“How’s Hef?” asks Kato Kaelin, who is not wearing a costume.
Fabio — no costume either — doesn’t hear Kato but another man nearby, dressed as Zorro, says, “How’s Hef? Just take a look. Hef’s great.”
Why shouldn’t he be? He’s having a party. It’s the . . . what . . . 6,895th party of his exceptionally charmed life? But who’s counting? What matters is this party, this huge, lavish party, the hottest Halloween ticket in town: 1,000 of Hef’s closest and most comely friends, some of whom will become naked by the evening’s end. Hey, some are half-naked already, and it’s only 9:30 at night.
A few days before, Hef was telling someone, “Now, this is a costume party. You will have to wear a costume.”
“I was thinking,” said the man, “with all due respect, of getting some pajamas, a robe, a pipe, slippers and a Pepsi and going as . . . the young Hugh Hefner.” He laughed and gave a sly smile. “I’m sorry,” Hugh Hefner said. “That won’t work. I’m going as the young Hugh Hefner.”
And so, there he is. Kato and Fabio are staring at him. Everyone is staring at him, surrounded by enough platinum blond hair and bright young female eyes to light a small town.
How’s Hef, indeed.
At 73 he looks terrific, a decade or more younger. He admits to having had some minor plastic surgery “to get rid of the turkey skin,” he says, pinching a portion of his neck that is now firm.
In person, he is smaller than one imagined, almost slight, but wiry. His face has a pinkish glow. His handshake is firm, but his hands are soft; literally, eerily, as soft as those of a baby.
He appears, in every sense, reborn.
“Rejuvenated, reincarnated, whatever the hell it is,” he says.
Separated for nearly two years from his second wife, Kimberley, Hefner is more visible than he has been in decades. He is named to the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors. He is the subject of two documentaries, one a part of the Arts & Entertainment “Biography” series. A made-for-TV movie, “Hefner: Unauthorized,” which focuses on the sex and drugs and the 1975 suicide of Hefner’s longtime assistant Bobbie Arnstein, premieres tonight at 7 p.m. on USA cable network. This month’s Harper’s Bazaar features a 14-page spread on Hefner and his house. Ron Howard is developing a feature film based on his life. He is on every Important-People-of-the-Century list.
“No publisher, no editor, no cartoonist, no writer . . . can match Hefner’s claim that he threw the biggest bomb in the greatest societal revolution in American history,” writes F. Richard Ciccone in his book “Chicago and the American Century: The 100 Most Significant Chicagoans of the Twentieth Century” (Contemporary Books). “If Hefner did not single-handedly start the sexual revolution, he was its Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington combined.”
That’s all very flattering.
But what really tickles Hefner is the embrace of some feminists — Camille Paglia has said, “(Hefner) is one of the principal architects of the modern sexual revolution” — and the adulation of a new generation.
“It’s so wonderful to have young kids come up to me in clubs — boys and girls — and say `You’re the man’,” he says.
Those “young kids” are such celebrities as Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller and Courtney Love. They, along with such hedonistic loyalists as Robert Culp, Tony Curtis, Robert Blake, James Caan and Jack Nicholson, have turned Hefner’s Los Angeles mansion back into the most prominent adult playground in the country; his life into a joy.
“I have to count my blessings,” Hefner says. “At this age — after all the hits I’ve taken in business and personally — the last two years have been absolutely unbelievable for me.”
This from a man who has had some pretty unbelievable years, most of them dating from December 1953 when the first issue of Playboy hit newsstands. It was 48 pages with a center spread featuring a nude calendar photo of Marilyn Monroe that had cost Hefner $200. About 70,000 copies were printed. Nearly all sold within two weeks.
He was 27 years old, frustrated with his job, his marriage and his life. He wanted to create “a men’s magazine devoted to subjects I was interested in — the contemporary equivalents of wine, women and song, though not necessarily in that order.”
It offered a new set of ethical values for an urban society. The message was loud and clear: Enjoy yourself.
The message got through. The magazine quickly reached a circulation of 1 million and then 2, 3 . . . topping out eventually at more than 8 million in the early 1960s and spawning magazine racks full of imitators, none nearly as successful.
Time magazine, in a 1967 cover story, said, “Hefner was the first publisher to see that the sky would not fall and mothers would not march if he published bare bosoms; he realized that the old taboos were going . . . He took the old-fashioned, shame-thumbed girlie magazines, stripped off the plain wrapper, added gloss, class and culture. It proved to be a sure-fire formula.”
Millions of words have been written in an attempt to unravel that “formula.”
Among the most intriguing come from Barbara Ehrenreich in her book “The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment” (Anchor Books). “(The real message of Playboy) was not eroticism, but escape — literal escape from the bondage of breadwinning.”
The images of naked women, she wrote, “were necessary not just to sell the magazine, but to protect it. When, in the first issue, Hefner talked about staying in his apartment listening to music and discussing Picasso, there was the Marilyn Monroe centerfold to let you know that there was nothing queer about these urbane and indoor pleasures. And when the articles railed against the responsibilities of marriage, there were the nude torsos to reassure you that the alternative was still within the bounds of heterosexuality. Sex — or Hefner’s Pepsi-clean version of it — was there . . . to prove that a playboy didn’t have to be a husband to be a man.”
Hefner was a husband and father when he launched Playboy. He shared a small Chicago apartment with the college sweetheart he had married in 1949: Mildred Williams, a teacher. Their daughter, Christie, was born in 1952. He was making $60 a week writing copy in the promotion department of Esquire magazine.
“The marriage was not good from the outset,” Hefner says. “We both had serious doubts before getting married. But I had no other game plan except to get married and, somehow, live happily ever after.
“But very soon I started becoming afraid that I was turning into my parents. I started to see that happening to my peers. People who were so much fun in high school were going dull.
“I would walk around looking at the lights of high rises. I felt like an outsider. I would fantasize about the lives that were going on inside those apartments and wonder whether I would ever be a part of it.”
He mortgaged his furniture and took out a loan for $600 and borrowed $3,000 from friends and relatives to start Playboy. But soon he was rich. And eventually he was single.
He and Millie were divorced in 1959. She got custody of the two children — Christie and her younger brother, David — remarried and moved to the North Shore. Hugh Hefner moved into a 48-room mansion at 1340 N. State Pkwy., slapped a sign near the door (translated from the original Latin it said, “If you don’t swing, don’t ring”) and began to cultivate an image and a lifestyle that would define him, his magazine and an era.
“Obviously he wasn’t a hands-on father,” says Christie. “But he was a good father. I had my 16th birthday party at the mansion. There was never a period of time when I didn’t see him.”
For his 70th birthday, Christie gave her father a video filled with photos and movies clips of them together since her childhood.
For his 72nd birthday, his doctor gave him a present: a prescription for Viagra.
“It’s Peter Pan time. I’m living a grown-up version of a boy’s dream, turning life into a celebration,” Hef says. “It’s all over too quickly. Life should be more than a vale of tears.”
There’s no crying at Hef’s house.
But there is a great deal of talk.
Perched on the edge of a couch in the library of his mansion in Los Angeles, he asks a reporter, “What is the nature of the story?”
“How about `local boy makes good?,’ ” he is told.
He laughs.
“I was a smart little boy,” he says. “I was publishing my own neighborhood newspaper when I was 8.”
That neighborhood was the Northwest Side of Chicago. Hugh Marston Hefner is the son of Glenn and Grace Hefner. They were from Nebraska. Glenn was an accountant. Grace was a teacher. Hugh and his brother, Keith, were raised Methodists and attended Sayre Elementary School.
“The best time of my life before Playboy was my last two years at Steinmetz High School,” he says. “It was a coming-of-age time. It was the first time I went steady. I was a class leader, writing and performing in plays and shows, working on the paper. The things I enjoyed were the things between classes.”
One of his passions was cartooning, and as a teenager he created a magazine called Shudder and had a Shudder Club for all of his pals. He also started a cartoon autobiography called “School Daze,” which he continued while serving two years in the U.S. Army infantry and while getting a degree in psychology at the University of Illinois. Graduating in two and a half years, he also drew cartoons for the Daily Illini and edited the campus humor magazine.
His other early passion was movies.
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“There is no way to underestimate the effect movies had on me as a boy,” Hefner says. “My dreams came alive at the Montclare Theater on Grand Avenue.” He remembers, as a child of the Depression, watching cinematic depictions of the roaring ’20s, “all those images of the Jazz Age, the flappers . . . And thinking that I’d missed the party.”
That same sort of feeling, he believes, fuels his renewed popularity.
“A lot of young people feel that they missed out on the party that was the ’60s and ’70s,” he says. “The attitude of the ’80s and early ’90s was very conservative — socially, politically and sexually. It was a reaction to the freedom and excesses of the ’60s and ’70s. What’s happening now is a counter- reaction, a desire to get into what was a great party.”
Hefner is its living, still-swinging symbol.
Writer Gay Talese called Frank Sinatra, “the embodiment of the fully emancipated male,” but the term is more appropriate for Hefner. The mere mention of his name can evoke all manner of freewheeling images.
Hefner has emerged from the dark decade of the 1980s and his marriage of the 1990s to discover that he is a white hot flame, attracting a new wave of swingers, would-be and for-real, male and female. Circulation of Playboy, which stands at about 3.2 million, has risen 65 percent on college campuses in the last three years.
“This is a new generation,” Hefner says, “without the same hang-ups and prejudices that dominated the 1980s.”
That was a tough decade for Hefner.
After withstanding withering feminist attacks for decades, Hefner and his empire were seriously bruised by a growing conservatism, by the Christian Right, by the Meese Commission on Pornography. Former playmate Dorothy Stratton was murdered by her husband and many, including film director and Stratton lover Peter Bogdanovich, placed some of the blame on Hefner. The once thriving chain of Playboy clubs and hotels got shabby and empty, magazine circulation steadily slumped and Playboy lost its lucrative casino licenses.
Christie Hefner was named president of the company in 1982 and chief operating officer two years later. She had to fire 100 employees in a drive to cut overhead. Hefner had to sell paintings, a de Kooning and a Jackson Pollock, as well as his airplane, the Big Bunny, to raise cash.
“These were very dark times,” says Christie. “We were in real trouble.”
In 1985, Hugh Hefner suffered a mild stroke. The following year a Newsweek cover story — “The Party’s Over” — featured a photo of a haggard Hefner.
“This was a period of re-evaluation for my father,” says Christie. “But I think that he never lost his optimism. I was so intimately involved in his decision to change his role in the company — stepping off the board and handing over the titles of chairman and CEO (in 1988) — that I understood better than most his need to redefine his life.
“Along with that business evolution, I felt he really might be open to falling in love and getting married.”
She may not have been surprised, but others were when Hefner married Kimberley Conrad on a sun-splashed July 1 in 1989 in front of the wishing well on the lawn that fronts the Holmby Hills mansion. The house and grounds were awash in white: 10,000 white roses and 1,500 yards of white satin.
Over the next years Kimberley — Miss January 1988/Playmate of the Year 1989 — attempted to domesticate the mansion. The “Gang,” as some old Hefner pals are known, stopped dropping by. The sign in the steep driveway was changed from “Playmates at Play” to “Children at Play.”
But Kimberley started to feel that Hefner was “too controlling,” his schedule too regimented. It became for her “monotonous.” It was she who requested the separation.
He says, “We drifted apart. In those first months after the separation, people would say, `You must be hiding a lot of pain,’ and I’d tell them that the reality is that the pain came long before the separation.” Indeed, he purchased the $7 million house next door to the mansion for Kimberley two years before the separation was made public.
His “coming out . . . rejuvenation, reincarnation, whatever the hell it is” was first chronicled by Chicago writer Bill Zehme in the August 1998 edition of Esquire. It told of L.A. Gen-X-ers greeting Hefner with shouts of “You’re a God” and “You rule”; of Hefner making visits to such L.A. clubs as the Opium Den, Garden of Eden and Coconut Club.
It was at these places that he met his current close companions: Brande Roderick, who is 25, and identical twins Sandy and Mandy Bentley, who are 21. They — along with new playmate Jessica Paisley, who is 21 — are featured in the photo spread in this month’s Vanity Fair, scattered around Hefner in his bedroom in the mansion.
At this year’s Halloween party the bedroom was off-limits. But the rest of the mansion and grounds had been transformed from sumptuous to scary.
Two decorative gargoyles perched on the roof of the 10,000 square foot Tudor style mansion, which Hefner bought in 1971. Tombstones filled much of the lawn area on the home’s hilly five and a half acres. Every inch of the property — the sunken tennis court, the pool and its grotto with whirlpools and mattresses, the aviaries, the heavily wooded pathways — was done up for Halloween. There were black-and-orange tents, a haunted house, hundreds of monster masks hung in the hallways, life-sized monsters and movie stars lounging about.
“It’s all just Aladdin’s Castle at old Riverview Park,” said Hefner, referring to Chicago’s legendary amusement park.
Earlier in the day, Hefner’s kids had come over, his kids by Kimberley, 9-year-old Marston Glenn and 8-year-old Cooper Bradford.
“I am grateful that (37-year-old) Kimberley and I remain close,” he says. “She lives next door and there is an open gate. The children are here every day. I go to their school outings, soccer games.”
When not engaged in such hands-on parenting and when not filling his nights with club-hopping or regular card games, movies and watching TV with the kids at the mansion, Hefner works.
With the aide of three pleasant women who work in a guest house at the mansion — part of a mansion staff of 70 — he fills the more than 2,400 bound scrapbooks that chronicle, in intimate detail, Hefner’s life.
“And I am more involved in the magazine in the last two years than in a very long time,” he says. “I’m not looking for new worlds to conquer. It’s more of the same. The global nature of the business. The Internet. This is, I think, the most exciting time for the company since the very beginning.”
The company is again healthy. In 1998 it showed revenues of $318 million and many analysts praise the operation.
Christie is in L.A. every other month or so for three or four days at the mansion. (Brother David, a computer whiz living in northern California, is an infrequent visitor). “I think of (my father) more as a partner than a colleague,” she says. “Of course, I think of him as my dad, not just in biological fact but because we love each other deeply and without reservation. He’s also my buddy because he’s just a lot of fun.”
Some of the fun Hefner has been having lately compelled a couple of people at a shareholders meeting to loudly complain about his salary, some $160,000 more than the $718,000 paid in salary and bonus to Christie. (As the largest holder of Playboy stock his net worth is estimated at $400 million).
“He is `Mr. Playboy,’ ” Christie says, adding that her father earns his pay by setting the creative direction for Playboy Enterprises and approving major editorial decisions at the magazine. “Most of all he is a living promotion for the brand. That image is essential to the company.”
The image is most prominently captured in a monthly photo feature in the magazine known informally as “Hef Sightings.”
“We run reader research surveys,” says Christie. “Do you know that the strongest appeal of the Hef Sightings is among those readers 18 to 24 years old?”
Looking at some Hef Sightings — like some of the pictures that accompany this article — one of Hefner’s pals from his Chicago days, speaking on the promise of anonymity, said, “Oh, Hef looks a bit silly, doesn’t he? I don’t know what he’s trying to prove. You look the pictures of the old days and you get the sense that that’s when he was really having fun. All of this starts to look a little childish, contrived, like he’s playing at being Hef.”
There are some who believe this fascination with Hefner and Playboy is merely a passing retro phase. A few former lovers and playmates argue that Hefner’s public exuberance is masking an empty life. Others claim he’s out and about simply to help try to repolish the Playboy image.
“There may be some mixed feelings about what I’m doing,” he says. “But what my life represents, probably now more than ever before, is the possibilities.”
When he says things like that, there is no mistaking the sincerity of his tone.
“There is a lot of pressure to make us put our childhood away,” he says. “But the boy is not only the father to the man, the boy is the best part of the man. (Boyhood) is when we dream the best dreams.”
Halloween is, of course, a kid’s delight and at the party, director Quentin Tarantino is looking for Hef.
“You seen Hef?” he asks. He has no costume.
Several people are smoking amid the tombstones on the lawn. A pair of women — aren’t there any brunettes in L.A.? — dance topless outside the tent, near the airy cages that hold spider monkeys. Flamingos cower in the garden. Hundreds of people dine and drink. Music blares. Videos, many of Hefner dancing at previous parties, beam from movie screens and TV sets.
“Surreal,” says a guest, dressed as a horse. “Just surreal, this whole Hef and Playboy thing.”
Hefner thinks not: “It’s genuine and it’s real. It’s been a revelation. I am being celebrated as never before. But it’s also like a movie. It isn’t supposed to work out like this — to have all the pieces fit at the end — to have this kind of celebration at this stage of one’s life.”
Lou Ferrigno, who was “The Incredible Hulk,” but has no costume, is done celebrating. “We’ve been here since 8,” says his female companion, as the two of them leave around midnight.
A woman in a green bikini says, “I hear Jack is here. Nicholson is here.”
“You’ll never find him,” says a man dressed like a cowboy. “He’s in costume.”
Inside the house, Chicago comic Judy Tenuta is touching a life-sized Alfred Hitchcock mannequin. In the grotto two naked women stop kissing long enough to ask a man dressed as a New York Yankee, “Do you feel like joining in?”
“Where’s Hef?” asks a man dressed as Jesse Ventura, the Minnesota wrestler/governor whose recent Playboy magazine interview was big national news.
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“I just saw him,” says a woman dressed as an angel, from a world in which angels are topless.
Some people say that Hef has gone upstairs with some of his friends. Some say he is down on the “Blair Witch” trail that has been carved through part of the property. Hefner is elusive this night.
This happened in the old days too. There would be nights when the Chicago mansion staff would go into a “Where’s Hef?” panic.
“I was out building snowmen,” he says. “I would sometimes take one of my girlfriends and we’d just go out and build snowmen in front of people’s houses. That is really the key to who I am. I am still a little boy. If you look around the mansion right now and see what’s going on here, you see that little boy.”
It never snows in Holmby Hills, but the memory of those snowman-building excursions brightens Hefner’s face. It also leads into a conversation about the past and how the one inescapable fact of growing older — no matter how good you feel, how rich you are or how young your companions may be — is the death of old friends.
“It makes me feel mortal,” Hef-ner says. “There’s no question but what . . . I’ve lost some very dear friends all in just a short time.
“My mother died two years ago (at 101 years old). Shel (Silverstein, the writer/artist and an early contributor to Playboy); my own secretary, Joni Mattis, who came with me here from Chicago, died in September; my best buddy from high school died; Mel Torme . . . ” His voice grows weak and tears well in his eyes. ” . . . The first girl I went steady with, my senior year in high school . . . She died.”
There is a lengthy pause.
“There is an imperative to live life well,” he says.
He is so doing, as he defines “living well.” Pleasure is all around.
At the Halloween party, Marilyn Monroe, wearing white, is having a nice chat with F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a serendipitous costume pairing, for both characters are very important to Hefner.
Monroe, the first naked woman in Playboy, is buried in a drawer at the mausoleum in Westwood Memorial Park, and a couple of years ago Hefner bought the drawer next to hers for his final resting place.
Fitzgerald was the author of “The Great Gatsby,” which is one of Hefner’s favorite books. It concludes with this line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”