Re: Hugh Hefner has died

[Ubiquitous]

billand...@yahoo.com wrote:

>Hugh Hefner, who parlayed $8,000 in borrowed money in 1953 to create
>Playboy, the hot-button media empire renowned for a magazine enriched
>with naked women and intelligent interviews just as revealing, has died.
>He was 91.
>
>Playboy confirmed the news in a press release, saying Hefner died in his
>home at the Playboy Mansion of natural causes on Wednesday.
>
>http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7980990/hugh-hefner-playboy-obit

Oh no! What will Bill Mahr do now that he can't score young chicks at the
Grotto?


--
Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.

[Ubiquitous]

billand...@yahoo.com wrote:

>Hugh Hefner, who parlayed $8,000 in borrowed money in 1953 to create
>Playboy, the hot-button media empire renowned for a magazine enriched
>with naked women and intelligent interviews just as revealing, has died.
>He was 91.
>
>Playboy confirmed the news in a press release, saying Hefner died in his
>home at the Playboy Mansion of natural causes on Wednesday.
>
>http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7980990/hugh-hefner-playboy-obit

Hugh Hefner gave off a more airbrushed quality than the girls in his
magazine.
The founder of the most popular men’s magazine in history appeared as the
personification of the libertine, do-your-own-thing age he created and
then inhabited. But an authoritarian, do-my-thing streak pervaded the
Playboy Mansion.

A fun-loving flock appeared at Hefner’s side and on his lap. But they
discovered that not all blondes have more fun.

Hefner imposed a 9 p.m. curfew on his harem. He banned them from the
Playboy Mansion’s kitchen. He required them to wear uniform flannel
pajamas. He tracked them with monitors and videographers.

Hefner’s mania for control showed itself in an obsessive-compulsive
disorder applied to people rather than, say, a book not flush with the
rest of the shelf or the wrong number of Jolly Ranchers in the jar. The
magazine mogul religiously clubbed at Las Palmas on Wednesdays (just not
this Wednesday), deemed Thursdays restaurant night, scheduled sex for
Fridays, and screened classic movies on Sundays. Rather than spontaneity
in a smoking jacket, Hef lived his life as a creature of habit in the
extreme.

In tell-all memoirs, the girlfriends who received his allowances (an
unkind name exists for women in such arrangements) turned on their
ostensible benefactor. Izabella St. James described less than 20 minutes
of intimacy in her two years as a mansion girlfriend. She reflected, “I
may as well have lived in a convent.” Girlfriend Holly Madison claims
that despite a half-dozen or so blonde beauties there for the taking,
Hefner, perhaps in solidarity with his readers that made him rich,
generally finished the sexual ritual by himself.

All this rebelled against the image that rebelled against societal norms.
Hefner performed a sort of plastic surgery on his own image that evoked
the plastic surgeries he bankrolled for his paramours. This cognitive
dissonance afflicted his glossy, too.

He called his creation Playboy despite the availability of Chronic
Masturbator as a magazine name. Soon pornographers trafficking in ugly
rather than the beauty highlighted by Hefner followed suit by
euphemistically naming low-rent, leave-nothing-to-the-imagination nudie
journals High Society, Penthouse, Swank, and other monikers misleading
their readers (users?) into mistaking seedy for classy. That Guy who
warned against the “glamour of evil” a long time ago was on to something.

But one does a violence to Hugh Hefner’s good bad name to say it in the
same sentence as Al Goldstein. Ray Bradbury fittingly first published
what became Fahrenheit 451, a book ostensibly about people who burn them,
in his magazine that so many wanted to burn. Milton Friedman, Jimmy
Carter, Rush Limbaugh, Malcolm X, Saul Bellow, Ansel Adams and other
luminaries sat for interviews. Playboy became the one skin magazine
subscribers could straight-facedly say, “I read it for the articles.”

When the world that Playboy created proved inhospitable for Playboy, it
pivoted away from nudes in 2015 before returning to them this year. If
you can’t beat ‘em, don’t be them. Playboy, to its credit, never became
Club International. The demand for naked women, never particularly low,
eventually failed to pay the bills because of the oversupply of them.
Ironically, Hugh Hefner struggled once the Eden of his imagination became
a reality. Our dreams become nightmares like that.

In U2’s song “The Playboy Mansion,” after pondering “if O.J. is more than
a drink” and “a Big Mac bigger than you think,” Bono wonders, “Have I got
the gifts to get me through/The gates of that mansion.”

After a sybarite existence for most of his 91 years, Hugh Hefner,
described as kind and fiercely loyal by friends, perhaps wondered, as
most do, whether he possessed the gifts to get through the gates of that
mansion. Surely he grasped that you can’t take the grotto, or the girls,
with you.

[Ubiquitous]

lcr...@home.ca wrote:
>On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 07:46:33 -0400, Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net>
>wrote:

>> I don't think he got where he is by being a moron, but from what I've heard
>>and read, his life at the mansion was pretty pathetic.
>
>I heard he had a pretty good private zoo and put on good fireworks
>shows each year.

"Hefner’s Mansion Embodied Hedonistic Fun and Darker Impulses
Seemingly everyone in Hollywood has a story about the Playboy
Mansion. Some of them are ugly."

By BROOKS BARNESSEPT. 28, 2017

LOS ANGELES — Everyone in Hollywood has a Playboy Mansion story. Many are
unprintable.

But the tale that best sums up Hugh Hefner’s den of iniquity, for a lot of
women, comes from Sharan Magnuson, who arrived in Hollywood in 1980 to pursue
an acting career and soon discovered a side of the Playboy Mansion that most
people never discussed — certainly not if they wanted to be invited back.

“At first, it was magical,” Ms. Magnuson, who went on to become a senior
executive at Warner Bros., said by phone on Thursday, a day after the death of
Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner. “Glamorous. Fun. The mansion in perfect
condition. Beautiful banquet spreads. You’d go outside and there were
flamingos and monkeys. And Hef, who would come downstairs later, was always
gracious and cool.”

Some of his male guests? Not so much.

In the mid-1980s, Ms. Magnuson, who was then known as Sharan Lea, and a
girlfriend were invited to the mansion on a Sunday: movie night. She was not
naïve, and ran with a hard-partying crowd. But she did not expect to find
herself cornered outside — near the mansion’s famous grotto, with its three
mammoth hot tubs and wooden shelves stocked with jumbo bottles of Johnson’s
Baby Oil. A guy who had seemed nice suddenly had nine hands.

“He tried to get me into the cave, and, when I refused, he really manhandled
me,” Ms. Magnuson said. “I felt violated.”

She said she had managed to push away her assailant, who disappeared into the
house. Within minutes, two guards approached her. “They said, ‘We’re sorry,
but Mr. Hefner is asking you to leave the property,’” Ms. Magnuson recalled.

“Banned from the Playboy Mansion for refusing one of his gross friend’s sexual
advances — total badge of honor,” Ms. Magnuson said. (She later added in a
text message: “One of the reason ingénues accepted invitations to the mansion
was to have a nice meal. Sad but true. I was the proverbial starving actress
back then.”)

The debauchery at the Playboy Mansion continued for another two and a half
decades. In 2005, Mr. Hefner’s reality show, “The Girls Next Door,” became a
tawdry hit and introduced a new generation to the property.

Like so many things in Hollywood, though, the reality had become quite
different from the carefully crafted image. Rather than a rollicking pleasure
palace, the mansion had become quite sad by 2009, when I spent time at the
mansion for an article that would be headlined “The Loin in Winter.” Mr.
Hefner’s struggling Playboy Enterprises was renting out the grounds nonstop
for corporate events. He had lost most of his hearing but was still trying to
pass off his silk-pajama shtick.

I remember being horrified by the aviary, which was stacked thick with white
bird excrement. Daylight was not kind to the grotto; a wet, dirty pad
resembling a small mattress appeared to be rotting in an alcove. The flamingos
that once prowled the property were long gone (or hiding in shame) and the
monkey cages, while clean, seemed to epitomize the place — an icky vestige of
another era.

Two years later, the grotto pools would be linked to an outbreak of
Legionnaires’ disease.

The stone house, built in 1927 for an heir to the Broadway and Bullock’s
department store fortune, may well have another act. Located a few hundred
feet off Sunset Boulevard and abutting the Los Angeles Country Club, the
Playboy Mansion was purchased last year by J. Daren Metropoulos, a businessman
and heir to a fortune built on Chef Boyardee meatballs, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer
and Bumble Bee tuna. The sale had one condition: Mr. Hefner could live there
until his death.

Mr. Metropoulos has fastidiously avoided the spotlight, refusing to answer
questions about his plans. But as the Hefner era fades into history, it should
be remembered that for all the hedonistic fun the mansion seemed to epitomize,
it contained many dark corners.

[anim8rfsk]

In article <oqlfm1$nl5$1...@dont-email.me>,

Assuming any of this to be true, yawn.

--
Join your old RAT friends at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1688985234647266/