No, that viral picture doesn’t show Hugh Hefner lighting a cigarette for Marilyn Monroe

Image: Getty Images for Playboy

People are sharing on Twitter tributes to Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder who just died, aged 91, at his Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. 

Many people paid tribute mentioning Marilyn Monroe, who famously appeared on the very first cover of the first issue of Playboy magazine in December 1953. 

However, a picture circulating on social media allegedly showing Hefner lighting a cigarette for Monroe in 1957 is a fake: 

The photograph actually shows English actor and director Laurence Olivier lighting a cigarette for Monroe during a press conference for the 1957 movie Prince and the Showgirl: 

‘Prince and the Showgirl’ press conference in 1957, with Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier.

Also, Hefner never met Monroe in person, as he himself admitted on a 2011 interview with Piers Morgan on CNN: 

Piers: Did you know Marilyn Monroe?

Hefner: She was actually in my brother’s acting class in New York. But the reality is that I never met her. I talked to her once on the phone, but I never met her. She was gone, sadly, before I came out here.

Despite that, Hefner did purchase the space next to Monroe’s vault at the Westwood Village Memorial Park, the celebrities’ cemetery in Los Angeles, for $75,000 in 1992, according to Reuters and the BBC.

The first issue of Playboy, which came out in December 1953, was 48 pages long and featured inside a nude 1949 calendar shot of Monroe, which Hefner bought for $200. All 70,000 copies of the magazine sold out within a few weeks. 

Monroe died on 5 August 1962 in her Brentwood home of a drug overdose.