Bob Guccione Jr. already knows what he wants on his tombstone: “Had a Weakness for Tall Blondes.”

At first glance, this might suggest he’s just a chip off the old pornographer’s block -- his father and namesake, Bob Guccione Sr., founded Penthouse, the well-known academic journal. 

But the woman the Gooch was thinking of when writing his epitaph was Ann Coulter, the ultra-conservative talking head whose tall blondness is more Dolph Lundgren than Claudia Schiffer. Coulter, with characteristic tact, denies that she was ever “arm candy for Bob Guccione Jr. The Gooch was my arm candy – my boy toy whom I regretfully had to replace with a much younger man.”

The senior Guccione's  taste, of course, ran rather more to porn stars than pundits.

Gooch Junior, however, is famously more circumspect: After the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue outsold Penthouse, he advised the old man “to put the clothes back on the girls.” Not surprising from a son and heir who’s modestly said that he “only dated 3 Penthouse models in [his] whole life.”

Perhaps that's why, when Guccione was still at Spin -- the music magazine he founded in 1985 with $2.5 million borrowed from dad -- Axl Rose slammed him in a song for being "pissed off that [his] dad gets more [women] than [him]." Rose was likely unaware that the Gooch's first publication was a homemade magazine entitled A Step-by-Step Guide to Kung Fu. Gooch promptly challenged Rose to a face-to-face battle royale. When Rose declined, Gooch called him "a cowardly dirt man."

After selling Spin in 1997 for $40 million, Gooch launched Gear, a men's glossy that attempted to cash in on the lad-mag craze, and was described by Guccione as "the most sophisticated of them all." Articles about such topics as the social and technological implications of a suit that electrically stimulated the wearer's genitals more than bore out this claim.

Tragically, despite bringing us pictures of a barely legal Jessica Biel wearing nothing but a thong, Gear folded in 2003. Guccione blamed advertisers’ inability to appreciate the magazine’s matchless sophistication.