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That's me...
Hugh Hefner.
I took a personal investment of $600...
and turned it into a global empire.
You may think you know me...
the guy who has it all.
Would you welcome Hugh Hefner.
The lavish mansion.
The legendary parties.
He would invite all these beautiful girls.
I mean, you talk about, like, dying and going to heaven.
It was amazing.
And, of course, the women.
Can you estimate
just how many ladies you have known?
No, I can't.
And what started it all...
Playboy magazine.
But for everything you've heard about me,
there's probably a lot you don't know.
For all the people who loved me,
there were plenty who wanted to take me down.
Playboy openly advocates the overthrow
of Judeo Christian standards.
There were times when I felt worn down,
trying to escape.
You know, you pick yourself up and you fight it again.
I've been investigated by the FBI and the DEA.
Hefner said that prosecutors kept pressuring
Miss Arnstein to testify against her boss in drug cases.
Attacked by the media and religious groups.
Well, with this I think that you'll agree,
it's a sniggering kind of sex.
It certainly isn't a healthy approach to sex.
And pushed to the brink of bankruptcy.
Hef, you are killing yourself.
But my magazine wasn't just about naked women.
It was breaking down barriers,
starting a cultural conversation about sexuality,
and standing up for social justice.
Hugh Hefner identified unequivocally
with the civil rights movement of that time.
Giving a platform to Dr. King, a platform to Malcolm X.
By any means necessary.
I've been called a pornographer...
a smut peddler...
and a sexist.
The day that you are willing to come out here
with a cottontail attached to your rear end...
And my lifestyle hasn't always been easy
on the people closest to me.
He dates other girls, and... I don't like it.
And he knows I don't like it.
I've gained enemies...
and lost friends.
An already emotionally troubled woman
was pushed beyond endurance...
and she killed herself.
The conception of Playboy
came from my dad's irritation with the status quo.
So, the entire magazine came to be
because of one guy who was pretty upset
with how most people interpreted and defined sex.
I've lived a life most could only dream of.
This is my story.
Or at least how I remember it.
Hef?
Oh! Bobbie.
- Hef! - What is it?
The cops are downstairs.
Just tell them I'll deal with it tomorrow.
They're here for you.
This morning a man is on trial in Chicago,
charged with violating that city's laws against obscenity.
He's Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine.
The issue has been the cause of many court cases
involving motion pictures, books, and magazines,
and various court decisions have left
considerable gray areas
in determining just what is salacious and obscene.
Men who would stand by and see their women
degraded and debased, as they are with the breast
and the buttock presentation by Playboy,
are not men at all.
What you're accusing me of, in essence,
is taking things that previously were taboo
and considered obscene and objectionable
and making them tasteful and acceptable.
Tonight, the first of three
special reports on the controversy.
The only thing wrong with sex is the fact
that we have a great tendency to treat it as something
shameful and guilty and taboo-ridden,
and this is what causes
the major problems, not the sex itself.
Mr. Hefner...
why did you start Playboy?
Well...
that's a tough question.
Just take your time.
Long before the mansions, before the clubs,
the parties, before the women, before the magazine...
there was just me.
Hugh Marston Hefner.
I was born in Chicago in 1926.
My parents were hardworking Midwestern protestants
who didn't allow dancing,
drinking, or swearing in the house.
My father spent most of his time at the office...
and my mother was emotionally distant toward me
and my younger brother, Keith.
I think that the major thing that I missed,
and that my parents missed in their own childhood...
because it's been passed from generation to generation...
was the inability to show love
in an emotional and physical way.
No hugging.
No show of any kind of emotion.
With my home life lacking the affection I craved,
I escaped into a world of fantasy.
And for me, that was cartooning.
As a young man, he was quite shy,
and so he created his fantasy life by writing stories
and by cartooning his life...
... where he could live out the kind of life
that he really wanted, that he fantasized about.
This was a way of compensating for that shyness,
and it has continued on through his whole life.
By the time I reached high school,
I'd even created an alter ego named Goo Heffer...
who was confident and popular.
But when I wanted to imagine a life
far more exciting than my own,
there was only one place to go.
When I was in my teens,
I got a job at the local movie theater.
I was taken to movies when I was very young,
and from very early on, up on that screen,
were all the dreams of the possibilities.
You'd come out of that movie and you'd feel like
you were Bogart or the leading man.
The heroine loved you in a very pure way,
and I think that was what I was really looking for.
The heroine I wanted in my life...
was Betty Conklin.
Everyone who's ever been a teenager
has known a Betty Conklin.
I was just overwhelmed by her.
There was a brief period of time in which I thought
it might really be, you know, a romantic relationship.
She picked my buddy instead of me,
and that told me more than I wanted to know.
And that was the period when I reinvented myself.
Over the next few years,
I was determined to transform myself
into the leading man I'd seen on screen.
So I turned to my favorite magazine for help... Esquire.
Esquire was the first men's magazine.
It was the only magazine that sort of went after
the general interests of men.
The reason there weren't more magazines for men
is because magazines,
and to a slightly lesser extent, reading,
was seen as like a pursuit that women did.
And it was kinda revolutionary to create a magazine for men
and that it would be successful,
and it was successful pretty rapidly.
I had just discovered Esquire
for the very first time,
and the world suggested by Esquire.
The cartoons, the fiction, the fashion,
and certainly the pin-ups, which were called Petty Girls.
The Petty Girls became my first favorite pin-up.
And I covered my walls with them when I was first in high school.
Esquire just opened my eyes
to a whole other world that was only hinted at
in the movies of the time.
Reading Esquire changed my whole approach to life.
I was more confident and outgoing.
And, by the end of high school,
I met someone.
Her name was Millie Williams.
I felt an instant connection with Millie.
She got my sense of humor,
liked the way I dressed.
But most importantly...
she understood me.
I met Hef at a graduation party, the week of graduation.
He made me feel very important and that he liked me a lot.
And he was fun to be with.
I really think that Millie
was the first girl that he really loved,
rather than just being in love with from afar.
That he really loved, who loved him back.
We started getting serious,
and when Millie registered for college
at the University of Illinois...
I decided to follow her.
But, like most couples of the day,
our private life was pretty innocent.
Everyone, I think, had the same routine,
in which sexually you did many things,
but you didn't do the thing.
And this was very typical, and somehow that kept you,
you know, God wasn't frowning.
My college life was fairly typical
for the first few semesters.
But in my junior year,
everything changed...
when a groundbreaking psychological study came out...
that would open my eyes
to a completely different side of life.
In 1948, sexologist Alfred Kinsey
published a massive study of American male sexuality.
In this study, he showed that American men and women
had a lot more sexual experience
than most people were willing to admit to.
Affairs, same-sex experiences, multiple partners.
And it made news all across the country.
You have to remember,
back in the '40s, no one was talking about sex.
In Hollywood pictures, a man and a woman
weren't allowed to be shown in bed together...
not even married couples.
That attitude was reflected
in books and other mass media.
There was a kind of a...
Norman Rockwell view of the world
that didn't exist,
and it bothered me very much.
Kinsey's expose of the hypocrisy in our country
was a revelation to me...
and I was inspired to start voicing my own opinion.
We've got it down to these six.
I became editor of the college humor magazine...
called Shaft.
This one.
And, taking a lead from Kinsey...
I used it as a sounding board for my own sexual beliefs.
Shaft magazine had an editorial
about the Kinsey report and about sexual repression
and the hurt and hypocrisy of it.
I wrote a great deal about the really moral issues.
That what we call moral,
in every other area of human activity,
is what is good for people.
And our traditional values related to sex
are not good for people.
They hurt people. They're hypocritical.
I started drawing racy cartoons,
writing essays about sex,
and challenging conformity.
I think what my father taught me about freedom of expression...
is that it's okay to not be PC
when you're having a conversation
about something that really matters.
It's okay to challenge other people's beliefs
and your own beliefs.
I also introduced a feature
that was an instant hit on campus.
When Hef was working on Shaft magazine,
he started Coed of the Month.
And it would be a girl,
and it would have career information
and her statistics
and what she was into and what she liked.
So he already had that idea pre-Playboy.
I loved the creative freedom
that writing for Shaft offered me.
And the best part was
I could use my cartoons to send hidden messages to Millie.
As he was talking about these laws,
these restrictive laws and repressive things,
it was very easy to discuss this together
and say how wrong this all was, because we both,
we felt the same way, despite my Catholic background
and his background.
And um, we found we had a lot of the same attitudes.
Our shared views brought us closer...
both emotionally and physically.
My romance with Millie, then, was an extended, uh, foreplay
until she graduated from college.
We had sex for the first time the summer of '48.
I would've been 22.
A few months after graduation...
I did what everyone else did in those days.
I proposed to my college sweetheart.
And we should be able to trust one another.
Don't smile it away...
But then one night...
Millie dropped a bombshell.
You were in love with a schoolgirl notion
of a popular novelist!
Millie.
Millie!
What was that about?
I just want to go home.
Everything okay?
That night...
Millie told me she had an affair.
Can we please go home?
I was completely blindsided.
Nothing in my life had prepared me for that moment.
I was just absolutely devastated.
It may be difficult to imagine,
related to the publisher of Playboy magazine.
But I had been intimate with only one woman in my life,
the woman I was gonna marry.
How I dealt with it, I don't really know.
I just dealt with it by, I think somehow,
putting it out of my mind.
This was, after all, the 1950s.
And back then, you married the girl you were in love with,
no matter what.
And, truth be told, I was still in love with Millie.
Our wedding was in the summer of '49.
We had our whole lives ahead of us.
And in January of 1951...
That's great news.
... I landed my dream job.
I'd just be writing copy in the ad department,
but I'd be working for my favorite magazine...
... Esquire.
This was my chance to do something creative.
But I quickly realized
it wasn't what I'd imagined.
Esquire had changed.
The 1950's was kind of a down period for Esquire.
I think they were probably reeling
from the end of World War II
and the beginnings of a more repressive society
and probably tended toward being a little more conservative.
They'd moved away from all the things
I'd been drawn to growing up.
The full-page cartoons, the jokes,
and most of all, the pin-up girls.
The job turned out to be a huge disappointment.
And when they refused my request
for a five dollar raise...
I quit.
But everything changed in 1952...
... when Millie gave birth
to our first child.
We named her Christie.
And while I loved being a father...
suddenly, I had a family to provide for.
And I needed to find a job...
... any job... as quickly as possible.
So I took a low-level position at a publishing house...
crunching numbers and trying to improve sales.
But the job was about as mind-numbing as it gets.
And, as time went on...
I realized I'd become just one of the masses.
The 1950's was a time of conformity.
The course was set out... you went to school,
you got married, you had children,
you got the best job you could to support your family.
There was not a lot of room for individuality,
and that did not appeal to Hef at all.
I only went into that bar to be alone.
And I certainly wasn't expecting what happened next.
I knew what I was doing was wrong...
but for the first time in a long time, I felt alive.
The affair ended as quickly as it started.
But it sparked something in me.
I'd always been happiest being creative,
and as I looked back on my cartoons, short stories,
and articles from Shaft magazine,
I saw what I was missing.
I became convinced very early
that older people became cynical
and somehow sold out those dreams.
And that's what I was unwilling to do.
I was not willing to make that tradeoff,
to get in line and lock step march away
the rest of my life.
My father was still trying to find himself,
and had a number of jobs
that I think were less than satisfying.
He was always, I think, drawn to both visual expression
and also to big ideas.
It was then that I made a decision
that would change the course of my life forever.
I decided to create a magazine of my own.
One that would appeal to guys like me...
featuring articles about music, literature, art, and culture.
When he started the magazine,
he actually created the magazine for himself.
There was no magazine out there
that he found of interest for a young guy.
Most of the men's magazines
were hunting and fishing magazines,
gun magazines, not sophisticated magazines.
The only sophisticated magazine
that was out there at the time was Esquire.
It was going to be, uh, what Esquire used to be.
And it was a magazine
that would really be for the young urban male.
But my magazine would be so much more.
In the same way that Kinsey blew the cover
off sexuality in America...
I wanted my magazine
to confront the topic of sex head on.
For Hef, I think the message about sex
has always been that it's healthy.
And natural.
And, that we shouldn't be ashamed of it.
And we should embrace it.
That was not the popular opinion in the 1950s.
And it's hard to remember now,
when you look back, that this was fairly revolutionary.
It was one thing to talk about sex,
but I wanted to do more
Growing up, my favorite parts of Esquire
were those drawings of the pin-up girls.
But I thought my magazine could go one step further...
by showing photos of nude women.
I think the brilliance of the magazine was
it spoke to all the interests of young men.
So those were cultural and political.
It was fashion, it was travel.
But it also was an unabashed recognition of the interest
that young men had in beautiful women.
I knew that there would be nothing that was
outside, uh, the boundaries
of what was already being published.
In other words, there were magazines,
art photography magazines, sunbathing magazines,
with nudes in them.
I wanted to package it in a way that...
suggested that this was not art.
It was... something with an editorial message,
and the editorial message was that sex was okay.
I was going to combine a modern lifestyle magazine
with nude photos of women.
And I had the perfect name for it.
Stag Party.
What magazines do you read?
Why?
Just name some.
I... I don't know.
I knew I liked the idea...
Now I just needed to see if anyone else would, too.
And the first guy that I thought of
was my old friend Eldon Sellers.
What if there was a magazine
that didn't fall into any one category?
That took all your favorite things
and put them into one place.
And it'll have a full-page color photo
of a real life pin-up girl...
completely nude.
It's gonna be great, Eldon.
It sounds like it.
It's going to be a progressive magazine for men.
He came to me and said that he would like to have some help
raising some money for a magazine.
He did a terrific job of promoting the idea
and explaining it, and he was...
he was extremely articulate about that.
I like that.
Eldon liked it so much,
he chipped in $2,000
and even offered to help me find more investors.
And, honestly, I was going to need all the help I could get.
Just to give you a sense of how much money I needed to raise,
Time magazine was started with an initial investment
of $86,000.
And that was all the way back in 1923.
Today, that's the equivalent of over $1.2 million.
Even when Playboy was started,
it was unusual to have that little capital
and those few resources.
Today, it would be almost impossible to consider
starting a magazine without having millions and millions of dollars
and the capacity to sustain losses for three,
four, five, six years.
I figured after Eldon's investment,
I was still going to need at least $6,000
to get my idea off the ground.
So we started meeting with investors in Chicago.
What do you think?
A lot of them said no.
But a few of them said yes.
Hello, Fred? Hugh Hefner here.
Well, I'm happy you asked.
Okay...
I was hoping for slightly better than that,
to be honest with you.
Okay... that sounds great.
No matter what,
I was going to make this happen.
And, after weeks of calling...
we got my younger brother, Keith,
and my neighbors to pitch in.
Even my puritanical mother gave me $1,000.
I never had a long conversation with my grandmother
about her investment in the magazine,
but, knowing her as I did,
I would say that... she would have said
it was not a magazine for her,
but that she believed in her son.
But even with my family and friends
pitching in,
I was still about $600 short.
So, out of desperation,
I put my furniture in hock.
It included some pretty nice pieces by designers
like Herman Miller and Eames.
And finally, I hit my goal.
With the money finally in place,
I was ready to start making my magazine.
But I quickly realized
I couldn't do this on my own.
So... what did Frank tell you?
Well, not much.
Just that you're... you're starting a magazine,
and you might be looking for an art director.
Well it's not just any magazine.
It's a lifestyle magazine with a full-color
nude spread of a girl in each issue.
But I want this magazine to be more than that.
A look that nobody has ever seen before.
I want this magazine to be beautiful.
You want to do a magazine with nude girls,
and you want the magazine to be beautiful?
That's right.
I had my art director...
a popular graphic designer
from the Southside of Chicago...
named Art Paul.
Art Paul was ahead of his time.
His designs were modern
and different from Esquire, and that's what Hef was looking for.
And Hef has a knack for finding that talent.
With Art Paul on board, I had my team.
I'd write the copy,
Art would create the design...
and Eldon would handle promotions.
My small apartment became Stag Party's offices...
and it was finally time to get to work.
Playboy was never
a corporate magazine.
It was never part of a giant publishing house.
You're talking about a magazine that is as DIY as it gets.
It's one man started it at his kitchen table in Chicago.
We came up with countless ideas
for how to make the magazine stand out.
At that time, 3-D movies were hugely popular...
so we considered featuring our girls in 3-D.
But attaching a pair of glasses to every issue
proved too expensive.
In the end, we realized it wasn't about the gimmick.
We just needed to find the perfect girl.
In the 1950s,
if you wanted a nude photo of a model,
and you didn't have your own to photograph...
the only places you could get them from
were calendar companies.
And, for a price, you could purchase
the rights to their pin-ups.
We reached out to countless calendar companies
and gathered hundreds of options
for our first cover girl.
What about her, huh?
No, she's not right.
This one?
No, no.
Maybe if you tell me exactly what
you're looking for, we can find the girl.
Well, that's the problem.
We're not looking for a girl, we're looking for the girl.
What does that mean?
We need to find a girl that no guy would be able to resist.
Someone who will make it impossible
for a guy not to open the cover.
Oh, well, if that's all...
I don't know where she is, but she's not here.
I'd spent weeks looking for a cover girl...
and I was starting to lose hope.
But in the fall of 1953,
the solution would come out of nowhere.
In those days,
Marilyn Monroe was every man's ultimate fantasy.
She was the very pinnacle of sexuality.
But years before she was famous...
when she was still known as Norma Jean Baker...
the young model had posed nude for a calendar.
She was the hottest star in Hollywood.
I heard about, uh,
the Marilyn Monroe calendar picture,
which everybody had heard about, but nobody had seen
because they were afraid to show it back then.
But I knew I had to put it in the magazine,
because she was the absolute perfect choice.
Hef had a real understanding of pop culture
and the public's fascination with celebrity.
So that Marilyn Monroe image,
he knew that was the golden ticket.
That was thing that was going to launch that magazine.
You have to remember,
this was before the Internet,
so getting access to photos this rare
was almost impossible.
But now, I knew who had the originals,
and what's even crazier...
was that he was right here in Chicago.
But I only had $1,000 left in my budget.
I just had to hope that would be enough.
Okay, uh, what can I help you with?
Well, I'm interested in purchasing one of your photos.
That's all?
It's, uh, it's not just any photo, Mr. Baumgarth.
It's Marilyn.
Look... people pay me a lot of money
just to look at those pictures.
Buying them won't be cheap.
Well, uh, I only need one.
But I have to have full rights to print it.
This is Marilyn Monroe we're talking about.
Uh, I couldn't let you have it
for any less than, uh...
600.
600?
Yeah.
That's a lot of money.
Make it 500.
Done. But you pay me now.
In cash.
Agreed.
There she is.
Marilyn didn't disappoint.
Apparently, the photographer was so nervous,
he forgot to change the film...
leaving some of the photos
with two images overlaid on top of each other.
Thank you.
I could hardly believe it.
There I was, holding what was probably
the most valuable photograph on the planet.
After months of planning,
I was ready to take the world by storm.
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