MR Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream

von Steven Watts

Gorgeous young women in coquettish, nude poses; extravagant mansion parties, complete with celebrity guests; hot-tub grottos; elegant smoking jackets; mirrored ceilings hovering above rotating circular beds; the enthusiastic promotion of wild, uninhibited sex: Put them all together, and a single name springs to mind - Hugh Hefner. But is the self-proclaimed hedonist who triggered and personified the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s really Mr. Playboy? Or is he Bill Gates with a very different operating system?In Mr. Playboy, historian and biographer Steven Watts argues that, in the process of becoming fabulously wealthy, famous, and, in some circles, infamous, Hugh Hefner has had as great an impact on American life as any other individual entrepreneur in history. Drawing on unprecedented insider information form both Playboy and Hefner himself, Watt's traces Hef's life and career from his conventional mid-western upbringing and the publication of the very first issue of Playboy in 1952 through the turbulent sixties and self-indulgent seventies, and on up to the present. He reveals that, from the beginning, Hefner's interests,and eventually his influence and his empire, stretched far beyond naughty pictures straight to the heart of how Americans live their daily lives.This fascinating portrait illustrates four ways in which Hefner and Playboy both shaped and reflected a series of profound changes in post-war America. In addition to his undeniable role in the transformation of sexual values and conduct in the 1950s, Hefner was one of the most persuasive advocates of the emerging consumer culture of the 1960s, flooding Playboy readers with symbols of material abundance and a leisure-rich lifestyle..Watts also shows how Hefner, with his popular magazine, syndicated television shows, franchised nightclubs, and movie and musical projects, was also instrumental in mainstreaming pop culture into a dominant force in most people's lives.Hefner's role as an object of scorn for the feminist movement of the 1970s was a painful one. His claim that he was a progressive who advocated sexual freedom for women as well as men carried no weight with feminists, who saw him as an advocate of the worst sort of male domination.Through it all, Hef continued to walk the Playboy walk. Watts offers singular insights into Hefner's remarkable double life as a workaholic pleasure seeker, running a huge and growing empire while throwing lavish parties at his Chicago and Los Angeles mansions and enjoying well-publicized affairs with numerous Playmates, including, most famously, Barbie Benton-all this while hobnobbing regularly with the Hollywood elite.Punctuated throughout with provocative anecdotes of life at the Playboy Mansions, Mr. Playboy tells a compelling and uniquely American story of how one man with a timely idea, a genius for marketing, and a true passion for his work really did change the world.