Let Us Introduce the Forgotten Female Genius Behind the Penthouse Empire
In a 1973 advertisement for the short-lived Penthouse spin-off magazine for women, Viva, it shows a portrait of Bob Guccione’s wife and executive partner, Kathy Keeton. “Who is this woman?” was the question printed in bold white letters below Keeton’s thin hand, covered in chunky rings.
Keeton was born in South Africa but moved to England to study ballet at the London Royal Ballet Company. After eight years, she left and started dancing in nightclubs and in films. This was when Guccione first heard of Keeton. In the second issue of Penthouse magazine, they printed a scathing review of her exotic performance based solely on a press release.
“Her manager called me up,” Guccione told New York magazine. “Screaming down the phone about ‘How could I be so crude and so insensitive about such a fine artist?’” So, Guccione sucked it up and went to see Kathy’s show.
Regardless of whether he was impressed with her dancing or not, it was her dressing room that won him over. While all the other performers had horoscopes and pictures of pinups taped to their mirrors, Keeton’s dressing station was bare, except for a stack of Financial Times newspapers and a few science books.
Guccione offered her a job in ad sales for Penthouse, promising her ten pounds a week.
Keeton soon proved herself to be a business-savvy powerhouse who protected her partner and his company. She rose to the position of chief operating officer and president of Penthouse General Media, becoming one of the highest paid women in the world, making $335,000 a year at the time.
Guccione and Keeton shared a love of knowledge, science, and art. Besides Viva (where she hired future Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour), Keeton also founded the wildly successful OMNI magazine in the late seventies, and Longevity a decade later, and was the author of two books: Longevity: The Science of Staying Young and Woman of Tomorrow. Like Guccione, Keeton was a strong, ambitious leader who devoted herself entirely to any project she took on.
In the nineties, Keeton was diagnosed with breast cancer and given six weeks to live. She refused chemotherapy and instead relied on hydrazine-sulfate therapy, an experimental treatment discovered by a scientist whom Penthouse had been supporting. Kathy lived two more years before passing away after surgery complications in September of 1997, at age 58.
The loss hit Bob Guccione harder than anything he’d ever faced. For 32 years,“they were as one,” his son Tony recalled. “It was a kind of ‘us against the world’ mentality that soldered them together.” Kathy Keeton was Guccione’s rock, and with her gone, the Penthouse founder was left to face the tumultuous times to come, for his life and business, alone.
Bob Guccione, founder and publisher of ‘Penthouse’ magazine, with his wife Kathy Keeton, December 1993. (Photo by David Montgomery/Getty Images)
