I Never Thought This Could Happen to Me…

Bob Guccione, who loved the naked ladies, but lacked Hugh Hefner’s fashion sense and Larry Flynt’s passion for the Constitution, has died of cancer at the age of 79. Once upon a time boys and girls, you needed $2.95 and a cashier willing to look the other way in order to see boobies; now you need Google. In that climate, Guccione founded Penthouse and made a fortune, keeping himself in the finest gold chains and unbuttoned silk shirts. Even if you can’t buy class, you can buy art, and Guccione amassed an art collection replete with Degas, Renoir, Picasso, El Greco, Dalí, Matisse, Van Gogh and Chagall appraised at more than $50 million. Guccione made Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, a household name with a photo spread that cost her her crown in 1984 and yielded the publication’s best-selling issue. When his ideas ventured outside the sock drawer, he was generally less successful. He sank $200 million into a failed Atlantic City casino, lost another $17 million trying to develop a nuclear reactor, and overestimated the market for a pornographic, blood-soaked history lesson with the John Gielgud rompCaligula. As pro bono porn proliferated on the Internet, Penthouse’s performance plateaued, then plummeted. Bankruptcy, resignation, foreclosure, death.