Hugh Hefner har lämnat det jordiska

Hugh Hefner har lämnat det jordiska

Hugh Marston Hefner levde mellan 9 april 1926 och 27 september 2017. Hela för mig tillgängliga världen - tidningar, radio, tv, sociala medier - kom med nyheten om Hugh Hefners död. Jag kollade med uppslagsverket Wikipedia, Hefner finns där på 54 språk. Inklusive svenska.

    

Min, möjligen felaktiga gissning är, att det finns människor som är säkra på att jag hamnar i Dantes Infernos sjätte cirkel, avsedd för kättare, tillsammans med den ärkeheretikern Hugh Hefner, som jag nu skall minnas. 

Troligen borde jag ens som en lättgenomskådbar provokation göra något sådant, om jag vill tas på allvar. 

Men så tänker bara hen som gärna dömer efter insinuationer och rykten i stället för kontrollerbara fakta. 

För en sådan person rekommenderar jag den gediget researchade och väldokumenterade, över två timmar korta, dokumentärfilmen Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, producerad och regisserad av den Oscarsvinnande dokumentärregissören Brigitte Berman. 

Filmens trovärdighet förstärks av att den inte fick något som helst stöd från Hefner eller någon av hans kulturstiftelser, och dessutom är den, knappast i affekt, tillägnad Anne Frank.

Förutom Hugh M. Hefner, vittnar i filmen och ger sitt omdöme om Hefner, Joan Baez, Dorothy Donegan, Jesse Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Ruth Westheimer, Gore Vidal, Max Lerner, Sammy Davis Jr., Miles Davis, Mike Wallace, Lenny Bruce, Vincent Bugliosi, Alex Haley, Dick Gregory, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, George Lucas, Pete Seeger, Gene Simmons, Malcolm Boyd, Jim Brown, Count Basie, Dick Cavett, Tony Curtis, Tony Bennett, Pat Boone, Buddy Rich, Alvah Bessie, James Caan, Mel Tormé, Warren Beatty, Bobby Doyle, Peggy Lord, Louis Gottlieb, ”Country” Joe McDonald, Barry ”The Fish” Melton, Bruce Barthol, David Bennett Cohen, Gary ”Chicken” Hirsch, Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, Josh White, Larry Adler, Kimberley Conrad, Robert Culp, Gahan Wilson, David Steinberg, Bill Maher, Tim Hauser, Dennis Prager, David Reuben, Charles Keating, Burton Joseph, Loretta Sanchez, Lois Lee, Hubert H. Humphrey och många fler.

Troligen känner du samtliga dessa vittnesbärares olika arbeten och aktiviteter och troligen hyser du respekt för flera av dem. 

Under rubriken “Hugh Hefner documentary reveals more than pretty faces”, skriver Maria Puente i USA Today: “Hugh Hefner's life, as we all know, has been a sybaritic male fantasy, living like a pasha in his pajamas, surrounded by barely clad bosomy bombshells, sometimes cohabiting with up to seven (really) at a time. So it's no wonder we hardly know anything else about him.

Who can see beyond all that to the real Hef: rights activist, literary and journalistic tastemaker, humanitarian?

Yes, humanitarian. Did you know Hefner, 84, once sent his black jet, Big Bunny, with the Playboy logo on the tail, to airlift a gaggle of orphaned babies and toddlers from Vietnam, with some of his Playboy bunnies assigned to watch over the kids?

Now comes Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, a revealing documentary by Canadian filmmaker and Oscar winner Brigitte Berman (opening Friday), who takes a closer look at the man she says has helped liberate American culture — racially, sexually, politically, psychologically — since Playboy began publishing in December 1953.

‘I wanted to set the record straight, not whitewash Hefner or his reputation,’ says the German-born Berman, who met Hefner at the 1987 Oscars when her film on bandleader Artie Shaw won best documentary. ‘Yes, he's a hedonistic playboy and lover of many women, but he's also the activist who fights for civil rights, freedom of speech, abortion rights, women's rights, gay rights.’ (…)”

Den mera kritiska och feministorienterade Betsy Sherman skriver i The Boston Phoenix: “You might expect that a sycophantic documentary about Hugh Hefner would suggest that Hef invented tits and ass. Brigitte Berman's Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel goes farther. It has the beans to imply that Hefner was, if not an inventor of, then a major force in the civil-rights movement, and that his actions in the '50s and '60s paved the way for the election of Barack Obama. The strange thing is that Berman has enough clips and credible talking heads to make an interesting case. 

Berman is best known for her jazz documentaries, so her appreciation for Hefner as creator of the seminal Playboy Jazz Festival creates an understandable point of entry. As the film shows, Hefner's embrace of black musicians and comics on his syndicated TV shows and in the Playboy Clubs did help break down barriers. But when the subject inevitably returns to sex and gender, the man who put bunny ears and tails on scantily clad waitresses starts to teeter on his pedestal. Berman's mixed-bag documentary, though diverting and informative in some ways, reduces the girlie-mag phenomenon to harmless camp, and it paints the Hef detractors she interviews, whether right-wingers or feminists, as party poopers.

Robert Heath's 1992 Hefner documentary ended with the swinger domesticated, married, and a father to toddlers. Now, with Hefner having resatyrized himself in the public imagination via his multiple-girlfriend configurations, Berman presents him as the octogenarian looking back on a storied past.

In 1953, the urge to make a big splash drove the Chicago native to launch a men's magazine. He landed the rights to a Marilyn Monroe nude photo for the debut issue. Playboy, with its rabbit-head symbol, purveyed an ideal of creamy, pneumatic feminine beauty — and attracted some damn fine writers. It also fought back, and won, after the US Post Office refused to give it a second-class permit. That was the start of a concerted effort to strike down antiquated legislation regarding sexual portrayal and practice.

After his divorce, Hefner ‘starting living the life I was espousing.’ A tuxedoed Hef is seen hosting Playboy's Penthouse, his late-'50s TV variety show, which would be set in a hip apartment during a party. Between clips of artists such as Josh White, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sammy Davis Jr. (whom Hef presents with a puppy), comic Dick Gregory affirms that Hefner showed audiences an unsurpassed array of black performers, who were invited not only to play and sing on camera but also to converse. Hefner's late-'60s show, Playboy After Dark, gave a platform to critics of the Vietnam War.

Berman seems to suggest that Hefner's perfectionism, which compelled him to construct a physically flawless standard of feminine beauty, makes him want to fix what he views as a society flawed by racism and repression. Hefner simply wants America's government and religious institutions to treat adults as adults.”

Jag upptäckte Isaac Bashevis Singer genom Playboy. Hans utomordentliga berättelse Tale of Two Sisters var tryckt i Playboy långt innan han tilldelades Nobelpriset i litteratur. Visst har Saul Bellow bidragit till att Singer blev uppmärksammad av Svenska Akademien, men de ärade herrarna och damerna där upptäckte troligen Singer på Playboys sidor. Tack för det, Hugh. 

Isaac Bashevis Singer föddes den 14 juli år 1904 och fick Nobelpriset i litteratur år 1978. År 1976 dramatiserade jag en av hans noveller och en stor Sydsvensk tidning skrev att Oravsky alltid hittar och blir förtjust i obskyrt material som ingen annan människa ens har hört talas om. Det lustiga i sammanhanget var inte bara det att 2 år senare Bashevis Singer var på allas läppar, utan också att Hugh Hefners tidskrift Playboy hade på den tiden en upplaga kring 7 miljoner och det är trots allt inte alltför ”obskyrt” lite.

Filmen Smoke från år 1995 är regisserad av den pålitlige Wayne Wang och Paul Auster. Manuset är skrivet av Paul Auster, och det bygger på hans egen novell Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story, först publicerad i Playboy.                                           

Hunter S. Thompson skapade vad som kom att kallas för ”gonzojournalistik”, där reportern sätter sig själv i centrum. Enligt Thompson själv, var det stressen att inte hinna göra klart ett reportage som skapade ”gonzojournalistiken”. I en intervju i tidskriften Playboy berättade Thompson att han inte kunde skriva klart en artikel om en hästtävling och beslöt sig att skicka in sina osorterade anteckningar till tidskriften. Han var ganska så säker på att därmed blev hans journalistiska karriär över. Så var det dock inte, då läsare, kolleger et cetera började tala om en ”nyskapade journalistik”.

Alla som tittar på film måste vara bekanta med Harold Ramis. Han kallades ”Alchemist of Comedy” och tillhörde de odödliga komikerna, manusförfattarna, regissörerna och skådespelarna. Han började sin karriär på Playboy: ”I called ... just cold and said I had written several pieces freelance and did they have any openings. And they happened to have their entry-level job, party jokes editor, open. He liked my stuff and he gave me a stack of jokes that readers had sent in and asked me to rewrite them…” berättade Ramis i flera tidskriftsintervjuer.

Washington Post skriver: “(…) Before he turned 50, Mr. Hefner was, as Esquire magazine once decreed, ‘the most famous magazine editor in the history of the world.’

He commissioned articles by some of the world’s most celebrated writers — Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and Joyce Carol Oates, to name a few. Among the works that first appeared in Playboy were excerpts from Alex Haley’s Roots, Larry L. King’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, John Irving’s The World According to Garp and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men.

The magazine’s in-depth interviews with leading figures from politics, sports and entertainment — including Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro and Steve Jobs — often made news. One of the magazines’s most newsworthy revelations came in 1976, when presidential nominee Jimmy Carter admitted in a Playboy interview, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

Each month, Mr. Hefner wrote an editorial in which he sought to define the ‘Playboy Philosophy.’ In his view, sexual freedom was part of a larger spirit of liberty, including free speech, relaxed drug laws and civil rights, including same-sex marriage. (…)” 

Det finns hur många människor som helst, kvinnor som män, vars karriär Hefner bidrog till.

Ordspråket ”Döm inte hunden efter håren”, är kanske inte malplacerat i det här sammanhanget. There’s more to Hefner than meets the eye. 

© Vladimir Oravsky