Hef soon found that the American dream, at least as it was being dreamt in the early '50s, didn't work for him. The routine, the job -- and later the wife -- all felt constraining for Hefner. He left Esquire and went to work designing his magazine. Stag, as it was to be called, grew out of what Hef called a mature appreciation of the human body. The human body in question belonged to a young Marilyn Monroe -- Hef had gotten hold of never-published photos of the budding star with "nothing on but the radio." Changing the publication's name to Playboy, he borrowed money from his mother (she always wanted him to become a missionary) and took loans out on his furniture. He sat down at the kitchen table and did the first layout of the magazine himself.

"Playboy isn't like the downscale, male-bonding, beer-swilling phenomena that is being promoted now by some men's magazines," Hefner explained recently. "My whole notion was the romantic connection between male and female."

Playboy quickly became far more than porn, even if the depth was lost on some fans. With his deep new pockets, Hefner was soon bringing in America's best writers and pundits, in case anyone was reading it for the articles. Lenny Bruce, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and others were nurtured. And Alex Haley got his groundbreaking "Autobiography of Malcolm X" off the ground through his interview with the leader in Playboy.

Hefner worked to encourage his cultural revolution on other fronts as well. The Playboy Foundation, since its inception in 1965, has given away over $11 million in the name of social change. A devoted civil rights activist, Hefner funded assorted social action projects long before social action was hip.

Of course, the Foundation was scarcely enough to dissuade censure. As a testament to Playboy's unique cultural situation, the magazine received, and receives, criticism from all sides. The conservative group Concerned Women for America claims Playboy "belittled marriage" and "made commitment a dirty word." On the left, critics argue a similar point. And Naomi Wolf recently wrote, "A lot of men stay unmarried decade after decade because they bought the Hugh Hefner line that polygamist bachelorhood is ideal, and they lead largely empty lives."

But Playboy also sought to help feminism, at least in terms of articulating its various divisions. As the women's movement grew too massive and complex for any kind of heterodoxy, Hefner occasionally found himself marking assorted forks in the road. After Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and published a scathing critique of the magazine's degradation of women, thousands of women -- many of whom made a living from various porn-related careers -- responded with equal venom. That which Steinem called degrading, they said, was the very thing that granted them a level of economic and sexual freedom that few women had previously experienced.

Hef certainly doesn't hold a monopoly on these watershed cultural moments. But a figure need not be responsible for brilliant history in order to play a brilliant role in it. Even if Hefner were nothing more than a lucky dope who accidentally stumbled upon cultural fault lines throughout his life, he is still genius enough to stumble upon them over and over.

Hef is happy. It's an overwhelming happiness, one so insistent that the darker periods of his life -- his divorce from Millie, his second divorce in 1989 from Kimberly Conrad -- get strangely clouded by light. The familiar elements of his biography come in shades of pink, so to speak, and his biographers generally seem charmed by all the mirth. This is where Hefner gets interesting. Instrumental to his success is not just an impressive publishing instinct, but an unparalleled knack for spinning myth.

It's not coincidence that Playboy is a household name -- more so than other publications with comparable sales. The magazine has woven itself into American mythology, elbowed its way onto the landscapes of growing up, of being a man. The archetypal coming-of-age narrative is nothing without that first flustered glimpse of a centerfold in the 7-11 parking lot. An uncanny ability to tap into the country's Zeitgeist has made Playboy as American as an apple pie sitting on a Thanksgiving table in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Even the Playboy Foundation feeds a certain brilliant fiction. As a part of its impressive good-deeds program, the foundation sets aside grant money each year for a handful of citizens whom it deems protectors of the First Amendment. As a result, patriotic has now been added to the list of attributes conflated with Playboy. The point is not that Hefner's mythologies are untrue -- often they reflect entirely accurate numbers, opinions and phenomena. Their cultural play takes shape in the way they are disseminated, true or not.

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