You touched many people's lives and helped many men touch themselves. R.I.P, good man. Legend! Iconic! First ever Cover. He Lived 91 years of a FULL Life! Died of natural causes. Now that's a Happy Ending.
'Life is too short to be living someone else's dream'... He was eulogized by his only son as a media and cultural pioneer as his death at the age of 91 was announced late on Wednesday. It was an apt description for Hugh Hefner, the pipe-smoking, hedonist Playboy creator who revved up sexual revolution in the 1950s and built an empire out of the tried and tested notion that sex sells. As much as anyone, Hefner helped slip sex out of the confines of plain brown wrappers and into mainstream conversation. In 1953, a time when states could legally ban contraceptives, when the word 'pregnant' was not allowed on 'I Love Lucy,' Hefner published the first issue of Playboy, featuring naked photos of Marilyn Monroe (taken years earlier) and an editorial promise of 'humor, sophistication and spice.' The Great Depression and World War II were over and America was ready to get undressed...'
Playboy to the end! Hugh Hefner will be buried in LA cemetery plot next to his first cover girl Marilyn Monroe after paying $75,000 for it in 1992
Hugh Marston Hefner. A man who died as he lived. I remember the first time I saw him on tv. It was on an episode of The Odd Couple with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. Felix Ungar took some nude pictures of his girlfriend and she sent them to Playboy. They become very popular. Feeling shame and embarrassment, Felix takes Playboy to court. Felix loses but is surprised when Hugh Hefner congratulates him and tells him that what he did took guts. He had a television show in the late 50's featuring his Playboy Club in Chicago where Playboy was based. The famous Playboy Bunnies were there serving drinks and chatting with the guests(the guests were black and white celebrities, politicians and etc). The show had a limited run on television because television stations in the South objected to seeing white women socializing with black men. The show is available on DVD and sold only through Playboy. He had a fear of living in a repressive, sexless society and he showed America and the world how to live. He practiced what he preached. And he didn't stop. May he Rest In Peace.
Hugh Hefner donated money to Dick Gregory to go find the bodies of the three Civil Rights workers murdered in Mississippi.
RIP to Papi Chulo the original Don Dada of the industry. "Been pimping since, been pimping since, been pimping!" Lol
The back story..if you care. It's actually quite interesting - *************** Hugh Hefner, who died Wednesday, will be laid to rest beside the woman who helped turn him into a publishing mogul and cultural force: Marilyn Monroe. When he launched Playboy in 1953, Hefner decided to use a nude, color photo of Monroe as his inaugural "Sweetheart of the Month," the predecessor to Playmate. "I feel a double connection to her because she was the launching key to the beginning of Playboy," Hefner told CBS Los Angeles in 2012. "We were born the same year." So, in 1992, Hefner spent $75,000 to purchase the crypt beside Monroe’s in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery as his burial site. "I’m a believer in things symbolic," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up." But for all the impact Monroe had on Hefner, the two never met, he said. And Monroe didn’t even get paid directly for the use of those images. While Hefner’s 1953 magazine turned him into an instant success, he didn’t make his way to out California until the 1960s, he said. Monroe died in 1962 in Brentwood. "She was actually in my brother’s acting class in New York," Hefner said of Monroe in 2011. "But the reality is that I never met her. I talked to her once on the phone, but I never met her. She was gone, sadly, before I came." The nude Monroe photo came into Hefner’s hands in a roundabout way. Years before, Monroe was in the beginning stages of her career and in desperate need of money after acting gigs dried up. She agreed to pose nude for pinup photographer Tom Kelley. She signed the release of the images, known as the Red Velvet series, as "Mona Monroe." "I don’t know why, except I may have wanted to protect myself," Monroe told George Barris in "Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words." She continued: "I was nervous, embarrassed, even ashamed of what I had done, and I did not want my name to appear on that model release." Monroe said she was later told that Kelley sold the photographs for $900 to the Western Lithograph Company, and they made their way into the "Golden Dreams" pinup calendar — which ended up making millions, especially after Monroe’s career took off. "Me? All I was ever paid for that nude calendar photograph was the fifty dollars Tom paid me as the original modeling fee," Monroe said. A year after the cash-strapped Monroe posed for those nudes, her acting career took off with acclaimed roles in "The Asphalt Jungle" and "All About Eve." And four years after the photo shoot, Hefner paid a Chicago calendar company $500 for one of those nude images, plus another clothed photo, to launch his magazine, Monroe said. Monroe graced the front while sitting on top of an elephant at Madison Square Garden. The cover proclaimed, "First time in any magazine, FULL COLOR, the famous MARILYN MONROE NUDE." On the inside, the magazine read: "There were actually two poses shot au naturel back in ’49, just before the gorgeous blonde got her first movie break. When they appeared as calendar art, they helped catapult her to stardom. We’ve selected the better of the two as our first Playboy Sweetheart." Hefner had laid the first issue out on his kitchen table, and cobbled together a few thousand dollars (including $1,000 from his mother) to launch Playboy. "His greatest piece of luck was his choice of the first centerfold," the New York Times wrote. "It remains by far the sexiest of all Hefner’s pinups." Monroe herself said that "the magazine, I was told, thanks to my photos, [was] an instant sellout all across the country, an instant success." From "Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words:" I never even received a thank-you from all those who made millions off a nude Marilyn photograph. I even had to buy a copy of the magazine to see myself in it… I admitted it was me who posed for that nude calendar even when the Fox executives became nervous and believed this would cause the ruination of any films I would appear in and also the end of my movie career. Of course they were wrong. The fans, my public, cheered when I admitted it was me, and that calendar and that Playboy first-issue publicity helped my career. Those iconic Monroe images will forever be linked to Hefner and the empire he’d go on to build. So the plan he concocted decades after publishing Monroe’s images — to be laid to rest beside her — made sense to the publisher. As he explained in 2012: "It has a completion notion to it."
