'Penthouse' Owners Losing Faith in New Direction?

It's tempting to view Mark Healy's sudden exit from Penthouse last week as the end of an era -- albeit a very brief one that you probably didn't even realize was occurring.

Healy was brought in a year ago to remake Penthouse from a medium-core pornographic rag into a mainstream men's magazine with nude photography. With Playboy trapped in a Hef-induced coma, and with porno chic back on the rise, a real opportunity existed, and Healy, who came from GQ, was the right guy for the job. He didn't attempt to make Penthouse highbrow, just readable. He took an addition-by-subtraction approach to the pictorials: Less graphic equals more alluring. He even got an A-list photographer, Terry Richardson, to shoot one.

Then he quit -- because, he says, Penthouse's owners "are not that interested in making a really good magazine. They're probably smart businessmen but they have a short-term view in an industry that requires a longer look." (Boca Raton-based investor Marc Bell bought Penthouse Media out of bankruptcy in 2004.)

The problem, says Healy, was marketing: Virtually no money was spent promoting the revamped Penthouse to advertisers or consumers, rendering the makeover pointless. "This is a magazine you cannot flip through at the newsstand. They didn't do a good job getting the word out there. People would ask me, do you hang out with Guccione? Who reports to whom?" (Founder Bob Guccione hasn't been involved since the sale.)

When newsstand sales softened, the owners instructed Healy to de-artsify the pictorials, prompting him to phone up his old boss, Jim Nelson. "Their ideas on how to make a go of it are based solely on increasing the explicit sexual content," he says.

Penthouse's president, Diane Silberstein, acknowledges that "mutually, everyone was unhappy" but insists the magazine won't return to its harder-core ways. "There was an internal desire to have the magazine feature sexier-looking girls," she says. "That's a better articulation of what we're doing here. Mark had a great vision. Everything he's done in the magazine stays."

Noting that she has four candidates for editor in chief coming in this week to interview, Silberstein adds that Healy's successor won't face the same frustrations. "I would agree that we haven't been aggressive in marketing the new product. In 2008 we expect to promote the hell out of it."