Been a waiter, shoe shiner too. Even had a cleaning company for a while. Nothing worked for Bob Guccione. Until he started the nude magazine Penthouse. The money and the girls poured in. And back outside. The documentary series Secrets of Penthouse tells the story.
“At the height of his success, my father lived in a mansion on New York’s Upper East Side. The house had 42 rooms in which a rotating group of sixty girls lived. I was 15 at the time and, together with my father, the only man in the house. The girls slept in the fancy part, the part with the gold baths and gold taps. But also in the part where father showed them videos of women having sex with animals. I had to sleep with the staff. Because my father wanted to keep me far away from pets – that’s what he called the girls. When he suspected that I was in love with Sheila Kennedy (a girl then 16 years old), my father forced her against her will and inclination to share a bed with one of his secretaries.”
Son Nick says this in the documentary Secrets of Penthouse , which is now streaming on Apple TV+. Father Bob Guccione can no longer refute it, because he died in 2010, penniless.
Bob Guccione was the son of Italian immigrants, born in 1930 in Brooklyn (New York). An artistic boy who wanted to become a photographer. But when he was 18, his girlfriend got pregnant and Bob had to get married. Shortly after the birth of their daughter, the couple divorced and Bob sought his fortune in Europe and North Africa. He earned a living as a shoe shiner, waiter and portrait artist.
Guccione came up with a grandiose trick
In Tangier (Morocco) he met the British singer Muriel Hudson. They became a couple and soon had four children. In 1960, Bob (then 30) thought it was time to settle in London with his family. He started a cleaning company, drew cartoons for a trade union and set up a mail order company with unsold nude magazines, including Playboy’s. Bob thought: I can do this better. He recruited girls who were willing to pose completely naked; that in Playboy were still scantily dressed at the time.
Because of his bare leaves Penthouse (he wanted a fancy name) Guccione came up with a grandiose trick. He sent the launch brochure, which already contained a few racy photos, to clergy, pensioners and wives of MPs. Guccione received a lawsuit, a fine of 300 euros, but above all a lot of press attention. The 120,000 copies of the first Penthouse were sold out immediately.
With those proceeds, Guccione moved back to New York, because he would have a much greater reach in the US. It was the sixties, the years of the sexual revolution. At that time, bare leaves were still seen as a means of combating bourgeois prudishness.
Relationship of trust with the girls
Playboy was already there. Yet it was Penthouse an even greater success with a monthly circulation of 4.7 million copies. Especially because Penthouse showed more nudity. “That was possible because I was the photographer,” Guccione said in an interview in the magazine Life . “I built up a relationship of trust with the girls and only then did I go into the photo studio with them. Hugh Hefner did not take the photos himself Playboy .”
Jane Hargrave was one of them Penthouse models. In the series she tells how she read a modeling advertisement as an 18-year-old Catholic student Penthouse . “When I checked into Bob’s mansion, he talked to me for a long time and then I had to undress in the bathroom. He looked at me, but didn’t touch me. I was enchanted by his great appearance and his deep divine voice. The following week we flew in his private jet to an island off Honduras. There we let our friendship ‘bloom’ and he took photos.”
During that period, Guccione was married to Kathy Keeton. Upon returning to New York, he let Hargrave sleep in the room next to his and Kathy’s. “Bob would regularly sneak into bed with me at night,” says Hargrave. She became a bit of a manager of the new models. She had to make sure they took their birth control pills…because the pills made them feel aroused and that was good for the photos.”
Madonna and Vanessa Williams were allowed in immediately
Guccione became one of the most successful publishers of the 1970s. He brought next Penthouse six other magazines, including one with naked men. In the meantime, celebrities jostled for each other Penthouse to be allowed to stand. Madonna and Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, were allowed in immediately. Their nude photos were flanked by stories from the best American pens such as Stephen King and Philip Roth. Guccione became richer and richer. Mid-80s estimated business magazine Forbes his net worth at $400 million.
But the next decade saw the US lurch to the right. President Ronald Reagan (Republicans) started the fight against porn. There was a ban on the Penthouse -sales in the 80,000 branches of the 7-Eleven retail chain. And then there were expensive tax evasion lawsuits. And for wrong photos: Penthouse printed photos of tennis star Anna Kournikova on a topless beach, but the photos showed a completely different woman. But much more fatal: Guccione did not realize that pornography was shifting from paper to the internet.
After the flop of his cinema film Calligula , with top British actress Helen Mirren, Guccione entered the hotel business. But his luxury hotels in the US and the former Yugoslavia went bankrupt. He tried to make up for that loss by investing his last money in a home-grown nuclear reactor. When Guccione died of throat and lung cancer in 2010, he almost lost his entire fortune. Only his fourth wife, a former one of course Penthouse model, still reminded of its rich past.
Secrets of Penthouse can be seen on Apple TV+