Legacy MattersLike Presidents, Hugh Hefner at 80 is worried about his legacy.
The founder of Playboy, says a Reuters profile, has become "utterly obsessed with his own legacy" and lately has "filled some 1,500 leather-bound scrapbooks about his life and history to date." From the first issue of Playboy to appear on Chicago newsstands in 1953 right up to the latest clippings on his current reality show, "The Girls Next Door," no trace of Mr. Hefner's storied adventures will be lost to posterity.
He's even picked out his grave site, directly adjacent to Marilyn Monroe's tomb at Westwood Memorial Park.
But he can't pretty up the reality that he will be known principally as a pornographer writes Matthew Scully in the Wall St Journal.
It was Mr. Hefner who put the real money in porn, a business hard to go poor in under any circumstances (except for the unfortunates given starring roles) and today a $57 billion-a-year global industry. He brought it into the central stream of culture, so that now even upscale bookstores stock Penthouse or similar offerings without a second thought. He gave porn that "classy" feel and its phony creed of "artistic" expression and protected "speech" by which far livelier fare than Playboy would soon ease into popular culture.
Playboy Enterprises itself, years ago, dropped the pretense of refinement and delicacy, following the money into hard-core cable. Soft-core, hard-core, these were all along just degrees of exploitation and self-debasement and for the procurers a purely legal and commercial calculation.
Scully's right when he says that not many women think that the world is a better place because of Playboy or "the smug, selfish ethic it has always purveyed"
Scully concludes:
All of us have our share of faults and sins to account for. But the lowest of vices and "strangest secret of hell," as G.K. Chesterton called it, is the desire to pervert others, to coax and corrupt them and drag them down with you.
In the end, your legacy is the impact of your being on earth on the lives of others.