The late magazine publisher Bob Guccione, whose face and pants were both made of leather, was profiled in Vanity Fair in 2005 by his former Viva editor, Patricia Bosworth, at a time when the erstwhile porn king was in steep decline, as cancer and creditors, not critics and censors, were his chief concerns. Say what you will about him, but pornography being readily available on screens in shirt pockets and on top of laps is proof Guccione understood the extent of our urges long before we did. Even as he was losing his personal battle, he had won the war. The opening:
“I‘m frankly amazed at my own optimism,” says Bob Guccione, the 74-year-old pioneering pornographer and founder of Penthouse magazine. “Whenever I’m facing a crisis—and I’m certainly facing a crisis now—I just fight harder. I know I’m going to survive.”
Recent news reports have portrayed Guccione as a broken man. Having lost his entire Penthouse empire, he is said to be destitute, camping out in just four rooms of his princely home, on East 67th Street in Manhattan, spending most of his days curled up in bed asleep or watching CNN.
“An exaggeration,” he croaks, attempting to smile. “Exaggeration,” repeats his special assistant, Jane Homlish, to make sure he is understood. In 1998, a doctor performed laser surgery on Guccione’s tongue in an experimental cancer treatment, so it is hard to understand him when he speaks. Because he has difficulty swallowing, a liquid nutrient called Boost is piped into his stomach.
And yet he looks trim, tanned, and healthy. His skin positively glows, and he appears almost serene, except for the dark, haunted eyes that glare out from under his thick, grizzled brows. The reason he sleeps during the day, he says, is that he is up until four in the morning working on projects and his oil paintings.
He has just given me a tour of his mansion, one of the city’s largest private homes, which he designed himself. He uses the entire place—he even had a small dinner party here recently. He’s especially proud of the mosaic-lined swimming pool on the ground floor, flanked by two lead Napoleonic sphinxes, each with a Marie Antoinette head. They’re at the far end of the pool. On the floor below is a fully equipped gym. There’s also a huge paneled screening room, a winding marble staircase up to the “ballroom,” and a double living room with antique-mirror walls. Part of a great carved fireplace that once belonged to the architect Stanford White is in Guccione’s bedroom.
The mortgage on the house is now owned by Mexican businessman Dr. Luis Enrique Molina, who literally saved Bob from eviction in February 2004 by paying $24 million to his creditors. Bob says he doesn’t know how long he’ll remain here, since he and his girlfriend, April Warren, are the only occupants of the house’s 45 rooms. He still has 6 servants (down from 22), in addition to Homlish, who says she has no plans to leave him.
She was working with Guccione when I first met him, in 1974. He hired me as the executive editor of Viva, a sister publication of Penthouse that was billed as ‘the world’s most sophisticated erotic magazine for women.’ That was during Guccione’s glory days, when he was said to be one of the richest men in the world. According to a report in the New York Post last October, Penthouse has earned $4 billion since 1965, when Guccione founded it. During that time Guccione has squandered about $500 million of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures.
Today, Penthouses circulation is down to 400,000 from a 1979 high of 4.7 million, a victim of X-rated videos and pornographic Web sites.•