By DAVE SHIFLETT
Journalists lately have taken to portraying Hugh Hefner as an octogenarian whose libido requires chemical upgrades and whose mansion is stuffed with tattered mattresses and stained carpets. But he still has his admirers. These include Carrie Pitzulo, a self-described feminist, who in "Bachelors and Bunnies" casts Mr. Hefner as something of a philosopher king and underappreciated crusader for women's advancement. How dare anyone think the Bunnyboy was ever simply a guy on the make?
Ms. Pitzulo, an assistant history professor at the University of West Georgia, begins by sketching Mr. Hefner's origins. He was born in 1926 into what he called a "typical Midwestern, Methodist home with a lot of repression." As a teenager, he appears to have been less repressed than enthusiastically self-obsessed. He began documenting his life in a series of scrapbooks that now numbers more than 2,000. After a girl rejected him in high school, he "reinvented" himself as "Hef," Ms. Pitzulo says, and he began dressing dapper and writing a music column in the school paper.
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