Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died on Sept. 27. Steve Proffitt, also a producer for Fox News in 1994, spoke with the publishing mogul for the Times.
The yellow warning sign on the drive reads, “CHILDREN AT PLAY.” The sauna–once a site for strictly adult games–is now used to store toys. The only bunnies in evidence at the Playboy mansion are the furry four-legged kind, part of Hugh Hefner’s personal zoo.
At 68, Hugh Marston Hefner is five years into his marriage to former Playmate Kimberly Conrad. He has two children with her, and has turned the day-to-day operations of Playboy Enterprises over to Christie Hefner, his daughter from his first marriage. These days he’s writing his autobiography, looking back at a life that, by any measure, has been quite an adventure.
Hefner was 27 when he published the first issue of Playboy, in 1953. It was an instant hit. Hefner’s genius was in removing the furtive, plain-brown-wrapper feel of the pin-up publications of the day. He designed his magazine to be kept on the coffee table, not hidden under the bed. In the pages of Playboy, he associated sex with money, sophistication and style. And Hefner made himself into the embodiment of that Playboy ideal–a regular guy who digs cool jazz, has a really neat bachelor pad and lots of sex with lots of gorgeous women.
During the 1960s and ’70s, his magazine spawned an empire–a broad-based merchandising operation, Playboy clubs and casinos and the Playboy cable TV channel. Hefner was at the helm, often with the help of Dexedrine, and always with a Pepsi. He took the company public and then moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1975, purchasing an estate built in the 1920s by Arthur Letts Jr., whose father founded the Broadway department stores. Hefner transformed the Letts home into his Playboy Mansion–complete with redwood forest, aviary, hot-tub grotto and game house. Parties were frequent and wild.
But with the dawn of the 1980s, the foundations of the Playboy empire were shaken. To many young people the magazine was either offensive or a curious anachronism. Circulation plummeted and, in short order, the company lost gambling licenses in London and Atlantic City. AIDS put the brakes on the sexual revolution. Dorothy Stratten, 1980 Playmate of the Year was murdered by her husband amid allegations that Hefner was somehow linked to the tragedy. Then in 1985, Hefner had a stroke.
He made a quick and seemingly full recovery. But Hefner says he was forever changed by the experience. The announcement of his marriage made front-page news in 1989, and the once highly visible Hefner now jealously guards his new family’s privacy.
Hefner wore his trademark silk pajamas for this interview. His Pepsi is now diet–and caffeine-free. Across an oversized backgammon table he talked of sex, gender and repression.
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Question: You’ve always been right in the middle of the battle of the sexes. How would you characterize the relationship of men and women right now?
Answer: I think it’s a very mixed message today. I think our society is fragmented. Messages regarding human sexuality have always been mixed in America. We are a schizophrenic nation. We were founded initially by Puritans, who escaped repression only to establish their own. Then the founding fathers gave us the Constitution to separate church and state. But the one thing that got left out of all those laws was human sexuality.
The relationship between the sexes is in many ways suffering from even more confused messages than ever before. You have the religious right and some left-wing feminists both taking very conservative postures on sexuality and the images of sex. There is within the women’s movement an antagonism towards sexuality and towards the opposite sex that obviously makes no sense and certainly wasn’t what (Betty) Friedan had in mind when she wrote “The Feminine Mystique” and started it all in the early 1960s.
We’re fascinated by our sexuality and frightened by it. And during the Reagan and Bush era you got an entire decade of anti-sex government. Sex is not the enemy. It is the beginning of civilization, family and tribe. Sex can be twisted and exploited, but in its most essential form, it’s the best part of who we are. And it frightens us.
Q: How did your efforts to open up the dialogue about sex, gender and sexuality either add to the confusion or provide some clarity?
A: This may be self-serving, but I sometimes feel that Playboy is one of the very few moral compasses when it comes to sex in America. Very early on, Playboy was saying the McMartin (child molestation) case was just another Salem witch hunt. We got sexual hysteria in many forms in the 1980s. It included a wave of McMartin-style allegations that had nothing to do with any real child abuse, and it was fed by AIDS. I said early on that if AIDS did not exist there is a portion of this country that would have had to invent it.
Q: How has the reality of AIDS transformed the philosophy behind Playboy?
A: I think there was a window of opportunity that lasted for two decades–from the invention of the pill in the early 1960s until the arrival of AIDS at the start of the 1980s. It was almost like the Garden of Eden. It was guilt-free sex with relatively few negative possibilities. Now the game has changed. But remember, disease has always been a consideration, and informed sexuality is always what Playboy has been about.
Playboy began editorializing about AIDS before any other national magazine, and brought some rational thought to the subject when the (television) networks and the rest of the mass media were really involved in a form of hysteria.
There was a cover story in Life magazine in early 1985–the shock headline was, “AIDS–Now We Are All At Risk.” Well that’s a lie. We are not all at risk. The risks are very clearly defined and related to specific behavior. There were people who said, “When you have sex with somebody, you have sex with anyone they ever had sex with.” Again, simply not true.
Q: Have you always been somewhat preoccupied with matters of sex?
A: I can remember in my adolescence feeling that many of the things that were hurtful and hypocritical in society were things related to sex. They included the kind of censorship laws that existed in the movies and books when I was young.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection next year, another blow to the Republican establishment on the same day the latest GOP effort to revamp the Affordable Care Act failed.
Corker and other Republican leaders in Congress have come under fire from President Trump and his supporters for not delivering in the early days of the administration.
Once considered an ally of Trump’s national security team, Corker traded insults with the president during the August break amid chatter that staunch conservatives would mount a primary challenge to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.
Corker’s retirement will touch off what is likely to be a highly contested, ideologically driven primary. It also creates a vacuum among Senate Republicans for leaders on national security issues. For now, Corker isn’t planning on getting involved in either contest.
“After much thought, consideration and family discussion over the past year, Elizabeth and I have decided that I will leave the United States Senate when my term expires at the end of 2018,” the Chattanooga Republican said in a statement.
Corker comes from Tennessee’s long tradition of establishment Republican figures who came to the Senate with ambitions that went beyond the state’s expansive borders. Two of the past five Senate GOP leaders have been from Tennessee, while Corker and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) are two of the most powerful committee chairmen.
Corker acknowledged that his clout led him to consider breaking his pledge, initially made during his 2006 race, to serve only two terms. “As we have gained influence, that decision has become more difficult. But I have always been drawn to the citizen legislator model,” he said in his statement.
But the establishment wing of the Republican Party has been under assault since the tea party movement took hold seven years ago, and even more so in the Trump era, when mild-mannered dealmakers have fallen out of favor with conservative voters who increasingly prefer angry confrontations over ideological outcomes.
Corker faced that dynamic back home over the August congressional break, when he questioned Trump’s stability after the president’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. “He has not demonstrated that he understands what has made this nation great,” he told local reporters.
That prompted taunting tweets from Trump, who said that Corker was “constantly asking me” whether to seek reelection.
Corker wrestled with the decision of whether to run for months, he said, finally coming to peace with the idea of retiring in late August, while at an event in Clarksville. He set a final deadline of Tuesday at noon to make his decision, he said, whatever happened with the health-care vote.
“I came as a citizen legislator, I did, and hopefully I provided some entertainment for you all by being a person who’s not thinking about reelection,” Corker said during an interview in his office. “That’s the way I came, and I want to depart on that same basis.”
Corker revealed his plans to retire just hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that he would not hold a vote on the latest bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act because it was destined to fail amid defections from GOP moderates.
Corker’s announcement also came just hours before polls closed in the Republican primary runoff in Alabama, in which appointed Sen. Luther Strange lost to Roy Moore, a former state Supreme Court justice. Moore’s insurgent campaign emboldened the sort of anti-establishment figures who have made McConnell a target of enmity and who were searching for a primary challenge to Corker.
Corker almost retired in 2012, but he was coaxed into running again when it became clear that he would be the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.
There is a growing fear among Senate Republicans that other incumbents will retire or face heated primary challenges next year.
Next year’s Tennessee Senate race will give hard-line conservatives their best chance yet to break through in a state where they have failed in recent primaries for Senate and governor — one of the last holdouts against the tea party wave that has swept other Southern states.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) might try to fill the conservative lane. Former representative Stephen Fincher (R), who retired last year with $2.4 million remaining in his campaign account, could try to run as a tea party hero — he was the first non-Democrat to win his western Tennessee seat since Davy Crockett — but with establishment help as someone who worked well with Alexander and Corker.
Some will look to Peyton Manning, the Super Bowl-winning quarterback who went to the University of Tennessee and retired in early 2016 from professional football. Manning is close to Corker, who brought him to a congressional GOP retreat this year.
Corker’s departure will be felt perhaps most acutely in the area of foreign relations, where the Tennessean not only served as his party’s top voice in the Senate but has for years been celebrated as one of the GOP’s best bipartisan dealmakers.
He established his chops early in his Senate career when lawmakers ratified the New START treaty, a strategic arms-control pact that regulates the size of the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles. Corker was one of the key GOP players who negotiated changes that made it possible to bring more conservative votes on board.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Corker also tackled nuclear security, joining with ranking Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.) to design a bill that gave Congress an opportunity to weigh in on a multilateral deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions before it could go into effect.
More recently, Corker has been the chief go-between for the White House and Congress when it comes to whether the president will certify Iran’s compliance with the deal next month — a decision that could kick off a brutal battle on Capitol Hill over whether to reimpose nuclear sanctions against Tehran.
Corker has fallen into the role of liaison between the Trump administration and the Senate on other matters as well, including sanctions, nuclear threats and foreign wars. He speaks with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson constantly and has frequent contact with the president.
At times, that has meant Corker has been the one holding the Senate back from tackling issues popular with the rank and file. For months, for example, he staved off a burgeoning effort to increase sanctions against Russia — he later explained that he intended to give Tillerson a chance to make a deal with Moscow to improve the bleak war in Syria.
