Playboy chief Hugh Hefner has responded to Vanity Fair‘s cover story on Larry Schiller’s ‘Lost Monroe Nudes,’ reports the New York Post.
‘On the Playboy website, [Hefner] posted, “None of these nude photos were lost — in fact, they are in the Playboy photo archives, or have been previously published in Playboy.”
One of Monroe’s final acts had been to return a nude photo to Schiller. She had written, “Send this to Playboy, they might like it.”
Sniped Playboy, “And, indeed, we did like it. So much, that we ran them 48 years ago, in our January 1964 issue, or again in January 2005. Sorry, Vanity Fair. Sometimes when something is too good to be true, it really is too good to be true. In the parlance of today: You got got.”
A Vanity Fair spokesperson said that while editors realize that some of the pictures previously appeared in Playboy — a fact mentioned deep in the article — there are quite a few that never were published.’
Though Marilyn never actually posed for Playboy, and never met Hefner personally, she was its first cover girl in 1953, and has been regularly featured in the magazine ever since.
You can read the aforementioned 1964 issue, and others, over at Everlasting Star
