Bob Guccione

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione (December 17, 1930 – October 20, 2010) was an American photographer and publisher.

The couple had a daughter, Tonina (1949-2020).

The marriage failed, and he left his wife and child to go to Europe to be a painter.

He eventually met an English woman, Muriel Hudson, moved to London with her, and married her.

They had four children.

To support his family, Guccione managed a chain of laundromats until he got work as a cartoonist on an American weekly newspaper, The London American, while Muriel started a business selling pinup posters.

He occasionally created cartoons for Bill Box's humorous greeting card company Box Cards.

During the late 1960s, feminist groups criticized the magazine for supporting women's liberation only in terms of making them free to engage in sexual relationships with men.

While Playboy devoted extensive print to covering sports, one of Hugh Hefner's great passions, Guccione had no interest in them and never bothered discussing sporting events or athletes in Penthouse, instead preferring to cover the art world.

The magazine was founded on humble beginnings.

Owing to his lack of resources, Guccione personally photographed most of the models for the magazine's early issues.

As the magazine grew more successful, Guccione openly embraced a life of luxury; his former mansion at 14-16 East 67th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side was said to be the largest private residence in the borough at 22000 sqft.

Up to the end of the 1960s, it was not acceptable to display anything more than a female's buttocks or breasts in mainstream publications and anything more risked obscenity charges.

Only low-budget underground magazines displayed female genitals or explicit poses.

However, the counterculture movement led to an increasingly liberated sexual attitude after which a series of court rulings struck down most legal restrictions on pornography.

Penthouse has also, over the years, featured a number of authorized and unauthorized photos of celebrities such as Madonna and Vanessa Lynn Williams.

In both cases, the photos were taken earlier in their careers and sold to Penthouse only after Madonna and Williams became famous.

He founded the adult magazine Penthouse in 1965.

This was aimed at competing with Hugh Hefner's Playboy, but with more explicit erotic content, a special style of soft-focus photography, and in-depth reporting of government corruption scandals and the art world.

Penthouse began publication in 1965 in the United Kingdom and in North America in 1969, an attempt to compete with Hugh Hefner's Playboy.

Although Playboy had always had a liberal bent and championed the Civil Rights Movement and other social justice causes, Guccione offered editorial content that was more sensational, and the magazine's writing was far more investigative than other men's magazines, with stories about government cover-ups and scandals.

Writers such as Craig S. Karpel, James Dale Davidson and Ernest Volkman, as well as the critically acclaimed Seymour Hersh, exposed numerous scandals and corruption at the highest levels of the United States government.

On the other hand, Playboy retained a certain conservatism and embraced mainstream American consumerism rather than rejecting it.

However, in contrast to Hugh Hefner, who threw wild parties at his Playboy Mansions, life at Guccione's mansion was remarkably sedate, even during the height of the sexual revolution in the 1970s.

He reportedly once had his bodyguards eject a local radio personality who had been hired as a DJ and jumped into the swimming pool naked.

The magazine's pictorials offered more sexually explicit content than was commonly seen in most openly sold men's magazines of the era; it was the first to show female pubic hair, followed by full-frontal nudity and then the exposed vulva and anus.

In the early 1970s, Guccione invested around US$45 million in construction of Haludovo Palace Hotel, a luxury hotel resort in Malinska on Krk Island near Rijeka on the northern Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia.

He invested an additional $500,000 in advertisement.

Despite Yugoslavia being nominally a communist country, it encouraged foreign investments.

The entire project was designed by Yugoslav architect Boris Magaš and realized through Brodokomerc, a local company.

By 1982 Guccione was listed in the Forbes 400 wealth list, and owned one of the biggest mansions in Manhattan.

In Williams's case, this led to her forced resignation as Miss America 1984.

The September 1984 issue in which Williams was first featured also included a layout with pornographic actress Traci Lords, who was only 15 when the photo shoot was done and was later revealed to be underage throughout most of her career.

However, he made some extravagant investments that failed, and the growth of free online pornography in the 1990s greatly diminished his market.

In the late 1990s, the magazine began to show more "fetish" content such as urination, bondage and "facials."

In 2003, Guccione's publishers filed for bankruptcy and he resigned as chairman.

Guccione was born in Brooklyn, New York, of Sicilian descent and raised Catholic in Bergenfield, New Jersey, the eldest child of Anthony, an accountant, and Nina, a housewife.

An altar boy, he considered but rejected entering the priesthood.

He attended high school at Blair Academy, a prep school in Blairstown, New Jersey.

In his teens, Guccione married his first wife, Lilyann Becker.