10 things Ray Bradbury and musician Nikki Sixx have in common: #8 - Familiar with Playboy

#8. Both SF&F author Ray Bradbury and Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx are intimately familiar with Playboy magazine.

Ray Bradbury has had fiction, essays, and poetry published in Playboy since the magazine was first launched in 1953. Fahrenheit 451 (1953), his SF masterpiece, was published in the magazine as a three-part serial in 1954. Bradbury was one of several prominent SF authors who participated in “The Playboy Panel: 1984 and Beyond,” published in the summer of 1963. A wide-ranging 1996 interview with Playboy is considered one of Bradbury’s most important, and not just for the author’s views on the magazine:

“Playboy is in fact one of the best magazines in history, simply because it has done more than any other magazine. It has published the works of most of the important short story writers of our time, as well as some of the most important novelists and essayists -- and just about every important American artist. The interviews have included just about everyone in the world with something important to say. Nowhere else can you find such a complete spectrum, from the semivulgar to the highfalutin [laughs]. I have defended Playboy since the beginning. Its editors were brave enough to say, "The hell with what McCarthy thing" when they ran excerpts from Fahrenheit 451. I couldn't sell that to any other magazine because they were all running scared. And I must add another important point -- one I'm sure that many other guys growing up in the sorry years before Playboy existed will agree with -- which is that there would have been a lot fewer problems if Playboy had been around back then. I wish I'd had Playboy when I was 14.”

The timeless guy of Sci-Fi even had time to visit Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills in 2002!

Nikki Sixx’s first wife was model and actress Brandi Brandt, Playboy’s “Playmate of the Month” for October 1987. His second wife was model and Baywatch actress Donna D'Errico, Playboy’s “Playmate of the Month” for September 1995. Sixx has visited the Playboy Mansion on several occasions, including a 2007 charity event benefiting the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Belated Happy Birthday, Mr. Bradbury!

Pictured: Dolores Del Monte, Playboy's Miss March 1954.

Previous entries on the Ray Bradbury-Nikki Sixx 10 list:

#10. Both are Angelenos who once palled around with a motley crew doing crazy things

#9. Neither attended college