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“I'm 86 years old, Playboy magazine
is approaching its 60th birthday…that it should still be relevant, that it
should still be hot—that we should be doing this interview—is beyond belief…very
satisfying,” says Hugh Hefner, dressed in his usual silk pajamas,
sipping from a bottle of Playboy branded water and seated beneath a large bust
of one of his greatest loves, Barbi Benton, her ceramic breasts glinting in the
mid-afternoon sunlight. “When I began publishing in ‘53, most of the post-war
men's magazines were outdoor adventure books, and I was not interested in
hunting and fishing,” he says. “So I created an urban, urbane lifestyle
magazine, in which the romantic connection between the sexes was the
centerpiece. And that's still the case. The concept of Playboy has really not
changed at all.”
White haired and just a tad hard of hearing, Hef (his
preferred nickname since adolescence) has a lot to reminisce about. Like how he
launched Playboy magazine in December 1953, using his apartment furniture as
loan collateral so he could publish the now-famous calendar nudes of Marilyn
Monroe, at a time when newsstand nudity was unheard of and when Monroe’s star was
on the rise. Or how he weathered the slings and arrows of feminist attack, while
being an ardent supporter of women’s rights (the Playboy Foundation was the amicus curiae, the friend of court, in Roe v Wade, helping fund the pro-choice
campaign). How he published some of the best American literary fiction
and nonfiction of the past 50 years—the words of Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, Ian
Fleming, and Vladmir Nabokov have appeared on the pages of Playboy, and more
than 30 Playboy stories have been adapted for film, including Born on the 4th of July, The Fly,
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Born on the Fourth of July,
Fahrenheit 451, All the President’s Men, Roots, In the
Valley of Elah, and The Hurt Locker. And of course, there were the parties—those
Gatsby-esque bacchanals at Playboy Mansion West in the 1970s, when the
magazine’s circulation was peaking at 7 million per month; when he was
operating 23 Playboy Clubs with 900,000 members worldwide; when things like
online publishing, reality television, the economic meltdown of 2008 (Playboy’s
value dropped from $1 billion to $84 million between 2000
and 2009 and was subsequently put up for sale) were unforeseeable specks
on a distant horizon.
Today, Hefner is in a phase of
intense forward motion, actively steering Playboy Enterprises into a new phase
of its existence—back to being family-owned and operated, and LA-based. When we
meet, he’s a few weeks away from unveiling Playboy’s brand new headquarters in
Beverly Hills, having closed his offices in Chicago and New York. This year he oversaw
a $122.5 million buy-back of Playboy Enterprises with
the help of Rizvi Traverse Management LLC., placing him—not Wall Street
or shareholders—firmly back in charge of the bunny again. “Once the
company went public, we had to worry about the bottom line every year,” says
Hefner. “And prior to that, I didn't worry about the bottom line, I worried
about the vision. Now I can worry about the vision again.”
So, what is that vision? “The company is basically moving towards
becoming a branding company, because our marks are so iconic,” says Dick
Rosenzweig, VP of Playboy Enterprises, Executive
Vice President of Playboy since 1988, and with Hef since the late 1950s. Brand licensing
remains Playboy's highest-margin business, he says. “We have been very strong in licensing
all over the world, more so really internationally than domestically.
Internationally, these countries look to America as the leader in contemporary
and hip society. To them, the Playboy name and the bunny represent something
that they want to emulate, whether it’s a rabbit head on a shirt or on a
volleyball or a nightclub.” In China, where the magazine and its website are
banned, Playboy’s licensing business is booming. In 2003, the Far
Eastern Economic Review named Playboy the most popular brand in China and there are about 650 outlets licensed to carry Playboy
merchandise, including a
high-end Playboy clothing line comprising men’s suits and formal attire. (Hef
doesn’t wear Playboy clothes. “I wear pajamas,” he says).
Reality TV has also helped take Playboy to an entirely new
demographic—young women. ““When reality
TV first became popular everybody and his uncle wanted to do one at the Mansion
and I was not interested,” says Hefner. “It was after the fourth or fifth year
that a friend, Kevin Burns, who had done a couple documentaries for A&E on
me, came with a notion of, instead of focusing on me, focusing on the
girlfriends, and that turned out to be an inspired idea.” Six season of Girls Next Door on E! and various
spinoffs later, and Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends are arguably as well-known as Hef
himself, especially among the shows’ viewers.
Playboy is still running clubs (casinos were a Playboy’s major
source of income in the 1970s), with the focus on quality rather than quantity—Playboy
is just ending a relationship with the Palms in Las Vegas and will “probably”
have another club in the city. There is a Playboy casino in Macau, one soon to
open in Cologne, Germany, and a casino club in London which opened about a year
ago in the back of the Four Seasons hotel. “That’s where we want to go in terms
of live entertainment - very hip and on the scene,” says Rosenzweig. And the
magazine, which has around 34 foreign editions, is especially thriving in
Eastern Europe, where it is seen as a bastion of the “American contemporary
hipness” coveted by the rest of the world. “The magazine is really at the base
of everything that we do,” says Rosenzweig. And while it may not have anywhere
close to the circulation it once enjoyed (around 1.5 million in the US in 2011),
as a brand ambassador, “the magazine brings a lot to the party.”
Now that he has control of the brand again, Hefner has been
swift to get rid of aspects of the company that gatecrashed that party, like
porn. “Licensing
has permitted us to get out of the part of the business that has never been my
favorite,” says Hefner, referring to softcore porn channels on cable TV and
websites operated by Playboy from 2001 until this year. After going private again, he sold the adult portion of their
company (once thought to comprise about 60% of the entre business) to a
German-Canadian company called Manwin, so that Playboy Enterprises could focus
on mainstream entertainment. “Porn is something we never really wanted to get
into, but Wall Street encouraged us to. They thought there was so much money in
it,” says Rosenszweig.
The relocation of Playboy to LA, finally executed this year,
has been on the cards for years. Hollywood has been Hefner’s home and community
since the 1970s—he purchased the Holmby Hills estate now known as Playboy
Mansion West in 1971, and moved there permanently in 1975, doing so in order to
more closely supervise Playboy Enterprises' interests in television and film
production, but also because Hollywood has always been something of a spiritual
home for him, as evidenced by his extra-curricular passion projects. Hefner championed the reconstruction of the
Hollywood sign in 1980 (was honored by a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for
his efforts), for instance, and again in 2010, when he donated $1million toward
saving the landmark. Hefner has financed the restoration of more than a dozen
classic black and white films, including 1945’s The Big Sleep, and funded historical documentaries on silver screen
sirens Clara Bow, Rita Hayworth, Marion Davies, Louise Brooks and cinematic
icons. “Films
had a major influence on my life growing up, so it’s my way of paying back what
I felt I got out of the movies,” says Hefner. “It’s the same thing with the
Hollywood sign…I helped save it because it had meaning for me.” So what does
Hollywood mean to Hugh Hefner, the elder son of conservative Protestant
parents, Glenn and Grace Hefner, and a direct descendent of distinguished
Massachusetts Puritan patriarchs William Bradford and John Winthrop? “Dreams, of
course,” he laughs. “Dreams.”
Published Thursday June 7, 2012
Read the interview at Variety.com here