Hugh Marston Hefner was born in Chicago on April 9, 1926, the older son of conservative Protestant parents, Glenn and Grace Hefner, and a direct descendent of distinguished Massachusetts Puritan patriarchs William Bradford and John Winthrop. He attended Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High on the West Side of Chicago, where he was no more than an average student, despite a genius IQ (152), distinguishing himself instead with his extracurricular activities, founding a school paper, writing, cartooning and serving as president of the student council, where he championed student causes.
Following graduation from high school in January 1944, Hef (a nickname preferred since adolescence) joined the army serving as an Infantry Clerk and drawing cartoons for various Army newspapers. After his discharge from service in 1946, he spent the summer taking art classes (anatomy, of course) at the Chicago Art Institute, enrolling that fall at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. Hef earned his bachelor's degree in two and a half years by doubling up on classes while drawing cartoons for the Daily Illini and editing the campus humor magazine Shaft, where he introduced a new feature called Coed of the Month.
He subsequently took a semester of graduate courses in sociology at Northwestern University where, pursuing his interest in individual freedom, he wrote a term paper examining U.S. sex laws in light of the then-astonishing Kinsey Institute research on human sexuality.
In June 1949, Hef married a classmate, Mildred Williams. Their ten-year marriage produced two children: Christie in 1952 and David in 1955.
Following college, Hef tried his hand at cartooning and, failing to sell any of his ideas for a cartoon strip, published a book of satirical cartoons about Chicago titled That Toddlin' Town.
Hef worked as an assistant personnel manager for the Chicago Carton Company for $45 a week in 1949 and as an advertising copywriter for the Carson, Pirie, Scott department store for just $40 a week in 1950. His future seemed uncertain when he landed a promising job as a promotion copywriter at Esquire at $60 a week in January 1951. When Esquire moved its offices to New York, his request for a five-dollar raise was denied, and he decided to stay behind and start a magazine of his own.
Hef and a fellow copywriter from Esquire tried to raise enough capital to launch a Chicago magazine and failed. While working as the newsstand promotion director of Publishers Development Corporation in 1952, he became convinced there was a market for a sophisticated men's magazine that would reflect the views of the post-War generation and he was the man to start it.
To support his family, he took a better-paying job as circulation manager of Children's Activities magazine in January 1953, but that spring and summer the dream of starting his own magazine became an obsession. He found a printer willing to print the first issue and a distributor to distribute it. He got friends and family to invest in the venture, raising just $8000, including $600 of his own money borrowed from a bank using his family's furniture as collateral.
The first issue of Playboy magazine, featuring the now-famous calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe, was produced on a kitchen table in his South Side apartment. On the newsstands in December 1953, it carried no cover date because Hef was not sure when or if he would be able to produce another. But the first issue sold more than 50,000 copies, enough to pay for the paper and printing costs and to finance another issue.
Thereafter, Hef never doubted that the magazine would be a success. He plowed profits back into the publication and hired a young, enthusiastic editorial, art, promotion and advertising staff to assist him. Playboy grew at a phenomenal rate. By the end of the decade, the magazine was selling more than a million copies a month and, to celebrate, Hef held the first Playboy Jazz Festival at the Chicago Stadium. It was called, at the time, the greatest single weekend in the history of jazz.
At the start of the new decade, Hef began to live out the "Good Life" depicted in the pages of his publication. He hosted a popular syndicated television show called Playboy's Penthouse, purchased the Playboy Mansion at 1340 North State Parkway, and opened the first Playboy Club on the Near North Side of Chicago on February 29, 1960.
Throughout the Sixties, Hef and Playboy became what Chicago columnist Bob Greene has called "a force of nature." Hef wrote an extended series of editorials titled "The Playboy Philosophy," championing the rights of the individual and challenging the country's heritage of puritan repression. The magazine became the largest-selling, most influential men's magazine in the world.
By 1971, when Playboy Enterprises went public, the magazine was selling 7 million copies a month and there were 23 Playboy Clubs, resorts, hotels and casinos with more than 900,000 members worldwide. The corporation also included book publishing, merchandising, a modeling agency, a limousine service, a record label and a TV and motion picture company. It was truly an empire ruled by one man.
Hef hosted a second syndicated television show, Playboy After Dark, taped in Hollywood in 1968 and 1969, and in 1970 acquired the famed black Big Bunny jet, a DC-9 from McDonnell Douglas, in which he regularly commuted between Chicago and California, and toured the world.
In 1971, he established a second residence in Los Angeles with the acquisition of a five-and-one-half acre estate in Holmby Hills, which quickly became known as Playboy Mansion West, where he was able to more closely supervise Playboy Enterprises' increasing interests in television and film production.
In 1975, Hef decided to make Los Angeles his permanent home, reflecting the extent to which Hollywood movies had influenced his dreams and aspirations as a boy. In 1980, Hef championed the reconstruction of the Hollywood sign (then in serious disrepair) and was honored with a star on the Hollywood walk of fame for his efforts. In saving the sign, Hef referred to it as "Hollywood's Eiffel Tower." The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce honored him further, with its First Annual Hollywood Hall of Fame Award as Outstanding Citizen of the Year.
The Hollywood sign restoration was only one of Hef and Playboy's major projects as a part of the Hollywood creative community. The company produced such features as Roman Polanski's Macbeth, distributed by Columbia Pictures, which was voted Best Picture of the Year in 1971 by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures; Monty Python's first film, And Now For Something Completely Different; Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack; and The Naked Ape, with Universal Studios.
Playboy also produced such popular television movies as Third Girl From The Left, with Kim Novak and Tony Curtis; The Death of Ocean View Park; The Cop and the Kid; and A Whale For The Killing.
The increasingly conservative Eighties took their toll on both Hef and his company. In 1985, he suffered a stroke that changed the direction of his life. He referred to it at the time as "a stroke of luck."
Bringing his life full-circle, the world's most famous bachelor was married on July 1, 1989 to Kimberley Conrad, Playboy's 1989 Playmate of the Year. Their fairy tale courtship resulted in an uncommonly romantic wedding ceremony conducted at the wishing well at Playboy Mansion West where Hef proposed. Their first son, Marston Glenn, was born on Hef's birthday, April 9, 1990, and their second son Cooper Bradford, was born on September 4, 1991. The Hefners are currently separated, and Mrs. Hefner and the boys live on an estate adjacent to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
Since the mid-Eighties, daughter Christie Hefner has served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Playboy Enterprises, but Hef continues to serve as the magazine's editor-in-chief, plays a key role in determining the path of Playboy Enterprises and directs other areas of the corporation including cable television and video production.
Hollywood and cinema continue to be major factors in Hef's personal and professional life. At his direction, the Playboy Foundation instituted the Freedom of Expression Award, given annually at the Sundance Film Festival. Hef recently underwrote the West Coast retrospective of the late British filmmaker Dennis Potter's works at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; he personally endowed a course in Censorship in Cinema at USC, at which he serves as a guest lecturer; and, he has been a major contributor to UCLA's project to restore classic films.
Hef was a sponsor of the acclaimed "American Cinema" series on PBS, and he has long been active in seeking out and restoring such vintage films as Vitaphone shorts and the films of Twenties British crooner Al Bowlly.
In 1994, Hef established and Playboy founded the Playboy Jazz Film Festival, the first-ever showcase on the West Coast for many of the best and rarest films in the jazz lexicon. This event was in addition to the annual Jazz on Film program traditionally presented free to the public by Playboy on the eve of the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, which is now in it's 22nd consecutive year.
On March 28, 1996, Hef was honored in formal ceremonies at the University of Southern California for his lifelong dedication to film and his endowment of a chair for the Study of American Film at the University's School of Cinema-Television. The Hefner gift marked only the second such endowment in the history of the prestigious film school. The other chair was endowed in memory of the late Steve Ross, who had served as chairman of Time-Warner.
Hef's personal archive at the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills contains more than 4000 feature films. Each weekend, he screens films at the Mansion for celebrities and personal friends. Each Sunday is a first-run feature. Friday nights are vintage classics. Often, Saturday nights are a mini-festival of silent films.
Hef has frequently been quoted as believing that the United States' most important export is "the American Dream," which he feels is conveyed to the world through motion pictures.
Hef has profoundly influenced society in the second half of the 20th Century during which his publication has been the world's best-selling men's magazine.
Frequently interviewed by major news and entertainment media the world over, in 1996 he was the subject of an extraordinary two-hour profile, Hugh Hefner: American Playboy on the A&E Network's prestigious Biography series. He had previously been the subject of a feature length documentary film, Hugh Hefner: Once Upon A Time, produced by Lynch/Frost Productions and distributed by IRS Releasing. After its first run in theaters, the film became a popular addition to many international film festivals and continues to attract new viewers on cable television and home video in the U.S. and on broadcast, cable and satellite-delivered television around the world.
More recently, he was the subject of a one-hour "Celebrity Profile" on the E! Entertainment Television Network and a half-hour "People in the News" installment on CNN.
In 2000, Hef guest-starred on an episode of HBO's Sex and the City, and in 2001, he appeared in the 1000th episode of NBC's Just Shoot Me. In addition to numerous ongoing national and international television appearances, Hef has been the subject of a host of recent print profiles in publications including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine and the Times of London. In 2000, the city of Chicago honored Hef by renaming a downtown street after him, and two days later Hef rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. In 2001, Hef was immortalized in silicone at the Hollywood Wax Museum and roasted by the New York Friars Club.
The recipient of a number of awards for his contributions to society in general and the publishing industry in particular, Hef received the 1996 International Publishing Award from the International Press Directory in London and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors at its 1998 ceremonies in New York.
Most recently, Hef has become a fixture on the Hollywood celebrity club scene and the Mansion has once again become a mecca for entertainment industry superstars including a new wave of young motion picture and television celebrities, rock groups and more.
His dreams are soon expected to reach the large screen theatrically in a feature film.
party time!
