Surely you have heard stories according to which the father and the mother have predetermined the future of the child long before he becomes an adult. This is something that sometimes "catches". The children follow the paths that their parents have set for them.
There are other cases, however, where the child rebels, follows his nature and does things of his own which may bring him into complete opposition to the wishes of the parents.
Such a case is his Robert Charles Joseph Eduard Sabatini Guccione. Big name. And its owner believed the same and that's why he "cut" it a bit and made it Bob Guccione. Does the name mean anything to you? Probably not. But surely you will know his most successful business initiative which made him famous all over the world.
Guccione, you see, is the man who inspired and published one of the most famous men's magazines. The Penthouse!
Anyone who says that he went through a kiosk and did not take a sneak peek at his always sensual cover or did not buy it even once, will probably be lying.
The pages of the Penthouse, which for many years was the awe-inspiring rival to Playboy, hosted many. Male fantasies.
Fate for some people, apart from being predetermined, is also hard and so from where you are at the top and it feels invulnerable to land abruptly on the bottom and not know how to escape from the blows.
On December 17, 1930, a baby boy was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents give him all this όνομα complex name mentioned earlier. This is a middle-class family in the American metropolis. They did not have much money, but they were not hungry. Dad is an accountant. The mother is a housewife.
Family with roots in Sicily. Faithful Catholics all wanted one and only thing. Let their son follow the way of God and become a priest. The little boy showed no interest in this perspective but did not want to spoil his parents' fate and so he found himself studying in a seminary.
That did not last long, though. He quit school quickly and turned to other things. His first attempt was to become a painter. A superficial youth wedding (only at the age of 18) and a child who came, his plans were overturned.
He quickly got bored of marriage and decided to return to his love of painting. He leaves everyone and everything and leaves for Italy to study painting. He leaves Italy and goes to Morocco. There he meets the singer Mariel Hudson, whom he married in 1960 and together they have four children! Family life hard, however, forces Bob to give up painting again to do various footwork as a clerk in a laundry chain!
For a man like Guccione, however, this life was like a prison. In 1964 he divorces and meets the woman he will later call his "muse"!
Anxious, Guccione tries to find something that will make him stand out. What he was looking for, he finally found one day looking at Playboy. We are now in the distant 1965 and it is the time when both in Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic there is the liberation of erotic desires. A sexual revolution.
Guccione decides to publish a magazine that will be like Playboy but will not be… Playboy.
He publishes the Penthouse which is much bolder and clearly less… cultural than Playboy. His goal was on the one hand to spark the imagination much more easily and on the other hand to "hit" the target group of the average reader who is neither educated nor looking to read analyzes about sexuality.
And he succeeds perfectly. By the autumn of 1969 the Penthouse was being issued on both sides of the Atlantic and had gained fanatical fans as well as fanatical enemies.
In the beginning (because there was no money) Guccione himself took pictures of the young girls and as he said he had chosen the "look of voyeurism" as a technique. The photos, that is, were not set up but the girls were looking elsewhere or doing other things while he was taking them.
It was the first magazine to publish photos showing the female genitals and the hairs that surrounded them, something unacceptable for that time. The following are the depictions of the sexual act without, however, showing the penetration. It was also the first magazine that years later showed the penis in full erection.
At the same time, through the photographs, he also sent political or social messages. He made the Penthouse "the magazine for sex, politics and protest" and thus managed to infuriate both conservative circles and feminists who accused him of using women as objects to achieve his political goals.
The ultimate success comes when the magazine publishes the famous nude photos of Madonna from the time she was a dancer.
The magazine is a huge success. Its sales exceed 5 million issues with revenues estimated at 6 billion dollars! In 1982, Guccione was named one of the richest people in the United States with a fortune of $ 400 million!
Guccione lives a great life but without his extremes Hugh Hefner. He prefers to invest his money in luxurious houses and purchases of works by great painters (he never forgot his great love) such as Picasso, El Greco, Daly and others.
And somewhere in there, business mistakes begin. He opens at least four more magazines of various subjects but none of them "catch" as much as he would like. In addition, he wants to get involved in cinema. As a producer he participates in the sensual film "Caligula" directed by Τ meter of the genre Tinto Bras. It invests $ 17 million but the film "presses" for revenue (as a videotape it left an era) after receiving a huge war from the conservative circles of USA.
And then, one business mistake followed another. His empire, however, began to crumble with the turn of the public first on video and then on the internet where now everyone could find plenty of pornographic material and even a handful.
The "crusade" started by the US president also helped in the collapse Ronald Reagan against "immoral magazines" but also in the fast-growing porn industry in general. The American president, in fact, referred by name to people like Hefner or Guccione, calling them "corrupt". The businessman reacted and started a fight through his magazines against Reagan, but now the downhill had no return for Guccione's creation.
In 2003 he declared bankruptcy and was forced to sell all his property, which included the great collection of works of art he had created.
Seven years later, and two months before Bob Guccione turned 80, he died of cancer.
The Penthouse is still published today, with its circulation, however, barely exceeding 100.000 issues per month…