America's Playboy Marks Magazine's 50th

Nov. 26, 2003 -- He built his Playboy empire on the bodies of flawless females, but 50 years later the single most important woman in the life and work of Hugh Hefner is not a pin-up, but a savvy businesswoman. It's his daughter, Christie Hefner.

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It is one of the most unusual father-daughter teams in the business world. One year older than the magazine, Christie Hefner is now CEO of the business. She is married, works during daylight hours and has no children.

She says she feels no conflict between running the Playboy empire and her personal life. "I like dressing sexy, and I like having a good time. But at the end of the day, my role at this company is CEO."

Hef, as he calls himself, is a night owl, separated from his second wife — 38 years younger than him — with whom he has two young sons. He now lives with six women he calls his girlfriends. "Lots of people date lots of girls," he told ABCNEWS. "You know, one girl on Tuesday and another girl on Wednesday; I date them all at the same time."

Pushing Sexuality Into the Mainstream

Once, that kind of statement might have drawn hisses of outrage. But today Hef is an icon and the magazine is considered mainstream. So who's changed, America or the Playboy?

Hint: At 77, Hef is still wearing his trademark pajamas — in the middle of the afternoon — and he's still devoted to what he describes as the inspiration for Playboy — "the play and pleasure of life."

That ideal was largely unheard of when Hefner launched the magazine in 1953. Back then, America liked Ike, and witch-hunted communists. Social tolerance was short and skirt hems long. "Sex" was a forbidden word in polite public conversation.

Along came Hef, stapling a nude pin-up of Marilyn Monroe into the center of his magazine. American men bought it — in droves. Especially the idea that nice girls liked sex. It was a radical notion.

Conservative groups quickly attacked the upstart magazine, and turned out to be its best publicity. By the end of the 1950s, Playboy was selling a million copies an issue. And Hef was transforming himself from a workaholic to the poster child for the fantasy he'd concocted. He also divorced his wife and left her with two young children: Christie and her brother, David.

Which made him, in Christie's words, an absent father. "I mean he wasn't my daddy in the sense of … I didn't bring my report card home to him."

Hefner acknowledges that he had little involvement with his children, "and it was hurtful, I'm sure," he said.

When Christie's mother remarried, she took her stepdad's name, growing up quietly in the Chicago suburbs as Christie Gunn.

Meanwhile, Hef was living the good life downtown. It was a non-stop party: on television; at the mansion in Chicago, and in a string of members-only Playboy Clubs populated by women wearing high heels, rabbit ears and fluffy tails.

"Honestly, in retrospect it probably was a little easier being an adolescent and not having people immediately know that Hef was my dad," Christie said. "Once at camp somebody came up to me and said, 'You know, Hugh Hefner's daughter is in your cabin. And I said, 'Oh really, who do you think it is'? … He said, it's Julie. … 'Cause she has large breasts.'"

Taking the Reins of the Family Business

But Playboy wasn't all about sex. The magazine also took political stands, coming out against the Vietnam War and capital punishment. Hef published edgy, probing interviews, and some of the nation's best-known writers. And yes, some folks did actually get the magazine just for the articles — even his daughter.

Christie said her relationship with dad developed as she got older and could talk with him about issues and politics and religion. "Then he became the best kind of dad," she said, "because you could talk to him about anything."

They grew so close that when Christie made Phi Beta Kappa in college, she decided to leave the anonymous world of Christie Gunn and to change her last name back to Hefner.

Hef describes Christie's move as one of the high points of his life. "The fact that she would willingly make that decision … meant the world to me."

It meant so much, Hef offered her a job when she graduated from Brandeis University.

It was the beginning of a remarkable family partnership. When Christie got there, she found a magazine that was selling 7 million copies a month. There were two Playboy Mansions, and a jet — the Big Bunny — to get from one to the other. Hef was riding high.

And then Playboy headed into a nosedive. Raunchier magazines stole readers. The hugely profitable casino business collapsed. In 1982, 29-year-old Christie Hefner asked her dad for a promotion: She wanted to be president of Playboy Enterprises.

Going Gritty, While Appeasing Feminists?

"The company had just lost $50 million, the stock price was in the toilet," she recalled.

Hef gave her a shot. "She was a very capable piece of woman power," he said, "and I think, in that timeframe, having a daughter become the chief operating officer of Playboy Enterprises seemed like a notion born in heaven."

That's because Christie could appease the feminists, who saw Playboy's version of women as the symbol of decades of sex discrimination.

Christie, a self-described feminist, disagreed with activists who charged that Playboy was demeaning to women. "I think if we start taking the attitude that when women are in sexy situations that's demeaning, we're saying, 'You better be a good girl.' And I think that's baloney," she said.

But Christie's influence ranged far beyond the centerfolds. To help stem their losses, she persuaded Hef to unload the Chicago mansion and close the unprofitable clubs.

She took the Playboy brand into new global ventures: clothing, jewelry, the Internet, cable TV, its own jazz label, and videos for couples.

Under her leadership, Playboy has also gone in a grittier direction — distributing "hidden camera" videos, looking up women's skirts.

She defends these "reality" videos as a successful business venture. "First of all," she said, "they're not real. I mean, let me be honest. They're no more real than wrestling is."

Maybe not, but they're a far cry from the fresh-scrubbed sexuality that was Playboy's trademark.And recently Christie bought seven hardcore video channels. "It was an opportunity to make more money in a business we were already in. … We're a pretty pro-sex company," she said.

In fact, Playboy's entry into pornography helped turn the company around — and hasn't hurt their image at all. Christie Hefner received this year's Family Business Council Leadership Award.

And as one of the handful of female CEOs in America, she continues the family tradition of supporting liberal causes through the Playboy Foundation.

Her Own Style

But while she may be her father's daughter, her style remains her own.

Christie operates out of a high-tech office. And while she is surrounded with artwork of naked women, the place of honor on her desk is reserved for a 50-year-old photo of herself as a little girl on her father's lap — as he edits an early issue of Playboy.

That's a far cry from the sexy image Hef cultivated, complete with his trademark round bed in his old workspace. But then, he has always been a genius at image-making. "My life itself is just an invention," he said, "It's just a very clever marketing ploy that happens to work out very well for me and the company."

So, half a century later, has Playboy changed or have we changed? "The culture's changed," Christie said. Adds Hef: "We've changed of course. We are much more comfortable in our skins now. We can deal with the reality that we are sexual beings."

And does he feel as if he's won the culture war? "Yes, I think so."