Hef's Little Black Book

by Hugh M. Hefner

  Once he sealed himself within his grand new vacuum, work and play fused, intermingled, moved as one. Regimen knew no boundaries—a beautiful thing. Why commute? Just move the paperwork off the bed and make room for the girls. Hours were not wasted as much as savored. “Separates me from the wasted motions,” he said. Also, most memorably: “The Mansion ended up working so well that going out came to seem like a useless exercise. What the hell was I supposed to go out for?” He barely went out, for certain. Maybe eight times in nine years, or so myth has it, but no one kept score, really. Once, when he and a Lady stepped outdoors during a blizzard to build a snowman in the front yard, panic seized the staff—“like there’d been a prison break,” he would say, chuckling. “He’s gone out! Hef’s gone out!’”

  He was never lonely therein. On a white French door that gave way to his vast ballroom—where two suits of armor stood sentry over bacchanals unending—there was affixed the most notorious brass plaque in the history of threshold passage. In Latin, it warned: Si Non Oscillas Noli Tintinnare. (“If you don’t swing, don’t ring.”)

  Inside, on good nights, amid the paintings of Picasso and de Kooning, amid the carved oak filigrees and the mammoth corniced pillars, jazz wailed, martinis rattled, Bunnies grooved, frugging up a storm. All such happenings took place just one flight above the indoor tropical pool, whose cave of hidden love—the Woo Grotto, it was called—was visible only to those who peeped down through a trapdoor, also hidden, in the ballroom floor. Those who swam elsewhere in the pool, meanwhile, could be viewed through a picture window in the subterranean underwater bar, most easily reached by sliding down a brass firepole. (Both Dean Martin and Batman reportedly stole Hefner’s pole notion for their respective TV shows.) Other accoutrements abounded: girls, girls, girls, of course, plus secret passages and nooks, a game room, a bowling alley, a steam room, fourth-floor Bunny dormitories (convenience!), red-liveried housemen, a 24-hour kitchen, spiral stairways, an electronic entertainment room (replete with early Ampex videotape recorders in the era when your basic video recorder cost twenty grand), and a hi-fi stereo console the length of a limousine with state-of-the-art features—hissless bliss. Then, too, there was his prized gold-fauceted Roman bath, which comfortably seated eight beneath a gentle spray of drizzle mists. As such, the Master of the Mansion could do, or view, whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it.

  Most important, however, without question, there was the Round Rotating Bed—historic! The Bed that launched a thousand hips! The most famous bed in the annals of time! The Bed, period.

  But we will get back to that soon enough.

  You Are Where You Live

  Your pad—or your crib, as it’s now called—is key. It’s an extension of who you are. And it’s the environment in which you are going to be spending some of the best times of your life. So it should be a projection of your own personality.

  * * *

  The Existential Importance of Hef’s House Explained

  Playboy cartoon, 1970: A man has clambered to a mountain peak to beg wisdom from a cross-legged guru. Guru tells man: “In a place called Chicago…there’s a man who lives in a mansion full of beautiful women and wears pajamas all the time. Sit at his feet and learn from him, for he has found the secret of true happiness.”

  * * *

  Pallor—however defiant, however triumphant—will wear upon a man’s soul, alas. The Great Indoors, the Pneumatic Era, the Chicago Hermitage eventually began to fatigue its chief proponent; he needed fresh air; he took flight. On the Big Bunny, his glorious jet-black DC-9, he flew west, to Los Angeles, birthplace of his formative Hollywood dreams, where show business wanted his business more than ever. He flew there and flew there until a house was found to keep him there. Paradise found: January 1971. Barbi saw it first and advised him of it; besotted by the splendor, he bought it in February. A baronial Tudor manor perched atop the greenest of slopes, set on five and a half acres of what would become his Eden—this was his Hollywood sequel: “A new Playboy Mansion for a new decade,” he would say, “interconnected to nature as the Chicago Mansion could never be. I had found the place where I would live out my life, and do my best to create a heaven on earth.”

  Playboy Mansion West would forever be the prettier sister, the sun-drenched blonde versus the dusky brunette, appropriately curvier of terrain, and what foliage! Heaven could only hope. Here, in this soft crook of Charing Cross Road—pristine epicenter of Holmby Hills—he would design his Shangri-la from scratch, take a great barren backyard (save for Southern California’s only stand of redwoods) and install an oasis, verdant and wet. Like a Midas possessed, he oversaw all minutiae: “Where the hell are my lily pads?” he famously inquired at one early juncture. Soon the property that had come sans pool had its own lagoon, with waterfalls spilling over a Grotto of steaming whirlpools beside koi ponds set in rolling lawns on which flamingos mingled with peacocks, cranes with ducks, a llama nibbled flowers, and—poetically—rabbits ruled. Wildlife flourished, but so too did the Wild Life, amongst and betwixt consenting adults—and this, of course, is what gave the lay of the land, if you will, its legacy.

  Naturally, then, the libertine seventies found their test laboratory at Mansion West: Monkeys swung in the trees, but humans swung everywhere else. Hef had arranged the accommodations—even the Game House had mirrored love nooks. Meanwhile, his own Master Bed West, not round but extra vast, with nude nymphs carved in oak relief, with automated movable curtains and mirrors and headboard—he would ride the box springs therein like a sultan on his magic carpet!

  My Shangri-la in the Land of Dreams: Playboy Mansion West.

  Still, no setting lured besporting events like the Grotto. Four Jacuzzis burbled within, so as to tenderize moments most tender, amid boulders and candlelight. “If those rocks could talk…” He would often muse and tantalize at once. (To finish the sentence might have finished careers.) But it is fair to say that those rocks have seen most everything and everyone (celebrity-wise) making waves, usually without clothes. Of course, there was the night of Hef’s fifty-eighth birthday, on which eighteen beautiful naked women waited in his Grotto to fete him, and him alone, as speakers hidden in the rocks blared “To All the Girls I Loved Before”—the popular song that had been officially dedicated to him alone.

  As he would say then and ever, “Just another typical day at the Mansion…”

  * * *

  The mansion West Toast to male Camaraderie

  As coined for special occasions of fraternization by grateful Mansion habitué and Hef friend actor Robert Culp: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, be of good cheer, for they are out there, and we are in here!”

  * * *

  The Center of the World Is Where You Wake Up

  For me, the most important room of the house has always been the bedroom. No surprise. It’s where you do your best work and play. At the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago, I had the rotating, vibrating bed. It managed to turn each of the four sides of the room into a different living experience. The joke at the time was that it spun at 78, 331/3, and 45 rpm like the old record players, which wasn’t true. But it permitted me to separately face the television area, the fireplace, the desktop headboard, or the dining area.

  The bed in Los Angeles is larger but more traditional in shape. It can easily accommodate twelve. And its special features can transform it into a little theater—with a wall-size television screen and a control panel that operates the lighting, curtains, drapes, music, and a projection system that includes videotape, DVD, laser, and satellite, cable, and regular TV. Your bed should be the center of the best part of your life.

  The truly best-laid plans: My Mansion West Bedroom.

  Whither the Bed of all Beds? Perfectly round, eight and a half feet in diameter, its rotations made it, well, revolutionary—going clockwise or counterclockwise at the twist of a dial in the headboard controls, purring softly, turning, turning—the laziest susan ever! Without moving an inch, he moved his Chicago bedroom, effectively sub
dividing a white-carpeted universe (remove shoes, please)—sectional permissiveness! “Hef—in a James Bond world,” wrote Tom Wolfe, who saw the Bed for exactly what it was: “the center of the world!”

  Moonlight Can Become You

  Working and playing all night has its advantages. I started doing it early on, before the Mansion, and learned something important about myself. I would come home at eight or nine in the morning and see people waiting to go to work, thinking how I would hate to be living that other life. I’d rather live by night and sleep during the day because all the good stuff happens at night.

  He lived for whenever, especially in the Chicago Mansion. Draped out and ignored, the sun never shone in the house. Time of day meant nothing there. He liked it that way, liked to stay up for days on end, editing, philosophizing, discoursing, loving, writing memos, playing games. (Forty-hour Pepsi-fueled, Dexedrine-enhanced backgammon or Monopoly marathons! A regular occurrence!) “The wee hours were the whee hours,” he said, “because while the rest of the world was asleep, romantic dreams were more likely to come true.” Thus, party nights became party mornings. Norman Mailer, who observed his share of such nights, wrote of one: “The party was very big, and it was a good party. The music went all the way down into the hour or two before breakfast, but no one saw the dawn come in, because the party was at Hugh Hefner’s house, which is one of the most extraordinary houses in America. I never saw the sky from that room, and so there was a timeless, spaceless sensation…. Timeless, spaceless, it was outward bound.”

  Often, at such parties, the host would never appear—he was Gatsby of Chicago in those days. Or he would appear briefly, then return to his chambers, with or without female accompaniment, to conduct the business of surveying corporate landscape and magazine layouts. He no longer went to the office; his bed was his twirling twenty-four-hour desktop, papers and printouts and color transparencies strewn everywhere. Riding the Bed in 1965, amid the clutter, he explained himself and his work habits to Tom Wolfe: “I don’t take calls anymore, I just return them. I don’t have any inboxes and out-boxes. I don’t have to arrange my life by other people’s hours. I don’t always have to be in some boring conference. I don’t have to go through business lunches and a lot of formalities. I don’t even shave if I don’t feel like it. I don’t have to get dressed. I don’t have to put on a shirt and a tie and a suit every day. I just put on a bathrobe!”

  And what he wore under that bathrobe, of course, would become for him what a hat was for Sinatra. The signature silken ensemble—legendarily, indelibly all his own.

  Pajamas Are a Playboy’s Best Friend

  One of the key moments of my life was the discovery that I could get away with wearing pajamas most of the time. It simplified that first decision of the day: What am I going to wear? The answer is black when I’m working during the day, and brighter colors at night. I wear them for both the comfort and the style. I have about twenty different colors, but I tend to favor purple. It has a nice kind of elegant quality and goes well with the smoking jackets, which are usually red satin or black velvet.

  The first pair of pajamas I had made to order was satin. That didn’t work very well because satin wrinkles and my sheets are also satin. There was a lot of sliding off the bed and pillows flying in all directions. Ever since, I’ve had them custom-made in silk. I wouldn’t care to ever go back to cotton.

  “We like our apartment,” he wrote in the introduction to Volume 1, Number 1, of Playboy magazine, December 1953. By then, ensconced with wife, Millie, and baby daughter, Christie, he had turned an apartment in Hyde Park, at 6052 South Harper, in the shadow of the University of Chicago, into a rarefied bohemian den that boasted Hans Knoll tables and Eames chairs and grass walls and bamboo shades and a nursery wallpapered with Pogo cartoons.

  “He did it all,” said Millie. “He controlled every aspect of it.” It became a salon for thinkers, for those rethinking their lives. He instigated talk and games and randy notions, and friends were intrigued. Said one woman, who would show up with her estranged husband (bohemian!): “Being in that apartment—the furnishings, the people and the good conversation—all of it made me feel on the cutting edge of an exciting world. I could always count on a good discussion taking place, besides the stag movies and the banned books.”

  Next sentence from Volume 1, Number 1 (re: “We like our apartment”): “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” He wrote from real and imagined experience. He would only experience more. Meanwhile the phonograph beckons…

  * * *

  Hef’s Music to Woo By

  The best songs for seduction are the ones that your date responds to, and these can be as different as day and night. Some respond to Sinatra and some like hip-hop (“Head down, ass up, that’s the way we like to fuck…”). As in all matters of taste, you need to choose what you think your companion will find most pleasing. That may seem obvious, but many potential relationships go astray at the outset because you don’t make an appropriate connection.

  The list of my favorites is endless. Each song evokes a different memory, a yearning, a dream.

  “Stardust”—Hoagy Carmichael classic, sung by almost anyone

  “As Time Goes By”—a favorite song from my favorite movie

  “Sophisticated Lady”—Duke Ellington

  “Dream”—Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers

  “Candy”—Johnny Mercer

  “Is That All There Is?”—Peggy Lee

  “Something Cool”—June Christy

  “It’s a Blue World”—Mel Torme

  “One for My Baby”—Frank Sinatra

  “If You Were Mine”—Billie Holiday

  “It’s Like Reaching for the Moon”—Billie Holiday

  “Let’s Get Lost”—Chet Baker

  “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars”—Astrid Gilberto

  “Misty”—Errol Garner

  “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”—Frank Sinatra

  “It Never Entered My Mind”—Frank Sinatra

  “But Not for Me”—Jackie Gleason Orchestra with Bobby Hackett

  “Wishing”—Vera Lynn

  “We’ll Meet Again”—Vera Lynn

  “Hold My Hand”—Al Bowlly

  “Love Locked Out”—Al Bowlly

  “Midnight, the Stars, and You”—Al Bowlly

  “Without a Word of Warning”—Bing Crosby

  “You and Me”—Peter Allen

  “Everything Old Is New Again”—Peter Allen

  “Can’t We Be Friends?”—Frank Sinatra

  “Mood Indigo”—Frank Sinatra

  “I’ll Be Your Friend, with Pleasure”—Bix Beiderbecke

  * * *

  Nobody will ever dance like him. Voted the best jitter-bugger in his high school class, he would remain all about slippery shuffles and twists, elbows pumping fast or slow, depending on the tune. His rhythm would always be correct, just unusual. There is video evidence aplenty—from such sixties television novelties as Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark on through a spry handful of late seventies network specials, where a nation learned that disco music had somehow overtaken it. Like no one else, he could become the most interesting Caucasian disco inferno on any floor.

  When Dancing with Her and She Insists on Leading, Understand Just This

  It all depends on where she wants to lead you…

  As a boy, he had everybody come over: “Mine was the home where all the children came to play.” This, too, never changed. He was born to host, never to guest. At other homes, he would be uneasy. At his own, he would exist only to welcome. His instinct was to create a nucleus of friends, of merry happenstance. Thus, the Parties. Oh, the Parties. He would perfect the art of throwing them. Over years, he would spend whatever it took just to throw them just right. As he favored sleepwear for himself, many of these parties w
ould require just the same—lingerie especially—on New Year’s Eve, and at his April ninth birthday bash, and again at the most notorious annual bacchanal occurring anywhere on the planet, the one called a Midsummer Night’s Dream, which remains the lawn party of all lawn parties, as he created quite a Californian lawn for himself, and for such debauchery. It is an uninhibited lingerie-and-pajamas-only affair that is arguably the most coveted invitation in Los Angeles. “There is a pleasure to being one of the hosts that is difficult to appreciate,” he would say. “Unless you’re in a position where you can do it. I don’t really know why it’s true, but I get a great deal of extra pleasure out of sharing all of this with friends. I don’t see how one would enjoy it if one weren’t able to share it with friends.”

  * * *

  Welcome to a Mansion Party

  STAFF MEMO, HEFSTYLE

  (I) THE RIGHT KIND OF ENVIRONMENT

  MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

  Roman and Greek Mythology Theme Pajama Party

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2002

  Baskets of Lifestyles condoms out in bathhouse and on shelf in grotto at all of Hef ’s major events.

  Decorations: A Midsummer Night’s Roman and Greek Mythology Theme with Satyrs and Pans, statues, murals, flowers, twinkle lights, gold, fuchsia and red fabrics, neon palm trees, gold sequined lamé linens.