{"id":7004,"date":"2015-04-09T12:17:38","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T12:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=7004"},"modified":"2015-05-02T14:11:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-02T14:11:38","slug":"the-serious-side-of-playboys-hugh-hefner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=7004","title":{"rendered":"The serious side of Playboy’s Hugh Hefner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hefner<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 At the Festival de Cannes in 1999, the Croisette was filled with promotions for \u201cAustin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me\u201d and the buzzword was \u201cshagadelic\u201d.<\/p>\n

When The Hollywood Reporter Cannes Daily ran a picture of Hugh Hefner, who turns 90 today, with some young women on his arm, my kicker on the caption said, \u201cShagarelic\u201d and rivals at Variety and Screen Daily declared it the headline of the festival.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to make fun of the Playboy founder when he appears with a gaggle of siliconed beauties but when I interviewed Hefner at the Playboy Mansion in 1995, he showed his serious side.<\/p>\n

\"tarzan<\/a>He had just given $1.5 million to the USC Film School and he spoke of his love of movies and music, which began in Chicago in 1934 when his mother took him to see \u201cTarzan and his Mate\u201d, the second of the series with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O\u2019Sullivan (left), and the last before films were censored under the Hays Code.<\/p>\n

Hefner said, \u201cI was very aware that they dressed differently in the next one, and \u2018Flash Gordon\u2019 had a tremendous impact on me. It was probably the most erotic serial of the 1930s in a very simple fashion. I had a big crush on Jean Rogers (below) \u2013 she had that kind of pre-Code platinum blone look.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he loved horror movies and mysteries but his true love was movie music: \u201cThe single most romantic scenes in movies for me were musical scenes with their ability to express emotion. Being raised in a very repressed, typically mid-western American home, there was something in the lyrics that you could express in a poetic way \u2013 the yearning, the hunger for lover that you saw in those musicals. Alice Faye made a big impact on me, another platinum blonde.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"flash<\/a><\/p>\n

Years later, Hefner had a spell as a movie producer on films such as Roman Polanski\u2019s \u201cMacbeth\u201d (1971), with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis (below); \u201cThe Naked Ape\u201d (1973), with Johnny Crawford and Victoria Principal; Arthur Hiller\u2019s \u201cThe Crazy World of Julius Vrooder\u201d (1974) with Timothy Bottoms and Barbara Hershey; and Peter Bogdanovich\u2019s film of the Paul Theroux novel \u201cSaint Jack\u201d (1979), with Ben Gazzara.<\/p>\n

Hefner said Playboy\u2019s corporate people in Chicago had turned down \u201cMacbeth\u201d because they did not think it would make money, and it did not do well commercially: \u201cShakespeare\u2019s not what you do with your first commercial benture but I reconsidered it. Roman was a friend and I felt he could bring something special to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"macbeth<\/a>Polanski was still reeling from the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, a few years earlier, and Hefner said, \u201cIn the making of that film there was almost a cathartic kind of something that occurred. I do think that it continues to be the best \u2018Macbeth\u2019 on film.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hefner also was instrumental, via Playboy\u2019s London executive Victor Lownes, in the first Monty Python film, \u201cAnd Now For Something Completely Different\u201d and he said he was involved in a secondary way with the last Peter Sellers film, \u201cThe Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu\u201d, with Helen Mirren (below): \u201cIt was a return to his \u2018Goon Show\u2019 days, what the film finally wound up being, and you can find it quite a delightful film in that context, because that\u2019s all it is, he took over the film and it was almost like an epilogue to his life. It was like going back full circle to his origins.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"fun<\/a><\/p>\n

Hefner has put money into film preservation at USC and UCLA, sponsored courses at Columbia, created a Playboy Sundance Award and this June will see the 37th annual Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. He also almost singlehandedly saved the Hollywood sign, which was in a state of disrepair until he launched a fundraising campaign that offered each letter for sale. Oddly, he ended up with the Y: \u201cI\u2019m not quite sure how that happened, perhaps it\u2019s because it\u2019s in the middle.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all the frivolousness of the Playboy brand, Hefner and the magazine played a major role in the fight against prejudice and repression in the United States. He noted that he founded the publication in 1953 in the middle of the House Un-American Activities Committee\u2019s investigation of Hollywood and the \u201cred scare\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"playboy<\/a>He said, \u201cIt was a very repressive time and you still find everybody fighting the same battles all over again. It\u2019s the way of things. America is a very schizophrenic country when it comes to sex. We essentially remain in part a Puritan culture and it is the conflict that exists between the Puritans and the Founding Fathers, who saw the great danger in that kind of repression and put it in the Constitution to separate Church and State. It\u2019s ongoing. It\u2019s who we are and one has to find some balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hefner said he is an 11th or 12th descendant of William Bradford, the Governor of Massachussetts \u2013 \u201ca real Puritan\u201d \u2013 who arrived at Plymouth Rock but he suggests that the Puritan concern to perpetuate censorship is simply a need to control somebody else\u2019s life.\u00a0He said, \u201cThat\u2019s what Puritanism is all about; that\u2019s how we got Prohibition. It\u2019s the notion that somehow or other we all need to be perfected in some wonderful moralistic way, and I know the way it should be done better than you and I\u2019m gonna tell you how to run your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parents should be allowed to control the availability of material at home so that adults can make their own choices for their families: \u201cThat is perfectly legitimate and vastly superior to the notion of allowing someone else to do it. I think that one of the things that is really remarkable is that we\u2019re more afraid of sex than we are of violence. That\u2019s always struck me as very bizarre. We\u2019re more afraid of the life-force than the death-force. It doesn\u2019t make any sense at all. We speak of sex and violence as if they are evil twins. Aren\u2019t they polar opposites? One is love and affection and procreation. The other is death, hatred and hurting.\u201d<\/p>\n

It comes from the mythology of religious heritage, Hefner said: \u201cWe have some very screwed up views of what is right and wrong when it comes to sex. What we call moral, in every other context, is what is good for people but not in sex. Sex has its own set of thou-shalt-nots that have nothing to do with what is really good for people. A lot of it is rooted in superstition and hatred. You see the attitudes toward gays or somebody who wants to live a little differently from you and me. These are not moral views. This is bigotry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 At the Festival de Cannes in 1999, the Croisette was filled with promotions for \u201cAustin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me\u201d and the buzzword was \u201cshagadelic\u201d. When The Hollywood Reporter Cannes Daily ran a picture … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[580,5,1263],"tags":[1992,2736,3374,3378,4170,3372,3381,3379,3373,3380,3377,3376,3375],"class_list":["post-7004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-festival-de-cannes","category-film","category-memory-lane","tag-flash-gordon","tag-macbeth","tag-tarzan-and-his-mate","tag-the-fiendish-plot-of-dr-fun-manchu","tag-festival-de-cannes","tag-hugh-hefner","tag-jean-rogers","tag-peter-sellers","tag-playboy-magazine","tag-roman-polanski","tag-sundance-film-festival","tag-ucla","tag-usc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7004"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7621,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7004\/revisions\/7621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}