Hugh Hefner, the incurable playboy who built a publishing and entertainment empire on the idea that Americans should shed their puritanical hang-ups and enjoy sex This combination of flesh and intellectuality made Playboy the world's bestselling men's magazine and Hefner a millionaire many times over. The venture gave him a pulpit from which to preach the virtues of a postwar revolution in morality and propelled sex into the American mainstream. Feminist Gloria Steinem fired one of the first shots when she posed as a Bunny and wrote a scathing expose in Show magazine in 1963. “Reading Playboy,” she later said, “feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”.LATimes