Hog-Wild in the Streets

By John Berendt From Telling It Like It Was 1969 In the summer of 1968, John Berendt, a young associate editor of Esquire, accompanied three members of that magazine’s unusual team of reporters to the Democratic National Convention, held that year in Chicago: Jean...

Death of a Playmate

By Teresa Carpenter The Village Voice November 5, 1980 It is shortly past four in the afternoon and Hugh Hefner glides wordlessly into the library of his Playboy Mansion West. He is wearing pajamas and looking somber in green silk. The incongruous spectacle of a...

Kiss ’n’ Kill

By Judith Rossner The Movies November 1983 Pornography, erotica, fantasies of beautiful women are probably as old as excess energy and leisure time. It was Hugh Hefner’s inspiration to bring them, on a large scale and slickly packaged, into the middle-class living...