find this so disgusting. Just leave the poor woman alone you bastard!

In any case, people in 1953 definitely wanted to see nude Marilyn. Hefner soon became a sensation, combining an utterly hedonistic lifestyle that rejected the sexual conventions of the 1950s with midcentury pretentious masculine intellectual bullshit. On the first, Hefner did not so much reject the sexual conventions as make lewd male behavior publicly acceptable. So he hired real journalists to publish real articles in between the tits. Many leading authors would publish in Playboy.

Now, Hefner does deserve some credit. He was good on civil rights especially. He gave Dick Gregory a huge boost when he hired the young comedian to work at the Chicago Playboy Club. Gregory would use this newfound fame to become of the real celebrity civil rights leaders, though late-era Gregory got pretty weird and problematic. He also hired Alex Haley to publish in Playboy, including an interview with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, as well as interviews with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He also stood for free speech, as a guy getting busted for publishing nude photos really much and he publicly debated people such as William F. Buckley on issues of speech.

But Hefner was a misogynist to the nth. He despised feminism and of course the second wave feminists of the early 70s despised him. It’s fair enough to say that certain members of that wave of feminism were distinctly anti-sex and that doesn’t age particularly well today (my students often have a hard time getting their heads around some of this stuff) but in the context of the society Hefner had helped create, it made perfect sense. For Hefner, women were there for male pleasure and if they did not serve male pleasure, they had no place in society.

Hefner partied like there was no tomorrow. Group sex was common. He cycled through women like no other. He had his original Playboy Mansion in Chicago and then later the real one in Los Angeles that became so famous. Hanging there was a rite of passage for important men of a certain generation and if they got laid by a hot blonde while hanging out there, even better. Who was going to tell what happened inside the Playboy Mansion?

It is almost impossible for me to wrap my head around the cultural phenom that Hefner became. I guess this is a moment to talk about narratives in the history of sexuality. Regardless of the realities, the 50s were seen as a straight-laced, buttoned-down period in which sex was not publicly discussed. Now, this is a lot less true in hindsight than it truly was, though there were a ton of cultural productions and political pressures to make it so, from the McCarthyite crackdown on anything considered deviant in public life to the portrayal of spouses sleeping in separate beds on TV. But this was as much an aspect of the 50s as Hefner and Playboy was. It’s not as if the war years were particularly repressive sexually; in fact, they were quite the opposite as people moved around the country and world and had all sorts of adventures, sexual and otherwise.

But Hefner represented a particular kind of fantasy, one that cut against the other male culture stereotype of the period, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Hef wasn’t moving to the suburbs. He wasn’t working an office job. He was a capitalist personally but had no interest in being a cog in the machine. The Cold War was not particularly important to him (I do wonder if the mansion had a bomb shelter now that I consider it). He was an independent man who was openly having sex with whoever he wanted and whoever he wanted was hot blondes with large breasts. Given the rampant misogyny of postwar America generally, to me the bigger difference between Hefner and all the businessmen having assignations in hotels is that Hef was doing it openly, rather than he was doing it at all.

In any case, Hefner was a national phenomenon. He had his own TV show, which I have seen only because it’s the earliest live footage of the great band Sir Douglas Quintet I’ve found. I am sure Doug Sahm had a good time with Hef. His fame lasted his whole life. He was on The Simpsons, he was really everywhere. And why? I mean, the kind of excuses made for a guy like this who not only objectified women, but actively exploited them is so bad.

Now, Hefner did have some good things about him. He was an open supporter of gay rights way before that was considered politically acceptable. Some of the Playboy models such as Pamela Anderson have said he empowered them in their fights for animal rights. So OK, fine. But my God. One can see where people such as Andrea Dworkin were coming from in their anti-pornography fights dealing with men such as Hefner, not to mention the cut rate types like Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt. I don’t agree with Dworkin and such really. I think the reality of sex work is that it is really complicated and some women are legitimately empowered and some women are legitimately exploited and you can’t really flatten the variety of experiences out. But when Hugh Hefner, a routine exploiter of women, a man known to insult women left and right, force them into competition with each other to please him, and create body image issues for so many people, is considered a completely normal and respected member of society, I just dunno man.

I don’t know if Hefner’s behavior really got worse as he aged or got grosser, but it did get more ridiculous. God knows how much Viagara the man used to have group sex with a bunch of identical looking 25 year old blondes when he was in his 80s, but it was a lot and I mean, have a little self-respect.

You know, I could go on here, but I think I will stop. Commenters can take this any direction they want to go. Hefner died in 2017. He was 91 years old.

Hugh Hefner is buried, disgustingly next to Marilyn Monroe, at Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit Hefner’s contemporaries in smut, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Larry Flynt is in Lakeville, Kansas and Bob Guccione is in Staatsburg, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here. As I mentioned yesterday, I am doing a bit of a 50th birthday fundraiser for the series, largely to pay for a conference in New Orleans the university is not going to pay for, so any help is appreciated to see dead southerners. Thanks to those who helped out yesterday. Some of you suggested a grave for me to see in New Orleans. Will do, if it is findable!