Originally published in the July 1996 issue of British GQ
As the century comes to a close, the Playboy man - his view of himself and the world - seems more real than ever before. His mark and his image are everywhere. With the return of James Bond, the Beatles and the Playboy Bunny, the new millennium holds great promise for us all." (Hugh Hefner writing in the April 1996 issue of Playboy.)
Playboy Enterprises (Hugh M. Hefner, prop.) has produced a 90 minute video called Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time, about, naturally enough, the life and philosophy of the company's founder. Playboy likes it if journalists about to visit the great man watch the video first. Actually, the company insists on it.
The viewing is scheduled for a Thursday in the Playboy headquarters in Los Angeles, a surprisingly modest suite of offices in an unassuming, shared building that says PLAYBOY in big, though discreet, lettering just below the roof. This is not where the magazine is put together; that's still done back in Chicago, as it has been since Playboy was founded there in 1953. The LA offices house the video and television divisions, probably exciting enough in its own way, but somewhat disappointing if you were idly daydreaming about meeting a Playmate or two.
The video is a lavishly produced documentary, narrated in stentorian tones by the actor James Coburn. It describes Hefner's Chicago childhood as “typically American... with a great deal of repression”. Hefner, it transpires, grew up in a home where physical displays of emotion and affection were discouraged, so that the young man became fascinated by fantasies, comics and films. Or, as James Coburn puts it, "darkened movie houses became his refuge from reality'. There's a lot of stuff in the same psycho-sexual vein, contrasting Hefner's "emotionally repressed” boyhood with his later "reinvention' of himself as The Playboy Man, the iconic libertine of what was for Hef a generally Swinging Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. The point, it seems, is that if it hadn't been for the “Puritanism' of his background, Hefner might not have become the voluptuary he was for almost four decades. In pop psychology, this is known as the Casanova Syndrome, sometimes explained as an overcompensation for an early deficit of love. It is also, of course, the sort of can’t that relieves the self-proclaimed victim of all responsibility for his behaviour.
But there's more. After university (where, amusingly, as editor of the campus humour mag, Hefner initiated a column called "Co-ed of the Month”), and after his first marriage to his college girlfriend, and after fathering two children, Hef felt he was "living a lie'. He wasn't fulfilling “his dream.” So, he launched Playboy ("recapturing the dream”) and, in time, he split from his wife and family. "While my father was absent emotionally,” he says on the video, “I was soon absent in point of fact."
Well, maybe, though one feels that dad really doesn't deserve this implied opprobrium. Hef seems to feel a bit confused on this point as well for, a bit further along in the video, he looks sincerely at the camera and says: “I think kids ought to have two parents, parents who love them... and I wasn't there.” There does, though, appear to be somewhat more self-pity than sorrow in his voice.
The first Playboy, as is well-known, was put together on Hefner's kitchen table with a total investment of about $8,000. Originally, it was to be called Stag Party, but a rude letter from lawyers representing another magazine called Stag (now long-defunct) put paid to that idea, and the name Playboy was conjured up at the last minute. The magazine's symbol, originally a stag, was hurriedly transformed into a rabbit, an animal, Hefner said later, that was "frisky and sexy" - as in, presumably, fucking like a...
Hefner's own metamorphosis into a frisky little bunny began, he says, in the late Fifties, when the magazine's circulation topped 1 million, and he began "living out the fantasy". His new life is symbolised by footage from Playboy's Penthouse, a late-night TV show that ran in America from 1959 to 1960. It is a toe-curlingly embarrassing rendition of Fifties hip hosted by Hefner himself at what is meant to be a sophisticated Playboy party: there's Buddy Rich and Sammy Davis Jr, jazz and cocktails, fireplaces and pile carpets, and women in tight dresses talking to men in tight suits in a supposed penthouse overlooking Chicago. Hefner himself sings, beside a piano, trademark pipe in hand, two girls standing adoringly at his side, while the rest of the party perches on the over-stuffed sofas or leans against the walls.
Adoration of a more physical sort was taking place at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, where Hefner worked and lived. "The nature of the process," he explains earnestly, "brought to me some of the most beautiful young women in America... The step between personal interest and interest in posing for Playboy was very small. It became almost something anticipated and expected..."
Oh, get on with it. What Hefner means is that he got laid a lot at this point. There were "many hundreds" of girls, he says, “probably more than 1,000”.
But that was all part of the changes that Playboy represented. According to James Coburn again, the magazine "told its readers a new morality had replaced the old taboos”, that, indeed, it "helped liberate a generation from the past”. Playboy's use of photos of the girl-next-door in décolletage, Hef will tell you, made sex acceptable in a buttoned-up society, freeing men and women from the prudery and repression of the Fifties, and laying the foundation for the sexual revolution of the next decade.
This seems like awfully heavy sociological baggage for a magazine like Playboy to carry. Another way of putting it is that Hefner realised men would pay money to see pictures of girls with their tops off.
The Playboy Mansion, the new one in LA, is on a narrow curving road just south of Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. You can tell it's an expensive neighbourhood because the road off Sunset is rutted and badly patched. Generally, in LA, the classier the neighbourhood, the crummier the roads.
Beyond the gate to the mansion is a yellow, triangular warning sign: "CHILDREN AT PLAY". Once, it said “BRAKE FOR ANIMALS", but there have been changes in Hef's life in the past decade. He is a married man now, with two young children. The parties, the bunnies, the excesses, all of that is of the past. What's more, on April 9, 1996, Hefner turned 70 years old.
One can imagine him, well aware of journalistic shorthand, changing the sign purposefully.
In the grounds of the mock-Tudor mansion, there are other shorthand symbols. Neatly lined up by the tennis courts are a dozen or so children's playthings: bikes, push-cars, tricycles. The "Love Grotto', a cave-like hideaway off the swimming pool with hot, bubbling spas, where all sorts of scandalous things are supposed to have happened in the past, is deserted. As is the games room, a small building separate from the mansion, where Hef keeps his collection of pin-ball machines and video machines.
Both the grotto and the games room have a dated air – sort of Seventies Playboy retro. The grotto has pillow-strewn ledges beside the pools for "romantically inclined” guests, creating just the sort of seductive atmosphere an eighteen-year-old might consider sophisticated. The games room has an annexe with an unusually thick, spongy, soft carpet, more pillows and a mirror on the ceiling. So far, just what you'd expect.
The aviaries, though, are a surprise. Hefner collects birds, which are housed in a series of huge cages. There are apparently 75 different species, including parrots, toucans, macaws and horned owls. On the vast lawn below the mansion are peacocks, flamingos, cranes and pheasants, as well as a number of wild ducks who moved in uninvited and decided to stay. There are also rabbits-known, inevitably, as "the last of the Playboy bunnies'.
The Playboy Mansion is said to cost $4 million a year to run, funded directly from corporate revenue (Hefner still controls 70 per cent of Playboy Enterprises' voting shares). There are 60-odd staff, working three shifts a day: cooks, cleaners, bodyguards, gardeners, veterinarians, drivers. It is rather like a vast luxury hotel, though in this case, there are only ever four guests.
It is a remarkable corporate indulgence for a man who, by his own admission, doesn't "give a shit about business". For Playboy Enterprises is not in rude good health. Its flagship magazine, 43 years old this year, has been called “a glossy, if somewhat stodgy, swirl of fashion, gadgets and sex", and has seen its circulation slump from an all-time high of over 7 million in the Seventies - in that halcyon period after the invention of the Pill and before the advent of AIDS - to about 3.4 million now. The company's plan to create a multi-media "Disney for adults" has been slow to boost revenues: the Playboy Channel in the US peaked at 1.5 million subscribers, slumped to about a third of that number, and recently switched to pay-per-view. In 1994, on revenues of $218 million, Playboy Enterprises lost $14 million; last year, it posted a $3 million profit on an income of $247 million. Its stock remains moribund at about $9 a share, while Forbes magazine last year said that, "Playboy ranks as one of the media business's great disappointments.”
Up until 1981, Playboy's financial shortcomings were bolstered by profits from gambling-particularly from the casinos in London. In that year, the company made a profit of $39 million from gaming (the magazine, by contrast, made $6 million). The rest of the Playboy empire - the clubs and resorts, the book publishing division, the modelling agency, the television and film production subsidiary, the recording company, the limo service (the limo service?) — made zip. In 1981, the British authorities revoked Playboy's gambling licence for a "technical violation of Britain's gaming laws", as Playboy puts it. The New Jersey gambling commission followed suit, shutting down the newly constructed Playboy casino in Atlantic City. The next year, Playboy Enterprises reported a loss of nearly $52 million.
1982 was also the year Hef appointed his daughter from his first marriage, Christie Hefner, then 29, as president of the company. Christie was left with little option but to cut back on the sprawling empire: she slashed overheads, sold off failing divisions, closed the clubs and resorts, reduced staffing levels. These days, Playboy Enterprises employs about 600 people (down from 1,700 in 1982) in four divisions: publishing, catalogues, entertainment and product marketing. She has concentrated investment in TV and video, on the assumption that electronic media, not print, will drive the company in years to come. She has sought production agreements with well-financed partners - notably CAA and MCA - to split expenses on television and feature production. And she has had some success.
Corporate profits in the most recent quarter nudged upwards by about 14 per cent. Pay-per-view revenue from the Playboy Channel has increased; the Playboy video label is booming; and product licensing is going through something of a renewal (particularly in the Far East). The company recently launched a second cable channel in America, the soft-core Adult Vision movie service, and is expanding overseas - a market that is probably better suited to Playboy's tame erotica than the US. Last year, it launched the Playboy Channel in Japan and (lucky us) here in Britain, and has now begun publishing new, local editions of the venerable magazine in the countries of what once were the Soviet Bloc. (A British edition '4 may be on the cards at some point as well.) It should also not be forgotten that, even at 3.4 million, Playboy is still the biggest-selling men's magazine in America. With more capital, Playboy plans to start up yet more Playboy channels overseas and move back into the casino business. Earlier this year, stock analysts began cautiously warming to the company.
Meanwhile, Hef remains editor-in-chief of Playboy. It's said to be the only part of the Playboy organisation he really understands, or pays much attention to. He is, after all, a magazine professional, who worked in promotions for American Esquire for two years before launching his own publication. He still chooses the photos for the Playmate spread, and - according to Bill Farley, his indefatigably cheerful PR man – signs off all the other pages in the magazine. He spends most of his time in the mansion, a lot of it watching movies, his particular passion (he has a library of 4,000 films). His schedule is mind-numbingly consistent: Wednesday nights he plays gin rummy with a small group of friends; Friday nights he watches a classic film with his family; Saturdays he shows a silent film; and on Sunday nights he screens a first-run movie for 70 or so guests. His other passion is television: he employs three VCR operators working around the clock taping the programmes and series he ticks in each day's TV schedule. There are three satellite dishes on the grounds of the estate, capable of bringing in hundreds of channels. His archive of television programmes is said to be vast, and growing daily.
He also makes himself more or less readily available to visiting journalists, all of whom get the standard dog-and-pony act: a tour of the mansion and a one-on-one in the library. At 70, in his circumstances, one wonders why he bothers. "Vanity, I suppose,” speculates Farley. "He's worried about his place in history.”
For a man of 70, it has to be said that Hefner looks remarkably well. Despite all those years of well publicised excess - the Dexedrine-fuelled work binges, the months spent sealed away inside the Chicago mansion, the steady diet of Wonderloaf and fried chicken, the week-long parties. Hefner is trim and sturdy, his hair only slightly greying, his stride almost self-consciously steady. When he begins to talk, there is just a faint slur in his speech, the result of a stroke in 1985, itself the catalyst for the changes in Hefner's life: his 'third act', as he likes to call it.
The library is an oak-lined room with a mock old master of Hefner as Henry VIII hanging over the fireplace. There are family photos, leather-bound copies of Playboy on the bookshelves, and a large colour blow-up of Kimberley Conrad, once Miss January and now Mrs Hefner, on the wall. She is in her bridal gear, though she seems to have mislaid her frock. The coffee table is a huge backgammon set. Hefner sits on one side, on a brown leather settee, in front of the leaded window, dressed in his trademark silk pyjamas and dressing gown. The light that filters through the thick glass is faint; a small lamp on the coffee table animates the bottom half of Hefner's face, leaving his eyes in shadow. It is difficult to read his expressions.
Turning 70, he says, he "feels much younger” than he might have thought possible. "Even when I was young, I said age is largely a state of mind if you're healthy." And he's healthy now: he has stopped smoking, he works out, he eats well, his life is ordered. He spends his days "editing Playboy, the creative end of it. And I spend a lot of time reflecting on a life well-spent." He pauses here, to leave a second for the inevitable follow-up. "Well-spent? Unbridled hedonism is 'well-spent'?"
"To pursue your dreams," he answers easily, “to have them come true, to have made a difference, to have changed society, to have fought against powerful forces... that's a life well-spent." It's difficult to tell, but I don't think he's smiling.
Hefner's third act began on July 1, 1989, with his marriage to Kimberley. He was 63; she was 25. The ceremony was beamed round the world from the mansion's own satellite dishes. “I think everyone should get married, he offers. "I just took a little longer than usual.”
Hefner, it should be said, is practised at interviews. He has a catalogue of well-thumbed responses for every occasion. He offers, for instance, this vignette from his childhood, a neat little parable with a ready-made psychological twist.
"If you want to get really Freudian, there's a rosebud in my past. When I was an infant, I had a blanket with a bunny motif on it. One day, it caught fire and was destroyed. So if you want to have some fun with it, my bunny blanket went up in flames and I went on to found the bunny empire." It's unlikely that Hefner means this story to be taken seriously. But he's content to deal in previously digested journalistic morsels. "You have to deal in sound bites. That's the nature of it,” he says at one point.
The sound bites, of course, are Hef's way of controlling an interview. Even so, he doesn't like what he reads about himself; he feels persistently misunderstood. “When I have a conversation like this, he says, "it's only half a conversation. What's written is for effect, rather than what the writer knows to be true. It's a reflection of the writer, and their perception of their audience. I'm not the guy portrayed in the press. There's this other guy.”
Hef warms to his theme, and mentions another interview with a British journalist who “wrote something relating to his own problems; it was nothing to do with me. I'm a sort of Rorschach test, because it's to do with money and sex. What comes out are the writer's own fantasies.”
How would he portray himself, then? Hef pauses for effect. "A remarkably moral, romantic man," he says quietly.
There are, of course, many different definitions of both "romantic” and “moral”, though it seems unlikely they could be stretched to encompass Hefner's life. Hef's explanation of what he calls "the romantic tradition", for instance, is "pursuit and conquest — that's the end of the story”. It's not a theory many would go along with but, what the hell, it's worked for Hefner - at least if one assumes that a reasonable goal in life is to bed 1,000 or so women.
Do you regret any of those 1,000 partners? I ask. At first, he seems genuinely bewildered by the question. He looks at me as though I’m making a joke, then starts to laugh, rather boisterously. "C'mon, Paul. I realise now all those questions are written down there...” He continues chuckling. By "down there", he means my notebook, as though the questions were scripted. They aren't, and clearly Hefner doesn't have second thoughts; like Edith Piaf, he regrets pretty much rien.
"I'm a lucky fella," he protests, still chortling. “My life has been so rewarding. Well, I could have made some better business decisions," he concedes. "I wouldn't have invested in Atlantic City either...” Then he becomes very serious: "With foreknowledge, I could have saved the lives of some people."
He means Bobbie Arnstein, his private secretary, who committed suicide after being convicted on drugs charges in the Seventies, and Dorothy Stratten, the 1980 Playmate of the Year, who was murdered by her husband. Hefner has often said they were the worst episodes of his life. The Arnstein case led to an investigation of Playboy itself, and Hefner at one point felt he might go to jail - "as absurd as that sounds." Advertisers pulled out of the magazine, outside directors quit, then the case was dropped.
The Arnstein affair might have destroyed another man. Hefner merely closed down the Chicago mansion and moved to Los Angeles, where the parties continued.
Hefner has a Quixotic view of his life and his accomplishments. He doesn't quite say the sexual revolution wouldn't have happened without him, but he's certain Playboy played a major part. "The Pill was important,” he says, "but the Pill doesn't change attitude. You see that change in attitude in Playboy, then in music, in rock 'n' roll, in Lenny Bruce, the beat generation... The sexual revolution began with the Kinsey Report. I've said many times that Kinsey was the researcher and I was the pamphleteer.”
It is of course brave, these days, to want to take even part of the responsibility for the sexual revolution, what with the bad press it's suffered recently. Others might not be quite so keen to have it on their CVs: American politicians regularly blame the new morality of the Sixties for the break-up of the family, the increase in illegitimacy, AIDS, and most other social ills. Would Hef care to take responsibility for all that as well?
He smiles slightly. "I take responsibility for the fact we have a more open society," he says. "Obviously, that gives people more options. If people screw up, it's their choice. Freedom brings with it a set of new concerns and problems. You can get exploitation and excesses.”
Freedom is a dangerous concept.
“It isn't sexual freedom that is the problem. What we have now is the worst of all worlds: forces that encourage sexuality and don't encourage education.”
It could be, of course, that Playboy is one of those forces that encourages sexuality. Since its inception, it has hymned the praises of sexual liberation; Hef himself contributed a series of editorials called, quite unironically, "The Playboy Philosophy", that eventually ran to 25,000 words. The philosophy, in essence, mixed respect for individual rights with sexual tolerance, and the maintenance of individual freedom with sexual freedom.
This was all very well, of course, but it probably didn't delay many readers on their way to the centrefold, Playboy's most celebrated contribution to the late twentieth century. The first centrefold featured Marilyn Monroe; the first "girl next door” centrefold only appeared in 1955, when Charlaine Karalus, a twenty-year-old circulation assistant at Playboy was persuaded to pose semi-nude in exchange, so the story goes, for an Addressograph machine. With her wholesome, Midwestern good looks, and innocent alias of Jane Pilgrim, she set the pattern for four decades of Playmates: "nice girls, girls who lived next door, girls you could take home to meet mom. Girls you might marry. It was all part of Hefner's oft-repeated editorial message "that nice girls like sex too”.
To this day, the centrefold shots retain a sort of Fifties wholesomeness: girls with improbably large breasts and impossibly clear skin, with the sort of rotund curvaceousness that went out of fashion three decades ago, shot in soft-focus so the girls seem like blow-up dolls. Though the photos are now more risqué than they were in the Fifties, Hefner never countenanced the sort of gynaecological photos common in rivals like Penthouse and Hustler. Playboy "went pubic” in the Seventies but that was it: no "pink shots”, no groups, no phallic objects.
But it was the centrefolds, of course, that roused the ire of the feminists. They objected to Hefner's "degrading” portrayal of women, of his "exploitation" of the models who posed for the magazine.
“It's a political point of view,” Hefner says now. “It’s a kind of Orwellian newspeak that redefines the terms in ways that have no meaning.
"It's a very authoritarian position,” he adds. “I think what you have to see is an authoritarian viewpoint versus personal freedom. It's a limited perception: the notion that women are sexual objects is hardly a revolutionary idea. Of course, women are. Is this hot news? It's what makes the world go around. That attraction between the sexes is among the best things about us.” Hefner delivers this little bromide without obvious rancour, though it's easy to understand that he might feel just a tad wounded by the way things have gone. For most of his life, he has been in the progressive vanguard - the father, as he sees it, of sexual liberation, fighting the good fight against right-wing Bible-thumpers who regarded him as a Smut peddler. He is an old-fashioned liberal, anticensorship, anti-racism, anti-discrimination. He set up the Playboy Foundation with his own money to agitate for those ideals; he has been honoured by the B'nai B'rith Anti Defamation League and by the Criminal Bar Association...
Then one morning he woke up to find that the goal posts had not only been moved, they'd been stolen. The American left had pushed on to the ideological wilderness of political correctness, and he, and Playboy, had been left behind. Pornography had been redefined as "exploitation"; the Bible thumpers had found new allies among radical feminists; there were moves from both the far left and the far right to get Playboy banned. You can understand that he might be a bit miffed.
For Hefner, the choice now is stark. He can be remembered as the man who liberated a generation from the strictures of sexual hypocrisy, who fought censorship, who expanded personal freedom. Or he can be remembered as the man who made a lot of money selling soft-porn to adolescent men. It's no wonder he's concerned about his place in history.
It's also not surprising that the last great project of his life is his autobiography. He has been working on it, reportedly, for more than a decade now, spending hours dictating chapters into a tape recorder and hiring and firing a host of ghost writers. It is due for publication at the turn of the century, to coincide with a major media assault, retailing the official Hefner-approved story of his life. There'll be the book, a documentary, a television mini-series and a movie. The movie, Hef says, will go into production in the near future. "We're just looking for the writer," he adds.
Who do you want to play you? I ask. He thinks about the question for a moment, walks over to the bar to get another Evian. "I don't know who's available now, but I could tell you in a historical sense," he says.
OK.
“Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda,” he muses, "Both Midwestern like me, both typically American..."
And American heroes, too. "Well, I'm a hero,” he protests. There is not a trace of irony in his voice. “I’m the guy who slew the dragon."
Excited by being surrounded by two dozen attractive women that small specks of saliva have started to form around his mouth. His wig is slipping ever so slightly. "Hell, I feel like a movie star, he beams. "All these women, and they all want to speak to me." A prospective fiancée could look forward to helping his mother and six sisters on the farm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he returned home alone.
Others have a more urgent requirement. Alan, a car salesman, thought it unlikely that he would find a lifelong spouse on his trip, but was satisfied he would have fun trying. "I'm seeing all the sights that I have always wanted to see and in the evenings, I have a great social life lined up. As many women as I can date." he whooped. "They're not averse to sleeping with me either, back home the dating process takes forever, and then there’s never any guarantees. Western women are so complicated. Here it's so goddamn easy.”
The next day, Dick, the film producer, flies into town. He is five foot five with a pug face that makes him look like he grew up with his head in a vice. But despite Dick's physical shortcomings, Vasilyeva is quietly optimistic about setting him up with Lena, a 21-year-old model dug up from a cinema queue. She's blonde, she's thin and her hair doesn't come from a bottle.
They go out to a Western restaurant. Despite Dick's alleged two homes and six-figure income, he appears sniffy about money (the meal is $250 for two). This is far more of a problem than ugliness. Attractive Russian women know their value. A Russian man can expect to spend up to a thousand dollars wining and dining a girlfriend in today's Moscow.
Dick is keen. He even, via a translator, pops the question. Lena declines. She even appears somewhat offended. What use has she of a tight-fisted American husband when, as the mistress of a Mafia boss, she controls more roubles than the Russian Minister of Finance. Even under her own steam she can earn upwards of $2,000 a night being, as she delicately puts it, “gang-banged by the Chechyen Mafia.”
So much for traditional values. But hope springs eternal. As Vasilyeva and I leave the still unrequited Dick, Vasilyeva spots a skinny blonde out strolling in a bleak housing estate. "Quick, hold my bag,” she hisses, already heading over the icy pavement. "Would you call her 55 kilos?” she yells, the wind carrying her voice away.
Meanwhile Naylor, still awaiting his decree nisi, has started writing to the mother of a Belorussian woman who called in to his Suffolk shop. “She sounds very nice," he smiles, optimistically. "I'm arranging for her to come here for a visit. She comes from Minsk, so she might be a better bet than Ludmilla. You never know, it just might work.”
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