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might you be?
Nary a peep on Penthouse publisher's eviction
By Jeff Bercovici
Is Bob Guccione sleeping in a cardboard box these days?
We just don't have an answer for you on that one, but not for lack of trying.
Last month, with foreclosure on his $37 million Manhattan mansion looming, the Penthouse publisher managed to talk creditors into granting him a two-week extension while a deal was hashed out.
But the new deadline came and went last Tuesday without a word from either side.
This would suggest negotiations are continuing, which would seem only logical. Guccione is a notoriously persistent negotiator, and one would imagine such a person would be at the top of his game when faced with losing his home, which happens to be one of the largest and most valued townhouses in New York.
But we can't tell you that for sure because neither party is willing to share a progress report with Media Life.
Repeated calls both to Penthouse parent General Media and to Kennedy Funding, the Hackensack, N.J., real estate lender to which he owes $15 million, were not returned.
Penthouse has been similarly reluctant to discuss reports that it is on the verge of total collapse. The cash crunch is so acute that Penthouse, unable to pay its printer, went more than two months without publishing an issue earlier this summer.
A new low came last month when the magazine was forced to reduce its employees’ paychecks by 75 percent.
The obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that Penthouse is not long for this earth. Indeed, Guccione himself has said that he sees no future for a print magazine like Penthouse, what with the web’s superiority as a medium for pornography.
His opinion is shared by Eisner LLP, General Media’s former auditor. Eisner quit in May after General Media omitted from a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission Eisner’s statement expressing doubt about the company’s ability to survive as a going concern. The SEC responded by opening an inquiry into Penthouse’s finances.
The lone bit of good news came two weeks ago when Anna Kournikova settled her $10 million lawsuit against Penthouse in exchange for a settlement of undisclosed size. But the good news here would seem slim indeed, that the tennis star decided to take a lesser amount rather than push for the entire sum, which might have taken years to win and collect through the courts.
The Russian tennis star sued last year after Penthouse published paparazzi photos of another woman and claimed they were of her.
Penthouse once had a circulation of more than 5 million, but as of the second half of last year, that number had fallen to about 530,000. Circulation is expected to slide still further as the magazine’s irregular publishing schedule scares off distributors.
Guccione, who is originally from Bergenfield, N.J., bought his 45-room, 20,000-square-foot mansion back in Penthouse’s 1970s heyday. Located on East 67th Street between Central Park and Madison Avenue, its décor includes a swimming pool modeled on a Roman bath and a collection of paintings by the likes of Picasso and Matisse. Guccione studied art before taking up porn publishing in London in the late '60s.
At its peak, during a far more libertine era in America, Penthouse was a serious challenger to Playboy, pushing the Hefner title to use more sexually explicit photographs. But even in those times, Guccione was even less successful than Hefner in bringing mainstream advertisers, and it wasn't that many years later that Penthouse's circulation began falling.
In more recent years, the publisher once famous for his throaty defenses of the First Amendment is now more often in the headlines for his various maneuvers to salvage the remains of his empire from creditors.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the people who live and work on Guccione’s block don’t seem terribly distressed at the idea of losing their most notorious neighbor. Most say his presence goes all but unnoticed.
“He’s very quiet,” says Ed Borelle, owner of Delle Celle, a clothing store located across the street. “I’ve seen him once or twice in 10 years.”
Mike Longo, the doorman of a building located several doors down from Guccione’s, says the disappearance of Penthouse would be no tragedy.
“I think he’s probably made enough money with it,” says Longo.
Mary Kay, a tourist from Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in the neighborhood on a recent afternoon, takes a similar view.
“Certainly, everyone has the right to their personal liberties. I personally would not miss Penthouse should it disappear.”
August 11, 2003© 2003
Media Life
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