Leontyne Price in 1994

Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in the Deep South, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.^[1][2][3]

One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant", "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls", as well as "genuinely buttery, carefully produced but firmly under control", with phrases that "took on a seductive sinuousness." ^[4] Time magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C."^[5]

A lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric") soprano, she was considered especially well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as several in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her voice ranged from A-flat below middle C to the E above high C. (She said she reached F "in the shower.")

After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts for another 12 years.

Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and nineteen Grammy Awards, 13 for operatic or song recitals, five for full operas, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In October 2008, she was one of the recipients of the first Opera Honors given by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Life and career[link]

Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a lumber mill and her mother Katie was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. Given a toy piano at the age of three, she began piano lessons with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. At 14, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson, an experience she later said was inspirational.

Price in 1951

In her teen years, Leontyne accompanied the "second choir" at St. Paul's Methodist Church, sang and played for the chorus at the black high school, and earned extra money by singing for funerals and civic functions. Meanwhile, she often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, an affluent white family for whom Leontyne's aunt worked as a laundress. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the girl's early piano playing, and later noticed her extraordinary singing voice.

Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at the all-black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. (This institution's public and private arms split in her junior year and she graduated from the publicly funded half, which became Central State University.) Her success in the glee club led to solo assignments, and she was encouraged to complete her studies in voice. She sang in the choir with another soon-to-be-famous singer, Betty Allen. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous bass Paul Robeson, who put on a benefit concert for her, she enrolled on a scholarship at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she studied with Florence Page Kimball, who would remain her principal teacher and advisor throughout the 1960s.

Her first opera performance was as Mistress Ford in a 1952 student production of Verdi's Falstaff. Shortly thereafter, Virgil Thomson hired her for the revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. After a two-week Broadway run, Saints went to Paris. Meanwhile, she had been cast as Bess in the Blevins Davis/Robert Breen revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and returned for the opening of the national tour at the Dallas State Fair, on June 9, 1952. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., and then went on a tour of Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Price from Porgy and Bess 1953

On the eve of the European tour, Price married the noted bass-baritone William Warfield, who was singing Porgy in the Davis-Breen production, in a ceremony at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many in the cast in attendance. In his memoir, My Music and My Life, Warfield describes how their careers forced them apart. They were legally separated in 1967, and divorced in 1973. They had no children.

At first, Price planned on a recital career, modeling herself after Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other great black concert singers. On occasional leaves from Porgy, she sang new songs and song cycles by American composers, including Lou Harrison, John La Montaine, and Samuel Barber.

However, her Bess proved she had the instincts and the voice for the operatic stage, and the Met itself recognized this by inviting her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953 at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Price was therefore the first African American to sing with the Met, if not at the Met. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, who, on January 7, 1955, sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera.

Emergence[link]

In November 1954, Price made her recital debut at New York's Town Hall with a program that featured the New York premiere of Samuel Barber's cycle "Hermit Songs", with the composer at the piano. (They had performed the world premiere of the cycle the previous fall at the Library of Congress.) Then, opera opened its door to her through TV. In February 1955, she sang Puccini's "Tosca" for NBC-TV Opera, under music director Peter Herman Adler, and became the first African American to appear in a leading role in televised opera. Several NBC affiliates (not all Southern) canceled the broadcast in protest.

That March, Andre Mertens, Price's agent at Columbia Artists, arranged an audition for her at Carnegie Hall with the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, then touring with the Berlin Philharmonic. Karajan declared her "an artist of the future" and invited her to sing Salome under his baton at La Scala. (On the advice of Miss Kimball and Mertens, she declined.) In 1955-56, 1956-57 and 1957-58, Price made recital tours across the U.S. in the Community Concerts series, and toured India(1956) and Australia (1957), sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

She took her first steps onto the grand operatic stage in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, singing Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. A few weeks later, Price sang her first Aida, stepping in for Italian soprano Antonietta Stella. The following May, she made her European debut at the Vienna Staatsoper on May 24, 1958, as Aida, under Karajan. There followed debuts at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (replacing Anita Cerquetti), and at the Arena di Verona, both in Aida. She returned to Vienna the following year to sing Aida and her first onstage Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, and in the summer of 1959, made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in the "Missa Solemnis", under Karajan.

Over the next decade, Karajan conducted Price in many of her greatest performances, in the opera house (Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's Il trovatore and Puccini's Tosca), in the concert hall (Bach's B-minor Mass, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Bruckner's Te Deum, and the Requiems of Verdi and Mozart), as well as in the recording studio (complete recordings of Tosca and Carmen, and a bestselling holiday music album A Christmas Offering--all of which are available on CD).

On May 21, 1960, she made her first appearance at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, again as Aida. She was the first African American to sing a leading role in Italy's greatest opera house. (In 1958, [Mattiwilda Dobbs]] had sung Elvira, the secondary lead soprano role in Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri.)

Metropolitan Opera[link]

The Metropolitan Opera invited Price to sing a pair of performances as Aida in 1958, but she turned down the offer on the advice of friends, including Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera. In his autobiography, William Warfield writes that Adler said, "Leontyne is to be a great artist. When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave."

In the summer of 1959, Met General Manager Rudolf Bing heard an Il Trovatore at Verona in which Price sang with tenor Franco Corelli. There followed an invitation to the Met to perform multiple leading roles. On January 27, 1961 she and Corelli made a historic double-debut with Corelli in Trovatore. The final ovation lasted at least 35 minutes, one of the longest in Met history. (Price said her friends had timed it at 42 minutes, and she used that number in her later publicity.)

In his review, The New York Times critic Harold Schonberg wrote that Price's "voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the least bit of trouble. She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has."

The reviews were less heady for Corelli, who told Bing the next morning that he would never sing with Price again. However, he relented and Price and Corelli sang together often over the next dozen years.

In the next few weeks, Price gave her Met performances as Aïda, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, and Liu in Turandot. In the middle of this extraordinary run of debuts, equaled by only a few sopranos in the Met's history, Time magazine put her on its cover. The next fall, American music critics named her "Musician of the Year" and she was put on the cover of "Musical America."

In September 1961, Price opened the Met season as Minnie in La fanciulla del West. When a musicians' strike had threatened to abort the season, President Kennedy sent Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate a settlement. During the second "Fanciulla" performance, she had her first serious vocal crisis. In the middle of the second Act, she grew hoarse and then lost her singing voice. She chose to shout her lines to the end of the act. The standby, soprano Dorothy Kirsten, was called to sing the third Act. The newspapers reported that Price was suffering a virus infection. After several weeks off, she repeated the Fanciulla, and then, after a Butterfly in December, canceled appearances for the rest of the year, and, in February 1962, left for a two-month respite in Rome. The official word was that she had never fully recovered from the earlier virus, but Price later said she was suffering from exhaustion.

In April, she returned to New York for her first Met Toscas. On her first Met tour that spring, she sang Tosca, "Butterfly," and two performances of Fanciulla, including one in Dallas that marked the first performance by an African-American on the Met tour in the South.

Other African American singers had preceded Price in leading roles at the Met.^[6] However, Price was the first African American to build a star career on both sides of the Atlantic, the first to return to the Met in multiple leading roles, and the first to earn the Met's top fee. In 1964, according to the Met archives, Leontyne Price was paid $2,750 per performance, on a par with Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. At the time, Birgit Nilsson, who was unique in singing Italian and Wagnerian roles, earned the Met's highest fee, $3,000 a performance.

Over the next five seasons, Price added seven more roles at the Met: (in chronological order) Elvira in Verdi's Ernani, Pamina in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Cleopatra in Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, and Leonora in La forza del destino. Her voice and temperament were especially well suited to Verdi's "middle period" heroines, noble ladies with high, glowing lines and postures of dignified suffering and prayerful supplication. She was also the leading exponent of the plaintive soprano part in Verdi's Requiem.

[edit] Antony and Cleopatra

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Her career climaxed on September 16, 1966, when Price sang Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, commissioned to open the Met's new house at Lincoln Center. Since their early collaborations, Price and Barber had remained close friends and colleagues, and the composer tailored Cleopatra's music to Price's warm middle register and soaring top.

In the performances, Price's singing was praised, especially for a powerful death scene, but the opera as a whole was widely considered a failure. Director Franco Zeffirelli was blamed for burying the music under heavy costumes and huge scenery. Bing admitted he had underestimated the challenge of mounting nine new productions that season (three in the first week), and relying heavily on untested high-tech equipment. (In rehearsals, an expensive turntable broke down and, in the dress rehearsal, another mechanical failure left Price trapped briefly inside a giant pyramid.)

Still others complained that Barber's score was difficult to grasp because of the dense Shakespearean verse, and lacked satisfying set pieces (apart from a powerful death aria for Cleopatra). The opera was never revived at the Met. However, with the help of Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber later reworked the score for successful productions at the Juilliard School and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, where it received praise. Barber also prepared a concert suite of Cleopatra's arias, which Price premiered in Washington in 1968 and subsequently recorded. Price lobbied Kurt Herbert Adler to have it produced in San Francisco, but did not succeed.

Late opera career[link]

In the late 1960s, Price cut back her operatic performances in favor of recitals and concerts. She was tired, frustrated with the number (and quality) of the Met's new productions, and perhaps felt the need to rework her vocal technique as she reached middle age. She became a popular artist in the orchestral and performing arts series in the major American cities and large universities. In the early 1970s, she also returned to Europe, for opera performances in Hamburg and London's Covent Garden, and gave her first recitals in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, and the Salzburg Festival. At the latter she became a favorite recitalist, appearing in 1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984.

She continued to sing limited numbers of performances at the Met and San Francisco, but undertook only three new roles after 1970. They were: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il tabarro (San Francisco only); Puccini's Manon Lescaut (San Francisco and New York); and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (San Francisco and New York).

She was frequently called on as a soloist for state occasions. In January 1973, she sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers" at the state funeral of President Lyndon Johnson, at whose 1965 inauguration she had sung. President Jimmy Carter invited her to sing a nationally televised recital at the White House in 1978, and she return to sing for a State Dinner after the signing of the Camp David Accords and on the visit of Pope John Paul II.

In October 1973, after missing a season, she returned to the Met to sing Madama Butterfly for the first time in a decade. In 1976, the Met mounted for her a long-delayed new production of Aida, with James McCracken as Radames and Marilyn Horne as Amneris, directed by John Dexter. The next year, she renewed her partnership with Karajan in a Brahms Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, and returned to Europe for what proved her final opera performances there, in Il trovatore at the Salzburg Easter Festival and Vienna's Staatsoper (the latter her first appearance there since 1964).

In 1977, Price sang her last new role, and her first Strauss heroine, the title role of "Ariadne auf Naxos," in San Francisco, to positive reviews. When she brought the role to the Met in 1979, she was suffering from a viral infection and cancelled six of her eight scheduled performances. Reviewing her first performance, the New York Times critic John Rockwell was not complimentary.^[7]

Price by Jack Mitchell, 1981

In fall 1981, she had a late career triumph when she stepped in for soprano Margaret Price as Aida in San Francisco, a role she had not sung since 1976. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herbert Caen reported that she had insisted on being paid $1 more than the tenor, Luciano Pavarotti. This would have made her, for the moment, the highest-paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied this.

After revisiting some of her most famous roles in San Francisco and at the Met, Price gave her operatic farewell on January 3, 1985, in a televised performance of Aida from the Met. Time Magazine described it as a "vocally stunning performance... that proved she can still capture her peak form." ^[3] Donal Henahan wrote that the "57-year-old soprano took an act or two to warm to her work, but what she delivered in the Nile Scene turned out to be well worth the wait." In 2007, PBS viewers voted her singing of the aria, "O Patria Mia", as the No. 1 "Great Moment" in 30 years of "Live from the Met" telecasts.^[8] The performance ended with 25 minutes of applause.^[4]

Price sang 201 performances with the Met, in 16 roles, in the house and on tour, including galas. (She was absent for three seasons—1970–71, 1977–78, and 1980-81—and sang only in galas in 1972-73, 1979–80, and 1982-83.)

Post-operatic career[link]

From left to right, NEA Chairman Dana Gioia honors the first class of National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honorees in 2008: Price, Carlisle Floyd, Richard Gaddes.

For the next dozen years, she continued to perform concerts and recitals. Her recital programs, framed by her longtime accompanist David Garvey, usually combined Handel arias, French mélodies, German Lieder, an aria or two, and a group of American art songs by Barber, Ned Rorem, and Lee Hoiby, and ended with spirituals. She liked to end a sequence of encores with "This Little Light of Mine", which she said was her mother's favorite spiritual.

With time, Price's voice became darker and heavier, but her upper register held up well and the conviction and joy in her singing always spilled over the footlights. On November 19, 1997, she gave a recital at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that turned out to be her last.

Before retiring, Price gave several master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, at the suggestion of RCA-BMG, she wrote a children's book version of Aida, which became the basis for the hit Broadway musical by Elton John and Tim Rice in 2000.

Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a "chauvinistic American".^{[citation needed]} She summed up her philosophy thus: "If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don't think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you."^{[citation needed]}

In October 2001, at age 74, Price was asked to come out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall for the victims of the September 11 attacks. With James Levine at the piano, she sang a favorite spiritual, "This Little Light of Mine", followed by an unaccompanied "God Bless America", capping it with a bright, easy high B-flat. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Recordings[link]

Leontyne Price's commercial recordings include three complete sets of Il trovatore, two of La forza del destino, two of Aida, two of Verdi's Requiem, two of Tosca, and one each of Ernani, Un ballo in maschera, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Cosí fan tutte, Don Giovanni (as Donna Elvira), Il tabarro and (her final complete opera recording) Ariadne auf Naxos. She also recorded a disc of highlights from Porgy and Bess, singing the music of all three female leads. It was conducted by Skitch Henderson and featured William Warfield as Porgy.

She recorded five Prima Donna albums of operatic arias generally of roles that she never performed on stage. She also recorded two albums of Richard Strauss arias, recitals of French and German art songs, two albums of Spirituals, and a crossover disc, Right as the Rain, with André Previn. Her recordings of Barber's "Hermit Songs", scenes from Antony and Cleopatra, and "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," were reissued on CD as Leontyne Price Sings Barber. Her most popular operatic aria collection is her first, the self-titled Leontyne Price, sometimes referred to as the "Blue Album" because of its blue cover. It has been reissued on CD, and lately on SACD. In 1996, for her 70th birthday, RCA-BMG issued a limited edition 11-CD boxed collection of her recordings, with an accompanying book, entitled The Essential Leontyne Price.

Archival recordings of live performances have also appeared. Deutsche Grammophon released CDs of live Salzburg performances of "Missa Solemnis" (1959) and Il trovatore(1962), both conducted by Karajan. In 2002, RCA discovered a tape of her 1965 Carnegie Hall recital debut and released it in its "Rediscovered" series. In 2005, Bridge Records released the complete 1953 Library of Congress recital with Barber, including the "Hermit Songs," Henri Sauguet's "La Voyante", and songs by Poulenc. In August 2008, a tape of a September 1952 Berlin performance of the Breen-Davis "Porgy and Bess" was found in the Berlin radio archives and released on CD—offering the earliest recorded glimpse of Price's voice and style. In 2011, Sony Classics brought out on disc her first two Met broadcasts, Il Trovatore (1961) and Tosca (1962), both with Corelli.

Critical appreciation[link]

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In The Grand Tradition, a 1974 history of operatic recording, the British critic J.B. Steane writes that "one might conclude from recordings that [Price] is the best interpreter of Verdi of the century." For the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, a 1963 Price performance of Tosca at the Vienna State Opera "left me with the strongest impression I have ever gotten from opera." In his 1983 autobiography, Plácido Domingo writes, "The power and sensuousness of Leontyne's voice were phenomenal--the most beautiful Verdi soprano I have ever heard."

Price, Honoree at National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honors, 2008

In an interview, Price once recalled that Maria Callas had told her, during a meeting with the older diva in Paris, "I hear a lot of love in your voice." The sopranos Renee Fleming, Kiri Te Kanawa, Jessye Norman. Leona Mitchell, Barbara Bonney, Sondra Radvanovsky, the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, bass-baritone Jose Van Dam, and the countertenor David Daniels, talk about Price as an early inspiration.

Miles Davis, in Miles The Autobiography, writes: "Man, I love her as an artist. I love the way she sings Tosca. I wore out her recording of that, wore out two sets. Now, I might not do Tosca, but I loved the way Leontyne did it. I used to wonder how she would have sounded if she had sung jazz. She should be an inspiration for every musician, black or white. I know she is to me."^[9]

She has also had her critics. In his book The American Opera Singer, Peter G. Davis wrote that Price had "a fabulous vocal gift that went largely unfulfilled," criticizing her reluctance to try new roles, her Tosca for its lack of a "working chest register", and her late Aidas for a "swooping" vocal line. Others criticized her lack of flexibility in florid music, and her occasional mannerisms, including scooping or swooping up to high notes, gospel-style. Karajan took her to task for these during rehearsals for the 1977 Il trovatore, as Price herself related in an interview in Diva, by Helena Matheopoulos. In later recordings and appearances, she sang with a cleaner line.

Her acting, too, drew different responses over a long career. As Bess, she was praised for her dramatic fire and sensuality, and tapes of the early NBC Opera appearances show her an appealing presence on camera. In her early Met years, she was often praised for her dramatic as well as vocal skill.

In March 2007, on BBC Music magazine's list of the "20 All-time Best Sopranos" based on a poll of 21 British music critics and BBC presenters, Leontyne Price was ranked fourth, after, in order, Maria Callas, Dame Joan Sutherland, and Victoria de los Ángeles.^[10]

References[link]

Notes[link]

Books[link]

• Sir Rudolf Bing, 5,000 Nights at the Opera: The Memoirs of Sir Rudolf Bing (Doubleday, 1972).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Adventures of America's Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present (Anchor, 1999).
• Plácido Domingo, My First Forty Years (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer (Doubleday, 1997).
• Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber, The Composer and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1992).
• Helena Matheopolous, Diva: Sopranos and Mezzo-sopranos Discuss Their Art (Northeastern University Press, 1992).
• Luciano Pavarotti with William Wright, Pavarotti, My Own Story (Doubleday, 1981), ISBN 978-0-385-15340-9
• Stephen Rubin, The New Met (MacMillan, 1974).
• Winthrop Sargeant, Divas (Coward, McCann, Geohegan, 1973).
• J.B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record (Timber Press, 1993).
• Robert Vaughan, Herbert von Karajan (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).
• Galina Vishneyskaya, Galina, A Russian Story (Harvest/HBJ Book, 1985).
• William Warfield, with Alton Miller, William Warfield: My Music and My Life (Sagamore Publishing, 1991).

Articles[link]

• "From Collard Greens to Caviar: Leontyne Price Reminisces", Opera News, July and August 1985.
• "Reunion: Justino Diaz", by Eric Myers, Opera News, March 2006, Vol. 70, No. 9
• "Time After Time", Stephen Blier reviews "The Essential Leontyne Price" CD collection, Opera News, October 1996
• "The Garbo of Opera", by David Perkins, News and Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), October 5, 1986
• "Leontyne Price Ill, To Rest for Month", New York Times, December 23, 1961
• "Where Atlanta's 'Big Mules' Relax", Time, January 10, 1977 (on 1964 "Don Giovanni" controversy)

External links[link]

• Leontyne Price at the Internet Movie Database
• Leontyne Price at the Internet Broadway Database
• Metropolitan Opera Archives Database
• Leontyne Price "Voice of the Century" Extensive fan site
• Leontyne Price Biography on Afrocentric Voices

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Katie Lohmann
Katie Lohmann attending Alana Curry's Birthday Party at Vice, Hollywood, CA on May 7, 2009
Playboy centerfold appearance
April 2001
Preceded by	Miriam Gonzalez
Succeeded by	Crista Nicole
Personal details
Born	(1980-01-29) January 29, 1980 (age 32) Scottsdale, Arizona[1]
Measurements	Bust: 32D[1] Waist: 22 Hips: 32
Height	5 ft 4 in (1.63 m)[1]
Weight	103 lb (47 kg; 7.4 st)
Official website

Katie Lohmann (born January 29, 1980^[2] in Scottsdale, Arizona)^[1] is a model, actress, and most notably a Playboy Playmate for the Month for April 2001.

Her first appearance in Playboy was in the Playmate 2000 search pictorial, published in the December 1999 issue. In that pictorial, she was described as a 19 year old massage therapist.

In November 2006, Lohmann was part of a trio of Playmates (along with Tina Marie Jordan and Karen McDougal) who appeared in the "Celebrity Playmate Gift Guide" pictorial of Splat magazine, a paintball enthusiasts magazine. The pictorial showcased new paintball products for the 2006 holiday season.^[3]

Lohmann appeared as "Hardbody" of the month in Iron Man magazine several times, including a pictorial together with frequent collaborator Karen McDougal in the November 2009 issue.

Filmography[link]

• 2012 - The Deceit
• 2009 - Dahmer Vs. Gacy
• 2008 - The House Bunny
• 2003 - Dorm Daze
• 2002 - The Hot Chick
• 2001 - Tomcats

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Katie Lohmann

• Official website
• Katie Lohmann at the Internet Movie Database
• Katie Lohmann article at Askmen.com
• Katie Lohmann at Playboy.com
• Katie Lohmann on Myspace
• Katie Lohmann on Twitter
• Katie Lohmann at Playboy Blog

Hugh Hefner
Hugh Hefner attending Glamourcon #50, Long Beach, CA on November 13, 2010
Born	Hugh Marston Hefner (1926-04-09) April 9, 1926 (age 86) Chicago, Illinois
Residence	Playboy Mansion, Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Education	Steinmetz High School
Alma mater	University of Illinois (B.A.) Northwestern University
Known for	Editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises
Home town	Chicago, Illinois
Political party	Independent
Board member of	Playboy Enterprises
Spouse	Mildred Williams (m.1949–1959; divorced) Kimberley Conrad (m.1989–2010; divorced)
Partner	Barbi Benton (1969–1976) Brande Roderick (2000–2001) Tina Marie Jordan (2001–2002) Holly Madison (2003–2008) Crystal Harris (2009–2011)
Children	Christie Hefner (born 1952) David Hefner (born 1955) Marston Hefner (born 1990) Cooper Hefner (born 1991)
Website
Playboy.com

Hugh Marston "Hef" Hefner (born April 9, 1926) is an American magazine publisher, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises.^[1]

Early life[link]

Hefner was born in Chicago, Illinois, being the elder of two sons born to Grace Caroline (née Swanson; 1895–1997) and Glenn Lucius Hefner (1896–1976), both teachers.^[2][3] Hefner's mother was of Swedish descent and his father had German and English ancestry.^[4][5] On his father's side, Hefner is a direct descendant of Plymouth governor William Bradford.^[6][7] He has described his family as "conservative, Midwest, Methodist."^[8] He went to Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High School, then served as a writer for a military newspaper in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946. He later graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with a B.A. in psychology with a double minor in creative writing and art in 1949, earning his degree in two and a half years. After graduation, he took a semester of graduate courses in sociology at Northwestern University but dropped out soon after.^[9]

Career[link]

Working as a copywriter for Esquire, he left in January 1952 after being denied a $5 raise. In 1953, he mortgaged his furniture, generating a bank loan of $600 (or $800 — he cannot recall which) and raised $8,000 from 45 investors — including $1,000 from his mother ("Not because she believed in the venture," he told E! in 2006, "but because she believed in her son.") — to launch Playboy, which was initially going to be called Stag Party. The undated first issue, published in December 1953, featured Marilyn Monroe from her 1949 nude calendar shoot and sold over 50,000 copies.^[10] (Hefner, who never met Monroe, bought the crypt next to hers at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.^[11][12])

After it was rejected by Esquire magazine in 1955, Hefner agreed to publish in Playboy the Charles Beaumont science fiction short story, "The Crooked Man", about straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. After receiving angry letters to the magazine, Hefner wrote a response to criticism where he said, "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too."

On June 4, 1963, Hefner was arrested for selling obscene literature after an issue of Playboy featuring nude shots of Jayne Mansfield was released.^{[citation needed]} A jury was unable to reach a verdict.^[13]

His former secretary, Bobbie Arnstein, was found dead in a Chicago hotel room after an overdose of drugs in January 1975. Hefner called a press conference to allege that she had been driven to suicide by narcotics agents and federal officers. Hefner further claimed the government was out to get him because of Playboy's philosophy and its advocacy of more liberal drug laws.^[14][15]

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for television and has made several movie appearances as himself. In 2009, he received a "worst supporting actor" nomination for a Razzie award for his performance in Miss March.

A documentary by Brigitte Berman, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, was released on July 30, 2010. He had previously granted full access to documentary filmmaker and television producer Kevin Burns for the A&E Biography special Hugh Hefner: American Playboy in 1996.^[16]

Hefner and Burns later collaborated on numerous other television projects, most notably on The Girls Next Door, a reality series that ran for six seasons (2005–2009) and 90 episodes.

In 1999, Hefner financed the Clara Bow documentary, Discovering the It Girl. "Nobody has what Clara had. She defined an era and made her mark on the nation," he stated.^[17]

Personal life[link]

Hefner married Northwestern University student Mildred Williams (born March 10, 1926) in 1949. They had two children, Christie (born November 8, 1952) and David (born August 30, 1955).^[18] Before the wedding, Mildred confessed that she had had an affair while he was away in the Army. He called the admission "the most devastating moment of my life." A 2006 E! True Hollywood Story profile of Hefner revealed that Mildred allowed him to sleep with other women, out of guilt for her infidelity and in the hopes that it would preserve their marriage. They divorced in 1959.^{[citation needed]}

Hefner remade himself as a bon viveur and man about town, a lifestyle he promoted in his magazine and two TV shows he hosted, Playboy's Penthouse (1959–1960) and Playboy After Dark (1969–1970). He admitted to being "'involved' with maybe eleven out of twelve months' worth of Playmates" during some of these years.^[19] Donna Michelle, Marilyn Cole, Lillian Müller, Shannon Tweed, Brande Roderick, Barbi Benton, Karen Christy, Sondra Theodore, and Carrie Leigh — who filed a $35 million palimony suit against him — were a few of his many lovers. In 1971, he acknowledged that he experimented in bisexuality.^[20] He moved from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Hefner had a minor stroke in 1985 at age 59. After re-evaluating his lifestyle, he made several changes. The wild, all-night parties were toned down significantly and in 1988, daughter Christie began to run the Playboy empire. The following year, he married Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad. The couple had two sons, Marston Glenn (born April 9, 1990) and Cooper Bradford (born September 4, 1991).^[21] The E! True Hollywood Story profile noted that the notorious Playboy Mansion had been transformed into a family-friendly homestead. After he and Conrad separated in 1998, Conrad moved into a house next door to the mansion.

Hefner then began to move an ever-changing coterie of young women into the mansion, even dating up to seven girls at once, among them, Brande Roderick, Izabella St. James, Tina Marie Jordan, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson. The reality television series The Girls Next Door depicted the lives of Madison, Wilkinson and Marquardt at the Playboy Mansion.^[22] In October 2008, all three girls made the choice to leave the mansion. Hefner was quick to rebound and soon began dating his new "Number One" girlfriend, Crystal Harris,^[23] along with 20-year-old identical twin and models Kristina and Karissa Shannon.^[24] The relationship with the twins ended in January 2010.^[25] After an 11-year separation, Hefner filed for divorce from Conrad stating irreconcilable differences.^[26] Hefner has said that he only remained married to her for the sake of his children,^[27] and his youngest child had just turned 18.^[21] The divorce was finalized in March 2010.^[28] On December 24, 2010, Hefner presented an engagement ring to Crystal Harris, publicly announcing the proposal the following day.^[11] Hefner and Harris had planned to marry June 18, 2011.^[29][30] Harris called off the wedding just 5 days before they were due to be wed.^[31]

Politics and philanthropy[link]

The Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award was created by Christie Hefner "to honor individuals who have made significant contributions in the vital effort to protect and enhance First Amendment rights for Americans."^[32]

He has donated and raised money for the Democratic Party.^[33] However, he has more recently referred to himself as an Independent due to disillusionment with both the Democratic and Republican Parties.^[34]

In 1978, Hefner helped organize fund-raising efforts that led to the restoration of the Hollywood Sign. He hosted a gala fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion and personally contributed $27,000 (or 1/9 of the total restoration costs) by purchasing the letter Y in a ceremonial auction.^[35][36]

Hefner donated $100,000 to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts to create a course called "Censorship in Cinema," and $2 million to endow a chair for the study of American film.^[37]

Both through his charitable foundation and individually, Hefner also contributes to charities outside the sphere of politics and publishing, throwing fundraiser events for Much Love Animal Rescue as well as Generation Rescue,^[38] a controversial autism campaign organization supported by Jenny McCarthy.

On April 26, 2010, Hefner donated the last $900,000 sought by a conservation group for a land purchase needed to stop the development of the famed vista of the Hollywood Sign.^[35]

Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, an endangered species of Marsh rabbit, is named after him in honor of financial support that he provided.^[39][40]

References[link]