Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy Magazine has died at the age of 91.
The news of his death was confirmed by Playboy Enterprises revealing he died peacefully from natural causes at his residence, and he was surrounded by loved ones.
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Hefner founded Playboy in 1953, after he was denied a $5 raise from Esquire, the company he was working as a copywriter. He took out a mortgage, generating a bank loan of $600, and raised $8,000 from 45 investors, including $1,000 from his mother (“Not because she believed in the venture,” he told E! in 2006, “but because she believed in her son.”), to launch Playboy, which was initially going to be called Stag Party.
The first issue, published in December 1953, featured Marilyn Monroe from her 1949 nude calendar shoot and sold over 50,000 copies. Hefner, who never met Monroe, bought the crypt next to hers at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in 1992 for $75,000
Hefner became known for moving an ever-changing coterie of young women into the Playboy Mansion, including twins Sandy and Mandy Bentley.
He got married to his high school sweetheart, Mildred Williams in 1949 and had two children for him, Christie and David Hefner, but divorced in 1959. He later got married to Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad in 1989; they were thirty-six years apart in age, and they had two sons: Marston Glenn and Cooper Bradford, but separated in 1998.
He finally got married to Crystal Hefner in 2012.
Hefner dated as many as seven women concurrently. Brande Roderick, Izabella St. James, Tina Marie Jordan, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson.
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