Playboy founder Hugh Hefner dead at 91
What you need to know:
Hefner founded Playboy in 1953 with $600 of his own money and built the magazine into a multimillion-dollar entertainment empire that at its 1970s peak included TV shows, a jazz festival and a string of Playboy Clubs whose cocktail waitresses wore bunny ears and cottontails.
Hugh Hefner the silk-robed Casanova whose Playboy magazine popularized the term "centerfold," glamorised an urbane bachelor lifestyle and helped spur the sexual revolution of the 1960s -- has died, the magazine said late Wednesday. He was 91.
Hefner founded Playboy in 1953 with $600 of his own money and built the magazine into a multimillion-dollar entertainment empire that at its 1970s peak included TV shows, a jazz festival and a string of Playboy Clubs whose cocktail waitresses wore bunny ears and cottontails.
Over the years, the legend of "Hef" only grew as he had affairs with hundreds of young women, married a few of his magazine's "Playmates" and cavorted on reality TV shows with a stable of girlfriends less than a third his age.
Some critics dismissed him as a relic of a sexist era, especially in his later years, when Hefner spoke openly of his Viagra-fueled sex romps at the Playboy Mansion. But many men envied his adolescent-fantasy lifestyle.
And his pioneering magazine, his biggest legacy, may have helped the buttoned-up America of the 1950s and early 1960s loosen up a little about sex.
"I would like to be remembered as somebody who has changed the world in some positive way, in a social, sexual sense, and I'd be very happy with that," Hefner told CNN. "I'm a kid who dreamed the dreams and made them come true."
Hefner was born April 9, 1926, in Chicago to Glenn Hefner, an accountant, and Grace Hefner, a teacher. Both parents were conservative Protestants from Nebraska.
"My folks were raised pure prohibitionist," Hefner told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011. "They were very good people, with high moral standards -- but very repressed. There was no hugging and kissing in my home."
In 1944, after graduating from high school, Hefner joined the U.S. Army as a writer for a military newspaper. Following World War II, he became a promotional copywriter at Esquire magazine, where he began toying with the idea of publishing a men's magazine.
"Esquire was always for older guys, but ... it was very much devoted to male bonding and outdoor adventure," Hefner told CNN.
"And I wanted to read a magazine that was a little more sophisticated and was focused really on the romantic connection between the sexes from a male point of view."
After raising $10,000 from investors, Hefner published the debut issue of Playboy in December 1953.
The premiere issue had no date, in case it sold poorly and there wasn't a second issue. On its cover was actress Marilyn Monroe, who also appeared in a nude centerfold -- a photograph that had been originally used for a pin-up calendar.
