Guccione’s staff, which included family members, often described the publisher as mercurial. He wandered Europe as a painter for several years.Īpril 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. He spent several months in a Catholic seminary before dropping out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. Guccione was born in Brooklyn and attended prep school in New Jersey. FriendFinder made a bid this year for Playboy, which now outsells Penthouse roughly 10 to one, but Hefner has rejected it. 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. In 2004, a private-equity investor from Florida acquired Penthouse in a bankruptcy sale. “The future has definitely migrated to electronic media,” Guccione acknowledged in a 2002 New York Times interview. Over the first six months of 2010, Penthouse reported circulation of barely 178,000. 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. Sales dropped after the Meese commission report and years later took another hit with the proliferation of X-rated videos and Web sites. 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. Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography issued a report attacking the adult entertainment industry. In 1985, Guccione had to pay $45 million in delinquent taxes. 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. He never received a gambling license and construction of the casino stalled. Guccione also lost millions on a proposed Atlantic City casino. However, it eventually became General Media’s most popular DVD. 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.ĭistributors shunned the film, with its graphic scenes of lesbianism and incest. Guccione lost much of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures. Keeton died of cancer in 1997 following surgery, but Guccione continued to list her on the Penthouse masthead as president. 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. He also created Penthouse Forum, the pocket-size magazine that played off the success of the racy letters to the editor. umbrella that included book publishing and merchandising divisions and Viva, a magazine featuring male nudes aimed at a female audience. Guccione built a corporate empire under the General Media Inc. That was the part that none of our competition understood.” “To see her as if she doesn’t know she’s being seen,” he said. He added that he attained a stylized eroticism in his photography by posing his models looking away from the camera. “We followed the philosophy of voyeurism,” Guccione told The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. The centerfolds were dubbed Penthouse Pets. Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women. He introduced the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution. Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidize his art career and was the magazine’s first photographer.
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