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Ultimate Playboy Hugh Hefner turns 80

BY JULIA ALLISON | Special to amNewYork

April 10, 2006

Hugh Hefner. (Handout / April 11, 2006)

Hugh Hefner was just 27 years old when he launched the first issue of Playboy, featuring the iconic Marilyn Monroe shot with "nothing on but the radio."

Sunday--53 years, two marriages, four children and countless girlfriends later--the original Playboy officially became an octogenarian.

Armed only with a large mansion, dozens of staff, silk pajamas and a mountain of Viagra, Hefner relentlessly continues his good-natured pursuit of hedonism.

So far, at least according to his E! reality show "The Girls Next Door," it looks like he's succeeded. Single for all but 20 years of his adult life, Hefner has produced such polarizing personal lore, it will likely trump the legacy of all but two or three of this century's U.S. presidents. After all, in a battle between sex and politics, sex always wins.

If the feminist mantra is "the personal is political," Playboy's (and Hefner's) is "the sexual is political."

"I would like to think that I will be remembered as someone who had some positive impact on the socio-sexual values of his time," Hefner said in an interview with Fox News last Friday.

An impact? No question. Playboy has been credited with (or blamed for) everything from glamorizing bachelorhood to denigrating marriage to "kick-starting the endless sexualization of everyday American life."

No one appreciates Hefner's cultural importance like Hef, however. "Sex is the primary motivating factor in the course of human history," he wrote in the introduction to The Century of Sex: Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution, "and in the 20th century, it has emerged" (thanks to Playboy) "from the taboos and controversy -- to claim its rightful place in society."

After flourishing in its groundbreaking first decades, Playboy nose-dived in the '80s, shuttering its clubs and casinos, while Hefner -- the King of Robust Health and Committed Bachelorhood -- both had a stroke and got married.

Still, monogamy (and staid living) didn't captivate Hef for long.

After his 1998 separation, Hefner found a culture both substantially sexualized ("Girls Gone Wild," Internet porn) and significantly inured to the trappings of sex ("Sex and the City," and again, Internet porn). Suddenly, Playboy wasn't shocking -- it was retro kitsch.

Hefner, once called an "Unfrozen Caveman Swinger, cryogenically preserved since the '70s," by Slate magazine, has since multiplied his decades-younger girlfriends, keeping three or more at a time (and making HBO's "Big Love" look positively quaint).

"The interesting thing," Hefner says delightedly, "is how one guy, through living out his own fantasies, is living out the fantasies of so many other people."

Of course, along with women over 35, the indefatigable Hefner dismisses age as inconsequential, "If you are healthy, age is largely a number. I'm planning on another quarter-century."

Good news for Viagra!

Julia would happily live in the mansion. For research purposes only, of course. E-mail Julia@JuliaAllison.com