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Mr Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, by Steven Watts
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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 t
- Sales Rank: #620821 in Books
- Published on: 2008-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.44" h x 1.78" w x 6.40" l, 1.93 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 568 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Mansion
1. He has been keeping an exhaustive “scrapbook” of his life since adolescence, which now consists of over 1800 volumes and takes up much of the third floor of the Mansion.
2. His favorite weekly event is Monday’s “Manly Night,” a gathering of longstanding male friends for an evening devoted to eating, trading friendly insults and stories, and watching old films.
3. Hefner became obsessed with backgammon in the 1970s, playing in tournaments at the Mansion that attracted world-class players and lasted for hours, sometimes days.
4. He was deeply traumatized during his college days when his fiancé confessed that she was involved in a sexual affair.
5. He nearly choked to death in the late 1970s after ingesting a small sex toy during a raucous lovemaking session with his girlfriend. She dislodged it with the Heimlich maneuver.
6. Hefner was a strong backer of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, contributing money and booking African American entertainers for his television show and the Playboy Clubs.
7. The Mansion library still prominently displays a large ceramic bust of Barbi Benton, Hefner’s girlfriend from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
8. The Mansion staff is inundated with requests for invitations to Hefner’s big parties. Some are from celebrities who want to bring their friends, and many are from young women who send photos of themselves in skimpy clothing and provocative poses. Nearly all are turned down.
9. Every bathroom at the Mansion is equipped with a bottle of baby oil, bottle of aspirin, and Jergens cherry-almond skin lotion. During big parties, many of them also have bowls filled with condoms.
10. Hefner has all of his meals brought to him in his bedroom suite at the Mansion. Even when the Mansion is filled with dozens of guests enjoying an elegant buffet meal for movie nights on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, he eats in his room before joining the crowd.
From Publishers Weekly
As he did in his previous books on Henry Ford (The People's Tycoon) and Walt Disney (The Magic Kingdom), Watts carefully details the life of Hugh Hefner and the influence his Playboy magazine has had on American culture. Using unrestricted access to the magazine's archives, Watts skillfully charts the intersection of Hefner's professional and personal history: the sexual titillation of his first issue; his mid- to late-1960s championing of leftist politics and writers such as Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut; his 1970s retrenchment after assaults by the women's liberation movement; his financial and personal troubles in the '80s and '90s; and his current position as the retro cool figurehead of an institution that is now a midsize communications and entertainment company. Watts evokes a time when Playboy was seen by its critics as a key symptom of decadence in American life, and is at his best when exploring his subject's early years, showing how Hefner's sexual and material ethic of self-fulfillment drove him to challenge the social conventions of postwar America. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
* “The book provides plenty of biographical detail…and it does a creditable job of making connections between the personal and the political.” (Choice Reviews, May 2009)
""Just past the round rotating bed, beyond the hot-tub grotto but before the pajama-draped walk-in, lies … what? If we’re to believe this book, it’s the Truth about Hugh Hefner—and, by proxy, about American life since the 1950s. Of course, the larger legacy of Playboy has been considered long and well (in these pages a couple of years ago, and elsewhere). But Watts, a history professor prone to interpreting American Dreamers (he has written stellar works on Henry Ford and Walt Disney), is wise to draw a narrow bead on Hef qua Hef, dividing his life into tidy quadrants of postwar influence and iconography: as sexual liberator, avatar of consumerism, pop-culture purveyor, lightning rod for feminist ire. He also succeeds in identifying and exploring raging personal paradoxes—hedonist and workaholic, libertine and romantic, provocateur and traditionalist—while resisting the urge to attempt reconciliation. The Horatio-Alger-with-a-libido case he makes—where else but in America could a repressed midwestern boy rise, and fall into so many sacks, while creating and brand-managing a multimedia empire?—is only intermittently convincing. Still, there’s plenty to enjoy here, from the factual wealth (Watts was granted access to the vast Playboy vaults and draws heavily on his subject’s compulsively kept scrapbook collection) to the photographs aplenty (some offer revelatory glimpses; others give off the whiff of stale cheesecake) to the fundamental pleasures of watching a larger-than-life figure scuttle social norms and satisfy his own lavish urges."" (The Atlantic, March 2009)
""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 Times)
When Hugh Hefner quit his job at Esquire to start a magazine called Playboy, he didn't just want to make money. He wanted to make dreams come true. The first issue of Playboy had a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an article on the Dorsey brothers, and a feature on desk design for the modern office, called ""Gentlemen, Be Seated."" Hefner wrote much of the copy himself and drew all the cartoons. But the most memorable part by far was the set of pictures he bought from a local calendar printer of a scantily clad Marilyn Monroe.
In this wise and penetrating biography, intellectual historian Steven Watts looks at what Hugh Hefner went onto become, and how he took America with him. Hefner became one of the most hated and envied celebrities in America, dating a long list of his magazine's beauties and always standing just barely on the wrong side of decency and moral uprightness. He also, at one time, had 7 million subscribers to his magazine. Though in time he would lose readers to more explicit magazines on one side and ""lad"" magazines on the other, the Playboy brand never lost its luster.
""...highly-readable and thought-provoking biography written by academic historian, Stephen Watts"" (Desire, November 2008)
Hugh Hefner started Pla
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Hef's Not Only Living the Dream, He Created It
By Bigshaker
I've been waiting a long time for the definitive biography of Hugh Hefner, a guy I've always had a certain fascination and admiration for - and here it is. Not just a shallow pop bio, this is a highly readable, insightful, and entertaining look into the life and times of one of pop culture's most recognizable, controversial, and ultimately beloved icons.
Mr. Playboy digs past the popular assumptions about Hef and even his own self-created image to lay bare the truth about the man who was the tip of the spear of the sexual revolution, and who literally invented the lifestyle of the modern playboy. The author does a great job of situating the Playboy phenomenon and its creator in the larger social, political, and cultural setting. The book even includes material on the successful The Girls Next Door reality TV show, so it's as up-to-date as it could possibly be.
Lots of good photos, including - naturally - a centerfold. It's a wild ride. If you have any interest or curiosity at all in the man and the magazine, you won't be disappointed by this book.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
PROFESSOR WATTS ISN'T OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW....
By William S. Cherry
I figure guys my age and olders owe a lot to Hugh Hefner. And it disturbs me when those who came years after us simply don't realize, much less understand, his enormous contributions.
Prior to the first issue of "Playboy," which reached newsstands in December 1953, men's magazines, if they were anything other than about sports, automobile mechanics or woodworking, were primarily on the trashy side.
Let's start with "Police Gazette" and count them off from there.
Most, printed on newsprint with poor art, graphics and composition, featured mindless articles thats purpose was a shallow attempt to stimulate libido, and pumped up more with photos of girls standing on their tip-toes obviously with their poking-chests the products of Frederick's of Hollywood bullet bras.
Esquire attempted to be the men's magazine bible, but it was so stodgy that it missed the mark.
So Mr. Hefner took it upon himself to design and produce a graphically artistic men's magazine, and print it on slick paper, slick paper just like "Town and Country," "Vogue," and "Vanity Fair" were.
He found known experts to write about jazz and theater and cars and cooking and manners and how to dress. He added photographs of young women who could have easily lived next door to Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. Maybe next door to me, too.
There were short stories by the same writers who were frequently published in the "New Yorker" and "Harpers."
There were business essays by one of the world's most-wealthy, J. Paul Getty.
Mr. Hefner made sure men discovered Shel Silverstein and cartoonist Gahan Wilson. We found out for ourselves that art could be something more relevant for us than the Mona Lisa because of the excitingly colorful paintings of artist Leroy Neiman.
Somewhere in the `60s, Mr. Hefner researched and wrote "The Playboy Philosophy." It discussed and drew supported conclusions on sex, religion and politics. It caused readers to think, evaluate and debate. Many, for the first time, determined precisely how they felt about some matters of life. Probably many disagreed with Mr. Hefner, but either way, that was a good thing.
Dr. Steven Watts is the chairman of the history department at the University of Missouri in Columbia. If my math is correct, he and "Playboy" were both born circa 1953.
Professor Watts wrote "Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream." Rather than talk about and discuss what Mr. Hefner brought to readers like me, readers who were at least teenagers in 1953, the story Professor Watts preferred to weave was about the shallow romantic life that Mr. Hefner has led for more than fifty years.
I think Professor Watts' book is a disservice to Mr. Hefner, and I'm inclined to think it is because he was never a boy much less a man before Mr. Hefner took it upon himself to teach males how to be cultured.
He just doesn't get it, and we shouldn't expect him to.
Perhaps someday some insightful, older author will tell about the important Hugh Hefner contributions and what they have meant to American men and women. It's long past due.
Meanwhile, thank you Mr. Hefner.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing.....boring!
By S.A.Nick
This book is SO BORING. The author writes the same stuff over, over and over again. The book could be 1/2 the size it is. I'm getting to the last chapters and finally it is getting a bit more interesting. I won't recommend this book to anyone.
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