To some he was a vile misogynist, to others he was a pioneer of the sexual revolution.
In this episode, we'll learn about the intriguing life of Hugh Hefner, the controversial founder of Playboy magazine.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine.
[00:00:26] To some, he was a visionary leader of the sexual revolution, to others he was a creepy misogynist who made millions by exploiting women.
[00:00:35] He is nothing if not controversial, so let’s not waste a minute and find out about the life and times of Hugh Hefner.
[00:00:45] In life, we all have experiences that change us.
[00:00:49] Something happens to us, we experience something unexpected, and it causes us to reassess our priorities and life choices.
[00:00:58] Perhaps you are thinking of something right now in your life.
[00:01:02] Perhaps there has never been anything that has caused a huge, seismic change.
[00:01:07] Or perhaps there has been. Perhaps you have completely done a u-turn, and you were going down one path, and then something happened, so you are now doing something that you and your family never thought you would do.
[00:01:22] Hugh Hefner was in that second category.
[00:01:26] He was born in 1926, to a very traditional conservative family in the American midwest. His parents were devout methodists, and home life was strict.
[00:01:38] As a young man growing up in the 1930s, he found this a little stifling, a little difficult to deal with, but there was not much of an alternative - this was early 20th century America, after all.
[00:01:53] He did the traditional thing: enlisted in the army, went to college, and proposed to his college sweetheart, with the hope to get married as soon as they graduated.
[00:02:03] His girlfriend, now fiancée I should say, accepted, and it looked like Hugh Hefner would lead a similar life to the millions of other American men of his generation: a family, a house in the suburbs, a car, kids, movies on the weekends, and so on.
[00:02:21] But, between the time that he proposed in December and the time that they got married the following June, Hefner’s fiancée told him that she had been having an affair, she had been cheating on him.
[00:02:34] In his own words, it devastated him, he was crushed.
[00:02:39] But, he was a traditional guy, at least at that point. The marriage went ahead, and the pair went on to have two kids.
[00:02:48] He got a job in publishing, at Esquire magazine, and by all accounts was doing well in his career.
[00:02:57] But after his wife had told him that she had been unfaithful, something had changed, something had stirred in Hugh Hefner. He was unhappy: unhappy at home, unhappy in his job, yearning for something different.
[00:03:12] In a candid interview when he was in his 80s, he recounted one time when he stood on the side of a bridge and just cried, thinking “is this all there is to life?”
[00:03:25] And while some people might just suck it up and deal with it, this was one of those moments in Hugh Hefner’s life when he did a complete u-turn.
[00:03:36] He quit his job and decided to start his own what he called “men’s magazine”. It would be a new kind of magazine for men, not talking about adventure and sports, but music, film and women.
[00:03:52] He didn’t have money of his own, and when he went to ask his father for a loan to get the business off the ground, he was turned down. After all, his father was a devout Methodist, he thought it was immoral and what’s more, he thought it made bad business sense.
[00:04:09] Surprisingly enough, Hefner would have more luck with his mother, who took her son to one side one evening and revealed that she had some savings of her own. She gave him a $1,000 loan, which would be about $11,000 in today’s money.
[00:04:27] Hefner took the money, along with another $7,000 that he had managed to cobble together, and launched what would become Playboy Magazine.
[00:04:37] Now, when you think of the words “Playboy Magazine” now, I imagine certain things come to mind, most probably women with blonde hair not wearing many clothes.
[00:04:49] When the first Playboy Magazine was launched, in December of 1953, it wasn’t all too different.
[00:04:56] And it launched with a splash, with perhaps the most famous blonde woman in the United States, even the world, at that time: Marilyn Monroe.
[00:05:07] On the front cover of the first ever Playboy magazine was a picture of a young Marilyn Monroe, with the headline on the front cover promising to reveal the first ever full nude photo in colour of Marilyn Monroe.
[00:05:22] Now, you might be thinking, why on Earth did Marilyn Monroe agree to pose naked for a then unknown men’s magazine, or perhaps why did she agree to pose naked at all?
[00:05:35] The short answer is…she didn’t.
[00:05:38] These photos were taken of Marilyn Monroe several years beforehand, when she had posed naked for a photographer for a measly $50.
[00:05:48] This was in 1949, and Marilyn Monroe was far from a star. She needed to make a payment on her car, and this seemed like an easy way to do it.
[00:06:00] Clearly, it was a last resort for the then 23 year old Monroe, as she had asked the photographer to make her look unrecognisable in the photos.
[00:06:11] Shortly after this photoshoot, her career had started to take off, and the photos became increasingly valuable.
[00:06:20] Hefner had developed something of a fixation for Marilyn Monroe, and he managed to buy the photo rights from another man, not from the movie star herself.
[00:06:31] And so it was that in December 1953, Marilyn Monroe, America’s biggest star, found that her nude photos were available for all to see, that was, if they were prepared to pay the 50 cents price for a copy of Playboy Magazine.
[00:06:49] Perhaps unsurprisingly, 50,000 people were, and the magazine was a hit from its very first edition. By its fifth anniversary it was selling over a million copies a month, and by 1971 this had increased to 7 million copies every month.
[00:07:09] Now, on one level, you might be thinking “of course it was a successful magazine, Hefner paid women to take off their clothes and men are filthy animals and will obviously pay money to see pictures of women not wearing any clothes”.
[00:07:24] Hugh Hefner, for better or for worse, rightly or wrongly, saw himself as doing something different. He saw himself not as a mere salesman of vice, but as someone who was pushing the boundaries of acceptability, as someone who challenged the status quo and was on the forefront of the American sexual revolution.
[00:07:48] Now, as a reminder, the magazine was launched in the early 1950s. Any kind of sexual relations outside of a marriage between a man and a woman were somewhat frowned upon, and certainly not talked about in magazines.
[00:08:05] Playboy was the antithesis of this.
[00:08:08] But it wasn’t just nude pictures of women. It was also a serious magazine, or at least had columns written by people we now regard as serious journalists and authors: people like John le Carré, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, and even Roald Dahl.
[00:08:28] There were interviews with figures such as Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X, Salvador Dalí and Jean-Paul Sartre, later on even the former president Jimmy Carter.
[00:08:40] I mean, if you read a list of the people who have either been interviewed by or written for Playboy Magazine and you were asked to guess the magazine they’ve all been in, I imagine that Playboy wouldn’t be the first name that came to mind.
[00:08:55] For all of the pictures of scantily-clad women, it was also a magazine with some serious writing.
[00:09:03] And at the centre of it all was Hugh Hefner. He wasn’t just the owner of the magazine or the editor, he was the embodiment of the Playboy ethos.
[00:09:14] He had divorced his wife in 1959, after having had two children, and was keen to portray himself as the living manifestation of his creation: the ultimate playboy.
[00:09:27] He launched a TV show where he would record his parties at his penthouse, which would be full of alcohol, raunchy music, beautiful women, and controversially at the time, people of all races.
[00:09:41] For all of his many faults, which we will talk about more in a few moments, Hefner showed a remarkable tolerance in certain areas.
[00:09:50] Race was one of them. In an era when there was still racial segregation laws in the south of the United States, Hugh Hefner featured black artists and writers when other magazines wouldn’t.
[00:10:04] Similarly, with gay rights. In 1955, two years after the launch of Playboy, he made the decision to publish a short story called “The Crooked Man”, by an author called Charles Beaumont.
[00:10:17] Beaumont had offered the story to Hefner’s previous employer, to Esquire magazine, but it had been rejected on the grounds that it was inappropriate.
[00:10:28] The story, see, was about a future in which homosexuality was the norm and heterosexual men were persecuted.
[00:10:37] I read it, and it’s actually quite a good story, if you’re interested.
[00:10:42] The point is, it was highly controversial at the time, and the Playboy offices were inundated by angry letters.
[00:10:51] Hefner defended his decision to publish the story, and the message of the story, saying "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too."
[00:11:04] Of course, this was the point the story was trying to make, but it took some bravery for someone to say it in 1955, when homosexual sex was still a criminal activity in much of the United States.
[00:11:19] So, in some respects, Hefner clearly had some progressive, admirable views we might even say.
[00:11:28] But when it came to his views towards women, the situation is more complicated. Or perhaps it’s less complicated, depending on your opinion of Hefner and Playboy magazine.
[00:11:40] According to Hefner, he was an advocate for women to take control of their sexuality, to embrace their femininity and innately human attraction.
[00:11:51] Women were under no obligation to pose for his magazines, he said, no one was forcing anybody to do anything they didn’t want.
[00:12:00] What’s more, 1 in 4 readers of Playboy Magazine were women.
[00:12:06] But according to his critics, he was a vile misogynist.
[00:12:11] He objectified women in his magazines, and in his private life, which was not really at all separate from his public life, he treated women merely as objects to satisfy his own sexual desire.
[00:12:24] Now, in case you didn't know much about Hugh Hefner before this, in his latter years, so let’s say from the 1990s onwards, he would be pictured with an array of different girlfriends, all significantly younger than him, and almost all of them being Playboy models.
[00:12:41] He was there, in his 60s, 70s and then 80s, with his arm around a woman in her early 20s, and he would boast that this was just one of his many girlfriends.
[00:12:53] At one point he claimed that he had 7 girlfriends at the same time, which he then trimmed down to four, before marrying a third time in 2012, when he was 86 and his wife was 26.
[00:13:08] Naturally, his bride was a Playboy model, and looked eerily similar to most of the other women who had graced the pages of the magazine.
[00:13:18] He died in September 2017, at the age of 91, leaving his 31-year old widow. And after his death, all sorts of nasty stories started to come out from under the woodwork.
[00:13:33] Former girlfriends spoke about how he had encouraged them to use drugs before having sex with him, how he would give each girlfriend $1,000 every week as pocket money, how there were strict curfews at the Playboy mansions where he lived with his girlfriends, how he had incredibly strict standards of physical appearance that he expected his girlfriends to uphold, how he encouraged infighting and rivalry between his girlfriends, and how to some it had felt like an almost prison-like atmosphere from which there was no escape.
[00:14:06] This was obviously unpleasant stuff, but it came as a surprise to few, especially to his critics.
[00:14:14] After all, he had built his career on the nude bodies of women, he had positioned himself as a philanderer and a sort of Cassanova-type figure, I don’t think many people were surprised to hear that in the privacy of his own home, surrounded by hordes of women 60 years his junior, he viewed himself in this way, and had behaved in such a manner.
[00:14:37] Since his death, a bunch of different girlfriends and indeed his widow, his wife when he died, have announced book deals and TV series where they have “revealed all” about what happened behind closed doors at the Playboy Mansions, and told all sorts of deep dark secrets about the man at the centre of it all.
[00:14:57] It all sounds pretty vile, and was a dark stain on the personal legacy of Hugh Hefner.
[00:15:04] And in terms of the wider impact of the man and his magazine, well, he fought conservative critics during his lifetime, and after his death in 2017 his legacy has come under even greater scrutiny.
[00:15:20] He once boasted that he was “a feminist”, arguing that he was allowing women to embrace their sexuality, and that sex was simply a natural part of life.
[00:15:32] But to others, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, he was a misogynist, a man who built an empire on the commodification of women’s bodies, someone who persuaded hundreds of women that posing naked for the enjoyment of men was in some way “empowering”.
[00:15:52] He is now buried in a cemetery in Hollywood, in the crypt right next to Marilyn Monroe, as per his dying wish.
[00:16:01] Despite the fact that it was Marilyn Monroe who launched Hefner’s career, when Hefner used her nude photo without her permission, the pair were not friends. They never actually even met.
[00:16:15] He had bought the burial spot right next to Marilyn Monroe in 1992.
[00:16:20] When he was asked why, he responded with, "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to pass up".
[00:16:29] One imagines that Marilyn Monroe might not feel exactly the same way…
[00:16:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Hugh Hefner, the controversial founder of Playboy magazine.
[00:16:43] We are actually going to be following up this episode with another one on the theme of 18+ rated content, and that will be on a website that launched a year after Hefner’s death: Onlyfans.
[00:16:55] So, keep a lookout for that one coming up this week.
[00:16:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:01] What do you think about the legacy of Hugh Hefner? Is he nothing more than a dirty old man who exploited women, or do you think his legacy is more nuanced than that?
[00:17:11] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:17:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine.
[00:00:26] To some, he was a visionary leader of the sexual revolution, to others he was a creepy misogynist who made millions by exploiting women.
[00:00:35] He is nothing if not controversial, so let’s not waste a minute and find out about the life and times of Hugh Hefner.
[00:00:45] In life, we all have experiences that change us.
[00:00:49] Something happens to us, we experience something unexpected, and it causes us to reassess our priorities and life choices.
[00:00:58] Perhaps you are thinking of something right now in your life.
[00:01:02] Perhaps there has never been anything that has caused a huge, seismic change.
[00:01:07] Or perhaps there has been. Perhaps you have completely done a u-turn, and you were going down one path, and then something happened, so you are now doing something that you and your family never thought you would do.
[00:01:22] Hugh Hefner was in that second category.
[00:01:26] He was born in 1926, to a very traditional conservative family in the American midwest. His parents were devout methodists, and home life was strict.
[00:01:38] As a young man growing up in the 1930s, he found this a little stifling, a little difficult to deal with, but there was not much of an alternative - this was early 20th century America, after all.
[00:01:53] He did the traditional thing: enlisted in the army, went to college, and proposed to his college sweetheart, with the hope to get married as soon as they graduated.
[00:02:03] His girlfriend, now fiancée I should say, accepted, and it looked like Hugh Hefner would lead a similar life to the millions of other American men of his generation: a family, a house in the suburbs, a car, kids, movies on the weekends, and so on.
[00:02:21] But, between the time that he proposed in December and the time that they got married the following June, Hefner’s fiancée told him that she had been having an affair, she had been cheating on him.
[00:02:34] In his own words, it devastated him, he was crushed.
[00:02:39] But, he was a traditional guy, at least at that point. The marriage went ahead, and the pair went on to have two kids.
[00:02:48] He got a job in publishing, at Esquire magazine, and by all accounts was doing well in his career.
[00:02:57] But after his wife had told him that she had been unfaithful, something had changed, something had stirred in Hugh Hefner. He was unhappy: unhappy at home, unhappy in his job, yearning for something different.
[00:03:12] In a candid interview when he was in his 80s, he recounted one time when he stood on the side of a bridge and just cried, thinking “is this all there is to life?”
[00:03:25] And while some people might just suck it up and deal with it, this was one of those moments in Hugh Hefner’s life when he did a complete u-turn.
[00:03:36] He quit his job and decided to start his own what he called “men’s magazine”. It would be a new kind of magazine for men, not talking about adventure and sports, but music, film and women.
[00:03:52] He didn’t have money of his own, and when he went to ask his father for a loan to get the business off the ground, he was turned down. After all, his father was a devout Methodist, he thought it was immoral and what’s more, he thought it made bad business sense.
[00:04:09] Surprisingly enough, Hefner would have more luck with his mother, who took her son to one side one evening and revealed that she had some savings of her own. She gave him a $1,000 loan, which would be about $11,000 in today’s money.
[00:04:27] Hefner took the money, along with another $7,000 that he had managed to cobble together, and launched what would become Playboy Magazine.
[00:04:37] Now, when you think of the words “Playboy Magazine” now, I imagine certain things come to mind, most probably women with blonde hair not wearing many clothes.
[00:04:49] When the first Playboy Magazine was launched, in December of 1953, it wasn’t all too different.
[00:04:56] And it launched with a splash, with perhaps the most famous blonde woman in the United States, even the world, at that time: Marilyn Monroe.
[00:05:07] On the front cover of the first ever Playboy magazine was a picture of a young Marilyn Monroe, with the headline on the front cover promising to reveal the first ever full nude photo in colour of Marilyn Monroe.
[00:05:22] Now, you might be thinking, why on Earth did Marilyn Monroe agree to pose naked for a then unknown men’s magazine, or perhaps why did she agree to pose naked at all?
[00:05:35] The short answer is…she didn’t.
[00:05:38] These photos were taken of Marilyn Monroe several years beforehand, when she had posed naked for a photographer for a measly $50.
[00:05:48] This was in 1949, and Marilyn Monroe was far from a star. She needed to make a payment on her car, and this seemed like an easy way to do it.
[00:06:00] Clearly, it was a last resort for the then 23 year old Monroe, as she had asked the photographer to make her look unrecognisable in the photos.
[00:06:11] Shortly after this photoshoot, her career had started to take off, and the photos became increasingly valuable.
[00:06:20] Hefner had developed something of a fixation for Marilyn Monroe, and he managed to buy the photo rights from another man, not from the movie star herself.
[00:06:31] And so it was that in December 1953, Marilyn Monroe, America’s biggest star, found that her nude photos were available for all to see, that was, if they were prepared to pay the 50 cents price for a copy of Playboy Magazine.
[00:06:49] Perhaps unsurprisingly, 50,000 people were, and the magazine was a hit from its very first edition. By its fifth anniversary it was selling over a million copies a month, and by 1971 this had increased to 7 million copies every month.
[00:07:09] Now, on one level, you might be thinking “of course it was a successful magazine, Hefner paid women to take off their clothes and men are filthy animals and will obviously pay money to see pictures of women not wearing any clothes”.
[00:07:24] Hugh Hefner, for better or for worse, rightly or wrongly, saw himself as doing something different. He saw himself not as a mere salesman of vice, but as someone who was pushing the boundaries of acceptability, as someone who challenged the status quo and was on the forefront of the American sexual revolution.
[00:07:48] Now, as a reminder, the magazine was launched in the early 1950s. Any kind of sexual relations outside of a marriage between a man and a woman were somewhat frowned upon, and certainly not talked about in magazines.
[00:08:05] Playboy was the antithesis of this.
[00:08:08] But it wasn’t just nude pictures of women. It was also a serious magazine, or at least had columns written by people we now regard as serious journalists and authors: people like John le Carré, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, and even Roald Dahl.
[00:08:28] There were interviews with figures such as Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X, Salvador Dalí and Jean-Paul Sartre, later on even the former president Jimmy Carter.
[00:08:40] I mean, if you read a list of the people who have either been interviewed by or written for Playboy Magazine and you were asked to guess the magazine they’ve all been in, I imagine that Playboy wouldn’t be the first name that came to mind.
[00:08:55] For all of the pictures of scantily-clad women, it was also a magazine with some serious writing.
[00:09:03] And at the centre of it all was Hugh Hefner. He wasn’t just the owner of the magazine or the editor, he was the embodiment of the Playboy ethos.
[00:09:14] He had divorced his wife in 1959, after having had two children, and was keen to portray himself as the living manifestation of his creation: the ultimate playboy.
[00:09:27] He launched a TV show where he would record his parties at his penthouse, which would be full of alcohol, raunchy music, beautiful women, and controversially at the time, people of all races.
[00:09:41] For all of his many faults, which we will talk about more in a few moments, Hefner showed a remarkable tolerance in certain areas.
[00:09:50] Race was one of them. In an era when there was still racial segregation laws in the south of the United States, Hugh Hefner featured black artists and writers when other magazines wouldn’t.
[00:10:04] Similarly, with gay rights. In 1955, two years after the launch of Playboy, he made the decision to publish a short story called “The Crooked Man”, by an author called Charles Beaumont.
[00:10:17] Beaumont had offered the story to Hefner’s previous employer, to Esquire magazine, but it had been rejected on the grounds that it was inappropriate.
[00:10:28] The story, see, was about a future in which homosexuality was the norm and heterosexual men were persecuted.
[00:10:37] I read it, and it’s actually quite a good story, if you’re interested.
[00:10:42] The point is, it was highly controversial at the time, and the Playboy offices were inundated by angry letters.
[00:10:51] Hefner defended his decision to publish the story, and the message of the story, saying "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too."
[00:11:04] Of course, this was the point the story was trying to make, but it took some bravery for someone to say it in 1955, when homosexual sex was still a criminal activity in much of the United States.
[00:11:19] So, in some respects, Hefner clearly had some progressive, admirable views we might even say.
[00:11:28] But when it came to his views towards women, the situation is more complicated. Or perhaps it’s less complicated, depending on your opinion of Hefner and Playboy magazine.
[00:11:40] According to Hefner, he was an advocate for women to take control of their sexuality, to embrace their femininity and innately human attraction.
[00:11:51] Women were under no obligation to pose for his magazines, he said, no one was forcing anybody to do anything they didn’t want.
[00:12:00] What’s more, 1 in 4 readers of Playboy Magazine were women.
[00:12:06] But according to his critics, he was a vile misogynist.
[00:12:11] He objectified women in his magazines, and in his private life, which was not really at all separate from his public life, he treated women merely as objects to satisfy his own sexual desire.
[00:12:24] Now, in case you didn't know much about Hugh Hefner before this, in his latter years, so let’s say from the 1990s onwards, he would be pictured with an array of different girlfriends, all significantly younger than him, and almost all of them being Playboy models.
[00:12:41] He was there, in his 60s, 70s and then 80s, with his arm around a woman in her early 20s, and he would boast that this was just one of his many girlfriends.
[00:12:53] At one point he claimed that he had 7 girlfriends at the same time, which he then trimmed down to four, before marrying a third time in 2012, when he was 86 and his wife was 26.
[00:13:08] Naturally, his bride was a Playboy model, and looked eerily similar to most of the other women who had graced the pages of the magazine.
[00:13:18] He died in September 2017, at the age of 91, leaving his 31-year old widow. And after his death, all sorts of nasty stories started to come out from under the woodwork.
[00:13:33] Former girlfriends spoke about how he had encouraged them to use drugs before having sex with him, how he would give each girlfriend $1,000 every week as pocket money, how there were strict curfews at the Playboy mansions where he lived with his girlfriends, how he had incredibly strict standards of physical appearance that he expected his girlfriends to uphold, how he encouraged infighting and rivalry between his girlfriends, and how to some it had felt like an almost prison-like atmosphere from which there was no escape.
[00:14:06] This was obviously unpleasant stuff, but it came as a surprise to few, especially to his critics.
[00:14:14] After all, he had built his career on the nude bodies of women, he had positioned himself as a philanderer and a sort of Cassanova-type figure, I don’t think many people were surprised to hear that in the privacy of his own home, surrounded by hordes of women 60 years his junior, he viewed himself in this way, and had behaved in such a manner.
[00:14:37] Since his death, a bunch of different girlfriends and indeed his widow, his wife when he died, have announced book deals and TV series where they have “revealed all” about what happened behind closed doors at the Playboy Mansions, and told all sorts of deep dark secrets about the man at the centre of it all.
[00:14:57] It all sounds pretty vile, and was a dark stain on the personal legacy of Hugh Hefner.
[00:15:04] And in terms of the wider impact of the man and his magazine, well, he fought conservative critics during his lifetime, and after his death in 2017 his legacy has come under even greater scrutiny.
[00:15:20] He once boasted that he was “a feminist”, arguing that he was allowing women to embrace their sexuality, and that sex was simply a natural part of life.
[00:15:32] But to others, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, he was a misogynist, a man who built an empire on the commodification of women’s bodies, someone who persuaded hundreds of women that posing naked for the enjoyment of men was in some way “empowering”.
[00:15:52] He is now buried in a cemetery in Hollywood, in the crypt right next to Marilyn Monroe, as per his dying wish.
[00:16:01] Despite the fact that it was Marilyn Monroe who launched Hefner’s career, when Hefner used her nude photo without her permission, the pair were not friends. They never actually even met.
[00:16:15] He had bought the burial spot right next to Marilyn Monroe in 1992.
[00:16:20] When he was asked why, he responded with, "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to pass up".
[00:16:29] One imagines that Marilyn Monroe might not feel exactly the same way…
[00:16:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Hugh Hefner, the controversial founder of Playboy magazine.
[00:16:43] We are actually going to be following up this episode with another one on the theme of 18+ rated content, and that will be on a website that launched a year after Hefner’s death: Onlyfans.
[00:16:55] So, keep a lookout for that one coming up this week.
[00:16:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:01] What do you think about the legacy of Hugh Hefner? Is he nothing more than a dirty old man who exploited women, or do you think his legacy is more nuanced than that?
[00:17:11] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:17:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine.
[00:00:26] To some, he was a visionary leader of the sexual revolution, to others he was a creepy misogynist who made millions by exploiting women.
[00:00:35] He is nothing if not controversial, so let’s not waste a minute and find out about the life and times of Hugh Hefner.
[00:00:45] In life, we all have experiences that change us.
[00:00:49] Something happens to us, we experience something unexpected, and it causes us to reassess our priorities and life choices.
[00:00:58] Perhaps you are thinking of something right now in your life.
[00:01:02] Perhaps there has never been anything that has caused a huge, seismic change.
[00:01:07] Or perhaps there has been. Perhaps you have completely done a u-turn, and you were going down one path, and then something happened, so you are now doing something that you and your family never thought you would do.
[00:01:22] Hugh Hefner was in that second category.
[00:01:26] He was born in 1926, to a very traditional conservative family in the American midwest. His parents were devout methodists, and home life was strict.
[00:01:38] As a young man growing up in the 1930s, he found this a little stifling, a little difficult to deal with, but there was not much of an alternative - this was early 20th century America, after all.
[00:01:53] He did the traditional thing: enlisted in the army, went to college, and proposed to his college sweetheart, with the hope to get married as soon as they graduated.
[00:02:03] His girlfriend, now fiancée I should say, accepted, and it looked like Hugh Hefner would lead a similar life to the millions of other American men of his generation: a family, a house in the suburbs, a car, kids, movies on the weekends, and so on.
[00:02:21] But, between the time that he proposed in December and the time that they got married the following June, Hefner’s fiancée told him that she had been having an affair, she had been cheating on him.
[00:02:34] In his own words, it devastated him, he was crushed.
[00:02:39] But, he was a traditional guy, at least at that point. The marriage went ahead, and the pair went on to have two kids.
[00:02:48] He got a job in publishing, at Esquire magazine, and by all accounts was doing well in his career.
[00:02:57] But after his wife had told him that she had been unfaithful, something had changed, something had stirred in Hugh Hefner. He was unhappy: unhappy at home, unhappy in his job, yearning for something different.
[00:03:12] In a candid interview when he was in his 80s, he recounted one time when he stood on the side of a bridge and just cried, thinking “is this all there is to life?”
[00:03:25] And while some people might just suck it up and deal with it, this was one of those moments in Hugh Hefner’s life when he did a complete u-turn.
[00:03:36] He quit his job and decided to start his own what he called “men’s magazine”. It would be a new kind of magazine for men, not talking about adventure and sports, but music, film and women.
[00:03:52] He didn’t have money of his own, and when he went to ask his father for a loan to get the business off the ground, he was turned down. After all, his father was a devout Methodist, he thought it was immoral and what’s more, he thought it made bad business sense.
[00:04:09] Surprisingly enough, Hefner would have more luck with his mother, who took her son to one side one evening and revealed that she had some savings of her own. She gave him a $1,000 loan, which would be about $11,000 in today’s money.
[00:04:27] Hefner took the money, along with another $7,000 that he had managed to cobble together, and launched what would become Playboy Magazine.
[00:04:37] Now, when you think of the words “Playboy Magazine” now, I imagine certain things come to mind, most probably women with blonde hair not wearing many clothes.
[00:04:49] When the first Playboy Magazine was launched, in December of 1953, it wasn’t all too different.
[00:04:56] And it launched with a splash, with perhaps the most famous blonde woman in the United States, even the world, at that time: Marilyn Monroe.
[00:05:07] On the front cover of the first ever Playboy magazine was a picture of a young Marilyn Monroe, with the headline on the front cover promising to reveal the first ever full nude photo in colour of Marilyn Monroe.
[00:05:22] Now, you might be thinking, why on Earth did Marilyn Monroe agree to pose naked for a then unknown men’s magazine, or perhaps why did she agree to pose naked at all?
[00:05:35] The short answer is…she didn’t.
[00:05:38] These photos were taken of Marilyn Monroe several years beforehand, when she had posed naked for a photographer for a measly $50.
[00:05:48] This was in 1949, and Marilyn Monroe was far from a star. She needed to make a payment on her car, and this seemed like an easy way to do it.
[00:06:00] Clearly, it was a last resort for the then 23 year old Monroe, as she had asked the photographer to make her look unrecognisable in the photos.
[00:06:11] Shortly after this photoshoot, her career had started to take off, and the photos became increasingly valuable.
[00:06:20] Hefner had developed something of a fixation for Marilyn Monroe, and he managed to buy the photo rights from another man, not from the movie star herself.
[00:06:31] And so it was that in December 1953, Marilyn Monroe, America’s biggest star, found that her nude photos were available for all to see, that was, if they were prepared to pay the 50 cents price for a copy of Playboy Magazine.
[00:06:49] Perhaps unsurprisingly, 50,000 people were, and the magazine was a hit from its very first edition. By its fifth anniversary it was selling over a million copies a month, and by 1971 this had increased to 7 million copies every month.
[00:07:09] Now, on one level, you might be thinking “of course it was a successful magazine, Hefner paid women to take off their clothes and men are filthy animals and will obviously pay money to see pictures of women not wearing any clothes”.
[00:07:24] Hugh Hefner, for better or for worse, rightly or wrongly, saw himself as doing something different. He saw himself not as a mere salesman of vice, but as someone who was pushing the boundaries of acceptability, as someone who challenged the status quo and was on the forefront of the American sexual revolution.
[00:07:48] Now, as a reminder, the magazine was launched in the early 1950s. Any kind of sexual relations outside of a marriage between a man and a woman were somewhat frowned upon, and certainly not talked about in magazines.
[00:08:05] Playboy was the antithesis of this.
[00:08:08] But it wasn’t just nude pictures of women. It was also a serious magazine, or at least had columns written by people we now regard as serious journalists and authors: people like John le Carré, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, and even Roald Dahl.
[00:08:28] There were interviews with figures such as Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X, Salvador Dalí and Jean-Paul Sartre, later on even the former president Jimmy Carter.
[00:08:40] I mean, if you read a list of the people who have either been interviewed by or written for Playboy Magazine and you were asked to guess the magazine they’ve all been in, I imagine that Playboy wouldn’t be the first name that came to mind.
[00:08:55] For all of the pictures of scantily-clad women, it was also a magazine with some serious writing.
[00:09:03] And at the centre of it all was Hugh Hefner. He wasn’t just the owner of the magazine or the editor, he was the embodiment of the Playboy ethos.
[00:09:14] He had divorced his wife in 1959, after having had two children, and was keen to portray himself as the living manifestation of his creation: the ultimate playboy.
[00:09:27] He launched a TV show where he would record his parties at his penthouse, which would be full of alcohol, raunchy music, beautiful women, and controversially at the time, people of all races.
[00:09:41] For all of his many faults, which we will talk about more in a few moments, Hefner showed a remarkable tolerance in certain areas.
[00:09:50] Race was one of them. In an era when there was still racial segregation laws in the south of the United States, Hugh Hefner featured black artists and writers when other magazines wouldn’t.
[00:10:04] Similarly, with gay rights. In 1955, two years after the launch of Playboy, he made the decision to publish a short story called “The Crooked Man”, by an author called Charles Beaumont.
[00:10:17] Beaumont had offered the story to Hefner’s previous employer, to Esquire magazine, but it had been rejected on the grounds that it was inappropriate.
[00:10:28] The story, see, was about a future in which homosexuality was the norm and heterosexual men were persecuted.
[00:10:37] I read it, and it’s actually quite a good story, if you’re interested.
[00:10:42] The point is, it was highly controversial at the time, and the Playboy offices were inundated by angry letters.
[00:10:51] Hefner defended his decision to publish the story, and the message of the story, saying "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too."
[00:11:04] Of course, this was the point the story was trying to make, but it took some bravery for someone to say it in 1955, when homosexual sex was still a criminal activity in much of the United States.
[00:11:19] So, in some respects, Hefner clearly had some progressive, admirable views we might even say.
[00:11:28] But when it came to his views towards women, the situation is more complicated. Or perhaps it’s less complicated, depending on your opinion of Hefner and Playboy magazine.
[00:11:40] According to Hefner, he was an advocate for women to take control of their sexuality, to embrace their femininity and innately human attraction.
[00:11:51] Women were under no obligation to pose for his magazines, he said, no one was forcing anybody to do anything they didn’t want.
[00:12:00] What’s more, 1 in 4 readers of Playboy Magazine were women.
[00:12:06] But according to his critics, he was a vile misogynist.
[00:12:11] He objectified women in his magazines, and in his private life, which was not really at all separate from his public life, he treated women merely as objects to satisfy his own sexual desire.
[00:12:24] Now, in case you didn't know much about Hugh Hefner before this, in his latter years, so let’s say from the 1990s onwards, he would be pictured with an array of different girlfriends, all significantly younger than him, and almost all of them being Playboy models.
[00:12:41] He was there, in his 60s, 70s and then 80s, with his arm around a woman in her early 20s, and he would boast that this was just one of his many girlfriends.
[00:12:53] At one point he claimed that he had 7 girlfriends at the same time, which he then trimmed down to four, before marrying a third time in 2012, when he was 86 and his wife was 26.
[00:13:08] Naturally, his bride was a Playboy model, and looked eerily similar to most of the other women who had graced the pages of the magazine.
[00:13:18] He died in September 2017, at the age of 91, leaving his 31-year old widow. And after his death, all sorts of nasty stories started to come out from under the woodwork.
[00:13:33] Former girlfriends spoke about how he had encouraged them to use drugs before having sex with him, how he would give each girlfriend $1,000 every week as pocket money, how there were strict curfews at the Playboy mansions where he lived with his girlfriends, how he had incredibly strict standards of physical appearance that he expected his girlfriends to uphold, how he encouraged infighting and rivalry between his girlfriends, and how to some it had felt like an almost prison-like atmosphere from which there was no escape.
[00:14:06] This was obviously unpleasant stuff, but it came as a surprise to few, especially to his critics.
[00:14:14] After all, he had built his career on the nude bodies of women, he had positioned himself as a philanderer and a sort of Cassanova-type figure, I don’t think many people were surprised to hear that in the privacy of his own home, surrounded by hordes of women 60 years his junior, he viewed himself in this way, and had behaved in such a manner.
[00:14:37] Since his death, a bunch of different girlfriends and indeed his widow, his wife when he died, have announced book deals and TV series where they have “revealed all” about what happened behind closed doors at the Playboy Mansions, and told all sorts of deep dark secrets about the man at the centre of it all.
[00:14:57] It all sounds pretty vile, and was a dark stain on the personal legacy of Hugh Hefner.
[00:15:04] And in terms of the wider impact of the man and his magazine, well, he fought conservative critics during his lifetime, and after his death in 2017 his legacy has come under even greater scrutiny.
[00:15:20] He once boasted that he was “a feminist”, arguing that he was allowing women to embrace their sexuality, and that sex was simply a natural part of life.
[00:15:32] But to others, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, he was a misogynist, a man who built an empire on the commodification of women’s bodies, someone who persuaded hundreds of women that posing naked for the enjoyment of men was in some way “empowering”.
[00:15:52] He is now buried in a cemetery in Hollywood, in the crypt right next to Marilyn Monroe, as per his dying wish.
[00:16:01] Despite the fact that it was Marilyn Monroe who launched Hefner’s career, when Hefner used her nude photo without her permission, the pair were not friends. They never actually even met.
[00:16:15] He had bought the burial spot right next to Marilyn Monroe in 1992.
[00:16:20] When he was asked why, he responded with, "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to pass up".
[00:16:29] One imagines that Marilyn Monroe might not feel exactly the same way…
[00:16:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Hugh Hefner, the controversial founder of Playboy magazine.
[00:16:43] We are actually going to be following up this episode with another one on the theme of 18+ rated content, and that will be on a website that launched a year after Hefner’s death: Onlyfans.
[00:16:55] So, keep a lookout for that one coming up this week.
[00:16:58] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:17:01] What do you think about the legacy of Hugh Hefner? Is he nothing more than a dirty old man who exploited women, or do you think his legacy is more nuanced than that?
[00:17:11] The place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:17:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
