Bob Guccione Died

Bob Guccione Died, penthouse, playboy june 2010, taya parker, maxim, arianny celeste playboy photos: Bob Guccione, who foundedPenthouse magazine and created an empire erotic business around it, than see it crumble as his investments have deteriorated and the world of pornography turned to video and the Internet, died Wednesday. He was 79.


A statement issued by the Guccione family said he died in hospital specialty Plano in Plano, Texas. His wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, said he had struggled against lung cancer for several years.

Penthouse reached the peak of his popularity in September 1984 with the publication of nude photos of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Williams, now a singer and actress, was forced to relinquish her crown after publication of the issue, which has sold nearly 6 million copies and have made 14 million dollars.

philosophy of voyeurism

A frustrated artist who has ever attended a Catholic seminary, Mr. Guccione Penthouse started in 1965 in England to subsidize his artistic career and was the first photographer of the magazine. He presented the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and sexual revolution.

Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Playboy Hugh Hefner offering a mix of sensational journalism with provocative pictures of naked women, called Penthouse Pets.

"We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Guccione said The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. He said he reached a stylized eroticism in his photographs posing his models in search of the camera.

"To see her as if she did not know she is being seen," he said. "This was the sexy party."

Mr. Guccione believes that Penthouse has earned $ 4 billion during his reign as publisher. He was listed in the Forbes 400 richest people with a net worth of $ 400 million in 1982.

Mr. Guccione has built an empire of companies in the Media General Inc., which included the divisions of the publishing and merchandising and Viva, a magazine featuring naked male targets a female audience. He also created Penthouse Forum magazine pocket who played in the success of democracy letters to the editor that began, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought I would be writing to you ..."

Diversification, the fall

Mr. Guccione and longtime business associate Kathy Keeton, who later became his third wife, also published more than price general public, such as Omni magazine, which focused on science fiction and science, and Longevity, a magazine for health advice. Keeton died of cancer in 1997 after surgery, but Mr. Guccione has continued to list her on the masthead Penthouse as president.

Probably the failure of the company best known was an investment of $ 17.5 million in 1979, the production of X-rated film "Caligula."

Legal costs further eroded his fortune, and he sold Penthouse in 2004. Among those who were prosecuted televangelist Jerry Falwell, a resort in California, a former Miss Wyoming and Penthouse Pet who accused him of forcing her to perform sexual favors for colleagues.

In 1985, Mr. Guccione had to pay 45 million dollars in unpaid taxes.

Married four times, he had a daughter, Toni, from his first marriage and two son, Bob Jr. and Nick, and daughter, Nina, his second.