Playboy icon Hugh Hefner spent his life enjoying the company of fair-haired beauties – and he’ll be spending eternity with the one he once described as ‘the ultimate blonde’.
Hefner is to be interred at LA’s Westwood Village Memorial Park next to Marilyn Monroe – the movie icon whose nude pictures launched the very first issue of Playboy back in 1953.
The publishing giant bought the crypt next to Marilyn’s for $75,000 back in 1992. It was substantially more than he paid for Marilyn’s nude calendar pics – $500. (A pre-fame Marilyn was paid a measly $50).
Speaking of his final resting place, Hugh once said, ‘Jay Leno suggested that if I was going to spend that kind of money, I should actually be on top of her.’
But while fans are seeing the final gesture as something cheeky and even romantic, others aren’t so sure – with some feminists raging online that it was a final act of disrespect by Hef – as Marilyn was allegedly not impressed that he’d published her then-shameful nude pictures in his magazine after she made it big.
Author Sady Doyle wrote in her book Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why: ‘Hugh Hefner, the man who’d leaked Monroe’s nudes in the first issue of Playboy decades before the phrase “leaking nudes” was even in the lexicon–he became an instant celebrity; she had to apologize for the photos, and feared for her career–bought the crypt next to Monroe’s for $75,000.
‘It was a gruesome joke, “sleeping with” the woman he’d almost ruined, and doing so without her consent–claiming her in death, as he’d claimed the right to exploit her in life.”’
But Hef himself wasn’t making any excuses for his choice of final resting place, saying before his death that he sincerely wanted to be with Marilyn, despite the fact they’d never even met, and explaining that other people he was close to are also buried in the same LA complex.
‘To me there’s something rather poetic in the fact that we’ll be buried in the same place,’ he said. ‘And that cemetery also has other meanings and connections for me. Friends like Buddy Rich and Mel Torme are buried there. So is Dorothy Stratten.’
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