YNOT – Penthouse magazine founder Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini “Bob” Guccione died Wednesday in a Dallas-area hospital after a six-year battle with lung cancer, according to a statement released overnight by his family. He was 79.Guccione’s fourth wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, and two of his children, Bob Jr. and Tonina, were at his side when he passed away at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano, Texas. Bob and April Guccione married in 2006 and moved from New Jersey to Texas in 2009.

A talented and respected artist who eventually amassed one of the great private art collections in the United States, Guccione was best known as the founder of Penthouse magazine, which he launched in 1965 in England and built into one of the world’s most popular magazines for men. The first U.S. issue was published in September 1969. He established “Penthouse” as a brand name that remains a significant part of pop culture.

Guccione resigned from his position as publisher and chairman of the board for Penthouse International Inc. in 2003, after parent company General Media (GMCI) declared bankruptcy. The company blamed catastrophic losses on a series of unsuccessful investments by Guccione, including a $160 million loss attributed to a failed Penthouse-branded casino venture in Atlantic City, NJ, and a never-built nuclear power plant.

In 2006, Guccione sued Penthouse Media Group — the holding company restructured from GMCI’s ashes — and several of its principals for fraud, breach of contract and conspiracy, among other things.

PMG became FriendFinder Networks Inc. in 2008, after the 2007 acquisition of assets belonging to FriendFinder parent company Various Inc. The company changed its name as a prelude to an abortive initial public offering of stock on the common market.

Guccione was born in Brooklyn, NY, on Dec. 17, 1930, into a large family of Sicilian immigrants headed by his accountant father. He was raised in Bergenfield, NJ, and attended the Blair Academy preparatory school. As a young man, Guccione’s consuming interest was painting. In 1948 he wrote to a friend, “I want to devote my life to the serious and profound intricacies of true and imaginative art.”

He married for the first time and fathered his first child, Tonina, before the age of 20. Shortly thereafter, Guccione moved to Europe to pursue his passion as a painter, in the process befriending and painting with Picasso and Matisse.

While traveling Europe, Guccione also befriended William S. Burroughs and other ex-patriot American writers. After marrying a second time, he sired four more children: Bob Jr., Nina, Tony, and Nick.

In 1965, while working as the manager for a chain of self-service laundries in London and concurrently as a cartoonist for weekly newspaper The London American, Guccione conceived Penthouse. From the beginning, he intended the magazine to be aimed at “regular guys” and offer more sexually explicit and daring content than its competitor, Playboy. Penthouse featured photos of nude women in highly suggestive poses, and its editorial coverage of government cover-ups and scandals frequently preceded “mainstream” media’s.

Penthouse operated on a shoestring in its early days, with the goal of generating enough income to allow Guccione to devote more time to his first love, painting. Guccione himself photographed most of the models for the magazine’s early issues. His photography owed much to his painter’s sensibilities, and the diffused, soft-focus look became the magazine’s hallmark.

Known as much for its ribald commentary and investigative reporting as for its leave-nothing-to-the-imagination pictorials, Penthouse rapidly found success. Guccione invested some of his resulting fortune in a mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — said to be the largest private residence in the city — and remodeled the behemoth structure with painstaking care. He and his third wife, Kathy Keeton, lived quietly in the 30-room, 22,000-square-foot home, although they frequently hosted events supporting causes including the New York Chapter of the NAACP. Philanthropy became a priority for the Gucciones, and the couple donated time and money to the poorest school district in Harlem in order to provide funding for basic needs and extracurricular activities.

The mansion also housed Bob Guccione’s art studio, where he eventually resumed painting some 32 years after he stopped to run the burgeoning Penthouse empire. He created oil-on-canvas works that were shown in critically acclaimed exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, the Nassau County Museum of Art and in many galleries across the country. He told an interviewer in 1994, “My art is something I do for myself, as all other artists do, so my art represents the real me.”

His own creations were not the only art for which Guccione became known. The walls of his New York City mansion and a country home in Staatsburg, NY, sported works by Modigliani, Picasso, Botticelli, El Greco, Durer, Chagall, Dali and Degas. The Guccione art collection was sold by Sotheby’s in November 2002.

In partnership with Keeton, Guccione launched several mainstream magazines, including Longevity, Viva and Omni. In the late 1980s, Omni became the first magazine to have an online presence. Guccione also produced or financed several motion pictures, including Caligula (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole; Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, and The Longest Yard (1974), directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Burt Reynolds, Eddie Albert, Ed Lauter and Michael Conrad.

After Keeton’s death in 1997, Penthouse published a short-lived comic book spin-off entitled Penthouse Comix, featuring racy stories.

Even after falling on hard times in recent years, Guccione and his Penthouse empire remain cultural touchstones.

“Bob was a true innovator, and his magazines reflected his wonderful artistic sensibility,” said Vivid Entertainment co-founder and co-chairman Steven Hirsch. “He paved the way for adult entertainment to become acceptable to mainstream America, and companies like Vivid have followed the path he laid out. He was without parallel in his art direction of Penthouse and succeeded in balancing portfolios of beautiful women with exciting editorial content. It was an act that was very hard to follow, and no one succeeded as well as he did.”

Anthony Haden Guest, who interviewed Guccione for New York Magazine shortly after the publishing magnate’s cancer diagnosis in 2004, wrote, “Bob Guccione pushed the soft-core envelope, building one of the most profitable porn empires in the world.”

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