Bob Guccione was struggling to get by in London in 1965 when he hit upon an idea for a magazine to out-sex Hugh Hefner’s popular Playboy. With a bank loan of $1,170 Guccione launched Penthouse—ginning up interest in the publication by sending pornographic samples to the wives of members of Parliament, clergymen, retirees, and even schoolgirls. The pornographer made his mark; all 120,000 copies of Penthouse’s first issue sold within days.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey, Guccione dreamed of being an artist, said Time. Following the failure of a teen marriage—his first of four— “he wandered Europe and North Africa, sketching cafe patrons.” After settling in London, Guccione conceived his “daring, next generation” challenge to Playboy: Instead of emulating Hefner’s “girl next door” models, Guccione’s naked girls were decidedly “naughty,” looking away from the camera to emphasize the magazine’s “voyeurism.”
Penthouse became the basis of a pornographic empire, General Media Inc., that would swell Guccione’s net worth to $400 million by 1982, said The New York Times. Living in a lavish Manhattan townhouse filled with works by the likes of Renoir and Picasso, Guccione “looked the part of the libidinous pornographer,” with “silk shirts open to the waist, showing gold chains on a hairy chest.” In 1984, Penthouse published sexually explicit photos of Vanessa Williams—taken two years before she became the first black Miss America. The issue sold nearly 6 million newsstand copies.
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Over time, Guccione’s fortune, diminished by bad investments, was further eroded by the advent of home video and the Internet, which offered cheaper and more varied “naked thrills,” said The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps his most spectacular failure was the film Caligula, a $17.5 million, X-rated sexfest that director Tinto Brass said had been intended as a “film on the orgy of power” but instead became a window on “the power of the orgy.”
General Media filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and creditors foreclosed on Guccione’s mansion a few years later, auctioning off its furnishings. “Kind of gaudy,” said a prospective buyer, perusing marble columns and fireplace mantels. “I guess he lived a different lifestyle.”
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