Hugh Hefner and the American dream

Hard as it may be to shake images of Hugh Hefner looking geriatric as he makes the rounds with his posse of blond gal pals, a new biography of the founder of America's first mainstream lad mag, Playboy, serves as a reminder that Hefner was once a sexual revolutionary. Here's a bit of the review:

If Hugh Hefner hadn't existed, the 20th century would have had to create him. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the 20th century would have wanted to create him either way. As the postwar era dawned, so too did an array of cheap, limitless entertainments, and in 1953, Hefner launched Playboy magazine. Based in Chicago (later Los Angeles), it offered cosmopolitan pleasures even as America fell prey to a kind of conformity that was, in its own gray way, as psychically crippling as communism.

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. And yet "Mr. Playboy" reveals that Hefner essentially inverted that ideal by creating his own ethos, in which hard work also happens in the mind, and its rewards spring from the pursuit of pleasure, not of virtue.

The rest of the review is here. And check out the blog post on Hefner (with videos) at our fab litblog, Jacket Copy.

--Veronique de Turenne

Photo: Undated handout of Hugh Hefner, center, with Ringo Starr, left, and Barbi Benton, right, at the Playboy club in London.