Hugh Hefner — the silk-robed Casanova whose Playboy men’s magazine popularized the term “centerfold,” glamorized an urbane bachelor lifestyle and helped spur the sexual revolution of the 1960s — has died, the magazine said late Wednesday. He was 91.
Hefner, affectionately referred to as “Hef,” had been out of the limelight in recent months, and was reportedly absent from his annual Midsummer Night’s Dream bash at the Playboy Mansion in August.
His tinseled soirees in his exclusive Los Angeles pad became the stuff of legend, filled with celebrity friends and scantily clad models. Hefner often worked the room in a red smoking jacket and a pipe hanging from his mouth.
Hefner founded Playboy in 1953 with $600 of his own money and built the magazine into a multimillion-dollar entertainment empire that at its 1970s peak included TV shows, a jazz festival and a string of Playboy Clubs whose cocktail waitresses wore bunny ears and cottontails.
Over the years, the legend of “Hef” only grew as he bedded hundreds of young women, married a few of his magazine’s “Playmates” and cavorted on reality TV shows with a stable of girlfriends less than a third his age.
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