Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream

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He is the author of four books, including The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century and The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Throughout this fascinating biography, Watts offers singular insights into the real man behind the flamboyant public persona. 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.

Steven Watts's biography presents a more complex personality lurking behind the pipe and smoking jacket, and Ray Porter's courtly manner suggests indignation, and near envy, over Hefner's excesses. If we’re to believe this book, it’s the Truth about Hugh Hefner—and, by proxy, about American life since the 1950s.

If we're to believe this book, it's the Truth about Hugh Hefner-and, by proxy, about American life since the 1950s. 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 is the author of four books, including The People′s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century and The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. 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. Gorgeous 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. This book also illustrates how the social conditions of this post-war period changed to cater for the individual consumerist desires of today. 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.This book is fundamentally a representation of societal change, with the experiences of one man, Hugh Hefner being a micro study of how some of those changes became incorporated into our own lives. 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.

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.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. 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?

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. 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.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. 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. 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.