Read Hef's Little Black Book Online
Authors: Hugh M. Hefner
Hef's Little Black Book (2 page)
Then, too, there was the matter of her virginity, which she had no intention of relinquishing any time soon. Two of his earlier major loves, Cynthia Maddox and Mary Warren, along with scores of other young women, had also presented him with the same challenge, which usually culminated in the same result. Feelings intensified, as they are wont to, and walls changed to portals, as his gentleness would impress each woman he ever knew. Of Barbi, he said, “So I waited months. I didn’t want to scare her away.” She came to Chicago in February 1969 for what would be their first Valentine’s Day together. His secretary had shown him his horoscope for that day; “it said something encouraging about consummating an affair,” he recalled. That night they spun on his Round Rotating Bed in his Master’s Quarters and made love for the first time, as only a romantic would have it. Said Barbi: “It was too late to turn back. It was like, Now is the night.”
H
efner Versus Freud: It’s Not About a Cigar, Really
Women want the same things men want. They want to be loved and taken care of—emotionally and in other ways. They want a relationship that permits them to grow.
H
ere Is Why You Want Her
What makes women sexy is partly physical image and partly what they’re thinking—how they manage to express it in both appearance and what they say. A woman who thinks sexy is likely to appear sexy. It has a lot to do with spirit and attitude. That, combined with vulnerability, can be tremendously appealing. A woman you want to both protect and possess is perhaps the sexiest woman of all.
T
here Are Rules to the Game, Most Unfortunately
There’s a danger in the early part of a relationship: If you appear to care too much, sometimes a girl may back away. She may often be more attracted to somebody who she thinks is hard to get—just as a guy often is. Of course there’s nothing rational about that. As a matter of fact, it’s counterproductive. But it’s a reality. Unfortunately, it then becomes a game, which means you have to sometimes hold back true feelings to keep her from running away.
Too many guys pay too much attention to what they have on their own minds and miss the cues and clues that may establish a common connection. Don’t just think about what you’re feeling; think about what responses you’re getting and are likely to elicit from what you say and do. The key to it all is not simply following your heart, but paying attention and listening.
Blondes are his weakness: There would, of course, be a blonde preponderance throughout his life—every hue of gold and yellow and flax, from platinum to strawberry to dusky to dirty and all shades in between. In particular, after his separation from the blonde Kimberley Conrad Hefner, he seemed to specialize exclusively in the tint. Blonde posses of three or six or eight would flank him in public and share his vast bed in private. His fascination with blondness—the shimmer and spice and allure of it—began as most of his yearnings had: at the movies, at the Mont-clare Theater on the West Side of Chicago, where a young and impressionable Hugh Hefner saw flickers of a life larger and richer than he could imagine. It was Flash Gordon’s space girl paramour, the radiantly blonde Dale Arden, who stirred him first, in the thirteen-part 1936 serial
Space Soldiers
: “That was the only really sexy serial ever produced! The final scene was an open-mouth kiss!” This image would never leave his fantasies and he would look for a bit of Dale Arden in every blonde who entered his viewfinder thereafter. The irony, however, is that Dale Arden was played by a nineteen-year-old actress named Jean Rogers, a brunette who dyed her hair blonde for the role. (Not that he wouldn’t have an everlasting weakness for brunettes as well, but still…)
Of Hef and Hair Tint
WHAT COLOR MEANS
Per unimpeachable experience, what are the qualities of allure specific to…
B
RUNETTES
?
There is almost a wife-and-mistress connection with brunettes and blondes. A lot of the brunettes with whom I’ve managed to fall in love represented not only respectability and home and marriage, but also something deeper and more romantic.
B
LONDES
?
What you get with blondes is something more dangerous and forbidden. There is a fascinating, universal attraction to them, representing sexuality and danger. So many blondes come out of the bottle, which is a daring choice. It’s flashier and they know it.
A
ND
W
HAT
A
BOUT
R
EDHEADS
?
Bottle or natural, redheads are a variation of blondes for me—danger.
U
nderstanding Their Sudden Hair Moments Can Be a Minor Art Form
When they change their hairstyle or hair color and you don’t like it, don’t comment on the way they look now. Just gently suggest how much you liked the way they looked before.
W
hen She Asks “How Do I Look?”—Tread Carefully
You start with “You look perfect.” Then if you don’t mean it, you say “Or you might try…”
E
xpressions of Affection Never Hurt
If she lives someplace else, it’s a good idea to let her know that you’re thinking about her with, say, a card, an unexpected phone call, or flowers. I’ve always favored roses. A single long-stemmed rose can make a surprisingly amorous statement.
His gestures of love would eventually become monumental in sweep, but they began innocently enough. Summer 1944: Before shipping off for army infantry training (he would serve stateside for two years), he had pursued a romance with the girl he would marry five years later, sweet and pretty Mildred—Millie, really—Williams, a classmate he noticed only as his bright senior year at Steinmetz High waned. That summer they smooched (nothing more, not in this chaste era), and then he was gone and wearing fatigues and living in barracks, where he could devote himself—devote his heart—to pining for his girl back home. He wrote her bundles of letters—guileless and beseeching at once—from army bases here and there. As sex was still a distant reality (his own virginity remained intact until he was twenty-two, so as to conquer Millie) while it was also becoming foremost in his mind, this son of two repressed Midwestern Methodists rhapsodized thusly in one such missive: “HOW I’D LIKE TO TAKE YOU IN MY ARMS and hold you so very close to me, and kiss you, and more, a heck of a lot more! But maybe I’d best skip over this lightly or I’ll have you blushin’ again. Needless to say, I think about being intimate with you. Think about it a lot, right or wrong.” Eventually he would know he was right to think about it, and he would tell generations to come just how right he was. Still, it all begins with the smallest gestures.
Y
ou Need to Know That You Are Who You Are
How much a man can change for a woman depends only on the man. I think the real question is, How much
should
you change for a woman?
One of the great dangers in relationships is that a woman falls in love with you and you with her, and then she tries to change you. The truth is, if you haven’t changed who you are by the time you are in your twenties, you aren’t going to be doing much changing thereafter.
Let us keep in mind: he was the most housebound of all despots, hermetically sealed indoors, pale, working (and playing and romancing) at home like no one in history at this point, the first and foremost fully embedded man of Mansion Life. He holed up through most of the sixties in a brown and gray Gothic structure on Chicago’s Gold Coast, in the most fabled of all urban domiciles, the original Playboy Mansion, 1340 North State Parkway, Valhalla, Sodom, Gomorrah, James Bond Heaven, etc. Basically, he went nowhere and had the world come to him. Then he started to make his TV show in California, and then there was Barbi on the set, and then love, and then the pallid one made some changes. Just for her. She threw him into sun
shine, made him play tennis with her—on public courts!—and made him pedal bicycles with her around Los Angeles. This was not him, but it was him, giddily so. Never fond of travel, he suddenly found himself traveling the globe with her. He was smitten and traveling was part of the romantic pursuit.
One trip to Acapulco: They lay on the beach and saw people parasailing in the skies. She said, “Oh, that looks like fun!” He said, “Let’s go do it!” He had never been able to swim.
Let’s go do it!
She went first. He went next. He flew over water for her and landed safely, and remembered only then that he could have drowned. Just for her. “I would have gone without a life jacket if Barbi hadn’t urged me to put one on.” And she would recall, “I guess Hef is a little crazy when he gets into something. We were both like little kids with each other.”
All of which is to say, anything is possible where love is concerned, even among the most unyielding of us.
W
hen You Work with Them, You Can’t Not Notice Them
Sex in the workplace is here to stay, because that’s where most of us spend so much of our time: Common interests in a common location make sexual communication and activity a certainty.
But a romance in the office can be a complicated affair in today’s world, with accusations of sexual favoritism, harassment, or worse. So handle the personal part of your professional life with a reasonable amount of care and discretion. It is always important to make certain that you aren’t misreading the signs of interest or uninterest in a coworker in matters of a romantic nature. Before a professional relationship can turn into a personal one—whether casual or serious—you need to be certain of the other party’s interest. And you need to be concerned about the rules of engagement that may have been established in your company and the attitudes of your coworkers as well.
If you have properly weighed the considerations and consequences involved, there is little to be gained by considering all office-related romances out-of-bounds. Life is short and love conquers all. Or at least that’s the way it should be.
Before he eschewed office life for the velvety cocoon of Mansion mooring, he fraternized most insatiably with females in his employ: “Offices are where you meet members of the opposite sex,” he would say matter-of-factly. His directive in personnel matters was nondiscriminatory from the start. “Everyone was to be judged on ability,” said one early human resource head. “But if I had a choice between two equally qualified people, I hired the more attractive one.”
Playboy
receptionists therefore tended to be stunning. Upon hiring dusky Bobbie Arnstein, who would become his closest aide-decamp and private secretary in the sixties, he leaned over her desk and instructed, “Don’t think of me as your boss or the publisher of this magazine. Think of me as a guy looking for a date.” She thought of him both ways and liked it just fine, as did he.
