The Mansion was the Playboy Mansion and question was dropped as casually as “Have you been to the new Target?” would be by other people. But to the person who asked me this in 2003, Pat Lacey, the Mansion was just that everyday. Pat was the “Bunny Mother” for the Playboy girls, kind of a house-mother who helps them with their public appearances and other aspects of their unusual lives. She was sweet and down-to-earth and when she invited me to the press luncheon for the Playmate of the Year event during the course of an interview for Glamour, I jumped at it. I could scarcely afford the plane ticket but I didn’t care. When Glinda invites you to the Emerald City, you go.
Playboy means vastly different things to different people. Twenty-somethings probably think of “The Girls Next Door,” seniors might remember the shocking/titillating introduction of naked ladies to their newsstand and your views on adult entertainment, artistic freedom, exploitation, body image, feminism, sex positivism, art and the evolution of our sexual culture might play into the image Playboy conjures to you. When I was starting out with hopes of being a writer, Playboy represented a high market standard, the exciting mix of sexuality and smart stories and an empire built and navigated by one man: Hugh Hefner.
“To realize one’s nature perfectly, that is what each of us is here for,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the picture of Dorian Gray, and I think that Hugh Hefner has done that. Even growing up in Nebraska farm country in a family with Puritan roots, Hef made his own magazines, including Shudder a horror mag with a “Monster of the Month,” and a club you could join for the yearly fee of a nickel. There’s a lot to admire there in someone who sees their dreams through to any degree, much less with the bang he has (no pun intended).
That’s why it was saddening to read a flurry of stories around New Years invoking the the tell-all book by Izabella St. James, a former Hef girlfriend, Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion. The hardcover version came out in in 200frigging6 but unflattering bits were trotted out in the wake of the recent announcement of Hefner’s engagement to 24-year-old Crystal Harris. Stories about poor conditions in the house, the girls’ schedules being tightly controlled and sex parties that don’t sound very sexy would be kind of bleak in general. Being about Hef, they just bummed me out.
And on January 5th, he fired back. In a satisfyingly chatty interview with Lloyd Grove in The Daily Beast, Hef calls St. James stories “self-serving semi-fiction,” and speaks directly to her claims including the one that the girls had a 9pm curfew (true), that he handed out drugs as aphrodisiacs (false) and had a lax attitude towards sexual safety (false: “There was testing,” he says, and “The only time anybody ever got pregnant in a relationship with me was the two times I was married.”)
I’m glad of this because some tacky tell-all is not the way a legend should be remembered. The dispiriting image these excerpts presented reminded me of another sexual genius, Mae West, who, like Hef, was a sex-positive ground-breaker in her day, but who slid into some uncomfortable self-parody toward the end with her last film Sextette (in which she’s 85) shows.
Maybe the difference between Hef and West was just the era in which they respectively aged. If Mae West had been 85 now instead of in 1978, maybe she’d have had her own reality show with real young male companions vying for her attention as they did in Myra Breckinridge. As it happens she was in her 80’s in an era that didn’t really know what to do with her – or anyone else – except put them in weird, goofy musicals.
Hef may be the target of ridicule or gossip at times but as he points out in [tialic|The Daily Beast] interview, his relationships are authentic and I don’t know how that can be bad. Yes, he has had many different incarnations as a romantic. Who hasn’t? If we progress in life we undergo little evolutions all the time, including in how we relate to people intimately. On one hand, I don’t know if I could handle so active a romantic life at his age—I’m kind of looking forward to being able to sag in peace. On the other, I’ll wait until I’m a rich, octogenarian, sexual-revolutionary to decide (it could happen—I have 30-some-odd years to try).
I did, indeed, go to the Mansion, by the way. I got tipsy with a hair stylist for Joe Millionaire and she and I sneaked a look into the infamous grotto (which was kind of dangerous with high heels and bloody marys). Hef emerged well into the event wearing a pink shirt white sport jacket (oh, and pants) with Holly Madison on his arm and eventually got on stage to introduce the year’s honoree Christina Santiago whose naked picture hung over a buffet table. As things began to wind down I was chatting with Bridget Marquardt, one of the Mansion’s famous blondes when she asked me “Would you like to meet Hef?”
I don’t often get star struck, but meeting Hugh Hefner was a big deal. He has the kind of charisma that people talk about Bill Clinton having. You just want to be around him. His hands (nothing untoward; it was a handshake) were huge and warm, like mitts that had just taken a pie out of the oven. He was gracious and I was so befuddled that I have no idea what I said by way of introducing myself but whatever it was he threw back his head and laughed, a real, out-loud belly laugh and I dimly thought “That’s good. Laughing is good.”. It was just like Lost in Translation, only I was there and still don’t know what was so funny. We talked only for a moment and then his attention was wanted elsewhere. And that was that.
I had to eat Ramen noodles for some time afterward to pay off the plane ticket, but it was worth it. For yay, I have been to the Mansion and it was good.
Hopefully Hef will be able to keep enjoying it, too, although as a public figure he’ll always be fodder for judgment and gossip. He’s just bought back the company returning it to private status, is obviously sharper and more well-spoken than some people decades younger and has a wedding to plan. Maybe it’s woefully naïve to hope a marriage with a 60 year-age difference will be settling—to put it in context, the year he was born, Bing Crosby released his first record; the year she was born Jello Biafra won a lawsuit over the “Penis Landscape” poster included in album “Frankenchrist.” But maybe a settled life isn’t the right thing to wish someone like Hef. Maybe just the next stage of an well-played game is the best wish… and what becomes a legend most.