Celebrities Remember Hugh Hefner for More Than Just the Articles

Hugh Hefner’s death at 91 on Wednesday inspired reactions from stars who got their starts on the pages of Playboy, celebrities who appeared at his famous parties and commenters who recognized his outsize role in American life.


On social media, Mr. Hefner was remembered as an icon of the sexual revolution and a supporter of free speech who brought pornography to the mainstream.

Mr. Hefner’s belief that America’s strict sexual mores should be eased was a once-radical idea that is now widely accepted.

“That I changed attitudes toward sex,” he said in a 1992 New York Times interview when asked what he was most proud of. 

“That nice people can live together now. That I decontaminated the notion of premarital sex. That gives me great satisfaction.”

He had a “keen sense of the future,” wrote the television and film producer Norman Lear.

 Gene Simmons of the band Kiss, who once said that any man would be willing to trade places with Mr. Hefner, celebrated the magazine publisher as a media pioneer.

Jenny McCarthy, the actress who got her start as a nude model for Playboy in 1993, was one of several women featured in the magazine who tweeted about Mr. Hefner’s influence on their careers.

Yet for all the praise of Mr. Hefner as a trailblazer, some feminists both inside and outside the United States criticized what they said was a legacy of objectifying women.

Meghan Murphy, a writer in Vancouver, British Columbia, who founded the website Feminist Current, called Mr. Hefner a “billionaire who profited from women’s subordination.”

Peter York, a leading British cultural commentator and the author of “The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook,” said Mr. Hefner’s death marked the end of an era for many Britons, who viewed Playboy as a potent symbol of a swaggering and liberated America.

Mr. York said that Mr. Hefner was a promoter not only of pornography but literature too. Playboy, he noted, had influenced popular culture in Britain by promulgating the idea that men’s magazines could show skin but also publish great writing, as it had by publishing writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and James Baldwin.

While Mr. Hefner launched Playboy as a magazine that would not “solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths,” some tributes recognized his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.

Mr. Hefner gave the comedian Dick Gregory one of his early breaks, signing him to perform at his flagship Playboy Club in Chicago in 1961, at a time when black artists were sometimes barred from white-owned venues.

On Twitter, the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson noted Mr. Hefner’s contributions to the movement.

Mr. Hefner’s last tweets were about the death of Mr. Gregory in August, and a request that followers donate to the One America Appeal, a hurricane relief effort promoted by several former presidents.

Despite Mr. Hefner’s support for public causes, he was most well known for his hedonist lifestyle. Commenters remarked on his reputation as a libertine and his role as a purveyor of racy photos. Many remembered Mr. Hefner by remembering the first time they encountered his magazine.