Thy Neighbor's Wife (57 page)

Elaborating on his position that he was more efficient in a mansion than he would be in an office, Hefner explained in an interview that was published in
Playboy:
“Man is the only animal capable of controlling his environment, and what I’ve created is a private world that permits me to live my life without a lot of the wasted time and motion that consume a large part of most people’s lives. The man who has a job in the city and a house in the suburbs is losing two or three hours a day simply moving himself physically from where he lives to where he works and back again. Then he has to take the time and energy to go out for lunch in
some crowded restaurant, where he’s more than likely dealt with in a rushed and impersonal fashion. He’s living his life according to a preconceived notion—certainly not his own—of what a daily routine ought to be…. The details of most people’s daily regimen,” Hefner went on, “are dictated by the clock. They eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at a time generally prescribed by social custom. They work during the day and sleep at night. But in the mansion it is, quite literally, the time of day that you want it to be…. One of the greatest sources of frustration in contemporary society is that people feel so powerless, not only in relation to what happens in the world around them but in influencing what happens in their own lives. Well, I don’t feel that frustration, because I’ve taken control of my life.”

But there was part of his life over which he suddenly lost control during the summer and fall of 1973, and, because it involved his two favorite women, he displayed to his household staff an uncharacteristic lack of composure and even signs of panic. What provoked this was a story in
Time
magazine in July entitled “Adventures in the Skin Trade”; and in addition to stressing the heightened rivalry between
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, as well as speculating on how the Supreme Court’s
Miller
ruling might inhibit men’s magazines,
Time
printed a photograph showing Hefner in Los Angeles being embraced by Barbi Benton, and a second picture of him sitting in the Chicago mansion with his arm around Karen Christy. “Long a two-of-everything consumer,”
Time
wrote, “Hefner has lately extended the principle to his romantic Me. Former Playmate Barbi Benton, his longtime escort, lives in the California mansion; blonde Karen Christy, an ex-Bunny in the Chicago Playboy Club, is ensconced in his Chicago quarters. Somehow the arrangement continues to work.”

The magazine provided Barbi Benton with the first indication that Hefner was more than casually involved with another woman; and that he had knowingly allowed himself to be photographed with Karen Christy for a newsmagazine was inexcusable to Barbi. Without telephoning or notifying Hefner in any way, Barbi packed a suitcase and left the mansion. When Hefner
learned of her departure, he immediately summoned his pilots to fly him to California—greatly upsetting Karen Christy, who had been led to believe in recent months that Hefner was more in love with her than with Barbi, a view that he had not only expressed but had further demonstrated by spending more time of late in Chicago than in Los Angeles.

Reassuring Karen as he kissed her good-bye that she was paramount in his life, but nonetheless insisting that he felt obliged to appease Barbi—and that he had to do it in person—he left for Los Angeles. Karen seemed to understand his leaving; Barbi had been in Hefner’s life before she had, and Hefner had convinced Karen that Barbi deserved his direct explanation. What Hefner did not admit to Karen was that he wanted Barbi to return, that he needed them both, that he was attracted to each for different reasons. He admired Barbi Benton for her vitality and blithe spirit; and the fact that he could not completely control this financially independent Californian, who was also striving to establish her identity as a country-and-western singer, made her more challenging to him, and constantly desirable. Like his mother, his former wife, and his daughter completing college, Barbi Benton was a woman of wholesome appeal and uncommon character; but in other areas that were important to Hefner—and particularly within the walls of his bedroom—Barbi was no match for Karen Christy. Though shy in a crowd, Karen was uninhibited in private; and during his vast and varied erotic past, he had never known anyone who could surpass her skill and ardor in bed. The sight of her removing her clothes thrilled him; and after he had covered her body with oil—which she seemed to enjoy as much as he—the smooth, soothing, glistening lovemaking on the satin sheets aroused him to peaks of passionate pleasure. Unlike Barbi, who was often tired in the evening after rehearsing in studios, and who disliked it when oil got into her hair on those nights when she had auditions on the following morning, Karen was not ambitious about a career and she had many free hours during the day for the washing and drying of her hair. Hefner was also pleased that Karen shared his enthusiasm for backgam
mon and the other games, and was always willing and available to travel with him, or to take planes to meet him whenever he called. When he was in the mood to be with just one other person, that person was usually Karen Christy; but when he was serving as a host at a large party—and especially at one of the fund-raisers for social causes that he frequently sponsored—he preferred to have Barbi Benton at his side. She had more social poise than Karen, was a better conversationalist, was capable of making a speech. Although her television appearances as a singer and comedienne had so far made her seem trivial and superficial, she was in person intelligent and astute; and she was the only woman that he had met in recent years that he thought could make him an acceptable wife.

While he had no intention of offering marriage to Barbi as a possible inducement for her return, he also could not imagine being happy in his West Coast mansion if she were not in residence; and as soon as he landed in Los Angeles, and located her by telephone at a hotel in Hawaii—where he was relieved to learn that she was staying with a lady friend—he pleaded for forgiveness and urged that she not allow the one article in
Time
to destroy their years of love and understanding. Though she remained cool on the phone, and insisted that she would stay another week in Hawaii, she did agree to speak with him in person after her return to Los Angeles. But when he next saw her, she was still upset and remote; and while she conceded that she still loved him and hoped that their relationship could be revived, she announced that she had gotten an apartment of her own in Beverly Hills, a place to which she could go when she wanted to get away from the house guests, the Bunnies, and the ongoing backgammon games at the mansion.

After Barbi Benton had joined Hugh Hefner in bed, she promised that she would not date other men, and Hefner promised that he would be faithful in his fashion; and from then on he sent flowers proclaiming his love each and every day to her apartment. During this time he was speaking on the telephone daily to Karen Christy, who seemed eager for his return; but when he
moved back into the Chicago mansion, he could sense that she, too, was somehow different, more reserved, less free with him, even though she told him nothing had changed between them.

The routine of the mansion slowly returned to normal: The pinball machines and table games were played through the night; the Bunnies shuttled back and forth between the dormitory and the club; the
Playboy
editors regularly arrived for meetings in Hefner’s suite—but a sense of restiveness permeated the big house. Extra teams of security guards, hired to stand watch around the property ever since the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, lent an air of emergency by their very presence behind the gates; and in addition there were signs of anxiety in the manner of Hefner’s secretary, Bobbie Arnstein, once a gentle influence in the house but now involved in a troubled love affair with a handsome and erratic young drug dealer who quietly and unpredictably visited her lower-floor apartment in the rear of the mansion.

Hefner’s most trusted male friend, John Dante, announced one day during this time that he had to get away. For years he had lived in the mansion as Hefner’s emissary to the clubs, but the job was now very undemanding and often boring, and recently Dante had referred to himself bitterly as an aging “game player.” Though he remained devoted to Hugh Hefner—and would be forever grateful for Hefner’s loan in 1968 of nearly $40,000 that allowed Dante to pay off the Chicago bookies to whom he was in debt for gambling on pro football games—Dante seemed desperate for a vacation from Hefner’s paradise; and with Hefner’s reluctant blessing, Dante climbed into a jeep, together with the 1973 Bunny of the Year, and headed for Taos, New Mexico.

And then one evening, after emerging from a business meeting, Hefner discovered that Karen Christy was missing from the mansion. She had been seen earlier in the afternoon by some of the house guests and guards, but a quick inspection of every room of the house, including the secret passageways and hideaways, failed to reveal a trace of her. By midnight Hefner was visibly
shaken and exasperated; and responding to a suggestion that she might be visiting the apartment of a Bunny friend named Nanci Heitner, with whom Karen Christy often spent time while Hefner was out of town, Hefner quickly put on a coat over his pajamas, jumped into his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, and, accompanied by guards, drove through a light snow into the Lincoln Park section of Chicago.

When the driver stopped in front of an old four-story red brick building where Nanci Heitner lived, Hefner and the guards hastened toward a dark doorway that had no overhead light, and, as they lit matches, they squinted at the mailbox in an attempt to locate the Heitner name and apartment number. There was a row of six buttons along the box, but the plastic nameplates were either missing or illegible; and so the impatient Hefner began to press all six buttons repeatedly. When the door was finally buzzed open, he stood at the staircase and called up in a loud voice: “Hello, I’m Hugh Hefner—is Karen Christie up there?”

The two guards carrying walkie-talkies, and Hefner carrying an open Pepsi, waited momentarily for a sign of response. When none came, Hefner proceeded to climb the steps and to knock on each door, repeating: “I’m Hugh Hefner, and I’m looking for Karen Christy.” Soon, on the second floor, he heard noises coming from the other side of a door, saw light streaming through the cracks and the peephole.

“What do you want?” a woman cried from behind the peephole.

“I’m Hugh Hefner, and…”

“Are you
really
Hugh Hefner?” she asked, still not unlocking the door. Then Hefner heard a man’s voice in the background asking the woman what the commotion was about, and she replied: “Some nut outside says he’s Hugh Hefner.”

Nobody on the second floor or the third would open doors, but Hefner continued up another flight of steps; and after he knocked on apartment 4-A, he heard a dog barking and a voice announcing: “Karen’s not here.” The door opened, and Nanci Heitner, a blondish young woman wearing a black robe, and holding back
her Tibetan watchdog, let Hefner and the guards in. “She’s not here—you can see for yourself.” As Hefner apologized for the late-hour interruption, the guards searched through Nanci Heitner’s rooms, in her closets, under her bed. Hefner looked haggard and desolate, his hair was blown wild, his Pepsi bottle was empty. After the guards had completed their search, Nanci Heitner walked with him to the door, feeling sorry for him.

Hefner’s car had barely pulled away from the curb when, moments later, the telephone rang. It was the sobbing voice of Karen Christy saying that she was in a phone booth and wanted to come over, adding that she
had
to get away from the faithless Hugh Hefner. After Karen had arrived, wearing a heavy coat and boots, her hair wet from the snow and her mascara smeared with tears, she explained that earlier in the day, as she awoke from a nap, she had overheard Hefner in the next room talking on the telephone to Barbi in Los Angeles, reaffirming his love and even making arrangements to join her for a weekend in Aspen. The night before, Karen told Nanci, Hefner had declared that it was all over with Barbi, claiming that during his recent visit to California he realized that Barbi no longer enthralled him. Obviously, Karen concluded, Hefner was deceiving her; and Nanci Heitner, concurring, suggested that she pack her things at the mansion and leave it forever.

Nanci Heitner was beginning to grow weary of hearing Karen constantly talking about Hefner, complaining about his selfish nature and how painful it was being involved with him. Frustrated in her desire to possess him exclusively, and lonely in the mansion when he was out of town, Karen had lately gotten into the habit of calling Nanci at all hours of the night, interrupting Nanci’s sleep after she had come home tired from work, or interrupting Nanci when she was in bed with a man. While Nanci always listened patiently, her lovers invariably became restless, piqued, or continued to make love while Nanci held the phone to her ear—which Nanci minded less than acknowledging to Karen
that she was too busy to listen, for she had become concerned of late about Karen’s mental stability and health, being aware that Karen had lost fifteen pounds and was indulging heavily in sleeping pills. Nanci was also very fond of Karen and identified with her. Like Karen, Nanci Heitner had been reared in a family of much hardship and death; and, like Karen, she had come to work for
Playboy
hoping that it would somehow introduce her to influential people and social opportunities that had previously been lacking in her impoverished past. Although nothing very special had yet happened to Nanci, she had reveled in the Cinderella situation of her friend; and, in a small way, Nanci had benefitted from it. At the club, where the managers knew that she was close to the woman who was closest to Hefner in Chicago, Nanci was deferentially treated as a person who, through Karen, could get messages to Hefner much faster than if they were sent through official channels. Indeed, Nanci frequently spoke directly to Hefner himself since he recently had begun calling her from Los Angeles on those occasions when an anguished Karen had hung up on him; he would call Nanci and ask her to deliver messages to Karen, asking her to call him back with Karen’s reaction. Since he never told Nanci to call him collect, the discord between Hugh Hefner and Karen Christy was greatly escalating Nanci Heitner’s telephone bill.