* * *
Classic mansion movie nights
HEF’S FAVORITE FILMS
Casablanca is my favorite film for many reasons. It has everything—lost love, redemption, friendship, patriotism, humor, adventure, and a great musical score. Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor and this is his best role, the one that made him a star.
Then, in no special order:
The Maltese Falcon (another Bogart classic)
To Have and Have Not (Bogart meets Bacall)
Singin’ in the Rain (my favorite musical)
City Lights (my favorite Chaplin)
King Kong (let’s hear it for the big guy)
The Godfather I and II (a sequel that actually makes the first film better)
Dr. No (Sean Connery as Bond and Ursula Andress as the ultimate Bond Girl)
Goldfinger
A Place in the Sun (Elizabeth Taylor at her most beautiful)
Adam’s Rib (Tracy and Hepburn at their best)
Gilda (Rita Hayworth at her best)
Laura (Gene Tierney ditto)
The Awful Truth (Cary Grant unforgettably funny)
Some Like It Hot (Marilyn at her best)
Chinatown (the best mystery since The Maltese Falcon)
Body Heat (a sexy film noir mystery)
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Shane (my favorite Western)
Anything with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers from the 1930s
The best of Woody Allen, including Annie Hall, Manhattan, Radio Days, and Bullets over Broadway
* * *
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.
* * *
Playboy after Dark
HEF PICKS SIX ETERNALLY ROMANTIC FILM MOMENTS
Casablanca—When Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
To Have and Have Not—When Lauren Bacall says to Bogie, “All you have to do is whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.”
City Lights—When the blind flower girl recovers her sight and realizes that Charlie Chaplin is her benefactor and a tramp. It is for me the most intensely moving moment in the entire history of motion pictures.
Now, Voyager—Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and handing one to Bette Davis at the end of the film.
Love Affair and An Affair to Remember—When Charles Boyer (and Cary Grant, in the remake) realizes that Irene Dunne (Deborah Kerr) failed to meet him at the top of the Empire State Building because she was hit by a car and is crippled.
King Kong—When the big guy starts to undress Fay Wray, removing garments like petals from a flower, and when he puts her down before falling from the top of the Empire State Building. As Robert Armstrong observes, “It wasn’t the planes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
* * *
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.”
All else in his life would be gravy, if only the metaphorical kind, but still: It should be noted, by the way, that two chickens must die in order for him to be served his requisite three drumsticks per meal. He always thought well of Colonel Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, with its secret herbs and spices, but even he could not wrest away that recipe. And so, when he and Barbi and contingent flew around Europe—and he refused to eat fancy food, and all else were thrilled with fancy food—his valet quietly infiltrated the haute kitchen of Maxim’s in Paris, in order to instruct its chef on the art of preparing southern fried chicken, à la Hefner. (“I am pretty horny for some fried chicken,” he had by then been muttering for weeks.) That night, it was unveiled to him under a silver chafing dish, along with mashed potatoes, gravy, and peas. After he consumed it, washing it down with a goblet of cold milk, the chef approached to inquire how he had liked the meal. “I’ve had better,” said the American Playboy. The chef could only shrug and return to the kitchen, bemused and dejected at once. “I was sure,” one witness recalled, “that he was going in there to blow his brains out.”
* * *
Eat Like Hef
Hugh Hefn
er’s Fried Chicken
FRESH CHICKEN PARTS
2 split chicken breasts
2 chicken thighs
6 chicken drumsticks
SEASONED FLOUR
3 cups all-purpose flour
1½ tablespoons Lawry’s seasoned salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
1 tablespoon Spanish paprika
1½ cups Wesson oil
Preheat an electric skillet to 375°. Rinse the chicken pieces thoroughly in cold running water. Combine the flour and the seasonings. Pour the Wesson oil into the skillet. Let the oil heat up. Test by sprinkling some flour in the pan. If it bubbles, it is hot enough to start frying the chicken.
Fully dredge the wet chicken in the flour mixture and place in the skillet. Reserve the seasoned flour. Cover and allow to steam/fry for 15 minutes. Uncover and sprinkle a small amount of seasoned flour over the top of all the chicken pieces. Chicken should be a nice golden brown before turning (approximately 25 minutes). Brown the other side (approximately 15–20 minutes). Remove the chicken pieces from the skillet. Place on paper towels to drain. Set aside and keep warm. Turn off the skillet.
NOTE: When ordering the chicken parts from the butcher, all products should be specified as follows: drumsticks should weigh 2.8 to 3 ounces, thighs should weigh 3.5 to 4 ounces. and breasts should weigh 22 to 25 ounces.
* * *
Never had he actually disliked the out-of-doors. He moved west, after all, to prove as much. In fact, he would immediately become the most ardent guide for tours of the property—proudly, gleefully, goofily even—leading visitors across rolling lawns, up hill and down glade, into the tropical aquatic aviary (rare fish! rare birds! unpleasant reptiles!), into the steamy Grotto (“if only those rocks could talk…”), off to the squirrel monkey cages, where he’d pass green grapes through the screens into tiny simian paws. Such tours, too, would inevitably halt beyond the wishing well and the pet cemetery, linger in a lush shady copse which is the site of the great Game House, the place where he has engaged in combat more ferocious than in any executive boardroom. Here, over pool and foosball tables, in front of pinball machines (wired for free play) and electronic contraptions that screech and pulsate, he has unleashed his inner guerrilla, his secret kamikaze. If he is famously the most primal of men in his bedroom, he is even more so inside this place. Here he has fulminated, simmered, combusted, kvelled, spun, keened, twisted, hollered, wailed, swaggered, bounced, fumed, waltzed, mourned, revivified, leapt, muttered, sang, bragged, jitterbugged, fell apart, and pounded fists of anguish or pumped fists of triumph. Upon victory, he is never subtle; it is no coincidence that a replica of his star from the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame was embedded in the concrete path that leads directly into his Game House.
Game Playing Gives You Something Else to Think About
It’s a great escape. That’s all it is. Working hard and playing hard has always been what my life has been about. Particularly if you’re doing things you really enjoy. When I first published Playboy, outdoor adventure magazines for men were very popular. But as I wrote in the introduction to that initial issue, I was a little more interested in the great indoors. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Indoors is where my favorite games are played.
When You’ve Got the Hand, Protect It
It’s certainly true that we went through periods of obsession in the Game Room, especially related to individual pinball and electronic games. Shannon Tweed, my girlfriend in the early 1980s, talks about the fact that she and the other girls viewed themselves as Pacman widows because they would sit there for hours waiting for us to get through these games. I played Pacman so obsessively that I got bursitis—like a tennis elbow for the thumb—and had to start wearing a glove during the games.
And so the greatest Playboy of them all played Games in a manner few other mortals dared to attempt or cared to imagine. It was part of showing them the way, of demonstrating that the simplest, most innocent pleasures could be indulged with a great hedonist’s abandon. Even if it happened during card nights of bridge and gin and (strip?) poker, or on the slick surface of Risk and Monopoly boards, or if it required well-thumbed Scrabble and backgammon tiles—he would and did find a way to do it larger, and with epic endurance. His credo from the get-go: “Americans knew very well how to earn money, but didn’t know very well how to enjoy it.” So he decided that he would embody the fever pitch of how money and the silliest little games, the board ones, could be enjoyed. And like no pinball wizard before him, he put the joy in joystick. “This Is Real Life,” he once exclaimed during an intense session captured by a documentary crew. “The rest is a game.” Like no man who had ever scored with more women, he would have plaques affixed above every throbbing, humming, thumping electronic game to identify the highest scorers so far. (Inevitably, that was usually him.) Still, ever the fair-minded Midwestern boy, whenever he broke new records while playing alone (practice, practice!), he would always summon a member of his security staff to witness what he had accomplished before the new number was memorialized on a plaque. Which it would be, most immediately. For he had what, goddammit, gone and scored again? And he was playing what, fair? He said so. Midwestern integrity.
Playmates Sondra Theodore and Monique St. Pierre watching the Playboy wizard in action.
How to Win It All at Monopoly
To win consistently, you should know that the orange properties are the most valuable. You can’t win with the Baltic and the Mediterranean; you can with most of the others. But it’s the orange that is most valuable—it’s a middle ground between the high-priced Boardwalk and the lower-priced properties. Mathematically, orange will usually prevail.
Monopoly, like Hef, was created during the Depression to give Americans big dreams to ponder, dreams that weren’t yet exactly within one’s grasp—kind of like the Life Philosophy that imbued him. Naturally, he played this game with insight. He also played it maniacally—the forty-hour marathons (Pepsi, Dexie, Pepsi, Dexie, Pepsi, Dexie, you get the picture) that would later be replaced only by forty-hour backgammon marathons.
Monopoly, though: cartoon capitalism and dice and play money, with play money whose bills bore his likeness where Mr. Monopoly’s face used to be, with pictures of both Mansions emblazoned on the back, eventually with even an Atlantic City Playboy Casino Hotel figurine to place on the Boardwalk (like in life, in that very moment)—a personal personalized game for the Luckiest Monopolist of One Culture’s Craziest Yearnings. This was the official game of the Chicago Mansion, circa early seventies, with blonde, buxom Special Lady on the side, Karen Christy, presiding. She surprised him with game tokens molded and hand-painted to represent the core players—as seen here, from left—longtime friend John Dante, secretary Bobbie Arnstein, Karen herself, Hef himself, poet/artist/contributor in residence Shel Silverstein, and fledging Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel, whom Hef persuaded during one such faux real estate contest into becoming a film critic rather than just one more beat reporter; they shared a love of film, it turned out—who knew?
He moved the game west eventually—it was the one game that allowed him pause for conversation, which he enjoyed—and after Karen had gone, and Barbi, too, new likenesses were molded for Californians in the mix, including one for new Special Lady Sondra Theodore, who saw her man differently during these matches: “He was great with games and fun with games. That’s when his personality really came out. The tension of real life flew out of him. He relaxed. Those were the times I found that I wanted to reach out and hug him, because he’s just so wonderful and witty and funny and loving—and it all came out when you sat down and played a game with Hef.”
The Tao of Backgammon and
Its Cunning Secrets
Of all the games we play, the one I most enjoy and that I’m best at is backgammon. It’s a natural game for me and I was fortunate enough to learn from world-class players. It’s all a combination of skill and luck. But more th
an anything, it is a running and blocking game.
And understanding the blocking portion of it is the most sophisticated form of strategy. Many players get their pieces out of play by moving them around and into their own home prematurely. The key is blocking. Of course, the other half of the game is the cube. The cube is the betting device, which makes the game particularly exciting. Knowing when to accept—or give—a double is really as important as the game itself.
There would be no meaningful conversation during backgammon—just fine, acrid, sparkling bluster. With this pursuit, his mind was buried deep into the argyle board, into the game, like with Pacman but without the bloop sounds. He loved the utter gentlemanly brutality of it: brain matter aswirl, hands flying, neurons snapping, and yet the constant movement, of fingers and of ego, the unending back-and-forth brag, of studious guesswork. Barbi, who had the sweetest noggin to date, who was damned good at it, who had tourneys named for her, claimed they discovered the game maybe in Africa, on the big tour of the world? “Actually,” she said, “Hef was responsible for bringing backgammon to this country.” He, of course, had been puzzling about it, knew about it, was waiting for it, learned it enough, then had decided in fact that Los Angeles needed a backgammon discotheque as the seventies dawned, and he opened a club minus Bunnies (not that the waitresses weren’t spectacular) called Pip’s, where he hunched over his game board. He and this game would never part, as he even now pulls down a board and marches it poolside to make trouble every warm summer Sunday. Near the nude sunbathers, but of course.
Hef's Little Black Book Page 5