Jason Meyers & Bob Hervey
Is Hugh Hefner still cool? Is he still worthy of our adoration? More importantly: Is he still naughty?
“The Girls Next Door” – a reality series about the fantasy world in which Hef lives: three hot young girlfriends at age 81! – begins its fourth season on E! at 10 p.m. ET Sunday, Dec. 9, and in honor of this “event,” we’ve asked two TNA writers, Jason Meyers and Bob Hervey, to hash it out in a literary pissing contest.
Not surprisingly, they had strong and decidedly different opinions about the legendary Playboy magazine founder.
Jason Meyers: Hef Was, Still Is And Always Will Be The Man!
He’s living proof that the dream is achievable. He has it all: wealth, fame, and gorgeous women at his beck and call.
And he owes it all to one big idea. Recognizing that 1950s America was on the verge of a sexual revolution, he launched Playboy magazine (the first issue of which featured Marilyn Monroe, photographed “with nothing on but the radio”).
Before long, Playboy practically became the official playbook for the bachelor way of life. And as the embodiment of that glorious lifestyle, Hefner became one of the immortal pop culture icons of the 20th century.
Behind the walls of his fabled Playboy Mansion, he is as close as you can get in this country to royalty. He luxuriates in his love of all of the finer things – from food, drink, cars, clothes and music to, of course, beautiful women. For pretty much all of his adult life, Hef has been up to his eyelashes in tits, ass and peekaboo glimpses of snatch. The current three ladies in his life, Holly, Bridget and Kendra, are absolute goddesses. What a great life.
All these things, as Hef has said, are “the stuff that dreams are made of.”
Yet here’s what’s truly inspiring about the man: With the right idea and enough inner drive, any average Joe can follow Hefner’s example.
He didn’t inherit what he enjoys now. It wasn’t handed to him. He went out and earned it. After quitting his job in the promotional department of Esquire magazine, he decided to start his own publication; one geared toward young, single men.
He hocked his furniture for $600 and raised $8,000 from investors (which included his mother, who chipped in one grand, even though his accountant father stiffed him). He lifted the Playboy name from a small, unsuccessful car company. He got wind of a Chicago-based calendar company that owned the rights to those famous Marilyn Monroe pinup pics and he bought them up for $500; in men’s magazine circles, that truly must qualify as the deal of the century.
Then, from his small apartment, toiling at a typewriter atop a card table (the only furniture he had left), he worked every angle he could think of to get 70,000 copies of the debut issue published and on the newsstands. Playboy was an instant hit – and the second issue, sans Marilyn, sold even better.
From that, Hef built an empire while also helping to usher in a tsunami of cultural change. “Sex is the primary motivating factor in the course of human history,” Hefner wrote in “The Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution,” “and in the 20th century, it has emerged [thanks to Playboy] from taboos and controversy to claim its rightful place in society.”
So thanks, Hef. Next time I pinch a female bottom, it’ll be in your honor.
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Bob Hervey: Hefner Created A Fantasy World – Now He’s Deluding Himself
My grandfather subscribed to Playboy when he was a young man.
Now he wears dentures, has been fitted with a pacemaker and rides around in a Rascal Powerchair – and he’s four years YOUNGER than Hugh Hefner!
The point I’m making is that Hefner and Playboy, like my grandpa, God love him, are way past their prime.
So excuse me for saying it, but I find Hefner’s “Girls Next Door” relationship with his three “leading ladies” extraordinarily sad and creepy.
Holly, Bridget and Kendra – each one more than half a century younger than Methuselah, I mean Hefner – aren’t so much girlfriends as they are modern-day harem girls. They bounce around the Playboy Mansion in a mildly titillating, photo-shoot-ready condition, forever ready to be summoned by the Crypt Keeper, I mean Hefner, any time he’s jonesing for an eye candy/arm candy fix.
What can they possibly get out of this relationship beyond the obvious shortcut to carefree lives of luxury? They don’t love Hefner; they love his money.
Maybe the good life he offers them is worth the occasional roll in the hay with a Viagra-enhanced cadaver. But I can’t help thinking that the girls don’t really dish gigglingly after having sex with the old geezer; they commiserate.
And what does Hefner get in return? He gets to cling to the feebleminded delusion that he’s still the young, vital, vibrant, ageless playboy of the previous millennium. I’m not saying they’re too young for him, but I have heard that, when each girl hooked up with Hefner, the police issued an Amber Alert.
What makes it ironic that he’s got a reality show now is that his world, for decades on end, has been a fantasy of his own making. Hefner was a loser in high school who, rejected by a girl he had a crush on, created a new persona in an attempt to be cool. He even coined that “Hef” nickname himself. But it wasn’t until he had money, until he enticed girls who liked money, until other men envied him because he had money and girls, that he was perceived as being cool.
Sadly, he hasn’t outgrown being that rejected high school senior with something to prove to everybody. Hefner isn’t just living in the “fabled” Playboy Mansion; he’s living in a big honking house of denial.
Playboy magazine, meanwhile, is trapped in a time warp, stodgily irrelevant in this age of Maxim, “Girls Gone Wild” and Internet porn. That said, my grandfather has promised that one day I’ll inherit his old Playboys – with all those innocent ’60s photo shoots of Playmates Dolly Martin, Christa Speck, DeDe Lind, Cynthia Myers, etc., etc. – and I can’t wait.
Those magazines will fetch a fortune when I list them on eBay.
Something tells me that Holly, Bridget and Kendra have their eyes on a similar prize in their relationship with Hugh Hefner.
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What’s your opinion on Hef? Cutting edge, or merely cadaverous? Leave your comments below or e-mail .