Hef's Little Black Book (5 page)

My Shangri-la in the Land of Dreams: Playboy Mansion West.

Still, no setting lured besporting events like the Grotto. Four Jacuzzis burbled within, so as to tenderize moments most tender, amid boulders and candlelight. “If those rocks could talk…” He would often muse and tantalize at once. (To finish the sentence might have finished careers.) But it is fair to say that those rocks have seen most everything and everyone (celebrity-wise) making waves, usually without clothes. Of course, there was the night of Hef’s fifty-eighth birthday, on which eighteen beautiful naked women waited in his Grotto to fete him, and him alone, as speakers hidden in the rocks blared “To All the Girls I Loved Before”—the popular song that had been officially dedicated to him alone.

As he would say then and ever, “Just another typical day at the Mansion…”

T
he Center of the World Is Where You Wake Up

The truly best-laid plans: My Mansion West Bedroom.

Whither the Bed of all Beds? Perfectly round, eight and a half feet in diameter, its rotations made it, well,
revolutionary
—going clockwise or counterclockwise at the twist of a dial in the headboard controls, purring softly, turning, turning—the laziest susan ever! Without moving an inch, he moved his Chicago bedroom, effectively subdividing a white-carpeted universe (remove shoes, please)—sectional permissiveness! “Hef—in a James Bond world,” wrote Tom Wolfe, who saw the Bed for exactly what it was: “the center of the world!”

M
oonlight Can Become You

He lived for whenever, especially in the Chicago Mansion. Draped out and ignored, the sun never shone in the house. Time of day meant nothing there. He liked it that way, liked to stay up for days on end, editing, philosophizing, discoursing, loving, writing memos, playing games. (Forty-hour Pepsi-fueled, Dexedrine-enhanced backgammon or Monopoly marathons! A regular occurrence!) “The wee hours were the whee hours,” he said, “because while the rest of the world was asleep, romantic dreams were more likely to come true.” Thus, party nights became party mornings. Norman Mailer, who observed his share of such nights, wrote of one: “The party was very big, and it was a good party. The music went all the way down into the hour or two before breakfast, but no one saw the dawn come in, because the party was at Hugh Hefner’s house, which is one of the most extraordinary houses in America. I never saw the sky from that room, and so there was a timeless, spaceless sensation…. Timeless, spaceless, it was outward bound.”

Often, at such parties, the host would never appear—he was Gatsby of Chicago in those days. Or he would appear briefly, then return to his chambers, with or without female accompaniment, to conduct the business of surveying corporate landscape and magazine layouts. He no longer went to the office; his bed was his twirling twenty-four-hour desktop, papers and printouts and color transparencies strewn everywhere. Riding the Bed in 1965, amid the clutter, he explained himself and his work habits to Tom Wolfe: “I don’t take calls anymore, I just return them. I don’t have any inboxes and out-boxes. I don’t have to arrange my life by other people’s
hours.
I don’t always have to be in some boring con
ference. I don’t have to go through business lunches and a lot of formalities. I don’t even shave if I don’t feel like it. I don’t have to get dressed. I don’t have to put on a shirt and a tie and a suit every day. I just put on a
bathrobe!”

And what he wore under that bathrobe, of course, would become for him what a hat was for Sinatra. The signature silken ensemble—legendarily, indelibly all his own.

P
ajamas Are a Playboy’s Best Friend

“We like our apartment,” he wrote in the introduction to Volume 1, Number 1, of
Playboy
magazine, December 1953. By then, ensconced with wife, Millie, and baby daughter, Christie, he had turned an apartment in Hyde Park, at 6052 South Harper, in the shadow of the University of Chicago, into a rarefied bohemian den that boasted Hans Knoll tables and Eames chairs and grass walls and bamboo shades and a nursery wallpapered with Pogo cartoons.

“He did it all,” said Millie. “He controlled every aspect of it.” It became a salon for thinkers, for those rethinking their lives. He instigated talk and games and randy notions, and friends were intrigued. Said one woman, who would show up with her estranged husband (bohemian!): “Being in that apartment—the furnishings, the people and the good conversation—all of it made me feel on the cutting edge of an exciting world. I could always count on a good discussion taking place, besides the stag movies and the banned books.”

Next sentence from Volume 1, Number 1 (re: “We like our apartment”): “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” He wrote from real and imagined experience. He would only experience more. Meanwhile the phonograph beckons…