SMUT: Bob Guccione is selling up because nobody reads Penthouse anymore. Oliver Burkeman reports on the rise and fall of a porn king
It was pubic hair that made Bob Guccione, and it was pubic hair that broke him. Any day now, the removal trucks - lots of them - will round the corner of Fifth Avenue at East 67th Street in Manhattan, pull up outside the palatial $40 million home of the founder of Penthouse magazine, and start to remove the trappings of a fortune built on showing the parts Playboy was too coy to reveal. It will take a while: there are 45 rooms, and a delicate $200 million art collection featuring works by Degas, Renoir and Picasso. By the time they arrive, Guccione, 71, will have picked himself up from the marble-floored poolside lounging area (it "looks like it's from 1920s Hollywood", says the broker handling the sale), gathered his troupe of Rhodesian ridgeback dogs, and relocated to an unspecified but undoubtedly smaller property.
Guccione is selling up because nobody reads Penthouse any more. They can find all the pubic hair they need, and more besides, on the Internet. There is "no future for adult business in mass-market magazines", Guccione declared. "The future has definitely migrated to electronic media." Communicating via fax from his home, where he is recovering from a throat cancer that leaves him unable to speak, he said: "It is the proliferation of more explicit images in television, videos and the Internet that have made the difference."
The onward march of technology was certainly one of the reasons why the auditors for Guccione's company, General Media Entertainment, announced this week that it would not be able to meet interest payments of $13 million on debts of $52 million and that the Bank of New York, which lent it most of the money, might soon have to "assume control" of the firm. ("We are not going out of business," Guccione insists.) But that was only half the story of how the magazine went from sales of seven million, at its peak, to fewer than 700,000 today, with a particularly precipitous 33 per cent plummet between 1997 and 2001. That version left out the way that a manic insomniac, clad always in his trademark chunky gold jewellery, launched an all-out assault on 1960s Britain, nearly got imprisoned for it, and then made millions from his hunch. It left out the way he squandered almost all of his fortune on breathtakingly ill-advised projects, from beach-front casinos to portable nuclear fusion kits.
And it revealed nothing of how, in the process, he forged an industry, and a public morality, that became so successful that it consumed him. "I believe Penthouse has helped liberate our attitudes toward sex and its extraordinary impact on many aspects of social development," Guccione says. "Much of the freedom currently enjoyed on television and in the media generally are directly attributable to the success of Penthouse."
It all started in a different townhouse - smart enough, but lacking 45 rooms and an indoor pool - in Mayfair, London, in January 1965. The 34-year-old Brooklyn-born Guccione, who was living there with his second wife and operating a dry-cleaning-delivery business, had already trained to be a Catholic priest, practised as an artist in Rome, starred in an Italian movie, smoked recreational drugs with William S. Burroughs in Tangier, operated a mail-order business selling back issues of American girlie magazines, and founded an ex-pats' newspaper, the London American. Hugh Hefner's recently launched Playboy was selling well in the UK, he noticed: more than 10,000 copies a month were being slipped into paper bags at newsagents' shops across the country.
But the upmarket lifestyle it espoused - all bathrobes, brandy and cigars under the golden west-coast sun - seemed absurdly distant from the life of the ordinary British male in the early 1960s. There was, in other words, a niche. Guccione took the photographs himself, after one day's training.
But then he found himself locked inside his home, with the police waiting outside to arrest him for outraging public decency, with the copies of the first issue of Penthouse that he had sent unsolicited through the UK's Royal Mail to his mail-order customers.
"He barricaded himself inside, because his lawyer told him: 'Don't step outside until we have the first issue of your magazine on the news-stands - then we can capitalise on the publicity,' " says John Heidenry, author of What Wild Ecstasy, a history of the sexual revolution which traces the careers of the entrepreneurs of porn.
The then-genteel officers of the Metropolitan Police apparently never sought to force their way inside. After they had spent three days outside his door, Guccione came out and accompanied them to the station. "But his reputation was made: here was this American who was bringing pornography into Britain."
Guccione's second wife was less impressed with the new venture than his readers, and divorced him. If Guccione was thrown by her decision, if he ever paused to consider a more reconciliatory career path, he has never let it show. He was already too busy thinking about the next part of his plan.
As journalist Tom Wolfe watched Hefner's Playboy empire grow ever larger, capitalising profitably on America's shifting moral climate, he was reminded of nothing so much as The Great Gatsby. "Both were scramblers who came up from out of nowhere to make their fortunes and build their palaces and ended up in regal isolation," he wrote in The Pump-House Gang. "But there was a major difference between Hefner and Gatsby. Hefner no longer dreamed, if he ever did, of making the big social leap . . . It was at least plausible for Gatsby to hope to make it into Society. But Hefner? . . . A man who runs a tit magazine? . . . There is no Society in Chicago for Hugh Hefner. So he has gone one better. He has started his own league. He has created his own world, in his own palace. He has created his own statusphere."
Guccione set out to invade - and to colonise - Hefner's statusphere. He did it with a US launch that featured a vastly popular ad campaign - a Playboy bunny in the sights of a rifle with the caption "we're going rabbit-hunting" - and a complex pyramid scheme which used the income from early sales to pay for the distribution of later unsolicited copies. But most of all, he did it by showing pubic hair.
"Hugh Hefner was a nice, white, Protestant boy from the midwest," says Heidenry, who would later edit Penthouse Forum, Guccione's spin-off publication based on explicit readers' letters. "Guccione was a Sicilian, and a Catholic. Hefner was bringing in the girl next door, and he was the guy next door, with the nice white teeth and the bathrobe. Guccione was the hood on the corner, not talking about the girl next door but about the bad girl in the neighbourhood. He was the first to do pubic hair, the first to do leather and whips, the first to use Dobermanns as props."
Hefner waited a few months to monitor the fallout from Guccione's more explicit photo-shoots, then followed suit.
And yet if Guccione had abandoned the strictures of the priesthood with a certain recklessness, he remained preoccupied with a version of decorum that pervaded the early years of the industry. "They're so busy reassuring themselves that it's all beautiful and tasteful - 'crude' is just the biggest fear of their lives," says journalist Lynn Barber, who helped to produce the US edition of Penthouse from London between 1967 and 1974. The atmosphere in the office, she remembers, was "totally unsexist . . . but they always said 'that guy is a failed florist', because he always put flowers in his girl shots, so that sometimes you could see more of the flowers than of the girls."
By then, Guccione had married his third wife, a South African ballet dancer, Kathy Keeton, who took a leading role in the burgeoning newcompany.
Hefner, who had initially thought of Guccione as a "minor pain in the ass over in England", according to Heidenry, switched into all-out feud mode. The two have met just once, briefly, at the home of an investment banker.
Even as sales soared to a high of seven million, though, Guccione never quite matched Hefner. Playboy remained the publication that persuaded famous women to pose for it; Penthouse was the one that paid the infamous to do so. Even when Penthouse developed a curious side-reputation for investigative journalism, it never achieved Playboy's trick of being both porn magazine and socially acceptable.
Then three things happened, not quite at once, but sufficiently close together to send Guccione reeling. The backlash of the 1980s began, and the feminist voices criticising pornography grew louder. (The radical leader of the movement, Andrea Dworkin, this week declared herself "delighted that Mr Guccione may be going out of business", but added that "he is being replaced, quite possibly, by something much worse".) Video and the Internet arrived, and Guccione moved into both disastrously late. A new magazine formula arose, typified by the softer-than-soft porn of "lads' mags" such as Loaded and Maxim. In response, Penthouse experimented with darker material, until it began to be removed from shelves by nervous distributors.
In the end, though, it was an 87-year-old New Jersey woman, Vera Coking, who didn't want to move house, that did for Bob Guccione. Throughout his career, Guccione had shown a penchant for crazy investment schemes, ploughing millions into the award-winning - but money-losing - science magazine, Omni, and backing plans by scientist Robert Bussard to build small nuclear fusion reactors in the hope that they might power space rockets. But it was a plan hatched in 1978 that caused his company's greatest financial haemorrhage, and it originated in a yearning to conquer Hefner's statusphere by building his own.
Its physical manifestation was to be a vast casino in the New Jersey gambling town of Atlantic City, a $200 million cornucopia of glamorous masculinity on the boardwalk looking out over the Atlantic. But he neglected to obtain a gambling licence before he went ahead. Coking's modest boarding-house was situated on land intended to be part of the complex, but she liked it enough to resist Guccione's offer of a $1 million buyout.
The vast steel structure Guccione had already built remained empty, rusting in the sea breeze, for 10 more years. A subsequent plan, to build a luxurious men's club nearby, failed too. His misadventures on the Atlantic City boardwalk may yet prove the beginning of the end of General Media Entertainment, and of Penthouse. But by the time that happens, the magazine's role in the sexual revolution will be long gone, leaving Guccione to reflect on the ups and downs of a life in porn in his newly modest surroundings.
"Penthouse has given me more stature on the world stage than any of my critics and detractors can ever hope to achieve," Guccione says. "I'm not ashamed of what I do."
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