Penthouse Magazine Founder Bob Guccione Dies at 79
Dudester
Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine and created an erotic corporate empire around it, only to see it crumble as his investments soured and the world of pornography turned toward video and the Internet, died Wednesday. He was 79.
A statement issued by the Guccione family says he died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano. His wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, had said he had battled lung cancer for several years.
Penthouse reached the pinnacle of its popularity in September 1984, when it published nude pictures of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Williams, now a singer and actress, was forced to relinquish her crown after the release of the issue, which sold nearly 6 million copies and reportedly made $14 million.
A frustrated artist who once attended a Catholic seminary, Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidize his art career and was the magazine's first photographer. He introduced the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution.
Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Hugh Hefner's Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women, dubbed Penthouse Pets.
"We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Guccione told The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. He added that he attained a stylized eroticism in his photography by posing his models looking away from the camera.
"To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen," he said. "That was the sexy part. That was the part that none of our competition understood."
Guccione estimated that Penthouse earned $4 billion during his reign as publisher. He was listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people with a net worth of about $400 million in 1982.
Guccione built a corporate empire under the General Media Inc. umbrella that included book publishing and merchandising divisions and Viva, a magazine featuring male nudes aimed at a female audience. He also created Penthouse Forum, the pocket-size magazine that played off the success of the racy letters to the editor that began, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought I'd be writing you..."
Guccione and longtime business collaborator Kathy Keeton, who later became his third wife, also published more mainstream fare, such as Omni magazine, which focused on science and science fiction, and Longevity, a health advice magazine. Keeton died of cancer in 1997 following surgery, but Guccione continued to list her on the Penthouse masthead as president.
Guccione lost much of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures.
Probably his best-known business failure was a $17.5 million investment in the 1979 production of the X-rated film "Caligula." Malcolm McDowell was cast as the decadent emperor of the title, and the supporting cast included Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole.
Distributors shunned the film, with its graphic scenes of lesbianism and incest. However, it eventually became General Media's most popular DVD.
Guccione also lost millions on a proposed Atlantic City casino. He never received a gambling license and construction of the casino stalled.
Legal fees further eroded his fortune. Among those who sued were televangelist Jerry Falwell, a California resort, a former Miss Wyoming and a Penthouse Pet who accused Guccione of forcing her to perform sexual favors for business colleagues.
In 1985, Guccione had to pay $45 million in delinquent taxes.
The next year, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography issued a report attacking the adult entertainment industry. Guccione called the report "disgraceful" and doubted it would have any impact, but newsstands and convenience stores responded by pulling Penthouse from their magazine racks.
Circulation dropped after the Meese commission report and years later took another hit with the proliferation of X-rated videos and Web sites.
"The future has definitely migrated to electronic media," Guccione acknowledged in a 2002 New York Times interview.
In 2003, General Media Inc. filed for bankruptcy. A private-equity investor from Florida acquired Penthouse the following year in a bankruptcy sale.
Penthouse and related properties are now owned by FriendFinder Networks Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla.-based company that offers social networking and online adult entertainment, including some with the Penthouse brand.
Guccione was born in Brooklyn and attended prep school in New Jersey. He spent several months in a Catholic seminary before dropping out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He wandered Europe as a painter for several years.
April Guccione said her husband was working as a cartoonist and a manager of self-service laundries in London when he got the idea of starting a magazine more explicit and aimed more squarely at "regular guys" than Playboy, which cultivated an upscale image.
Guccione's staff, which included family members, often described the publisher as mercurial.
"He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt," wrote Patricia Bosworth in a 2005 Vanity Fair article about Guccione, for whom she had worked as executive editor of Viva.
"He hired and fired people - then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next."
Sponsored LinksGuccione's management style even sparked a rift with his own son, Bob Guccione Jr. In 1985, the publisher helped his son launch the music magazine Spin, with Bob Jr. serving as editor and publisher. After just two years, the two clashed over the direction of the magazine and the elder Guccione decided to shut it down, forcing his son to secure outside funding.
Success as a publisher allowed Guccione to amass an impressive art collection, which included paintings by El Greco, Modigliani, Dali, Degas, Matisse and Picasso. The works adorned his 30-room, 22,000-square-foot mansion in New York City.
Guccione's financial problems forced him to sell his art collection in 2002 at auction. The collection had been appraised by Christie's at $59 million two years earlier. Four years later, he was forced to sell his Manhattan mansion.
Guccione eventually went back to painting, and his works were shown at venues including the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio and the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, said April Guccione, who married him in 2006. The couple moved from New Jersey to Texas in 2009.
Married four times, Guccione had a daughter, Toni, from his first marriage and two sons, Bob Jr. and Nick, and a daughter, Nina, from his second marriage.
April Guccione said services for her husband will be private.
A statement issued by the Guccione family says he died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano. His wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, had said he had battled lung cancer for several years.
Penthouse reached the pinnacle of its popularity in September 1984, when it published nude pictures of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Williams, now a singer and actress, was forced to relinquish her crown after the release of the issue, which sold nearly 6 million copies and reportedly made $14 million.
A frustrated artist who once attended a Catholic seminary, Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidize his art career and was the magazine's first photographer. He introduced the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution.
Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Hugh Hefner's Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women, dubbed Penthouse Pets.
"We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Guccione told The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. He added that he attained a stylized eroticism in his photography by posing his models looking away from the camera.
"To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen," he said. "That was the sexy part. That was the part that none of our competition understood."
Guccione estimated that Penthouse earned $4 billion during his reign as publisher. He was listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people with a net worth of about $400 million in 1982.
Guccione built a corporate empire under the General Media Inc. umbrella that included book publishing and merchandising divisions and Viva, a magazine featuring male nudes aimed at a female audience. He also created Penthouse Forum, the pocket-size magazine that played off the success of the racy letters to the editor that began, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought I'd be writing you..."
Guccione and longtime business collaborator Kathy Keeton, who later became his third wife, also published more mainstream fare, such as Omni magazine, which focused on science and science fiction, and Longevity, a health advice magazine. Keeton died of cancer in 1997 following surgery, but Guccione continued to list her on the Penthouse masthead as president.
Guccione lost much of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures.
Probably his best-known business failure was a $17.5 million investment in the 1979 production of the X-rated film "Caligula." Malcolm McDowell was cast as the decadent emperor of the title, and the supporting cast included Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole.
Distributors shunned the film, with its graphic scenes of lesbianism and incest. However, it eventually became General Media's most popular DVD.
Guccione also lost millions on a proposed Atlantic City casino. He never received a gambling license and construction of the casino stalled.
Legal fees further eroded his fortune. Among those who sued were televangelist Jerry Falwell, a California resort, a former Miss Wyoming and a Penthouse Pet who accused Guccione of forcing her to perform sexual favors for business colleagues.
In 1985, Guccione had to pay $45 million in delinquent taxes.
The next year, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography issued a report attacking the adult entertainment industry. Guccione called the report "disgraceful" and doubted it would have any impact, but newsstands and convenience stores responded by pulling Penthouse from their magazine racks.
Circulation dropped after the Meese commission report and years later took another hit with the proliferation of X-rated videos and Web sites.
"The future has definitely migrated to electronic media," Guccione acknowledged in a 2002 New York Times interview.
In 2003, General Media Inc. filed for bankruptcy. A private-equity investor from Florida acquired Penthouse the following year in a bankruptcy sale.
Penthouse and related properties are now owned by FriendFinder Networks Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla.-based company that offers social networking and online adult entertainment, including some with the Penthouse brand.
Guccione was born in Brooklyn and attended prep school in New Jersey. He spent several months in a Catholic seminary before dropping out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He wandered Europe as a painter for several years.
April Guccione said her husband was working as a cartoonist and a manager of self-service laundries in London when he got the idea of starting a magazine more explicit and aimed more squarely at "regular guys" than Playboy, which cultivated an upscale image.
Guccione's staff, which included family members, often described the publisher as mercurial.
"He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt," wrote Patricia Bosworth in a 2005 Vanity Fair article about Guccione, for whom she had worked as executive editor of Viva.
"He hired and fired people - then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next."
Sponsored LinksGuccione's management style even sparked a rift with his own son, Bob Guccione Jr. In 1985, the publisher helped his son launch the music magazine Spin, with Bob Jr. serving as editor and publisher. After just two years, the two clashed over the direction of the magazine and the elder Guccione decided to shut it down, forcing his son to secure outside funding.
Success as a publisher allowed Guccione to amass an impressive art collection, which included paintings by El Greco, Modigliani, Dali, Degas, Matisse and Picasso. The works adorned his 30-room, 22,000-square-foot mansion in New York City.
Guccione's financial problems forced him to sell his art collection in 2002 at auction. The collection had been appraised by Christie's at $59 million two years earlier. Four years later, he was forced to sell his Manhattan mansion.
Guccione eventually went back to painting, and his works were shown at venues including the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio and the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, said April Guccione, who married him in 2006. The couple moved from New Jersey to Texas in 2009.
Married four times, Guccione had a daughter, Toni, from his first marriage and two sons, Bob Jr. and Nick, and a daughter, Nina, from his second marriage.
April Guccione said services for her husband will be private.
11 comments
Giccione believed in pushing the limits and that led to his downfall. He was behind the curve in internet publishing and lost a lead that he never recovered from.
I can't fail to notice that it was just after Kathy Keeton's passing that Guccione made the decision to make Penthouse's pictorial content hardcore (even attempting at a point to take watersports to the mainstream), which still failed to save the business. Keeton being the partner that was influential in Omni and Prevention, at one point mainstream successes, she may have been a necessary influence. The experience with Spin and the ancillary businesses suggest that Guccione suffered simultaneously from control issues and a tendency to excesses. While the elder competitor, Hefner, was either willing or forced to accept turning over management of the business side to the younger generation and suffering the radical contraction of his onetime pretensions of "empire" to save a smaller but viable core business, Guccione failed to read or heed the signs, and lost it all.
farmerart, some "Penthouse Clubs" in the USA, if displaying the trademarked three keys symbol they would be part of the post-bankruptcy General Media's selling the name for "branding" purposes. If there's a "Penthouse Club" in Vancouver since the 80s or 90s, however, it may indeed have nothing to do with Bob, whose business was primarily in the UK and US, but that's just a guess.
I loved Penthouse as a kid, they always pushed the limits. Girls with their legs spread, different layouts. Hot, wet, delicious.
Too bad Penthouse didn't go the diretion of Reality T.V., or build a Penthouse brand on the internet. I think the "Penthouse" stripclubs brand, came about after the bankruptcy. But it's not going all that great, because they had one in Arizona, and they sold it because it was a bad location, really bad.
I'll miss that magazine, God Bless Bob, may he rest in peace.
htp://www.blushcabaretflagstaff.com
WOW!!!
you really do need to get out more bro! :)
watching and listening to guccione speak he kinda came over like a mafioso, but he was as much an early porn trailblazer as hef was.
and @ blush.. try penthouse.com
troop:
Yup, never saw the mag. I have been messing around with SCs and porn and stuff for only the last six months. In business I was a freaky demented workaholic; time for nothing else. I've a bunch of catching up to do.