People say we cannot separate who we are from what we do. If that is the case, no one could do a better job of portraying the adage than Hugh Hefner, the Playboy.
Once a copywriter for Esquire, he left the job after being denied a $5 raise and started his own publishing company, Playboy Magazine.
Hefner also was the editor-in-chief for his magazine pretty much his entire adulthood and lived a life that couldn’t be more reflective of what he published until his time of death on September 27, 2017, at the age of 91.
TIME once described Hefner as a prophet of pop hedonism, Vanity Fair regarded him as an iconic playboy, and The Washington Post called him a visionary editor.
Those who adored him would love to remember the man as an “Enlightened Publisher” and “The Godfather of the S*xual Revolution,” yet many saw him as just a dirty older man.
For sure, Hugh Hefner was many things; perhaps too many you probably didn’t know that underneath his red smoking jacket were some shocking oddities.
10 /10 It Started With A S*xual Rejection
At his younger age, during high school in his hometown of Chicago, Hefner was once rejected by a girl. Now, this might sound like nothing unusual for any young man to experience, but he took the rejection with an oddity of a peculiar kind.
Soon after the crushing moment, he preferred to be called “Hef” instead of “Hugh.” He started drawing a comic strip about himself’s fantasy version, which eventually manifested as a reality in his adult life.
9 /10 A Crush On Alice Faye
In a 2009 interview with Los Angeles Times, Hefner said that his taste in women has never changed. One of his first fantasies came right out of movies in the 1930s, specifically Alice Faye and the female lead (most likely Jean Rogers) in the “Flash Gordon” serial. Both women had a significant impact on Hefner when he was 10.
He even went as far as saying that it was the only s*xy serial ever produced. As it turned out, he always saw the female actors as beauty ideals – blonde and big breasted – highlighted through his enterprises.