Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream

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The most interesting parts of the book involve Hefner’s childhood. As a kid consumed by pop culture, he doodled and daydreamed his way through class. When a girl rejected him in high school, the young Hefner gave himself a montage-worthy makeover: buying new duds, improving his dance skills, learning hip expressions, and adopting a “suave manner.” Many people revise their image in high school, but Hefner was eerily thorough, producing an entire comic series about his new self. He described the character in writing as “a very original fellow” who “calls everyone ‘Slug’ or ‘Fiend’ and his pet expression is ‘Jeeps Creeps.'” It's quite interesting to take a journey of multiple phases with Hef, starting from his unmooring from puritanical beliefs in the 50s, to his adoption of his own dreamed lifestyle inspired by his friend and promotions manager Lownes. Like it or not, Hugh Hefner has affected all of us, so I treasured learning about how and why in the sober biography.""- Chicago Sun Times

Hugh’s education in sexual matters received a jolt, however, from a family scandal that even his mother’s progressive approach couldn’t explain. In 1931, Glenn’s father, James Hefner, was arrested in Burlington, Colorado, and tried on four counts of taking indecent liberties with three girls aged ten and eleven. The charges accused the sixty-one-year-old man of willfully and feloniously placing his hands under the clothes of . . . and upon the private parts of the girls. He was convicted and spent over a year in jail, while his wife rented a room nearby so she could visit him. Grace was so horrified by this crime and fearful of having married into a bad family that she briefly considered taking the two boys and leaving. But Glenn, after visiting his family, came home so completely mortified by the incident that she immediately abandoned such thoughts. Hugh’s reaction to this incident was tangled when he learned of it a few years later. He felt disgust at the crime and intense sympathy for his father. Yet he wondered what had caused such aberrant behavior. Somehow, emotional and sexual repression seemed to be at fault. He blamed those who were trying to control our lives in terms of sexuality, concluding that the real sinners were people who were trying to make the rules. They were the Puritans. ³⁵

This tendency had appeared in him at a very young age. Along with his brother and his pals, he organized a game he called Clay that they played day after day for years. Using modeling clay on a large table, they created dozens of small human figures and elaborate settings—battlefields, haunted mansions, mysterious ships—that were like miniature movie sets. He invented stories the boys would bring to life as they would bend and twist the clay figures and speak for them. Grace later would recount how her eldest son liked to fantasize and tell stories and play with these clay figures. ¹⁵ The History of the Sign: 1978: A Sign is Reborn". Hollywood Sign. Archived from the original on November 25, 2010 . Retrieved December 26, 2010. Hefner was known to friends and family simply as "Hef". [41] He married Northwestern University student Mildred ("Millie") Williams in 1949. They had a daughter named Christie (b. 1952) and a son, David (b. 1955). [42] Before the wedding, Mildred confessed that she'd had an affair while he was away in the army. He called the admission "the most devastating moment of my life." A 2006 E! True Hollywood Story profile of Hefner revealed that Mildred allowed him to have sex with other women, out of guilt for her own infidelity and in the hope that it would preserve their marriage. The couple divorced in 1959. [43] [44] The story of Playboy is also a direct parallel to the story of America, born at a time of great rebirth, optimism and progress - the roaring 50's - when millions fulfilled the American Dream of a better life. Many great brands were born at this time, and Hef's boat rose with the tides. Vile, John R.; Hudson, David L.; Schultz, David Andrew (2009). Encyclopedia of the First Amendment. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press. p.564. ISBN 978-0-87289-311-5.

In this sense, Hefner’s historical influence has been, quite literally, fantastic. The Playboy dream is the stuff of fantasy, conjured from the realm of desire by a kind of cultural alchemy. While often flowing from Hefner’s personal experiences— My life has been the fulfillment of a fantasy, he likes to say—his vision of happiness also resonates powerfully in the broader culture. The notion of having few limits on personal pleasure is the modern American dream as well as Hefner’s. As the historian Daniel Boorstin observed, the enormous abundance of modern America has created a world where fantasy is more real than reality. . . . We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them. ³ More importantly, Hefner has presented a compelling vision of the good life in modern America. In so doing, he occupies a crucial position in a longer historical trajectory. In the early 1900s, as historians have emphasized in recent decades, the Victorian restraints of the nineteenth century steadily eroded as the mass of Americans gradually replaced a traditional code of self-control with a new creed emphasizing emotional, physical, and material gratification. Then the privations of the Great Depression and World War II stunted the process, creating a great cultural reservoir of pent-up material and emotional desires. In the postwar era it shot forward once again, and Hefner emerged as perhaps the leading popular philosopher of a revived, intensified culture of self-fulfillment for an audience yearning for gratification. He seductively portrayed the pursuit of happiness as a combination of physical pleasure, leisure entertainment, and consumer enjoyment. Brilliantly commingling sexual liberation and material abundance, Playboy captured the essence of modern American desire. Our Puritan roots are deep," Hef told TIME. "We're fascinated by sex and afraid of it." Hefner didn't seem skittish; he indulged in it at every chance he got. Life at the mansion was lavish and lascivious—a Puritan's ninth circle of hell. Strolling grounds populated with imported squirrel monkeys, flamingos and llamas, dotted with waterfalls and full of celebrities, Peter O'Toole said: "This is the way God would have done it if he had the money." Adds a guest: "It was like going to some infant's paradise, where you could eat all the candy you wanted and you wouldn't get fat." Out of precaution in case Dex does run the photos, Sharona warns Benjy about the impending threat, though doesn't go into more specific details. Benjy assures her that he can handle it, and not to let a "bad guy" off the hook because of him. Separately, Sharona is surprised to see Amber Post, the woman of the hour, off by herself, crying softly. The two women bond when Amber shows pictures of her four-year-old daughter, and worries that she'll be ashamed of her mother when she grows up. Sharona sympathizes, admitting the similarities between their situations, but the important thing is dealing with the present.

By the 1970s and 1980s, more raunchy competitors like Larry Flynt’s Hustler and Penthouse were making headlines. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the so-called lad mags — including Maxim, Stuff and FHM – claimed the mantle of championing a male lifestyle that emphasized bawdy humor and sex. Punctuated throughout with descriptions and anecdotes of life at the Playboy Mansions, Mr. Playboy tells the compelling and uniquely American story of how one person with a provocative idea, a finger on the pulse of popular opinion, and a passion for his work altered the course of modern history. Hugh Hefner". Biography. Archived from the original on November 15, 2017 . Retrieved April 30, 2018. On November 18, 2010, Children of the Night founder and president Dr. Lois Lee presented Hefner with the organization's first-ever Founder's Hero of the Heart Award in appreciation for his unwavering dedication, commitment and generosity. [80]