New Delhi: In 1963, Playboy carried an interview with India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in its October 1963 issue.
Playboy was banned in India back then. Yet, once Nehru’s interview became the talk of the town, people started smuggling it. It was allegedly sold for 30 times more than its original cost.
Nehru had famously vouched for the need for a nuclear weapon for the country’s safety and had said that he was sure of India’s development and spectacular growth in the future.
The interview, however, had its share of controversies.
If reports are to be believed, when the magazine was going to print in its final stage for that particular edition, Playboy received a message from the Indian Embassy saying that such an interview had never taken place.
Playboy issued a clarification which confirmed the Embassy reaching out and said that Playboy had never directly interviewed Nehru.
The magazine issued a clarification saying that the interview, which was given to the magazine by a well-known journalist, was actually a culmination of Nehru’s speeches. The journalist, however, was never found.
The magazine’s founder Hugh Hefner, who helped usher in the 1960s sexual revolution with his groundbreaking men's magazine and built a business empire around his libertine lifestyle, died on Wednesday at the age of 91.
Hefner, once called the "prophet of pop hedonism" by Time magazine, peacefully passed away at his home, Playboy Enterprises said in a statement.
Hefner was sometimes characterized as an oversexed Peter Pan as he kept a harem of young blondes that numbered as many as seven at his legendary Playboy Mansion. This was chronicled in "The Girls Next Door," a TV reality show that aired from 2005 through 2010. He said that thanks to the impotency-fighting drug Viagra he continued exercising his libido into his 80s.
"I'm never going to grow up," Hefner said in a CNN interview when he was 82. "Staying young is what it is all about for me. Holding on to the boy and long ago I decided that age really didn't matter and as long as the ladies ... feel the same way, that's fine with me."
Hefner settled down somewhat in 2012 at age 86 when he took Crystal Harris, who was 60 years younger, as his third wife.
He said his swinging lifestyle might have been a reaction to growing up in a repressed family where affection was rarely exhibited. His so-called stunted childhood led to a multi-million-dollar enterprise that centered on naked women but also espoused Hefner's "Playboy philosophy" based on romance, style and the casting off of mainstream mores.
Comments
0 comment