By Terry Kirby
It began as a raunchier rival to the airbrushed all-American values of Playboy, unashamedly winning the "pubic wars" of the centrefolds in the 60s.
Playboy's Hugh Hefner celebrated the joys of the bachelor lifestyle, but for Penthouse and its flamboyant founder Bob Guccione, going for the groin was clearly top priority.
Now, nearly 40 years after it was first published and at a time when soft porn is probably more acceptable than ever before, it is supremely ironic that Penthouse is facing bankruptcy, outflanked by the Internet and the rise of harmless lads' magazines such as Maxim and FHM.
As his empire crumbles around him, Guccione, now 72 and ill with throat cancer, stays holed up in his $40-million, 45-room Manhattan mansion which has been offered as collateral for his debts.
Much time must surely be spent contemplating a largely self-inflicted series of catastrophic business decisions that have only hastened the Penthouse empire demise.
Penthouse has been in trouble for years; now the end is surely in sight. This week Guccione's publishing house filed for Chapter 11 protection at the US bankruptcy court in New York, seeking to restructure its debts and operations. The size of its debts is unclear, but the court was told it had up to $100- million (about R742-million) in both assets and debts.
According to reports, the company has been unable to maintain payments on a $41-million loan and the magazine has appeared only once since April because it has been unable to pay its printing costs.
The August issue is already nearly a month late. Some staff have been laid off and others not paid.
Last year, Guccione declared there was "no future" for mass-market adult magazines. He's probably right: circulation - five million at its peak in the 70s - had dropped to around one million in 1996 and to 530 000 at the end of last year.
Guccione's plight will be music to the ears of the man whom he once sought to depose as the King of the Centrefold.
Hugh Hefner - now in his mid-70s - is waxing while his old rival Guccione wanes, separated from his wife, said to be rejuvenated by Viagra and frolicking with his four regular Playmate girlfriends while the circulation of Playboy holds steady at 3,2 million.
Hefner has achieved this by cleverly retaining its airbrushed image and maintaining the idea it can be bought for something other than images of scantily-clad women: its interviews and serious articles.
"About the only thing remaining in Penthouse's favour is that it is portable porn," said Laurence O' Toole, author of Pornocopia, a recent study of the porn industry. "That apart, people who are used to looking at images on the internet don't feel they need to use magazines."
Ever since it was launched in London in 1965, when Guccione was working as a journalist there, Penthouse has sought to both emulate and go further than Playboy. Penthouse was the first to abandon airbrushing and coy poses to risk showing pubic hair.
Its photographs became more and more anatomical and Guccione boasted that "lesbians, threesomes, and full-frontal male nudity" had all been shown first in Penthouse. Where Playboy had girl-next-door Bunnies, Penthouse had its provocative Pets.
Guccione himself, a rugged Sicilian-American with a penchant for leather coats, open shirts and heavy medallions, surrounded by a bevy of Pets, implied that he was the real thing and that Hefner, with his silk pyjamas, his pipe and Pepsi, was really a bit of a wimp.
Guccione bought his own mansion and filled it with a $200-million art collection.
Many now agree the beginning of his decline was spending $17,5-million on the box-office bomb Caligula, a movie that remains an embarrassing blot on the careers of Peter O' Toole, Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell.
Guccione then spent $12-million on a failed project to mass-produce portable nuclear fusion kits and a further $40-million on research into genetic engineering. Another $60-million, plus $200 million of other people's money, was spent on an aborted casino venture.
Guccione's wife, former Durban stripper Kathy Keeton, died from breast cancer in 1997.
For many years, Guccione had relied on Keeton to run the financial side of his empire.
Guccione was grief-stricken by her death and retreated into his mansion, surrounded by his art and his bodyguards.
But as the debts mounted and without Keeton to advise him, things have gone from bad to worse.
Last year, Penthouse published what it wrongly claimed were topless pictures of tennis star and pin-up Anna Kournikova.
The magazine has already had to pay an undisclosed sum in damages to the woman who claimed the photos were of her.
Just three weeks ago, Guccione settled out of court with Kournikova.
The sum was undisclosed, but is likely to have been huge.
Ironically, perhaps the last straw that broke the back of Penthouse, the pioneer of pubic hair, might well have been to publish the kind of topless photographs that appear in newspapers worldwide every day. - The Independent