Book description
The real Hugh Hefner-the extraordinary inside story of an American icon
"Riveting... Watts packs in plenty of gasp-inducing
passages."-Newark Star Ledger
"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
"This is a fun book. How could it not be? Watts aims to give a
full account of the man, his magazine and their place in social
history. Playboy is no longer the cultural force it used to be,
but it made a stamp on society."-Associated Press
"In Steven Watts' exhaustive, illuminating biography Mr.
Playboy, Hefner's ideal for living -- marked by his allegiances to
Tarzan, Freud, Pepsi-Cola and jazz -- proves to be a kind of gloss on
the Protestant work ethic."-Los Angeles TimesGorgeous
young women in revealing poses; extravagant mansion parties packed
with celebrities; a hot-tub grotto, elegant smoking jackets, and round
rotating beds; the hedonistic pursuit of uninhibited sex. Put these
images together and a single name springs to mind-Hugh Hefner. From
his spectacular launch of Playboy magazine and the dizzying expansion
of his leisure empire to his recent television hit The Girls Next
Door, the publisher has attracted public attention and controversy
for decades. But how did a man who is at once socially astute and
morally unconventional, part Bill Gates and part Casanova, also evolve
into a figure at the forefront of cultural change?In Mr.
Playboy, historian and biographer Steven Watts argues that, in the
process of becoming fabulously wealthy and famous, Hefner has
profoundly altered American life and values. Granted unprecedented
access to the man and his enterprise, Watts traces Hef's life and
career from his midwestern, Methodist upbringing and the first
publication of Playboy in 1953 through the turbulent sixties,
self-indulgent seventies, reactionary eighties, and traditionalist
nineties, up to the present. He reveals that Hefner, from the
beginning, believed he could overturn social norms and take America
with him. This fascinating portrait illustrates four ways in which
Hefner and Playboy stood at the center of several cultural upheavals
that remade the postwar United States. The publisher played a crucial
role in the sexual revolution that upended traditional notions of
behavior and expectation regarding sex. He emerged as one of the most
influential advocates of a rapidly developing consumer culture,
flooding Playboy readers with images of material abundance and a
leisurely lifestyle. He proved instrumental-with his influential
magazine, syndicated television shows, fashionable nightclubs, swanky
resorts, and movie and musical projects-in making popular culture into
a dominant force in many people's lives. Ironically, Hefner also
became a controversial force in the movement for women's rights.
Although advocating women's sexual freedom and their liberation from
traditional family constraints, the publisher became a whipping boy
for feminists who viewed him as a prophet for a new kind of male
domination. Throughout, Watts offers singular insights into the real
man behind the flamboyant public persona. He shows Hefner's personal
dichotomies-the pleasure seeker and the workaholic, the consort of
countless Playmates and the genuine romantic, the family man and the
Gatsby-like host of lavish parties at his Chicago and Los Angeles
mansions who enjoys well-publicized affairs with numerous Playmates,
the fan of life's simple pleasures who hobnobs with the Hollywood
elite. 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.
- Spans from Hefner's childhood to the launch of Playboy
magazine and the expansion of the Playboy empire to the present
- Puts Hefner's life and work into the cultural context of
American life from the mid-twentieth-century onwards
- Contains over 50 B/W and color photos, including an actual
fold-out centerfold
Steven Watts is Professor of History at the University of Missouri.
He is the author of five books, including The People's Tycoon: Henry
Ford and the American Century and The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and
the American Way of Life.
