Thy Neighbor's Wife (59 page)

In a federal courtroom in November 1974, having been found guilty of conspiracy in bringing a half pound of cocaine into Chicago, Hefner’s secretary Bobbie Arnstein was sentenced to fifteen years in prison—five years longer than the harshest sentence received by her male coconspirators who had negotiated and carried out the transaction. Although federal agents knew from personal surveillance and the wiretaps placed on the phone of her boy friend Ron Scharf that she was aware and approving of his
activities, and was a drug user herself—and had accompanied him to Miami where the deal was made—her lawyers insisted that she had mainly gone “along for the ride,” being enamored of young Scharf, who was seven years her junior, and wanting to prove her compatibility in the hip and daring drug culture that he personified to her.

The fact that her long sentence was “provisional,” and could be greatly reduced and maybe suspended if she would become a government informer against other drug users or distributors of her acquaintance—which was the method the federal agents had used in inducing a narcotics convict to implicate Bobbie Arnstein, Ron Scharf, and another young man—convinced Arnstein’s attorneys that the lawmen were less interested in punishing her than in using her to get to the man for whom they suspected she might be obtaining the drugs, namely her boss, Hugh Hefner.

For years in Chicago, law-enforcement authorities and church groups had been offended by Hefner’s hedonism and expanding wealth, but they had so far been unable to imprison him as a criminal. In 1963, after a pictorial display of Jayne Mansfield in
Playboy
was declared to be obscene, a vice squad with a warrant forced its way into the mansion, accused Hefner of publishing filth, and literally dragged him out of bed to be booked at the station house. But he was released on bail, and in the subsequent trial he won his freedom after a bung-jury verdict.

However, the drug case against Bobbie Arnstein, his most intimate employee, seemed to present a more promising opportunity to finally check Hefner and his influence, which now, eleven years after the obscenity arrest, had spread to the extent that his magazine was openly displayed on newsstands all over the nation, even in the drugstores of very conservative communities. With part of his fortune, Hugh Hefner had established a foundation that lobbied for the decriminalization of marijuana and opposed all forms of authoritarian repression; and as a party-giver whose invitees regularly included rock stars, jazz musicians, and young political radicals, it was reasonable for the federal and state investigators to assume that, even though Hefner himself
might not indulge, his generosity as a host would prompt him to cater to the habits of his guests. In the forefront of the investigation against Hefner was the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, James R. Thompson, who years before in Chicago had prosecuted the case against Lenny Bruce and who, following the wide press attention he received during the Arnstein-Hefner inquiry, would become the next governor of Illinois.

One month after Bobbie Arnstein had been sentenced, James Thompson summoned her and her attorney to his office and informed them that he had learned from reliable sources that there was a “contract” out on her life, and he warned her that during the time she was free on bail she should trust “neither friend nor foe.” The Arnstein attorney interpreted this as an attempt to further frighten an already intimidated defendant into suspecting her employer, and perhaps terrify her to a point where she would testify against him. If this was the government’s intention, it did not succeed; but although Bobbie Arnstein had no doubt of Hefner’s continued loyalty and affection, she began to feel somewhat uneasy in the mansion and even wary when the butlers brought to her room her usual drink and midnight snack.

Adding further to her sense of isolation and discomfort in this place that had so long been her home was the guilt she felt each day as she saw the newspapers and read of the government’s widening probe into the private lives of Hefner’s friends and associates, his house staff, the Bunnies, and many of the celebrities that he had entertained not only in Chicago but in Los Angeles. The investigators also pulled from their files the case of a Bunny named Adrienne Pollack, whose death in 1973 was suspected to be the result of an overdose of Quaaludes. Though Hefner claimed to have never met Adrienne Pollack, and though at the time of her death she was living with a boy friend who was an admitted user of narcotics, the headlines linked Hefner with her demise, and a separate grand jury was established to reinvestigate the Pollack case.

Among the dozens of people who were questioned about
Hefner was a former
Playboy
editor named Frank Brady, who had recently written an unauthorized biography of the publisher; but instead of concentrating on the extent of Hefner’s possible involvement with the procurement or use of drugs, Brady was mainly asked about Hefner’s sexual affairs and the type of activity that transpired in his bedroom. The same line of questioning was followed with others who were queried—the investigators seemed eager to present the Arnstein conspiracy case in an atmosphere of sex and drugs, degeneracy and death. While Hefner could not protect himself against deprecations upon his character, he was determined to thwart any possible attempt by investigators to infiltrate his property and “plant” in obscure places samples of drugs that they would later uncover as evidence against him. After ordering his security force to search every nook, cranny, and medicine cabinet in his two mansions, he called for stricter vigilance at the gates and a closer scrutiny of all delivery boys, maintenance crews, and other outsiders who passed through the service entrance. His engineers periodically checked the phones against wiretapping and electronically “swept” the rooms and halls for any evidence of “bugs.”

In this time of heightened suspicion Bobbie Arnstein became increasingly morose, and on two occasions, while her appeal was pending, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and required medical treatment. Although Hefner invited her to work in the sunnier surroundings of the California office, where he was now spending most of his time since Karen Christy’s departure, his attorneys urged that she not live in the Los Angeles mansion, warning that she might still be dependent on drugs. When a close woman friend in Chicago, a former
Playboy
employee named Shirley Hillman, discussed moving with her family to Los Angeles to share a home with Bobbie, the shift to the Coast seemed tempting; but Bobbie resisted because she knew that in California she would be reliant on an automobile. She had been afraid of driving ever since an accident in 1963 when, on a road in Kentucky with her fiancé, an associate editor named Tom Lownes—a brother to the
Playboy
executive, Victor Lownes—she had hit a
bump in the road, veered onto the dirt shoulder into a tree, and overturned Lownes’ Volkswagen. Thrown out of the vehicle, she broke an arm and suffered other injuries; but Lownes, trapped in the car, died instantly. For many months thereafter Bobbie Arnstein was haunted by moods of depression, and could not be left alone day or night as she relived the accident and blamed herself again and again for her fiancé’s death.

Still, after Hefner’s suggestion during the winter of 1974 that she join him in California, she promised she would fly out soon after the New Year’s holiday. During the second week in January, on a Saturday night, she had dinner at the North Side apartment of Shirley and Richard Hillman, and appeared to be optimistic about her future and also hopeful about the outcome of her case. She said that it was unlikely that she would be sent to prison.

At 1:30
A.M.
a male friend drove her back to the mansion, where, after checking for messages—there were none—she obtained a fifth of liquor from the night houseman and carried it to her bedroom. After a few drinks, she packed a cosmetics case and left the mansion for a walk. Blocks south, on North Rush Street, she pushed through the revolving door of the aging Hotel Maryland, in the basement nightclub of which during the 1950s Lenny Bruce had entertained audiences that often included Hugh Hefner. Signing the hotel register under the name “Roberta Hillman,” Bobbie Arnstein took the elevator to the seventeenth floor and, after entering her room, hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob and double-locked and bolted the door. Through the window of her room she could see the thirty-seven-story skyscraper topped by a large-lettered sign beaming in the night: PLAYBOY. Shortly before 3
A.M.
, she made three telephone calls—one to the man who had driven her home (there was no answer); one to the mansion to check if there were any late messages (there were none); and one to the Hillman apartment. Richard Hillman answered, and, though Shirley was asleep, he said he would awaken her; but Bobbie told him not to, adding, “Just tell her I called.” In Bobbie Arnstein’s cosmetics case were bottles containing barbiturates, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers.
After consuming enough of each in a quantity that would kill her, she composed her final statement on hotel stationery and put it in an envelope on which she wrote: “boring letter of explanation within….”

The next afternoon, when a chambermaid was unable to enter the room, the manager ordered the lock broken. Bobbie Arnstein, still dressed, was found dead lying on the edge of the bed. Her letter began: “It was I alone who acted and who conceived of this act. Because of recent developments, it behooves me to specify that it was definitely not the result of
any
determination or action on the part of my employers—who have been most generous and patient during my recent difficulties….

“Despite the (perjured) testimony of the government’s ‘star’ witness,” her note continued, “I was never a part of any conspiracy to transport or distribute the alleged drugs connected with the case…. I don’t suppose it matters that I say it, but Hugh M. Hefner is—though few will ever really realize it—a staunchly upright, rigorously moral man—and I know him well and he has never been involved in the criminal activity which is being attributed to him now.” In conclusion, she added: “If—as has been said before about someone else, my veneer (or psychological make-up) couldn’t permit any defenses against my sense of reality, then it has comforted me to know that this last decision—being of my own choosing…was the only one I’ve felt able to exercise over which
I’ve
had complete control….”

The announcement of Bobbie Arnstein’s suicide brought a despondent and angry Hefner flying into Chicago; and at a crowded press conference near the fireplace in the main room of the mansion, he attacked the prosecutors and mourned his friend. Unshaven, his eyes red, reading from the prepared statement, he began: “For the last several weeks, I have been the subject of a series of sensational speculations and allegations regarding supposed illicit drug activities at the Playboy Mansions in Chicago and Los Angeles—attempting to associate me with the recent cocaine conspiracy conviction of Playboy secretary Bobbie Arnstein and the death of Chicago Bunny Adrienne Pollack from a drug
overdose sixteen months ago. Although I had no personal connection of any kind with either case, I reluctantly agreed to make no initial public statement on the subject because our legal counsel was convinced that anything I said would only be used to further publicize what—in our view—is not a legitimate narcotics investigation at all, but a politically motivated, anti-Playboy witch-hunt.

“The suicide of Bobbie Arnstein makes any further silence impossible,” he continued. “Whatever mistakes she may have made in her personal life, she deserved better than this. She deserved—among other things—the same impartial consideration accorded any other citizen similarly accused. But because of her association with Playboy and with me, she became the central focus in a cocaine conspiracy case in which it appears she was only peripherally involved. There is ample reason to believe that if she had provided the prosecutors with evidence to support any serious drug charge against me, she would never have been indicted. Faced finally with a conditional sentence of fifteen years, the pressures of a lengthy appeal and increasing harassment from government prosecutors and their agents, an already emotionally troubled woman was pushed beyond endurance—and she killed herself….

“It is difficult,” he said, “to describe the inquisitional atmosphere of the Bobbie Arnstein trial and related Playboy probe. In the infamous witchcraft trials of the Middle Ages, the inquisitors tortured the victims until they not only confessed to being witches, but accused their own families and friends of sorcery as well. In similar fashion, narcotics agents frequently use our severe drug laws in an arbitrary and capricious manner to elicit the desired testimony for a trial.” After referring to Bobbie Arnstein as “one of the best, brightest, most worthwhile women I have ever known,” Hefner was forced to pause. His hands gripped the lectern, tears fell, and, except for the sound of the cameras, there was silence in the room. Finally, he went on to say: “For the record, I have never used cocaine, or any other hard drug or narcotics—and I am willing to swear to that fact under oath, and penalty of perjury, if that will put an end to the groundless
suspicions and speculations…. The zeal with which certain government agents are pursuing this case says more about the prosecutors, I think, than it does about the accused. It appears that the ‘enemies list’ mentality of Watergate is still with us; and the repressive legacy of puritanism that we challenged in our first year of publication remains as formidable an opponent to a truly free and democratic society as ever.”

While many newspaper columnists and editorialists agreed with Hefner’s criticism of the investigation, other newspapers were less sympathetic, and a writer for the Chicago
Tribune
accused Hefner of trying “to cop a plea through publicity.” In a statement from the United States attorney’s office, James R. Thompson emphasized that “no one, including Hugh Hefner, is above the law”; and in response to the charge that Hefner was being targeted because he was the publisher of
Playboy
, Thompson commented: “I’m not sure that what Hefner stands for these days is all that relevant—or that any prosecution of him would mean much.”