By Geoff Marsh
Whosoever plants a tree winks at immortality. — Felix Dennis
Felix Dennis, one of three editors of the 1960s-era pop-culture magazine Oz (and later publisher of Maxim) died as a result of throat cancer at home in Dorsington, England, on Sunday, June 22. Aged 67, he was one of the richest men in Britain — and a revolutionary publisher.
Dennis had all the enthusiasm of an avuncular Victorian entrepreneur and was an engaging blend of alternative journalist, publisher, bon viveur and raging capitalist. Despite the long hair and, later, copious amounts of chemicals, he didn’t quite fit the hippie mould but his business-like attitude made the alternative lifestyle a reality for many.
Rather like the musical “Hair,” he was packaging the Age of Aquarius concept and selling it to the newly emergent drug aficionados, in his case through the newsagents. He later proved, of course, that it was a social wave he was riding and he would repeat his success with many subsequent social and cultural trends.
“If I have the chance to make a penny and I don’t take it, that’s a penny lost as far as I’m concerned,” was his ethos. One business colleague commented that Dennis was the only hippie he could ever trust, a compliment to the way he managed to combine the conventional with the alternative in the early 1970s. His intuition enabled him to see business opportunities beyond the then-current publishing formats, and Dennis moved on from the underground press fully intending to make his fortune.
He experimented with a new format, the poster magazine, for a projected series of one-off forays exploiting media trends. He would print a giant portrait of the latest superstar — from the movies, TV or sport — on one side of a poster-size sheet which could be pinned up on fans’ bedroom walls. The other side was divided into eight pages so that the sheet could be folded to look like a magazine.
Dennis’ first poster magazine featured Bruce Lee and was an instant hit. Its continuing success as Kung-Fu Monthly provided the financial wherewithal for Dennis to found an empire of magazine titles that appealed to the sexually liberated, tech-savvy and health-conscious generation that emerged in the 1980s.
But Dennis’ (and the magazine Oz‘s) most notorious claim to fame may very well come from the obscenity charges levied at him and the other Oz editors by the U.K. government, charges that resulted in the longest obscenity trial in the U.K. up to that point, at the Old Bailey in London in 1971.
Responding to suggestions that Oz had lost touch with youth culture, the editors handed editorial control of Issue 28 of the magazine to a bunch of 15- and 16-year-olds from a local secondary school and allowed them to publish whatever interested them. The results, needless to say, were sexually adventurous and very funny — the sorts of things that kids would find amusing. The establishment, of course, were as much horrified by the fact that the teens had been given free rein to publish what they wanted as by what they chose to write about and illustrate.
Those protesting the trial included John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Dennis and two other defendants were acquitted of conspiracy charges but convicted of lesser offenses. Convictions for all three were overturned on appeal, and publication of Oz continued.
Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, on May 27, 1947, Dennis certainly had the astrology for a successful and innovative communicator with the Sun and also a Mercury/Uranus conjunction in Gemini.
Mars and Venus conjunct in Taurus grounded his revolutionary, “Age of Aquarius” approach to publishing — and fostered his ability to make money from it. He is believed to have been worth close to $1 billion, and enjoyed a lifestyle rich with sex and drugs that sometimes horrified feminists and body holisticians.
Yet Dennis devoted much of his time in later life to writing poetry, the enjoyment of fine French wine, and creating a large forest in the centre of England — a picture of Venusian sensuality and Martian motivation coming together in Taurus if ever there was one (as well as his earlier hedonism).
More than a thousand acres have been planted with more than 1,000,000 saplings at The Heart of England Forest Ltd, a registered charity to which Dennis has bequeathed a reported 80% of his fortune to ensure its continuance.
That’s a lot of winks.