![]() Professor Dershowitz is the author of 27 fiction and nonfiction works.Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine who died on Wednesday aged 79, built a fortune out of showing those parts of the female anatomy that other magazines would not, but saw his business empire fall apart after the pornography industry migrated from print to video and the internet. He has also published more than 100 articles in magazines and journals, and more than 300 of his articles have appeared in syndication in 50 national daily newspapers. Dershowitz is a Brooklyn native who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights.” He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. I hope his family eventually gets to enjoy the paintings that were so much a part of Bob’s soul. It was a good fight, and although he died fighting it, the fight is not yet over. Bob Guccione died fighting for his right to maintain control over his own artistic output. He wanted them around him as he lay dying, but his creditors denied him his last wish. In this file photo, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione poses in his New York mansion with an over-sized gavel his daughter gave him after. Although these paintings did not have enormous commercial value, they meant everything to Bob. What he could not bear was his creditors taking his own art-the painting he himself had done as a young man. Bob could live with that, because he knew that taking financial risks had consequences. They took his homes, the art he had collected over the years and even his furniture. These failures resulted in predators coming after him with a vengeance. ![]() Others failed, most particularly his efforts to build casinos and expand his business into other areas. Some of these missions succeeded, especially during the early years of Penthouse. We often disagreed about both, but I never questioned the seriousness of his views. Anthony Haden-Guest: My Pal the Porn King Guccione believed deeply in what he was doing to expand boundaries of sexually explicit photography, as well as his efforts to expand the boundaries of medicine through his other magazines and the research he supported.His paintings were exhibited in several museums and some hung in his office. In addition to the art of the great masters, Bob had a collection of his own paintings, most of which were done when he was a young man living in Europe and exploring various forms of painting. He had so much art that much of it was stacked up in his office. He loved early 20th-century paintings, especially by Modigliani, Picasso, Leger, and Rouault. The talk around the table was serious, often revolving around the wonderful art we were privileged to see throughout his home. I don’t remember any politicians or Hollywood celebrities. ![]() The guests at his dinners were philosophers, British barristers, poets, occasional athletes (mostly boxers), and artists. The only naked woman I ever saw in the house was rising out of a seashell in the Botticelli painting that hung on the wall near his marble staircase. He invited people to dinner and I was a frequent guest. He was not Hugh Hefner, who used his house to exemplify his sexual values.īob’s house-an elegant mansion on the East Side of New York-was his private refuge from the world. Since he led a relatively solitary life and was seen largely through the lens of his controversial magazine, not very many people got to know him. (For a full expression of my views on pornography, see the chapter in my book Shouting Fire, “Why Pornography” pages 163-175.) The purpose of this column is to tell its readers about Bob Guccione, the man. I will be happy to continue to debate it, as I did in the many columns I wrote for Penthouse magazine and in the testimony I gave before the Meese Commission on pornography, but that is not the purpose of this column. I know that this last view is controversial and I have debated it with numerous feminists over the years. He never forced anybody to look at the pictures, and the pictures didn’t harm anybody. I think what he did was none of anybody’s business except those who enjoyed his magazine. Bob was a nice guy who did things that some people thought were not nice. Although there is undoubtedly some truth to that position-I have defended Nazis, Stalinists and other assorted bigots-it does not apply to Bob Guccione.
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