Playboy adds 'Runaway Bride' sticker to July issue (AP)

CHICAGO – Playboy is making a last-minute addition to the cover of its July issue after founder Hugh Hefner's fiancee called off their wedding.

Chicago-based Playboy says it is affixing red and yellow stickers over the cover image of 24-year-old Crystal Harris. The stickers say, "Runaway Bride in this issue!" The 85-year-old Hefner announced Tuesday that the pair will not wed.

The issue is due on newsstands Friday.

Harris appears on the July cover wearing a sailor hat with the headline "America's Princess introducing Mrs. Crystal Hefner." The pair were to be married Saturday at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

Hefner tweeted Wednesday that "recent events call for a special sticker on the July cover."

A Playboy spokeswoman says the magazine is adding stickers to as many issues as possible.

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Next Playboy has "runaway bride" sticker on cover (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, dumped by his fiancee days before their wedding, said Wednesday he is affixing "Runaway Bride" stickers over her picture on the cover of the magazine's upcoming issue.

Hefner, 85, announced a day earlier that 25-year-old Crystal Harris had "a change of heart," and that Saturday's wedding ceremony for 300 people at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles had been canceled.

In an unfortunate coincidence, Harris appears on the cover of the July Playboy issue, hitting newsstands Friday, described as "America's Princess ... Introducing Mrs. Crystal Hefner."

In the interests of journalistic accuracy, Hefner has moved quickly to remedy the situation.

"Recent events call for a special sticker on the July cover. Look for it on newsstands," Hefner said on Twitter.

A big red sticker announcing "Runaway Bride In This Issue!" covers most of Harris' bottom half.

Still visible is Hefner's beloved cocker spaniel, which Harris took with her after the split. She is wearing his trademark sailor's cap and smoking jacket, and holding a pipe.

A spokeswoman said the sticker would appear only on newsstand copies since issues have already been mailed to subscribers.

It was not clear why the couple split, although Hefner said there were no arguments. TMZ reported that Harris wanted a bigger weekly allowance and a career in the music business. Coincidentally she released a song, "Club Queen," through iTunes Tuesday.

A two-hour TV special featuring wedding highlights was due to air July 13 on the women's cable channel Lifetime. That has now been canceled.

The marriage would have been Hefner's third. He said his second wife, former Playmate Kimberley Conrad, and her mother were among the friends who consoled him in recent days.

Hefner, known around the world by his nickname Hef, has championed sexual freedom and civil rights, published stories challenging McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, and backed gay causes and the legalization of marijuana.

Raised in San Diego by British parents, Harris met Hefner at his annual Halloween party in 2008. She moved into the mansion after a few weeks and became Playboy's Playmate of the Month in December 2009.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman)

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Playboy founder Hugh Hefner dumped at the altar (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Heartbroken Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said on Tuesday his wedding this weekend was canceled because his 25-year-old fiancee, a Playmate from his magazine, changed her mind.

Hefner, 85, and Crystal Harris were due to tie the knot in front of more than 300 guests at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on Saturday. It would have been Hefner's third marriage.

"The wedding is off. Crystal has had a change of heart," Hefner wrote on Twitter.

"The breakup is a heart breaker, but better now than after the marriage," he added later.

He also denied a report on celebrity website TMZ.com that the couple had had "a nasty argument" on the phone.

Adding insult to injury, he said Harris took his favorite pet, a cocker spaniel named Charlie, when she moved out of the mansion.

On the other hand, Hefner said he has been consoled by his coterie of old pals and his former wife Kimberley Conrad, and announced he would be hosting a screening of "Runaway Bride."

Hefner proposed to Harris on Christmas Eve, he announced on Twitter at the time. Since then Hefner has been planning the nuptials in between serving as hands-on editor of Playboy and entertaining family and friends at movie screenings and backgammon games.

A two-hour TV special featuring wedding highlights was due to air July 13 on the women's cable channel Lifetime.

Hefner and second wife Conrad, a former Playmate now 48, divorced in 2010 after a lengthy separation. His first marriage to Mildred Williams ended in divorce in 1959. He has two children from each marriage.

Hefner, known around the world by his nickname, Hef, has championed sexual freedom and civil rights, published stories challenging McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, and backed gay causes and the legalization of marijuana.

With a cover featuring a calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe, Hefner put together the first issue of Playboy on the kitchen table in his Chicago apartment in 1953 at a cost of $600. It sold 51,000 copies -- enough to finance a second issue -- and led to a multimillion dollar international corporation, which Hefner recently took private.

Raised in San Diego by British parents, Harris met Hefner at his annual Halloween party in 2008.

She moved in to the mansion after a few weeks and became Playboy's Playmate of the Month in December 2009. She will be on the cover of the magazine's upcoming July issue.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by David Lawder)

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Playboy club returns to London, some hopping mad (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – Hugh Hefner opens a new Playboy club in London's swanky Mayfair district on Saturday after an absence of 30 years, and the imminent return of the "bunny girls" has some feminist groups and commentators hopping mad.

The 85-year-old entrepreneur is in London to launch the new venue, where life membership costs 15,000 pounds ($25,000) and a single "Sazerac" cocktail will set a member back 2,000 pounds.

He expects a mixed welcome at the plush new club at its official launch, with up to 200 feminist protesters promising to make their objections felt under the banner "Eff Off Hefner!."

Inside, young women dressed in the famous Playboy rabbit ears, collars, cuffs and skimpy corsets will offer him and his guests champagne and deal cards at the gambling tables that will be the key economic ingredient to the venture.

For Hefner, flanked by his 25-year-old fiancee Crystal Harris during an interview with Reuters, the opening will be a nostalgic return to the 60s and 70s when the hugely successful London club bankrolled much of his magazine empire.

"The club I think that most of us remember, certainly on an international level, with the greatest fondness, the most iconic of the clubs, was London," he said.

"So with the return of the bunnies, which began five or six years ago in Vegas ... London becomes really key to all that. It represents not only the future, it represents the iconic past."

The famous London Playboy club closed in 1981 after its gaming license was revoked, although by then the A-list glamour had faded and the venues were on the decline around the globe.

After a long hiatus, Hefner re-launched the concept in Las Vegas in 2006, although he said he did not expect to return to the days when Playboy had 30 clubs in the United States alone.

RETRO-CHIC OR RETRO-SLEAZE?

The Playboy brand, however, had made a comeback, he argued.

"There is a great appeal for that retro-chic quality I think," he said. "There's a feeling for a lot of people that it was may be the party they missed, they want to go back there, with the Beatles and the Rat Pack and the bunnies."

For some commentators and activists, the party should remain in the past.

Kat Banyard of UK Feminista, who will be at the Playboy club opening on Saturday evening to demonstrate, said Hefner's porn empire had "laid the groundwork for the sex industry as we know it today ... which relentlessly exploits and degrades women.

"The Playboy Club represents a step back in time to a place where women retreated as sexual objects to serve, titillate and decorate in a world where men are all-powerful."

Commentator Ruth Wishart wrote in the Herald Scotland newspaper: "'A sanctuary for masculinity', gushes an alleged branding guru. Or a warren of retro-sleaze if you're a vaguely sentient citizen of the 21st century."

Hefner, no stranger to objections to his business model, believes the publicity the protests attract has been good for the club, not feminism.

"I think it's a complete misreading of history," he said of the "Eff Off Hefner!" campaign.

"The reality is that Playboy and the Playboy clubs were the beginning of the sexual revolution. When the Playboy clubs first opened the bunny girls were the center of it all and ... were empowered in a way that women had not been before.

"It was the beginning of independence for women and the magazine has represented personal and sexual liberation for both men and women ... Playboy represents personal freedom. That's what feminism ought to represent too."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

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Mummified Playboy Playmate died of heart failure (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A former Playboy Playmate whose mummified body was found in her dilapidated Beverly Hills home last month, died of heart failure, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday.

Yvette Vickers, a B-movie actress who was named Playboy's Miss July in 1959, was found dead at her home on April 27 after evidently being undiscovered for up to a year.

Joyce Kato, an investigator with the Los Angeles county coroner's department, told the Times she died of natural causes "due to arterial sclerotic cardiovascular disease," or heart disease caused by a hardening of the arteries.

Several calls made to the coroner's office to confirm the report went unanswered on Saturday.

A neighbor found Vickers' body after her suspicions were aroused by old letters and cobwebs in the mailbox. The house was packed with boxes, and at least one window was broken. A space heater was running in the upstairs room where the body was lying on the floor

Vickers, born Yvette Vedder in Kansas City, Missouri, would have been 82 when her body was found. She was briefly married twice during the 1950s.

Her film credits include 1958's "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" and 1959's "Attack of the Giant Leeches." Her last feature role was in a 1990 horror called "Evil Spirits."

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Peter Henderson)

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German playboy Gunter Sachs kills self at 78 (AFP)

PARIS (AFP) – Legendary German playboy Gunter Sachs, a former husband of French bombshell Brigitte Bardot, killed himself at his Swiss chalet, his ex-wife's office told AFP. He was 78.

Separately, his son Rolf Sachs confirmed the death to German celebrity magazine Bunte, and the German newsweekly Focus said he had shot himself. Swiss police could not immediately confirm the reports.

Sachs was a veteran of the go-go 1960s who helped make the French Riviera resort Saint Tropez a playground for rich and beautiful celebrities, such as film star Bardot, who was said to be devastated by the news.

"We called Gunter Sachs's private secretary who confirmed the suicide to us, but we have no details on the circumstances," an official at Bardot's animal rights foundation told AFP.

The source said Bardot "has been informed and is devastated. She had kept close ties with Gunter Sachs, who was a guest when we celebrated 20 years of the foundation."

A billionaire philanthropist and art collector, Sachs was the grandson of the found of car giant Opel and the third of Bardot's three husbands.

A few hours after meeting her for the first time he had a helicopter fly over her famous Cote d'Azur home, La Madrague, and shower it with hundreds of red roses.

"It's not every day that a man drops a tonne of roses in your yard," she later wrote.

The couple married a few weeks later on July 14, 1966, in Las Vegas. The divorced just over three years later.

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