The Smoking Jacket Stays On
Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953 with forty thousand dollars and a photograph of Marilyn Monroe he’d bought for five hundred. What he built from that gamble outlasted every attempt to kill it—censors, moral panic in all its rotating flavors, the internet, the very notion that a magazine needed to exist at all. He died on September 27, 2017, at ninety-one, in the Playboy Mansion, which is exactly where you’d expect him to die. Some men burn at the right temperature their whole lives.
This journal probably wouldn’t exist in the form it does without him—or at least without the space he and people like Larry Flynt carved out for a certain kind of publishing, a willingness to treat nudity and cultural criticism as compatible rather than contradictory. Whether you admired Hefner or found him repellent, what he dismantled needed dismantling. He broke taboos that deserved to stay broken.
The joke—"I only read it for the articles"—worked because the articles actually were good. Playboy published Arthur C. Clarke, Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Chuck Palahniuk, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami. It ran interviews that became historical documents. The combination of serious literary culture and women presenting themselves completely—without apology, without shame—wasn’t an accident or a contradiction. It was the whole point. Anyone can be respectable. Being respectable and also publishing naked women and calling it a philosophy takes a particular kind of stubbornness, and Hefner had it his entire life.
He wasn’t without his uglier angles. The mansion, the revolving girlfriends young enough to be his grandchildren, the way the whole enterprise was ultimately organized around his pleasure and his gaze—looked at directly, there’s something airless in it. But I’d rather not eulogize someone by cataloguing everything they got wrong. What he got right was the insistence that pleasure and intelligence belong in the same room, that sexuality doesn’t have to be hidden or ashamed of itself. He fought that corner for sixty years. That’s what I’ll keep.
Rest easy, Hef. Silk smoking jacket, cigar going, satisfied expression. Wherever you ended up, I hope they let you keep the look.