The randy rhymer

Fabulously rich roue Felix Dennis made his money touting ta-tas in magazines like Maxim and Stuff. Now he's peddling poetry.

By Rebecca Traister

Sept. 25, 2004 | At a center-stage lectern in Manhattan's soaring Gotham Hall, magazine publisher-cum-poet Felix Dennis was sending one out to the ladies in the room. "This is about the obsession some of you have with plastic surgery," he said, shaking his gray mane sadly. He gave his wine-soaked audience a sly grin and raised his hand as if to testify. "Now I know that ... I am the publisher of Maxim," he confessed, acknowledging that the impossibly perfect skinnies featured in his magazines might contribute to the culture of self-loathing that makes cosmetic surgery so popular with women. But, he hastened to add, "the beautiful young movie stars on Maxim's covers have been slightly changed by air brushing, not by steel scalpels."

Then Dennis, who looks like Jerry Garcia if Jerry Garcia had had a permanently scarring encounter with an electric socket, launched into a fevered reading of "To a Beautiful Lady of a Certain Age," his brown spectacles just barely hanging on to his bearded and rapidly bobbing face.

"Lady, lady do not weep
What is gone is gone. Now sleep.
Turn your pillow dry your tears,
Count thy sheep and not thy years..."

Dennis had built up quite a head of steam by the third stanza, which begins, "Lady this is all in vain/ Youth can never come again." But then he really let loose: "NIP AND TUCK 'TIL CRACK OF DOOM!" he thundered. "What is foretold in the womb/ May not be forsworn with gold -- Nor may time be bought and sold!"

The six black-clad members of the Royal Shakespeare Company flanking Dennis on either side of the stage smiled nervously. A listener in front of me whimpered, "I'm scared."

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Until now, Felix Dennis, 57, has been best known as leader of a soft-core newsstand revolution, and one of the publishing industry's most terrible enfants. The publisher of Maxim, Stuff, music magazine Blender and news digest the Week began life as a wannabe blues singer in a London suburb. A horny young buck in the swinging '60s, he started his climb through media's ranks by selling copies of hippie magazine Oz on King's Road. (In 1970 he was tried for conspiring to corrupt the morals of children with an edition of Oz that depicted an orgy on its cover.) Dennis' stable of magazines would later be populated by periodicals on considerably less titillating topics: cars, computers and world news. But what made Dennis famous -- besides his public bout with crack addiction, reports of his multiple simultaneous girlfriends, and his 1996 admission to the Guardian that he preferred non-penetrative sex -- was his popularization of toned-down skin rags aimed at advertiser-friendly young men.

But now, the man who made a fortune on unsentimental product is using his lucre -- according to the New York Times his net worth is between $300 million and $700 million -- to fund a 14-stop tour in support of "A Glass Half Full," his first collection of poems on topics like aging, terrorism, death and faithful mutts.

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