Hugh Hefner Dies: Who's Going to Take Care of the Bunnies Now?

While I know the realities of our own human existence, I honestly was starting to wonder if a man like #HughHefner would ever die.

I got my answer in the early hours of this morning, when I learned that the legendary Playboy editor—and perhaps the personification of the chic party persona—passed away at the age of 91 on September 27. I wasn't necessarily a follower of Playboy, though I rather enjoyed the joke that people read the magazine "for the articles." For the longest time, I never really understood the mystique that surrounded Hef. I got that he had a lot of money, and certainly understood that money was a huge draw when it came to people being attracted to others. All that said, I think the issue was that when I first was introduced to Hugh Hefner as a public figure through the media, I saw an old man and could not understand the attraction.

But.

Hefner cultivated an image, if not a lifestyle, that many hoped to aspire to. There was something incredibly cool about him; he could show up at a party in his trademark silk pyjamas and still have women fawning over him. It didn't take long for me to understand why Hefner garnered so much attention.

He was incredibly classy, for starters. While you might see couples engaged in very public displays of affection, you might see Hefner giving any one of his Bunnies—and his wife—a peck on the lips or cheek, with an arm crooked behind her back. There was something inherently respectful, it seemed, with his direct dealings with women, and while I am not a supporter of women baring all under a photographer's watchful lens, I do believe in the artistry involved in tasteful nude photos. At least as far as the photography went, I believe Hefner wanted his magazine to represent something sophisticated and urbane, rather than the level of "smut" that many magazines of the genre might lower themselves to.

Indeed, his efforts to get some of the biggest names of the 1950s and 1960s are certainly reflective of thoughtful prose: Margaret Atwood, Alex Haley (interviewing none other than Martin Luther King Jr.), and Gabriel García Márquez, just to name a few authors, have all graced Playboy's hallowed pages. Certainly, the images that have been featured on Playboy's covers have all become iconic, almost from the moment they hit the shelves; Pamela Anderson, Shannon Tweed Simmons, and the incredible Marilyn Monroe have all been captured in their splendor for Playboy's front covers at varying points in their careers, with Monroe famously quipping that she had "nothing but the radio on," when she was photographed for Playboy's very first edition.

Regardless of how you might feel about Hefner, the man and the company he built with his parents' support changed how society viewed the sexual revolution, in many respects. People began to talk more freely about sex and women and relationships far more openly than they ever would have done before Hefner decided to start Playboy, and while in his later years his associations with his girlfriends raised a few eyebrows because of the significant age gaps, the fact is, Hefner did some great things for how we perceive sex and women.

He also did some great things about how we perceive wealth, too. Hefner was a philanthropist who chose to do some great things to support historical buildings and monuments in Hollywood, in addition to never once taking for granted just how fortunate he was to live the life he had.

“I have not become jaded,” he reportedly toldThe Washington Post in 2003. “I wake up every day well aware of my good fortune, loving the work I do, loving my life, realizing that life is a crapshoot and I’m on a roll second to none.”

Godspeed, Hef.