Hef's Little Black Book (7 page)

He will always be remembered with the pipe. He would clench it, fidget with it, speak through it, wave it emphatically, even smoke it. He took it up mostly as a television prop (“I thought it looked cool”), and thereafter it would be difficult to think of him without it. Thus, one of the most legendary oral fixations in history was born. After suffering a minor stroke in 1985—from which he began to recover within two weeks—he put his pipes away for good and never missed them. Still, at certain Halloween parties, he has been known to come dressed as Hugh Hefner. When he does that, he fishes out one of his old numbers and moves about the property making like himself from thirty years before—the prototype of retro cool, to be sure.

T
he Best Accessory: Taking Up the Pipe

W
heels Do Make a Statement

From the start, his magazine celebrated Materialism, the acquisition of the Good Life and all the new and shiny trap
pings. It took him a while, however, to catch up with his credo. In December 1953, shortly after the first issue was published, the secondhand, beat-up Chevrolet coupe he had been driving went dead on him for good. He replaced it with a sturdy Raymond Loewy–designed Studebaker, which served mostly as a sensible family car. By 1955, however, once the company was flush with success, he opted one day to walk into a Cadillac showroom, collar open, looking unimpressive, feeling self-impressed. “How much does an Eldorado cost?” he asked a bored salesman who was reluctant to even hand over a brocure to him. “About sixty-five hundred,” he was told. “How long would it take to get one in bronze?” he asked. A couple of weeks, he was told. “Okay, here’s a
check for a thousand as a down payment,” he said. “When you deliver the car, I’ll give you another check for the rest.” He walked off with a swagger in his step. He’d never done anything like that before. He would start getting used to it.

T
he Big Bunny: So You Buy a Private Jet and Paint It Black…

He never traveled very easily—commercial flights were not his thrill so he eventually made sure that he would travel very well. His sleek black airship sliced through the skies for nearly six years, beginning February 1970, winging mostly between private terminals at O’Hare and Los Angeles International, between Mansions and Special Ladies. Of all the toys he had given himself, this was the biggest and arguably the best—his greatest extravagance, price tag $5.5 million, an unrivaled symbol of sybaritic engorgement. Whenever it landed, crowds gathered. The white rabbit head on the tail announced who had come to town. (Sometimes this could be deceptive, as the plane was occasionally leased to the likes of Elvis Presley and Sonny and Cher.) More flying Mansion than flying apartment, it was a plane that would normally seat more than a hundred passengers; he retrofit it
so that capacity would top out at thirty-eight and comfortably sleep twelve. It was all about more legroom for much better-looking legs. Parties swung above clouds. The Jet Bunnies were trained to cook his favorite meals at his midair whim. Movies were shown in wide-screen Cinemascope. His private quarters had a separate rear entrance, their own electronic entertainment system, and their own shower; bedcovers were silk and Tasmanian opossum fur and well romped upon. “When we went to Europe,” Barbi Benton would recall, “we’d immediately go to the back of the plane, hop in the Round Bed, go to sleep, and wake up in Italy.”

If there was a mother of all Big Bunny jaunts, it was the aforementioned one: Beginning in late July 1970, he and Barbi and an entourage of friends, including artist LeRoy Neiman and film critic Gene Siskel (in his universe, there would always be an entourage of friends), embarked on the most elaborate excursion of his life. Over seven and a half weeks, they flew to England and Spain, Kenya and Tanzania, Greece and Italy, Germany and France—Morocco, even, where some sultan threw them a carpeted beach party and fed them dessert laced with opiate! By 1976, however, he tired of traveling, was hardly flying to Chicago at all, and decided to sell his black bird to Venezuela Airlines for $4.2 million. The Venezuelans promptly gutted it and transformed it into a commercial carrier whose passengers would never know they rode where Hugh Hefner had slept and played and indulged in great amounts of turbulent intercourse.

I
nsight from the President— and a Member—of the Mile-High Club

Hef’s World of Film, Food, and Adult Games

A gift from Shannon Tweed with Hef and Shannon as Bogie and Bacall.

H
e has starred in the Movie of his Own Life. Some time during boyhood he convinced himself that he would Do Large Things, at which point it was as though he almost believed a camera was trained upon his every ingenious move thereafter. At his famous Mansion parties, most certainly, corporate video crews follow him everywhere, recording each moment of his presence as host, while he greets guests and nuzzles women and dances into the night. He once said, “If you don’t have a picture of it, how do you know it ever happened?”

To wit: He was a born visual enthusiast nonpareil—and look at where that got him. As a teen, he wrote, directed, and starred in a short film called
The Return from the Dead
, silent and faux Gothic, shot in his basement; he played a mad scientist who in his death throes is seen scrawling the words
The End
in his own blood on the floor. Love of the movies had by then seized him with ferocity. He was just eight when he saw
Tarzan and His Mate
, and his life would instantly change forever. Jane, as played by Maureen O’Sullivan, actually swam nude right in front of his impressionable eyes! “My interest in censorship came from the movies,” he would later say.

Who are these men making time with bombshell Jayne Mansfield?

Indeed, he was all but entirely molded and shaped by that which he had seen in dark theaters: Precode bombshells Jean Harlow and Alice Faye fueled a lifelong lust for like bombshells. Urbane swells like Cary Grant and William Powell and Fred Astaire taught him how to be a romantic leading man, a role he would essay in new ways
for other generations. Bogie showed him that being a bit of the wry rogue would never hurt, either. And then there was Marilyn Monroe, whom he first glimpsed in a trifle called
Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hey
!—her unspectacular film debut—at a theater in Danville, Illinois. He had brought Millie Williams to Danville on that June 1948 weekend so as to lose his, and her, virginity. They saw the movie the next afternoon. “You can imagine how I cherish the symbolism of that,” he would say, as he is one who tends to cherish symbolism of any sort. “More than anyone else in our lifetime, Marilyn made nudity socially acceptable.” Five years later, he would acquire nude calendar photos of her and make her his first cover girl and centerfold pinup, begetting all else to follow. Further symbolism: When he departs the mortal coil, he will sleep with Marilyn forever, in the drawer adjacent to hers at the Westwood Memorial mausoleum. He made sure of that.

T
hink Cinematically and You’ll Find a Happy Ending

Mansion Movie Nights became ritual starting in Chicago. Sunday evenings he would dress casual, go share the buffet, have a few drinks, and meet Bunnies on their night off. Friends and visiting celebrities were invited to see first-run 35-millimeter showings of the latest box-office hits, projected on a large screen lowered into the ballroom,
where suits of armor flanked the portals. At Mansion West, the Sunday ritual endured, but in later years he would expand the playbill by running classic films on Monday (Manly Night, when his cronies would choose the feature du jour from the vast house collection); on Friday, for an astute group of buffs christened the Casablanca Club (Hef personally prepares insightful notes explaining the production nuances of whatever film he elects to show); and on Saturday. Like a ringleader, he wanders about his home to gather guests just before the seven o’clock (ever punctual) screening; “It’s mooovie time,” he will intone. When the lights dim in the Living Room—where butlers have laid out bowls of fresh popcorn and candies—he will sit on the far left end of a long leather sofa in front of the screen, and his Lady and/or Ladies will snuggle beside him. He is happiest at such times, bathed in the flickering light, watching dreams unfold. Always was.

His Holmby Hills neighbors of yore had been heroes of his youth—Harlow, Disney (another Chicago-born dream merchant made good), Bogie and Bacall. Once asked why he didn’t spend more time hobnobbing with the swells of Europe, he replied, “No, I’m more attracted to America’s nobility—the kings and queens of Hollywood.” Ghosts of Old Hollywood, most appropriately, seem to hover about his splendid grounds: “It has been suggested, and it’s probably true, that the lifestyle here at the house, the parties et cetera, are closer to the real,
and imagined
, Old Hollywood than can be found anyplace outside of here today. In fact, the good times here now are
better
.” New Hollywood, meanwhile, began prowling his premises from the moment he took up residency. In the seventies, Nicholson and Beatty and Tony Curtis and Jimmy Caan all but lived there. “They all came by because the chicks were here,” the Man of the Manor has noted. Future generations would follow suit—from DiCaprio to Clooney to Maguire.

Food has been as essential to Movie Nights as the movie itself. When one enters the realm of Dionysus, one expects (correctly) to feast. Dionysus, in this case, however, will eat nothing himself and only watch his guests gorge from the dining room groaning board. He will sit at the head of the table and hold court and drink his Jack and Pepsi, but never eat. He has long preferred to dine in bed, with Ladies, late at night. Moreover, the food in his buffet line would not suit him anyway. Food is an unusual area of predilection in his world.

As with most all else in his life, degustation is a steadfast ritual of quirk, truly remarkable in its precision. His is a palate both simple and, well, desperately
particular.
No mere meat-and-potatoes man, he is a meat-and-potatoes man who must have everything just so, including the arrangement of the vegetables on the plate and the location of salt and pepper shakers on the bed tray. And that is just the beginning of it. There can be no surprises, no new twists or seasonings in any time-honored recipe. Indeed, experimentation has forever been out of the question.

Getting it Just So for him is the utmost directive in the Mansion kitchen: “Hef’s the easiest man in the world to please,” his longtime executive assistant Mary O’Connor has said, “providing everything is done just the way he wants it.” A meticulous kitchen log has always been kept in the butler’s pantry describing the preparations of his meals in minute detail, with photographs of how each individual
favorite meal must be presented to him. When he calls the kitchen to place his order—his summons comes as a buzz that sounds like no other sent from the property—all current activity therein stops entirely (that is to say, the preparation of the food orders of his houseguests), while staff scrambles to accommodate his cravings. Further quirks and tastes: He remains most fond of Wonder Bread, but only slices pulled from fresh unopened packs. He is also fond of pot roast, meat loaf, Lipton’s chicken soup (the instant kind), and lamb chops, quite especially. Seafood does not really exist in his life. Breakfast food (eggs and bacon and hash browns and french toast, and so forth), on the other hand, is his thrill. And, more often than not, he will insist upon washing it all down with ice-cold milk in a freshly chilled highball glass. Shaken, not stirred.

And then there is the topic of fried chicken. Fried chicken has long been sacrosanct in Hefworld, and here is why: When he was a boy, his family would often go out to dinner on Sundays to a neighborhood restaurant that offered what he considered to be perfect fried chicken. He yearned for this perfect fried chicken ever after, Sundays especially. Once he became king of a Mansion, wherein he drafted memos like no others in history, he drafted this one, circa early sixties, to his kitchen staff: “This is just a note to tell you that the chicken we had over the weekend was absolutely the best I have ever had at the house. It had the dark crust on the outside, and the very tender, well-cooked
meat inside, and it was just delicious. The gravy for it still isn’t all that it ought to be—not really enough meat flavor to it, not quite thick enough, and not quite creamy enough. It had a rather orange color to it, whereas my favorite fried chicken and pork chop gravy is fairly thick tan to light brown in color.”