“Playboy” founder Hugh Hefner, dead at 91

Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Playboy(NEW YORK) — Hugh Hefner, founder and chief creative officers of Playboy Enterprises and a man who became both a symbol of the sexual revolution and a target of criticism from feminists, has died at 91.

Playboy announced Hefner’s death on Twitter Wednesday night. “American Icon and Playboy Founder, Hugh M. Hefner passed away today. He was 91. #RIPHef,” the message read.

Hefner was born in Chicago in 1926 and had been working at low level jobs in publishing when he left to launch Playboy magazine.  Playboy‘s first issue, published in December 1953, featured nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe from an old 1949 calendar photo shot. Over the next two decades Playboy would grow into one of the largest circulation magazines in America.

The magazine was not only home to photo shoots of nude models, but also published the writing of literary writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Margaret Atwood, published the work of cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, Shel Silverstein and Gahan Wilson and was almost as renowned for its serious news-making interviews with the likes of Jimmy Carter and Malcom X as it was for it’s “Playmate” centerfolds.

Hefner would launch a string of Playboy Clubs — famously featuring women in Playboy’s iconographic “bunny” costumes, and in the 1960s a television show. In 1971, Playboy purchased what became known as the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills neighborhood of West Los Angeles, which became the notorious scene of celebrity parties.

Hefner was also one of the first media moguls to build a lifestyle brand around himself — his own personality and his famous smoking-jacket-and-slippers attired style.

Hefner was married three times — to Mildred Williams from 1949-1959; to Playboy Playmate Kimberly Conrad from 1989 – 2010; and to Playmate Crystal Harris from 2012 until his death.

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