Hugh Hefner is in the house, or so we think. We can't say for sure because his son Marston doesn't see his dad every day, and we're not technically in the house, anyway. We're in the game room, a low stone outbuilding separated from the Mansion by about a hundred meticulously landscaped, hedgerow-lined yards. Like the rest of the Mansion, the game room has a decided swinger-in-amber vibe. There's a pool table, a Foosball table, a jukebox, some Reagan-era arcade games, and a little seating area designed to look like the interior of a '70s conversion van. On this particular afternoon, there is also Julie McCullough, a blond Playmate (February '86) perched on a high stool, smoking a cigarette, playing Centipede. And Marston and me, shooting a game of eight ball, talking about what it's like to be the son of Hugh Hefner.
Marston doesn't actually live in the Mansion—not anymore, not since his parents split up in 1998 and his mom, the blond Playmate Kimberley Conrad (January '88), moved into a more modest house that adjoins the property. He's 18 now, about to graduate from high school, a tall and lanky kid with heavy brows, watchful, slightly sad eyes, and a complexion that says "I spend too much time playing video games." He has none of his dad's swagger or mothlike attraction to the bright lights of Hollywood—which you could attribute to a young man struggling to define himself in opposition to his famous father, or to the fact that they just don't spend that much quality time together these days. Marston doesn't make it over every day. He's usually here on Thursdays, though, for… backgammon night.
"It's a regular thing," he says. "We talk about what's going on in school. My latest stuff. I've always been able to go over and talk, but when it came to doing something together, we'd have to plan it out beforehand. He's a really busy guy."
Do you keep a bedroom here?
"No," he says. "I did."
For a kid who spent the first eight years of his life in the Playboy Mansion, the mythical home of American male sexuality, Marston seems to keep this place at arm's length, as though he is from this world but not of it. He seems to have no interest in, say, scoping chicks with Bill Maher at the Midsummer Night's Dream party. He does not wear silk. He is a former leader of the Human Rights Student Task Force and has strong opinions on Darfur.
Still, he's had what has to be the world's most illustrative, intensive at-home sex education. Right?
"Well, as a 15-year-old kid, seeing naked people occasionally, that's—it's just the lifestyle of growing up as Hugh Hefner's son, in his shadow. It's not a boo-hoo sob story. But it's not the same as every other kid."
Marston leans over the table, pulls back the cue, and shoots clumsily. "You'd think I'd be better at this." A Playboy publicist, tasked with keeping an eye on things—this is Marston's first real brush with the press—is chilling in the van room, watching. "My, like, expectancy for what girl I'm going to get is, like, so fucked-up. I've just been around really hot women my entire life, so the average high school girl won't do it for me. But instead of making me really care about looks, I look for the personality and a personal connection. Because I've been around looks all my life, and it's like, if I can't talk to her…"
We couldn't agree more. But on to the more profound question: When you're Hugh Hefner's kid, do you learn about sex like other kids do, by pilfering your old man's Playboys?
"No, I learned about sex through sex education. In eighth grade. The only reason I might know more is because, like, it was all around me. So I'm more comfortable."
And then there is this: Thursday nights, when Marston and his dad get together to play backgammon—and "rap," as Hef will tell me—they convene in the library. And in that library, above the doorway, hangs a large framed photograph of Marston's mother, topless, her tanned, taut breasts arching skyward.
Male bonding, Hefner-style.
Hugh Hefner shuffles into the library, berobed and besilked, looking every bit his 82 years. He lowers himself onto a striped couch and sits with his good ear toward me. Nary a shag carpet has been updated since he moved into this place in 1971. The lights are all on dimmers, every surface covered with wood paneling or hewn from rugged stone. Behind him is a nude bust of his ex-girlfriend Barbi Benton. Over in the famed Grotto, there's a control panel with orange buttons that regulate the water jets, like a prop from a James Bond film, and on that control panel is a rotary dial—not for making phone calls but for changing LPs. No music plays today. No one is frolicking.
Hef is here to talk about Marston, his third child. (He has two kids from a previous marriage—"The first two children just sort of happened," he says—and another son, 16-year-old Cooper, with Kimberley Conrad.) Hef picks up a sheet of paper that's been placed in front of him on the coffee table. Talking points from his publicist. About Marston. For our interview.
I ask him to describe Marston's personality for me.
"First of all, he's the firstborn, and he's very much aware of that," he says, smiling. "He thinks of himself as Hef junior."
(Later, when I ask Kimberley about this, she objects, saying, "Actually, I don't know about that. I think other people think of him as Hef junior.")
Hef married Kimberley on July 1, 1989, here at the Mansion. He was 63. She was 26. The press played the marriage as a defining cultural moment—the ultimate bachelor tamed—with the wedding making the cover of People magazine. Marston was born ten months later. For Hef, this was a second chance at family life.
"It goes even deeper than that," he says. "In the '50s and '60s, I was devoted to building the company. And in the mid-'60s, I was devoted to writing the Playboy philosophy. In the '70s, I escaped to the West Coast and did what a lot of people did in the '70s."
You swung?
"I swung. I redefined the very nature of swinging."
And the '80s?
"A very dark decade for the company and for me personally. In 1985, I had a stroke, produced by the stress of what was going on around me. With the marriage to Kimberley, I was seeking a safe harbor. I had never really thought about remarrying, but I was feeling my years, and when I met her I thought, It's not going to get better than this; I'd better seize the opportunity.
"With Marston, I was there, a hands-on father. As you look at the first version of that documentary on my life that A&E did, called American Playboy, you can see the children's toys in the great hall. And Marston was a big fan of Batman, so I showed up one afternoon unexpectedly in a Batman costume and tried to convince him I was Batman!"
On the wall behind Hef is a photo of him with his sons, the two boys in matching blue sweaters.
How old are the kids in that photo?
"I don't know," he says.
Given Hefner's considerable experience with the opposite sex, I wonder what nuggets of fatherly wisdom he may have passed along to Marston.
"Stay away," he says. "Look out. They're trouble. [laughs] No, I didn't say any of those things. Well, I don't know. I think most of it has been by example."
But did you ever sit Marston down and do the whole birds-and-bees thing?
He shakes his head.
Did you ever try to explain the fact that, just after the separation, you started dating seven blond women?
"Not really. What is there to say?"
There was never any conversation about monogamy or marriage?
"What kind of conversation would that be?"
What kind of signal does that send?
"I think the signal that it sends, quite frankly, which the boys liked, was that instead of somebody replacing mama, I dated a bunch of girls."
After about forty-five minutes, Hef appears to be losing steam. I turn off the tape recorder, and he rises from the couch. As he does, he rips the kind of fart that one does not even attempt to hide from. No one in the room blinks.
Here's how Marston describes his mother: "My mom is the hard-ass, because she has to be. She got 75 percent custody. She's like, 'That's not okay,' and my dad is like, 'Oh, you kids.' She has to play bad cop." Here's how James Caan once described her after she had kids and tried to get Hef to ercise some restraint over the parties in the house: Kimberley put a damper on everything. And here's how she describes herself: "I think there is a time and place for everything. If people want to be naked, that's their choice. When the boys were little and living next door, and Hef would have the Summer Fun in the Sun on Sundays—they don't need to be exposed to three girls having a make-out session in the Grotto and a guy jumping in. It's not appropriate."
Marston's house connects to the Mansion via a gate and has tall hedges that cocoon it from its high-profile neighbor. One night he invites me over to play Guitar Hero. At the back door, we run into Kimberley, who's seeing off a Mansion butler. She's in white jogging pants, her blondish hair pulled back, making her look less like a bronzed sex goddess than like a 44-year-old suburban mother of two. Several barking dogs circle her feet. She gives Marston a look betraying parental disappointment; she wasn't expecting company.
Kimberley is fiercely protective of her kids and keenly aware of what being Hugh Hefner's son means for Marston. She knows how people will want to portray the family.
"Okay," she says, "Marston and Cooper have grown up around Playmates, so it isn't a big deal. I think a lot of people are like, 'Oh, my God, a Playmate!' I don't know. But they've grown up around it." A pause. "It's like working at Krispy Kreme—you don't eat all the doughnuts."
Did you ever have a conversation with the boys about their father's dating life?
"You know what I really believe that every person is wired differently. Whatever the boys decide to do, it will be… They have integrity. I don't think they'll be one of these young bucks running around Hollywood—guys in their twenties and thirties—that have five girls going. My personal feeling is they'll be one-on-one kind of guys."
Marston has been busy lately filling out his college applications, deciding where he wants to go. (He's thinking Wesleyan. "I'm trying to stay away from really earthy schools," he says. "Like, I wanted to apply to Bard, but from what it said, it was a really granola school. Wesleyan is, like, academically rigorous.") In June he'll graduate and leave Kimberley with Cooper, who will in turn likely go off to college the following year, leaving her here with her dogs, alone.
I ask her if she's excited about Marston heading out into the world.
"I'm very excited for him," she says. "But at the same time, I worry about him. I don't want to say worry. Let's not say worry, because it's a negative word. I just want him to be happy. I hope that his college years are great for him. I'm definitely going to miss him. The reality of it is it hurts my stomach. I love my boys. I love having them around. It's a huge part of my life. You know, they are my life."
It's friday night, and Marston is bound for Westwood Village, a suburban-style shopping area near UCLA, where, he tells me, there exists a little-known culinary mecca known as BJ's. "They have this thing called a Pizookie," he says. "It's like a pizza-sized cookie, and they put ice cream on it. It's freakin' delicious. Everyone has to have one in their lifetime." We take a seat—he picks a table with a good view of the UCLA hoops game—and he orders a pizza. He's got his skinny jeans on, Vans, and a gold KR3W jacket. He looks, to be completely honest, like pretty much every other wealthy white kid in Los Angeles.
I ask him if he ever worries, given his name, about people taking advantage of him, using him for access to the Mansion, trying to get close, knowing that one day he could be the one running the Playboy empire.
"Oh yeah," he says. "It's easy to tell who wants to be your friend for those reasons and who doesn't. People find out and they're like, 'Oh, my God, Hugh Hefner is your father. You're a god.' And I'm like, All right, I'm a god. Yeah. I'm a god."
Do you read Playboy?
"When I was little, I would totally take old issues and cut out Pamela Anderson pictures and make, like, a folder. I haven't read it recently. But I still love the magazine."
What do you read?
"Newsweek. Um, and I used to read Time, but it's, like, they're not really in-depth with their cover stories. The stories are very brief. I find that Newsweek has more info. I read The New Yorker. But that's when I want to read something, like legitimately read something. You need to have the energy to read because it's, like, fucking so much."
Are you following the election at all?
"No."
Are people in your school talking about it?
"Not really."
Okay, let's say you were to take over the business one day. Have you given any thought to how you would change it?
"As far as the nudity goes, I don't think I would change a lot, except maybe make the pictures cool and artsy instead of some really obvious setting. It's usually, like, cowgirl. You know what I mean I'd do something tight, like a painted body on a crazy art canvas. I'd want to make it cool again. Not like now, where it's some cheesy saying and then a Playboy Bunny on a T-shirt."
What about the Playboy aesthetic?
"I'd make it much more multicultural and diverse. Not so many blonds. I'd mix it up. Just how my dad has his taste, I have my taste."
Your dad, I say, he's a man with a specific…type. I'd say: blond. I'd say: surgically augmented. I'd say: not exuding a tremendous amount of (outward) intellectual ambition. How different are your tastes?
"The ones I find attractive are brunet, blue eyes, and that's about it. An intelligent woman that I can have a conversation with.… That centerfold in the magazine probably wouldn't be my girlfriend, because I wouldn't find her attractive. I don't care about fake boobs if the girl has a good personality, but most girls with fake boobs I don't find attractive—because of why they got the fake boobs in the first place."
The Pizookie arrives. It's housed in a pie tin and looks like it would slay a yeti. Okay, fuck the Pizookie: Before we go, I say, tell me one good Mansion story.
"One time I was hanging out with my friends, and there was a Slip 'N Slide," he says. "It was midnight, and I was like, I want to do the Slip 'N Slide! There wasn't any water, so we put oil on ourselves and slid down like that. We also shot BB guns at the guests. One time a security guard stopped us. Then another funny story is that—"
Let me rephrase. Did you ever see people having sex?
"No. I mean, if you go to the Grotto at a party, you can expect to, like, see someone. I've just never been like, 'Let's go into the Grotto so I can see someone having sex.' "
You're way more mature than I was at your age.
"It's, like, a little awkward, because it's not like I'm at some other kid's house and people are having sex. It's my house. Just knowing people are having sex at my house is uncomfortable."
Steven Kurutz is a writer living in New York. His first book, Like a Rolling Stone: The Strange Life of a Tribute Band, was published in April.
This story originally appeared in the June 2008 issue with the title “Next of Skin.”