Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione dies at 79

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/20/AR2010102006785.html

Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione dies at 79
TERRY WALLACE
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 20, 2010

DALLAS -- Bob Guccione had tried the seminary and spent years trying to make it as an artist before he found the niche that Hugh Hefner left for him in the late 1960s. Where Hefner's Playboy magazine strove to surround its pinups with an upscale image, Guccione aimed for something a little more direct with Penthouse.

More explicit nudes. Sensational stories. Even more sensational letters that began, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought I'd be writing you..."

It worked for decades for Guccione, who died Wednesday in Texas at the age of 79. He 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.

In 1984 it was the magazine that took down Miss America, publishing nude pictures of Vanessa Williams, the first black woman to hold the title. Williams, who went on to fame as 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.

But Guccione's empire fell apart thanks to several bad investments and changes in the pornography industry, which became flooded with competition as it migrated from print to video and the Internet. His company, his world-class art collection, his huge Manhattan mansion - all of it, sold off.

Guccione's family said in a statement that he died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano. His wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, had said he had battled lung cancer for several years.

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 Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women. The centerfolds were 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 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.

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.

Sales dropped after the Meese commission report and years later took another hit with the proliferation of X-rated videos and Web sites. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Penthouse's circulation dipped below 1 million in the late 1990s and fell to about 463,000 in 2003, the year General Media Inc. filed for bankruptcy. Over the first six months of 2010, Penthouse reported circulation of barely 178,000.

"The future has definitely migrated to electronic media," Guccione acknowledged in a 2002 New York Times interview.

In 2004, a private-equity investor from Florida acquired Penthouse 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. FriendFinder made a bid this year for Playboy, which now outsells Penthouse roughly 10 to one, but Hefner has rejected it.

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."

Guccione'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, Tonina, from his first marriage and three sons, Bob Jr., Tony, and Nick, and a daughter, Nina, from his second marriage.

April Guccione said services for her husband will be private.
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Former Associated Press Writer Gary Kane in New York contributed to this report.

Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/business/media/21guccione.html

October 20, 2010
Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79
ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine in the 1960s and built a pornographic media empire that broke taboos, outraged the guardians of taste and made billions before drowning in a slough of bad investments and Internet competition, died Wednesday in Plano, Tex., The Associated Press reported. He was 79.

A statement issued by the Guccione family says he died Wednesday at Plano Specialty Hospital after a long battle with cancer, The A.P. said.

It began in London in 1965 with a bank loan, an idea and an accident. The loan was for $1,170. The idea was a new magazine with nude photos to outdo Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. And the accident was an old mailing list, so that promotional brochures with pornographic samples went out to clergymen, schoolgirls, old-age pensioners and wives of members of Parliament.

The outcry was huge. And there was a $264 fine for mailing indecent materials. But all 120,000 copies of the first issue of Penthouse sold out in days, and Mr. Guccione, a struggling artist from New Jersey who had been knocking around Europe for more than a decade, was on his way to being a tycoon.

By the early 1980s he was one of America’s richest men, king of a $300 million publishing empire, General Media, which owned Penthouse, with a monthly circulation of 4.7 million in 16 countries, and 15 other magazines, including Omni and Penthouse Forum as well as titles on bodybuilding, photography and computers, in addition to book, video and merchandising divisions.

Forbes listed Mr. Guccione’s net worth in 1982 as $400 million. His art collections, worth $150 million, included works by Degas, Renoir, Picasso, El Greco, Dalí, Matisse and Chagall. Troves of art and antiques filled his Manhattan home, a 17,000-square-foot double town house on East 67th Street, and his country estate in Staatsburg, N.Y.

Mr. Guccione looked the part of the libidinous pornographer. He was tanned and muscled, and he wore slim pants and silk shirts open to the waist, showing gold chains on a hairy chest. His personality was volatile, but he did not drink, smoke or use drugs.

“He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt,” Patricia Bosworth, who had been executive editor of Mr. Guccione’s Viva magazine in the 1970s, wrote in Vanity Fair in 2005. “He hired and fired people, then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next.”

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 17, 1930, the son of Anthony and Nina Guccione. He was raised Roman Catholic in Bergenfield, N.J., and said he considered the priesthood, but decided to be an artist. In 1948 he graduated from Blair Academy, in Blairstown, N.J. At 18 he married the first of his three wives, Lilyann Becker, and had a daughter, Tonia. The marriage soon failed.

Over the next 12 years he traveled in Europe and North Africa, sketching tourists in cafes and working odd jobs. In Tangier he met Muriel Hudson, an English singer. They traveled together for several years, were married in 1955 and had four children: Bob Jr., Nina, Anthony and Nick.

In 1960 they settled in London, where he ran a dry-cleaning business, drew cartoons for a syndicate and edited a small newspaper. A mail-order business, selling back issues of men’s magazines, put him deep in debt, and his wife left him, taking the children. But Penthouse transformed his life.

With Kathy Keeton, a dancer from South Africa who was his girlfriend, his business partner and later his wife, Mr. Guccione challenged Playboy at the height of the sexual revolution, introducing Penthouse in the United States in 1969 and building it into one of the nation’s most successful magazines, a mix of what was billed as “sex, politics and protest” that took in an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion over 30 years.

Its images of women, often shot by Mr. Guccione, left little to the imagination. Compared with Playboy Playmates, as the Hefner centerfold models were known, Penthouse Pets were arrayed in more provocative poses. The magazine infuriated feminists and conservatives, but others praised it for breaking taboos.

Penthouse occasionally ran nude layouts of well-known women, including Madonna. In 1984, sexually explicit photos of Vanessa Williams, taken two years before she became the first black Miss America, appeared in Penthouse. Ms. Williams lost her crown and sued for $500 million, but the suit was dropped and Penthouse reported a $14 million newsstand windfall.

Aside from the battle of the centerfolds, Penthouse offered an aura of class: fiction, celebrity profiles and political articles. It published Alan Dershowitz, Stephen King, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates and J. P. Donleavy, and interviews with Germaine Greer, Gore Vidal and Isaac Asimov.

Other Guccione magazines made splashes: Viva, featuring male nudes for female browsers, folded in 1978 after five years; Omni, a science and science fiction offering, began in 1978 and ended in 1995. Mr. Guccione employed his children and father in his enterprises.

The dissolution of the Guccione empire took years. A $200 million Penthouse casino in Atlantic City never materialized, and he lost much of his investment. A $17.5 million movie containing hard-core sex scenes and graphic violence, “Caligula,” was shunned by distributors, and Mr. Guccione lost heavily. He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.

The government took chunks of his fortune. In 1985, the Internal Revenue Service demanded $45 million in back taxes. In 1992, he had to borrow $80 million for another tax bill. In 1986, after a scathing federal antipornography report, Penthouse was withdrawn from many newsstands and circulation revenues — a major source of income — fell sharply.

The trend accelerated in the 1990s as Internet pornography grew increasingly available. Mr. Guccione responded with more explicit sexual content that drove advertisers and vendors away, limiting many sales to pornographic bookstores. Ms. Keeton, the president and chief operating officer, died in 1997, and friends said her loss had profound effects on Mr. Guccione’s business and personal life.

Mr. Guccione, who developed throat cancer in 1998, sold artworks, media properties and his Staatsburg estate as revenues dwindled and debts soared. Penthouse posted a $10 million loss in 2001, General Media filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and he resigned as chairman and chief executive of Penthouse International. Creditors foreclosed on the Guccione mansion, and he moved out in 2006.

Dozens of items from the town house — fireplace mantels, marble columns, even a circular staircase — were auctioned off by a Connecticut gallery in 2009 for a fraction of their presale estimates, with the proceeds going to a charity.

“Kind of gaudy,” said Dave Kerr, a prospective buyer looking skeptically over the lot. “It wouldn’t work in our house. I guess he lived a different lifestyle.”

A list of survivors was not immediately available.

Bob Guccione ascends to the penthouse of absolute reality: R.I.P.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/bob_guccione_ascends_to_the_penthouse_of_absolute_reality_r.i.p

Bob Guccione ascends to the penthouse of absolute reality: R.I.P.
Marc Campbell
10.21.2010

Me and Guccione had the same dentist in Manhattan. I’d see him gliding thru the waiting room glittering with bling bling like King Tut. Bob’s testosterone fogged my Italian wraparounds. The cat had presence.

Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine in the 1960s and built a pornographic media empire that broke taboos, outraged the guardians of taste and made billions before drowning in a slough of bad investments and Internet competition, died Wednesday in Plano, Tex., The Associated Press reported. He was 79.

Penthouse was to Playboy what The Rolling Stones were to The Beatles. I came down on the side of The Stones.