Thy Neighbor's Wife (58 page)

Still, Nanci was slow in complaining because she was flattered by her trusted role as their intermediary, and she also knew that Karen was often too confused to act rationally in her own behalf. Had Karen fallen in love with a married man with children, she would have better understood the ground rules; but the dilemma was in becoming ensnared in a whirlwind romance with an adolescent tycoon who wanted to monopolize the love of two women—and every time he chose to be with one, it was doubly destructive to the ego of the other, because he was clearly signifying his choice rather than fulfilling an obligation to a wife and family. Nanci knew that it was particularly depressing for Karen during holidays: While Hefner usually spent Chirstmas with Karen in Chicago, he was with Barbi for the big New Year’s Eve party at
Playboy Mansion West. And Nanci was quite sure that if Hugh Hefner was not with Barbi Benton he would be with another young woman—he would always want what he did not have, he enjoyed the chase, and he would always be simultaneously drawn to two different types of women: the healthy, perky “good” girl personified by Barbi, and the big-breasted, sexy “bad” girl that Karen represented. Nanci knew that the situation with Hefner was impossible for Karen; he would never marry her, which had lately become her hope, nor could he offer her even a semblance of the personal commitment that her insecurity required. And now, following this latest visit by Hefner and his guards to her apartment, Nanci Heitner had all but exhausted her patience with Karen’s ongoing soap opera. She felt compassion but emphasized to Karen that there was no future for a woman in Hefner’s bed; and Karen, though tearful at times, nodded in agreement and promised that she would end the affair at once.

The two young women spoke for hours, leaving the apartment at 2
A.M.
for a final drink in the more cheerful ambience of the nearby Four Torches bar. But as they returned to the apartment building two hours later, they saw Hefner’s car cruising along the street; and when Hefner spotted them, he jumped out of the car and ran toward Karen with outstretched arms. Karen, stopping next to Nanci, cursed under her breath; but as he approached her with tears in his eyes, and his arms reaching out to her, Karen suddenly moved forward to embrace him, and she too began to cry. As the two of them held one another tightly and exchanged tender words, Nanci turned; and as Hefner led Karen toward the open door of the limousine, Nanci Heitner climbed up the steps leading to her apartment.

Hefner assured Karen on the following day that the phone call she had overheard regarding the Aspen weekend was not to Barbi Benton, but rather to his daughter, Christie Hefner. This somewhat assuaged Karen’s hurt feelings, although in truth she was almost less enamored of Hefner’s Phi Beta Kappa daughter
than she was of Barbi Benton. Karen had met Christie Hefner several times when Christie was visiting from college with her friends, and she recently had been upset when she overheard one of the boy friend’s disparaging remark about Hefner’s “concubinage.” Karen also had heard that Hefner’s daughter and Barbi Benton got along well in Los Angeles, and had gone on a shopping spree together in Beverly Hills, and this made Karen, at this sensitive time, even more insecure. But Hugh Hefner had given no indication, at least to Karen, that he could be influenced by his daughter’s judgment of his women; and she was encouraged when he suggested that they take a short vacation in Acapulco. It had been a long, cold winter for Karen in Chicago and she looked forward to a few days of lying in the sun.

Accompanied by a couple of Hefner’s friends that Karen liked, the visit to Acapulco was for her a reprieve from all the turmoil of the past months; Hefner was giving her his most valuable gift—his time—and during the effulgent days and nights that followed she luxuriated in his presence and wished that it could continue indefinitely. But the warm outdoors and tranquil evenings were of limited appeal to Hefner; and after one week, citing office problems that demanded his immediate attention, the restless publisher prepared for his premature departure while convincing Karen to remain with his friends through the weekend.

On the way to the airport, sitting close to him in the back of the car, Karen wondered aloud when they would next be together. After he had offered a vague reply, she pressed him to be specific, wanting to know approximately how long his business would take, and when she might count on seeing him again. But he remained stubbornly noncommittal and distant—it was as if he were already in the air, miles away, out of range. And as she walked with him arm in arm through the crowded terminal, and out toward the glaring runway where the Playboy plane was waiting, she felt her anxiety rising; and before kissing him good-bye, she tried one more time to elicit from him a direct answer to her urgent question—at which point, suddenly and furiously, he
took the hard leather attaché case that he was carrying and hurled it high in the air toward his plane. As the case bounced heavily on the ground and skidded forward several feet, Hefner bolted toward it like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit; and when he reached it, he jumped on top of it with both feet, stomping up and down many times. While his pilots observed with astonishment, and groups of suntanned straw-hatted tourists also stopped to look, the petrified Karen Christy ran toward him; but before she reached him, he had miraculously calmed down, his tempestuous outburst having exhausted itself within a few seconds. As he stepped down from his case, he seemed neither embarrassed nor even fully aware of what he had done. And after he had retrieved his somewhat battered valise, and had kissed Karen good-bye, he proceeded without delay up the metal staircase into the cabin of his plane.

Later that night he telephoned her at the hotel, said he was sorry if he had frightened her, told her that everything was fine, and promised that he would notify her as soon as he had resolved the problems he was confronting. In a telephone conversation days later, after Karen had expressed a wish to visit her relatives in Texas, he encouraged her to go, and even offered to fly the Playboy plane from Los Angeles to Dallas at the completion of her visit and accompany her back to Chicago. This was a grand gesture on his part—the trip from Los Angeles to Chicago via Dallas was hardly the direct route that he preferred to travel, and he also said that he would be happy to meet her uncle, aunt, and her other relatives who would be with her at the Dallas airport.

True to his word, the black DC-g with the white bunny emblem painted on its tail landed at the new Dallas/Fort Worth Airport; and as the unusual plane came slowly to a halt in front of the observation deck of the white terminal, several hundred people—travelers, ticket agents, baggage porters, bathroom attendants, ruddy men wearing ten-gallon hats, women holding children, long-haired young people carrying guitars—all suddenly
turned and gazed through the gigantic window that overlooked the field.

The plane was the only big jet ever to be painted black, which was exactly why Hefner had chosen that color; and as the plane’s steps were lowered and the cabin door swung open, Hefner stood momentarily alone on the top step, his hair and silk shirt moving in the breeze, his intense dark eyes focused on the mass of silent faces staring down at him from behind the massive pane of glass. He had not been in the state of Texas in nearly thirty years. When he had first visited Texas, in the summer of 1944, he arrived on a troop train headed for Camp Hood—a skinny, eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate who had been voted by his class the third most likely to succeed. Now, at forty-seven, he had returned to lay claim to one of Texas’ most curvesome blondes, to greet her relatives, and, with no intentions toward marriage, to carry her away to Chicago—an act that in an earlier time would have surely aroused the rancor of her kinfolks and provoked the sound of shotguns.

Walking toward the terminal, with his guards a few paces behind, Hefner spotted Karen waving at him from the top of the ramp, smiling from under her straw hat. Wearing clogs, a slim skirt, and a T-shirt that left little to the imagination, Karen edged through the crowd to greet him, and to introduce him to the relatives with whom she had stayed at a cabin on Eagle Mountain Lake. There were her aunt and uncle, her three cousins, her two gangly teenaged stepbrothers wearing jeans, her twenty-year-old sister, Bonnie, who was carrying a crying one-year-old baby, and Bonnie’s husband, an Air Force sergeant on leave from his base in Tokyo.

Removing his pipe, Hefner shook hands with them, smiled, and engaged them in conversation; and when a photographer came over, Hefner agreed to pose with the group. Meanwhile his friends from the plane—men wearing gold medallions and open-necked shirts, jet Bunnies in shiny black skintight uniforms, and a plume-hatted centerfold model carrying a poodle—had stepped onto the runway, seeming restless, and were looking up at the
crowd; and Hefner, concluding his chat with Karen’s relatives, took her arm and headed back toward the plane.

The crowd, not moving, continued to watch as the engines started; and they were still watching when the black airplane had become a distant object in the sky.

Having established a stronger sense of herself, and what she wanted, during her time away from Chicago, Karen was slow in readjusting to the routine of the mansion. The absence of John Dante had deprived her of the one male friend that she could confide in when Hefner was away; and when Hefner was there, his many business meetings and the personal problems of his secretary, Bobbie Arnstein, so preoccupied him that an uncharacteristic air of forbearance and even gloom pervaded the Chicago household. Days before Karen had returned, Bobbie Arnstein was arrested outside the mansion on charges of having earlier conspired with her boy friend, among other young men, to transport a half pound of cocaine from Florida to Chicago. On the day of her arrest she was discovered to be carrying in her purse a variety of pills, including a small quantity of cocaine. Freed on $4,500 bail, her name and photograph were thrust onto front pages around the country, and, by implication, Hefner and the mansion staff and his entourage were under suspicion of indulging, and perhaps even trafficking, in drugs. Although Hefner steadfastly supported Bobbie Arnstein throughout the litigation and paid the bills of her attorneys, the abundant publicity was clearly disturbing to him, particularly when he believed that there was probably less drug consumption in his mansions than in the average dormitory on an American campus.

The drug probe was not Hefner’s only distraction at this time: There was a charge of discrimination brought against
Playboy
by a black employee who had been passed over for promotion in the company’s personnel department; there was an intensified IRS investigation originally initiated by the Nixon White House after Hefner was placed on the “enemies list”; and there were continu
ing reports of Playboy’s declining stock prices and the conspicuous losses in its hotel operations and other subsidiary ventures. Suddenly, after years of astounding profits, abysmal bliss, and apparent control over his environment, Hefner’s foundation seemed shaken; and while Karen Christy would have willingly remained at his side if she felt she had a real place in his world, she was convinced at this time that it was foolish of her to remain. She was only a part of his folly, a prop for his image. Though she knew it was silly, she felt old at twenty-three, a shrew who eavesdropped on his phone calls, a bed partner that he easily replaced when they were apart. She had been told by one of the jet Bunnies that, on the day before his plane landed in Dallas, Hefner had spent the night in his Los Angeles bed (while Barbi Benton was out of town on a singing assignment) with the centerfold model who had ridden with the poodle on the plane; and though Karen was not so naive as to ever expect Hefner’s sexual fidelity to extend much longer than a week, she was no longer willing to abide by his expectations that she remain uninvolved with other men. There was a young man in Dallas that she knew and had even dated secretly. She was sure there were other men in the world outside that she would enjoy meeting. And so with much encouragement from her Bunny friend, Nanci Heitner, Karen Christy decided at last that she would pack her bags and, without a word to Hefner, permanently leave the mansion.

The problem of getting her things past the security guards was not inconsiderable, but she eventually devised a plan that enabled her to send her possessions to Dallas without alerting anyone in the house who might report it to Hefner. Explaining to the maids and butlers that she was sending her unwanted clothes to her poor relatives in Texas, she packed in cardboard boxes, little by little, her furs, her jewels, and her vast wardrobe of dresses and negligees that Hefner had given her. After mailing more than thirty boxes during a two-week period to her aunt in Dallas, Karen Christy managed to get her white Lincoln into the hands of a former Bunny whom she knew she could trust; and, on a day when Hefner was in Los Angeles, she used a chauffeured limou
sine to go shopping at one of her favorite boutiques on Rush Street.

While the chauffeur and a security guard sat waiting in the car, Karen entered the shop and, with the help of a saleslady she knew, was able to exit through a rear door to a parallel street, where she hailed a taxicab that took her to the place where her car and two girl friends were waiting. One of them, Nanci Heitner, was there to help with the long drive to Dallas—a trip that they would accomplish in sixteen hours, using Dexedrine to stay awake. Along the way, many miles from Chicago, Karen paused to use a roadside phone to say good-bye to Bobbie Arnstein and to explain that she simply could not stay at the mansion any longer.

After Bobbie Arnstein had relayed the message to Hefner in Los Angeles, he became agitated and fretful, and for the next week he telephoned Karen repeatedly and tried to convince her to return. But while she wanted to maintain their friendship, and agreed to visit him from time to time in Los Angeles, she told him she would never go back to Chicago. She had just gotten a small apartment in Dallas, had been hired as a model by a local agency, and was dating a young executive with a computer firm that she had met previously in Dallas. While she continued to drive her white Lincoln, she had no use for her furs and expensive jewelry. Around her neck she was soon wearing a gold chain given her by her new boy friend; and suspended from it was a fourteen-karat price tag on which was printed: “Sold.”