The original playa

This article was originally published during the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.

The prevailing image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is one of a Viagra-popping octogenarian satyr, ensconced in his fabled L.A. mansion, frolicking with a harem of big-breasted Playmates young enough to be his granddaughters. Some find it disgusting, others find it amusing and others think it's just sad.

'Perceptions related to both myself and the magazine are very much projections of other people's dreams, fantasies and prejudices.' Hugh Hefner

Those with longer memories, however, will remember the other sides of Hefner. There was the gutsy young publisher whose magazine, launched in 1953, paved the way for new, uninhibited attitudes towards sex. There was the activist who used his pages to fight for civil rights and liberties. And there was the rebel who broke racial barriers on television, published blacklisted writers in the McCarthy era and championed pariahs like comedian Lenny Bruce.

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, Brigitte Berman's new documentary premiering at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, illuminates those half-forgotten facets of the man. The most extensive film on Hefner to date (it runs 135 minutes), Berman's biopic skims the salacious details of his very public private life but homes in on the considerable social impact of Playboy. Among those interviewed are Rev. Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, George Lucas, Bill Maher, sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer and gay clergyman Malcolm Boyd. Hefner himself co-operated fully with Berman, opening his vast personal archives to the Canadian filmmaker, even letting her animate his teenage cartoons.

Although Berman talks to a few of his detractors Christian singer Pat Boone, old-guard feminist Susan Brownmiller the portrait is largely flattering. It's no surprise that Hefner's happy to promote it. On the phone from the Playboy Mansion, his Midwestern drawl as robust as ever, he explains that he and Berman first bonded over their shared love of jazz. He was a fan of her Oscar-winning documentary Artie Shaw: Time is All You've Got (1986), a fascinating biography of the idiosyncratic big-band leader, and ended up releasing her earlier Bix Beiderbecke doc on his Playboy video label.

Even though he studied psychology in college, Hefner says he didn't start Playboy as a sexual crusader. When the 27-year-old Hefner put together the first issue of the magazine at the kitchen table of his Chicago apartment, his only aim was to produce a younger, racier version of the already-established Esquire.

"It had always been a dream of mine to publish a men's magazine," he says. "We didn't really introduce into its pages the other half of who I am in other words, the social activist until the early 1960s. Once the magazine had passed a million copies a month, I started taking more chances." It was then that he introduced the celebrated Playboy Interview its first subject, jazz legend Miles Davis and began banging out a rambling, 18-part editorial credo that he dubbed The Playboy Philosophy. Partly a response to his critics, it spelled out Hefner's liberal views on everything from politics and religion to gay rights and gender parity. "My comment at the time was, 'If we were going to be damned, I'd rather be damned for who I am than for what other people think that I am.'"

Hefner acted on his beliefs, both in Playboy and in its spinoff projects. The film includes some fascinating archival clips of his 1959-60 syndicated television show, Playboy's Penthouse, whose guests included blacklisted musician Larry Adler and the interracial Gateway Singers.

"It's difficult for people today to realize what a different world we lived in back then, and how truly segregated it was," he recalls. "Even major performers in many cases couldn't live in the same hotels in which they performed. Nat (King) Cole appeared on the first show of Playboy's Penthouse. He'd had a short-lived network show in the middle '50s and it was cancelled because they couldn't get any advertising. Nat's comment on that was, 'Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.'"

By the 1960s, Playboy was a major success as the first magazine to both titillate male readers with nude centrefolds and edify them with literature and serious commentary. World-class intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote articles. Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer contributed their latest fiction. Future Roots author Alex Haley conducted a famous Playboy Interview with Martin Luther King Jr., as well as a tense one with American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, a testament to Hefner's unstinting belief in free speech.

By the 1970s and '80s, however, Playboy was under attack by feminists, anti-porn campaigners and the newly invigorated religious right. Hefner responded by supporting the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and a charity to rescue child prostitutes, and by making humanitarian gestures like airlifting Vietnam War orphans on his private "Big Bunny" jet. A cynical Brownmiller suggests Playboy was shrewdly undermining its enemies, but Hefner seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the objectification of women. When asked about it, his favourite dodge is to claim that he and Playboy are a kind of Rorschach inkblot test. "Perceptions related to both myself and the magazine are very much projections of other people's dreams, fantasies and prejudices," he says.

While the multimillionaire continues to support worthy causes, the relevance of his magazine has faded. "Obviously, the magazine can never have the kind of impact that it had in the '50s and '60s, because that [sexual] revolution, although it's ongoing, has taken place. We live in a very different world in terms of our social-sexual values and behaviours than we did before I started the magazine."

Of more immediate concern, however, are Playboy's shaky fortunes in the era of internet porn and lad rags like Maxim and FHM, as well as declining print readership and the current recession. Hefner admits times are tough, but he has faith in Playboy's many side projects and products from casinos to lingerie as well as growing markets abroad.

"Curiously enough, with all the other problems in terms of magazine publishing, et cetera, the brand itself is hotter now than it's ever been," Hefner says. "It is one of the most popular of men's brands on the mainland of Red China, where the magazine is not yet permitted. There is a fascination with it. That bunny represents, for a lot of people, personal, economic and political freedom."

Late in Berman's film, Dr. Ruth suggests that Hefner's misfortune has been to let his lifestyle a teen boy's fantasy of games, parties and sexy women obscure his importance as a social activist. When I mention the quote, Hefner shrugs it off. "There are many roads to Mecca, there's more than one moral way to live your life," he says, insisting his work has been a reaction to the puritanical, hypocritical one of his parents' generation. Nor does he have any serious regrets.

"I think I am one of the luckiest cats on the planet," he says. "I take a tremendous amount of satisfaction in the impact that I've had on my world."

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel opens in Toronto on Aug. 6, Montreal, Edmonton and Calgary on Aug. 13 and Vancouver on Aug. 20.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.