Penthouse

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Penthouse

Penthouse, "the international magazine for men," became a household name along with its number one competitor, Playboy, during the 1960s and 1970s era of "free love" and sexual revolution. Following the 1953 debut of Hugh Hefner's erotic magazine, Bob Guccione rightly sensed that men might prefer to see a bit "more flesh" than was being offered by Playboy. In 1965, Guccione launched the London-based Penthouse, with slightly racier pictorials as well as investigative stories.

In 1969, the magazine was moved to the United States, where it expanded into a publishing dynasty that included Forum (1975), Penthouse Letters (1981), and several non-erotic ventures, such as Omni, a consumer science magazine (1978), Compute (1979), and Longevity (1989). Although Penthouse (a subsidiary of General Media Publishing) continued to grow and diversify over the next three decades, the company remained privately owned by Guccione and his companion, Kathy Keeton, whose operation was something of a Mom-and-Pop arrangement, staffed by several members of Guccione's family. Working from the nine-story mansion he shared with Keeton on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Guccione became known for his gold chains and lavish lifestyle.

Guccione's enterprise was anything but smooth sailing during the 1980s. Throughout the Reagan era, Penthouse was ravaged by attacks from Christian right-wing conservative groups such as the National Federation for Decency. One of the more damaging campaigns came in 1986 when Attorney General Edwin Meese and an 11-member Commission on Pornography sought to intimidate retailers by publishing a blacklist of pornography distributors. Sending its warning on Justice Department stationary, the Commission advised several large booksellers and retail chains that they would be named. Bowing to the pressure, Southland Corporation, parent company of 7-11 convenience stores, announced that it would no longer sell either Penthouse or Playboy in its 4,500 outlets. By the end of the campaign, some 20,000 retail and convenience stores had been dissuaded from carrying the adult titles.

Penthouse retaliated, along with Playboy and the American Booksellers Association, by filing a suit against the Commission, charging it with violating the First Amendment. Although a Federal District Court eventually forced the Commission to retract its letter, it denied the plaintiffs financial relief; in a strange footnote, Edwin Meese was later reported to have said that he did not consider either Playboy or Penthouse to be obscene.

Penthouse's constant legal battles throughout the 1980s and 1990s cost it millions of dollars in annual litigation fees, but the magazine had another, more threatening problem: videocassette distributors, who now boasted that some ten percent of their sales were in the category of erotica. "People are simply reading less," noted Guccione. "They're into other media."

Overall, Penthouse witnessed a steady decline in circulation and never recovered its 1979 high of 4.7 million. By 1987, the numbers had fallen to 3 million; by 1995, circulation was just over the one million mark. That same year, the magazine actually lost money for the first time in its history. Playboy's numbers were also steadily declining, but remained slightly higher than those of Penthouse.

To recoup profits, Guccione's team experimented with a range of strategies, including a cover story on celibacy as "the new hot lifestyle." It also launched headlong into three new ventures in the 1980s, including Spin, a music magazine to be run by Bob Guccione, Jr., New Look, which survived less than six months, and the unexpected Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Technology, which targeted defense industry personnel.

Never one to back down from a First Amendment challenge, Penthouse found itself under siege yet again in 1990; this time, by the American Family Association, a Christian group which planned to picket 400 Waldenbooks and K-Mart stores for carrying Penthouse and Playboy. In response to the threat, Ed Morrow, President of the American Booksellers Association, and Harry Hoffman, President and CEO of Walden, took out advertisement space in 28 daily papers, in which readers were asked to respond by "voting" for freedom of expression. The campaign was a success: over 50,000 Americans returned ballots in support of First Amendment rights within the first seven days of the appearance of the advertisements. In contrast, less than 100 picketers showed up for the American Family Association's planned protests.

In 1992, Penthouse faced yet another challenge from the United States Navy, which found the distribution and sale of adult magazines on naval bases to be inconsistent with rules and regulations concerning sexual harassment and human dignity. Guccione responded rhetorically, asking, "How do you put a man in uniform, teach him to kill, expose him to images of war and all sorts of inhumanity and in the same breath tell him he is not sanctioned to buy a magazine that shows people making love?" This, however, was a battle that Penthouse would lose. In 1996, President Clinton signed The Military Honor and Decency Act, stating that "the Secretary of Defense may not permit the sale or rental of sexually explicit material on property under the jurisdiction of the Defense Department." Although Guccione won an appeal, citing the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, the decision was overturned in a 1998 Supreme Court ruling which held that a military base is not a public forum.

So as not to be left behind in the technological race, Penthouse went on-line in 1995, and quickly became one of the 25 most frequently-visited web sites. The magazine also found something of a new niche in the early 1990s with unauthorized celebrity sex photos. During this period, it won court battles to publish explicit materials of Tonya Harding (sold to the magazine by ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly), Paula Jones (also obtained from a former boyfriend), and Pamela Lee Anderson and her husband Tommy Lee.

In 1995, Penthouse received additional publicity from an unlikely source when the Unabomber named the magazine as his third choice—after The New York Times and The Washington Post —for publication of a manuscript advocating an anti-technology revolution. Guccione offered the terrorist—who was linked to 16 bombings since 1978—an unedited monthly column in return for his agreement not to strike again; the offer was nullified, of course, by the Unabomber's subsequent capture.

Peter Bloch, Penthouse editor since 1983, once claimed that Guccione's publication, unlike Playboy, had never been ashamed to portray explicit sexuality in its pages. Indeed, Penthouse broke barriers, said Bloch, by being "the first to show full frontal nudity." In 1997, the magazine ventured a step further into carnality, announcing that it would no longer shy away from depicting copulation. It remains to be seen, of course, what the anti-pornography forces will make of this.

—Kristal Brent Zook