Source: ThirdAge News

Penthouse founder Bob Guccione died on Wednesday in Texas after a long bout with lung cancer, his family said. He was 79 years old.

Guccione also suffered from oral cancer, the Oral Cancer Foundation says. “My cancer was only a tiny tumor about the size of an almond at the base of my tongue,” he explained in an intervie with New York Magazine. “The cure is probably every bit as bad as the disease. It’s affected my ability to swallow . . . the mobility of my tongue . . . it makes it very difficult for me to talk…”

The Wall Street Journal reported his family said in a statement Guccione died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano.

Guccione created Penthouse in 1965, immediately setting it apart from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine through its more graphic photos of unclothed women and less reliance on the written word. If Playboy was the publishing world’s version of the Beatles, Penthouse was the Rolling Stones.

“Unlike his future arch-rival Hugh Hefner, he did not suffer from sexual shyness and repression,” John Heidenry, a former Penthouse Forum editor wrote in his book “What Wild Ecstasy.”

“He liked girls, pure and simple, like any average healthy Italian boy from New Jersey, and he was no virgin.”

Guccione diversified into other magazines, movies and other ventures and his fortune at one time was estimated at $400 million but Penthouse’s popularity waned with the advent of Internet pornography.