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Ted Downum
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 21 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 2436
Posted: 21 February 2026 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply
Obviously this is an exaggeration. You weren’t born finding Hefner “creepy”. 

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Of course I wasn't born finding Hefner creepy. I found him creepy as long as I was aware of him as a public figure, an aging hedonist in pajamas and a smoking jacket who lived in a Hollywood mansion with a bunch of much younger women. He was creepy, tacky, and a little pathetic. That was Hefner as I first saw him in the media, probably in the early eighties, and to the best of my knowledge, he only got more like that until he died. 

If he was, at an earlier time, a champion of American culture and racial and gender equality, I'm glad to hear it. We need more champions of those things in this country, particularly now. I was never aware of a version of Hefner like that. 
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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 135724
Posted: 24 February 2026 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply
Found an article by Hefner’s widow, describing the fabled LA mansion as full of termites and black mould.

Not unlike the man’s legend…….

(Trivia: I built a 3D computer model of the mansion’s exterior to use as Stately Wayne Manor in GENERATIONS.)

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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 13128
Posted: 24 February 2026 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply
I was born in the 60s and so "Playboy" still carried a weight of seriousness through my maturation into adulthood, but a lot of it built upon some of its earliest features, e.g., interviews with MLK Jr, Albert Schweitzer, Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Jean Genet, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Paul Ehrlich, John Kenneth Galbraith, etc. -- and stories by Hemingway, Plimpton, Bradbury, etc.

These intellectual heights certainly masked a font of deep creepiness, from the start. But "Playboy" emerged at a time so repressive that even comicbooks were thought to be corrupting.
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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 135724
Posted: 24 February 2026 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply
The Playboy interviews have been collected in several hardcover volumes. Well worth a look.
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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 13128
Posted: 24 February 2026 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply
The joke in the old days was, "I only read it for the interviews." But -- some of them were stellar, indeed.
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