Forever young?

AP

LIKE Mick Jagger, who has just become Sir Michael, Hugh Hefner is a famous bad boy who has gradually evolved into one of the great and good. The 77-year-old, who launched Playboy magazine 50 years ago this month, has a road named after him in his hometown of Chicago, features in advertisements for such mainstream fare as burgers, gin and casual clothes (and we don't mean silk pyjamas and velvet smoking jackets). And, it is said, nowadays members of the public often greet him in the street with a “You're the Man!” Is there a greater compliment?

Maybe. This week, he received the ultimate establishment imprimatur: Christie's, the venerable auction house, sold off a half-century's worth of contents from Hef's attic. These included nude pictures of the most beautiful women in the world, including Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, various supermodels and, of course, Playboy's first centrefold, Marilyn Monroe. Also on sale: his little black address books, with phone numbers both for the famous, such as singer Nat “King” Cole, and for the likes of Lynn, known only by a brief note (“haven't met, friend of Joyce's, big T”)—and his old Mercedes, which comes with two invitations to the New Year's Eve party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

Just as Mr Hefner has become a pillar of the establishment, so his publishing house has become the very model of a mature American corporation, both in its virtues and its vices—though Mr Hefner is probably the only corporate boss in America whose huge travel and entertainment expenses, including obligatory Playmates, continue to be regarded, without question, as a necessity of doing business. Playboy Enterprises—whose chief executive is Mr Hefner's daughter, Christie—has become a multimedia group, with TV channels in many countries and a great global brand: the black bunny head. Yet it must also grapple with three pressing problems common to many established firms: intensifying competition, the challenge of how to use the internet profitably, and the pervasive power of Wal-Mart. It is not clear how well it is grappling. The firm has only just edged back into the black, having lost money since 1999.

When Playboy started out, it dominated a niche somewhere between traditional men's magazines full of country pursuits and cheap porn rags. As this week's auction showed, Mr Hefner's genius was to feature lots of great writers in order that men could half-plausibly claim that they only “buy it for the articles”. Original manuscripts up for auction included fiction by Jack Kerouac, interviews with Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, and Orson Welles, letters from William Saroyan, Isaac Asimov (doubting that he would appeal to a wide audience) and Ray Bradbury (praising the merits of Playboy and Mad above all magazines). There was even an original Ian Fleming story featuring the ultimate “Playboy man”, James Bond.

The articles allowed Mr Hefner to claim, with some justification, that he was the apostle of a better life, not just a better, well, whatever. Now, he says, claiming victory, “we live in a Playboy world.” The change in public attitudes spawned numerous rivals. By the late 1980s, like many successful innovations, Playboy was no longer unique. It featured the same beautiful women seen in many other places, including lingerie catalogues sent to every home. Worse still, in the 1990s, a number of distributors, notably Wal-Mart, ceased to distribute magazines featuring nudity. New publications flooded into Playboy's niche of youngish male readers, such as Maxim, Stuff and FHM, which feature pictorials carefully designed to avoid distribution problems.

Bunny money

Though it has avoided the fate of Penthouse, a rival that is now bankrupt, Playboy's circulation has fallen to 3.1m from a peak of 7.2m in 1972. Yet its reputation has lately been improving, perhaps due to Mr Hefner, who still oversees the magazine, reversing an earlier move in a harder direction that led to the so-called “pubic wars” with Larry Flynt's Hustler. Covers featuring women from Enron and WorldCom were well received. Actresses suffering through a dry patch in their careers have begun appearing in Playboy for a boost. In an effort to revive its fortunes, last year a new top editor was poached from Maxim.

Mr Hefner himself has that new-found appeal to teenagers and young adults, perhaps because he resembles the sort of elderly parent who will never say no, possibly because he throws good parties and possibly because his early taste in writers has proved sound. He certainly has a certain retro-coolness, which his magazine plans increasingly to echo. And yet this image does not reflect the real direction of his firm.

Mr Hefner's new respectability coincides with Playboy Enterprises' growing reliance on the sort of porn that people definitely do not buy to read the articles. (There are parallels with Richard Desmond in Britain, a publisher of some fairly hardcore porn magazines who has become chummy with Tony Blair since buying the Daily Express newspaper—and may buy the broadsheet of conservative England, the Daily Telegraph.) According to Nielsen//NetRatings, 33m unique visitors used an adult site in America in October—one in four internet users. In 1994, Playboy was the first national magazine to go online; the firm's sex and gaming sites are now turning a profit. Some 60% of the revenues of Playboy Enterprises now comes from online sites and cable TV. It will shortly launch another cable network, Spice Live, that will let viewers be “more interactive” with adult stars.

The challenge will be to stop the firm's hard-core porn sites harming the image of the softer Playboy magazine. Still, as Christie Hefner has pointed out, Disney has adopted a somewhat similar twin strategy, releasing less family-friendly movies, such as Quentin Tarantino's latest violent hit, “Kill Bill”, under its separate Miramax brand. If Disney's boss, Michael Eisner, can manage to segment such different brands, why not Hef?