Bob Guccione RIP
- Thread starter gibsomstreet
- Start date
He will forever be remembered as one of the "3 Wise Men" of porn and his out of focus pics (boy, was he ever a lousy photographer).guccione
Text from above NY Times link:
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.
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.
Dear forum,
I remember reading about his personal and financial problems a few years ago in an article. Guccione had so much plastic surgery I could barely recognize his face from the photo.
I can still remember those fantastic 3 some and lesbo Penthouse pictorials, from the 80's.
RIP Bob. My palm sisters, my wingding , and I solute you.
I remember reading about his personal and financial problems a few years ago in an article. Guccione had so much plastic surgery I could barely recognize his face from the photo.
I can still remember those fantastic 3 some and lesbo Penthouse pictorials, from the 80's.
RIP Bob. My palm sisters, my wingding , and I solute you.
He had no place to go when his mansion was sold. The new owners took pity on him and allowed him to move into the gardeners house on the same property. Guccione was wheeled out as a novelty when the new owners had parties.Text from above NY Times
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.
He was at the right place, at the right time, with the right product. You can not sell crap like that today.
You can say that about any business, nothing new. You take advantage of the opportunity available at the time, but to sustain success you have to keep re-inventing for the times.He was at the right place, at the right time, with the right product. You can not sell crap like that today.
Oh, I agree. Be that as it may, there was alway a Penthouse magazine or two in my room during my University days.He was at the right place, at the right time, with the right product. You can not sell crap like that today.
R2R
Penthouse.
Just the name gets a bit of a reaction in me. I go into an apartment and I see "Penthouse" on the elevator and my mind automatically thinks porn for a split second.
Penthouse got me through my sexually deprived (depraved?) adolescence. From about the age of 12, which would have been 1977 I began my descent into the abyss lead by Penthouse. I clearly remember being 12 and 13 and in Sr. Public School. There was a group of guys who would swap porn magazines back and forth. I would steal a Penthouse from my older cousin's house, or my friend who had the balls would go into the local corner store and actually BUY a Penthouse - with my money. I had the dough, but he had the balls. We'd share it back and forth over the course of the next 2 weeks and then it would go into circulation at school. I remember "the Grade 8 Trip to Ottawa” (I think everyone in Southern Ontario went to Ottawa as a class and stayed in the Dorms at Carleton University) I remember bringing Penthouse to share and trade. It all seems so long ago, so funny when I think back and so innocent in a way.
The advent of the VCR when I was in HS changed things rather dramatically. Now, having a porn tape was the sought after thing and Penthouse, while still valuable - definitely took a back seat. My own personal escalation I suppose.
Anyway, Penthouse was a big part of my sexually deprived youth and the guy who helped me through it just died.
RIP Bob, you had a good run.
Just the name gets a bit of a reaction in me. I go into an apartment and I see "Penthouse" on the elevator and my mind automatically thinks porn for a split second.
Penthouse got me through my sexually deprived (depraved?) adolescence. From about the age of 12, which would have been 1977 I began my descent into the abyss lead by Penthouse. I clearly remember being 12 and 13 and in Sr. Public School. There was a group of guys who would swap porn magazines back and forth. I would steal a Penthouse from my older cousin's house, or my friend who had the balls would go into the local corner store and actually BUY a Penthouse - with my money. I had the dough, but he had the balls. We'd share it back and forth over the course of the next 2 weeks and then it would go into circulation at school. I remember "the Grade 8 Trip to Ottawa” (I think everyone in Southern Ontario went to Ottawa as a class and stayed in the Dorms at Carleton University) I remember bringing Penthouse to share and trade. It all seems so long ago, so funny when I think back and so innocent in a way.
The advent of the VCR when I was in HS changed things rather dramatically. Now, having a porn tape was the sought after thing and Penthouse, while still valuable - definitely took a back seat. My own personal escalation I suppose.
Anyway, Penthouse was a big part of my sexually deprived youth and the guy who helped me through it just died.
RIP Bob, you had a good run.
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Sorry Jim, but I immediately get a picture of the pages of those swapped mags getting progessively more stuck together as they were passed back and forth! Having said that, I enjoyed many similar experiences as the one(s) you describe.Penthouse.
There was a group of guys who would swap porn magazines back and forth.
I did always wonder if all of the forum letters were legitimate. I suspect they were the equivalent of the phony pictures and profiels on today's on-line dating site scams... just a way to keep the reading public coming back for more.
Over heard at the Pearly GAtes.....
Barbara Billingsley to Bob Guciani
Just what beaver are you talking about?
Barbara Billingsley to Bob Guciani
Just what beaver are you talking about?
Well said JTK... I actually feel bad for kids in the internet era as everything is too easy to get and is so over the top. Back then, there was much more mystique, and more taste, as dumb as that sounds.Anyway, Penthouse was a big part of my sexually deprived youth and the guy who helped me through it just died.
RIP Bob, you had a good run.
I remember, as a youngster, when Playboy started showing a little pubic hair in their photo shoots! As I recall, Penthouse raised the bar from the very beginning.Well said JTK... I actually feel bad for kids in the internet era as everything is too easy to get and is so over the top. Back then, there was much more mystique, and more taste, as dumb as that sounds.
No, I don't recall encountering any stuck together pages. We were 11, 12, 13 at the time - you know what I mean.Sorry Jim, but I immediately get a picture of the pages of those swapped mags getting progessively more stuck together as they were passed back and forth! Having said that, I enjoyed many similar experiences as the one(s) you describe.
When I look back and recall, I sort of grin at the boyishness of it all. Swapping nudie magazines before school let it. Stuffing the magazine down the front of your shirt and hoping you would not get caught by a teacher, or have your treasure taken by another guy who figured out what you were carrying and he wanted it. Smuggling it home to read by flashlight so as not to get "caught" by mom. Finding that perfect hiding spot (the heat vet, or behind the dresser drawer) so as to have access, but not get caught.
In a way though, reading Penthouse (and we did read them after the pics got boring) gave us an "education" about sex because sure as Christ we weren't learning about it in school. There was a lot of information in there for a 12 year old to sift through. I clearly remember Penthouse speaking to the idea of spanking as sex play and me wondering why the fuck anyone would consider that pleasureable.
There's a lot of truth in that.Well said JTK... I actually feel bad for kids in the internet era as everything is too easy to get and is so over the top. Back then, there was much more mystique, and more taste, as dumb as that sounds.
In some ways the much more "in your face" style of sex now (It's everywhere) somehow takes away from the thrill a little bit. Sometimes when something is forbidden, it's far more exciting to have.
Porn is so easy to access now, almost (but not quite) mainstream even.
I remember being 15 and going to a theatre in Hamilton (I think it was called "The Playhouse" down at Barton and Sherman with my buddies to see a real porno. I remember between movies, they would have a stripper come out on stage and get naked. (I'm going back 30 years here). I remember there were about 8 of us from High School (drove down in my buddy's mom's Chevette in 2 shifts) who braved walking up to this place not knowing WHAT would happen - if we would get turned away (somehow just getting turned away from a movie theatre seemed like a big deal when you were 15) or get let in. As it turned out, the owner of the theatre wanted the money more than he was worried about getting nailed by the R Rated movie cops.
Anyway, I don't remember the movie, but I do remember the stripper who came out on stage between the movies and how everyone (all 12 of us - 8 from school and 4 lone wankers) RAN down to the front row of the theater to get a better look.
It was the first time I'd ever seen a live naked woman - at least one with pubic hair.
Good times.
For some season, I will always remember Penthouse for:
1) Lousy out of focus pics.
2) Amputee sex in the Penthouse Forum.
1) Lousy out of focus pics.
2) Amputee sex in the Penthouse Forum.
