Sometimes, too, quieter toys made an impact. For instance, the Killer Ben-Wa Balls Incident, a classic Mansion moment. One Special Lady had received a pair of Japanese ben-wa balls from a friend and, well, inserted them one evening and, well, forgot they were in place, forgot all about them. Hours later she found herself in the Bed astride, well, Hef’s face while he pleasured her. “We were going at it,” she recalled, “and all of a sudden he was shoving me off and gagging—ack, ack, ack—and I realized that they’d gone down into his throat. They almost killed him. I just kind of Heimliched him and got ’em out. It seemed funny afterward, and I had them framed with background of Purple Heart velvet and the motto LEST WE FORGET.”
a Funny Thing Happens on Your Way to Love
If you don’t see the humor in sex, you don’t see the humanity in it. They go hand in hand.
And then there is the business of baby oil. No Mansion cupboard since the sixties has been devoid of it. Row upon row of Johnson’s baby oil bottles standing sentry, awaiting the Master’s next urge. In point of fact, the Chicago Mansion’s Round Rotating Bed headboard contained, in the far left corner, a plentiful stash of bottles. It is merely the stuff of slick sensual legend on his premises, and here is why: “Perhaps the only sexual quirk Hefner has is his fetish for baby oil,” recalled Playmate Marilyn Cole. “He would spend hours rubbing it all over me like a master chef tenderly basting a chicken. It was his way of making me ready for him. It also had a somewhat unfortunate side effect. If a girl spends half the night getting covered in baby oil, she inevitably ends up with very greasy hair.” Or from Playmate Marcy Hanson: “Oh, God, the baby oil! It’s a bitch to get it out of your hair. It can take days and days. Each of us had her own way of getting it out—everything from champagne to baby powder to ‘Fuck it, let’s do it again.’”
To Serve and Protect Like a Man Requires Noticing
There are many forms of safe sex, and most have to do with really paying attention to what’s going on related to your body and hers. I’ve never been a big prophylactic man, but I have never gotten a woman pregnant when I wasn’t married and I’ve never had a problem with sexually transmitted diseases. It has to do with taking care of business.
Reflections on the Little Blue Pill
If you take Viagra one hour before the fact, it can last eight to twelve hours. I don’t mean the sex can last eight or twelve hours, but the effect can. If you have seven girlfriends, let me say, you need the little blue pill.
Viagra isn’t just for older guys. This pill is not for people of a certain age; this pill is for guys of any age. There’s always a time when you’re looking for wood—nights when you’re drinking a lot, for instance—and it may not be there. It provides the certainty that wood is there when you need it.
He would declare Viagra the best gift he ever received. Never mind that his virile endurance has always been his pride and joy. One woman long ago said that he could go to it in such epic and extended fashion that it almost got “borin’.” What man would not take that as praise?
As it turned out, this new gift arrived in his life precisely at the most opportune moment. His separation from Kimberley Conrad Hefner had been announced three months earlier, and in the tumultuous interim, he found himself to be hermetically unsealed, leaving the tall gates and stone walls behind, charting the new real world again—and discovering that young women were still as interested in him as he had always been in them. He said of that same moment: “So many young people were waiting for me to come out and play. It was like spotting Elvis at the supermarket.”
And so on April 9, 1998—his seventy-second birthday, as spry and rejuvenating a birthday for him as ever before—new blue pharmaceutical magic was presented to him, because if not to him, then to whom? Never was there a more appropriate test pilot for such a blue-yonder flight. He flew and did not stop: “It redefines the boundary between fantasy and reality. I think Viagra is the best recreational drug in America.” He would even share blue bounty, for experimental purposes, with the Ladies in his Bed. “They insisted,” he said. “In theory, it should work as well for women as it does for men, but the results are thus far inconclusive. I think we need to do a little more research.”
He always did know how to work it. Or play it.
But Staying Hard Without a Blue Pill Needn’t Be Hard to Do
Fear of premature ejaculation has never been part of my experience. I don’t know what that’s all about. One could argue that there is no such thing as premature ejaculation. When you want to ejaculate, you ejaculate. It may be premature for her, but not for you.
Conversely, however, that is part of what endurance is all about: You should be thinking about her pleasure and her climax. That actually does help you get to where you ought to be. Don’t think about Mickey Mantle. Think about the girl you are with, not just about your own satisfaction.
numbers Don’t Matter
Part of my life has been a testing of the outer boundaries of sexuality, stretching the limits of what you can do and still consider yourself moral. Morality is not defined by numbers of partners. You can have sex with just one person and this can be a very immoral relationship.
People understood early on the kinds of parties he might wish to attend, this new renegade of bohemian upscale decadence—whatever such a thing could mean at such a time. “I went to my first orgy in 1957 on my first visit to Hollywood,” he recalled. “It was a beatnik affair held in my honor at a home filled with models and starlets. It convinced me that everything about Hollywood that I ever fantasized about was true.” A female participant in that event would, however, remember that when the night ended, there was Young Mr. Playboy, mogul in the making, curled up in front of a fireplace, nude, sleeping beside a cat. As in: These Things Take Practice. He practiced well and with vigor. At the Chicago Mansion, he practiced on the Round Bed with carefully selected partners—friends, eager dormitory Bunnies, and others. Then he moved practice downstairs to his enormous Roman bath, where bubbles would foam and soft music would play and there would never be fewer than ten women to four guys—the Hefner ratio, this, and only because of utter trust in the other guys. Some pairings would then wander a few yards away from the bath and over to the water bed—among the first such undulating sleep mats in the world—and continue what had already begun amid wet soap. (Quoth Dean Martin, during an NBC-TV Hef roast: “He gets so much action, he’s got the only water bed with whitecaps.”) Said John Dante, his Playboy Club executive and Monopoly pal, and one of the trusted chosen in group experimentations, back then and thereafter: “We had a ball. You’d be kissing one girl—kissing two. You’d have two lovely faces on either side of you, God almighty—it was the most fantastic happening you can ever imagine—beautifully made up, one more gorgeous than the other, perfectly formed bodies, stroking you, sucking you, fucking you. But Hef was the main thing. He was playful about it all. It was strictly fantasy time, indulging all of the senses from food to smell to taste. He enjoyed seeing all of us get pleasure—men and women alike. How bad can that be?”
Such scenes became almost a Mansion West constant beginning in late 1976, upon the final departure of Barbi Benton, who had never been inclined to play with others. “Hef used to ask me if I was ever interested in having a third party join in,” she would recall, “and I had no interest in that—guys or girls, for my birthday or his. No way.” He took on his newfound liberation with blissful abandon: “I was more committed than ever to noncommitment. This was my real swing period. It was not simply a third girl, but every variation on a theme—and I do mean everything imaginable in the realm of experimentation. We literally had a little community of group sex, a circle of a dozen friends who were into scenes.”
Thus was born the eternal Mansion mystique, wherein anything could happen and usually did—but only if you wanted it to. Still, he was always gentle and deferential, concerned about the feelings of those who partook and those who did not. “Sex was never mandatory with Hef,” said Playmate M
onique St. Pierre. “It was always optional. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough women.” Still, players who played during that halcyon playtime uniformly wax wistful about it: “It was just a fabulous time of free love,” said Marcy Hanson. “Everything you read about or thought about really did happen. But in such a loving way. It wasn’t seedy, like when you think of Larry Flynt or that other jerk, Guccione.”
The More Can Very Much Be the Merrier
Women come to me with the expectation of having multi-partner sex, but that’s more true today than at any other time in my life. Before that, I certainly discussed with girls that I was dating the possibility of bringing other women to our bed. But it’s something that you can do only as long as both you and she are comfortable with it.
It’s a big mistake to get into multi-partner relationships if there isn’t real understanding and security in the primary relationship. You need to be sure, I think, not only that you’re going to feel fine the following day, but that she will, too. It’s foolish to squander the tomorrows that exist in a relationship for a momentary adventure. It’s not a smart way to live your life.
I’ve always felt, quite frankly, that it’s a mistake to put off pleasure, but I think you should do it rationally. You should live for today and also for tomorrow.
A Mansion orgy, then, was always happily consensual, full of good cheer and humor, lacking inhibition and later regret. Still, while all involved were sating each other, the gratification of one in particular was understandably paramount. “The girls all loved Hef and wanted to make him feel like a sultan,” said John Dante, who witnessed much as well as participated frequently. He once recalled a vigorous roundelay in the sprawling Master Bed during which eight females had come to play with the Master and Dante and another fortunate friend. And it was good. As it always was. And it was crowded, as it often was: “Everybody was on top of everybody else. You didn’t know who was where.” And it was an hour on, as it also often was. And Dante was atop a female, deeply in flagrante delicto, as it were. As was the Master, somewhere else amid the scrum. “All of a sudden, I hear, ‘Uhhh, uhhh, uhhh!’ Hef is about to go. All of the girls in the bed, including the one that’s under me, start saying, ‘Come on, Hef! C’mon, baby! Come on!’” Which is exactly what then did occur, as it always did. “And all the girls are laughing, including the one under me. I look into her face and go back to what I was doing with her. And she looks at me, and what I read in her face is, ‘Hey, schmucko, it’s over!’” So she disengaged from Dante while remaining beneath him, while the Master called downstairs for food. “And she says to him, with me on top of her still, ‘I’ll have a cheeseburger and a malted milk.’ Hef repeats in the phone, ‘One cheeseburger, one malted milk.’ And that was it. After Hef came, it was over.’”
There Are No Guidebooks for Swinging, So Proceed with Caution
If there are any rules of etiquette in having consensual multi-partner sex, I haven’t found them yet. Just pay attention to what’s going on around you and don’t do anything you’ll feel guilty about the next day.
For one who never learned to swim, he would commune in water more famously than most. But then he had created perhaps the most famous Grotto in modern civilization in order to achieve that distinction. Plus, as he would point out, “You don’t swim in the Grotto. It’s all standing, sitting, and lying down.” It is all that and human wave making. It is the Jacuzzi of all Jacuzzis, the cave of love, hidden behind a waterfall, connected to the pool via an underwater tunnel, and yet separate unto itself because of its legendary frolics. Secreted away in the stone walls are five synthetic boulders that pipe intimate music—the singing rocks!—while those who swirl in the warm waters make beautiful music. Upon obtaining his Shangri-la in Holmby Hills, he decreed that a Grotto was required and that it be constructed to resemble something that “had emerged from the sea millions of years ago,” according to its architect, Ron Dirsmith. “When it was finished, it had an ethereal, timeless quality, almost like being in some kind of church. Hef related to it philosophically. It was a very serious moment.” And then the sex started.
Grotto Love Has Its Ups and Downs
In a certain sense, it’s like making love in a steam bath. The heat and humidity are nice initially but it limits your potential. Certain women, however, have expressed great fondness for the water jets. Historically, most of the lovemaking I’ve done in the Grotto has been foreplay that then led to the bedroom.
Oftentimes whenever sex started in his bedroom at either Mansion, he would flip a switch and a video camera—embedded in the wall, trained upon the action—began to capture the magic unfolding. He was always one to document his life, after all. “Early on, in a gadget-filled house, I recorded a lot of sexual adventures,” he would say, “but only with the participants’ knowledge and approval.” (After the technology had advanced, he and his partners could actually watch themselves carry on while they carried on, which did require a good amount of neck-craning.) As he is who he is, voyeuristic proclivities such as these were his birthright, except he didn’t know it until his libido awoke during his marriage to Millie. It was in that period he asked his father to buy him a 16-millimeter projector for Christmas; his father would never suspect why, nor would Millie—until frequent screenings of stag films became part of their home entertaining. In no time, he became a connoisseur of the genre, as primitive as it was then. Duly inspired, just before starting a magazine that would embrace all things racy, he and his friend Eldon Sellers made their own stag film, very much on the sly, with a willing young woman.
Sellers, who was merely the accomplice, would recall: “He asked me to be involved, and I was all for it. It was his idea to call it After the Masquerade Ball. We wore masks—it was the funniest thing. Despite the masks, Hef was worried about someone recognizing him someday. So he asked me if I would take his place in close-ups—trade places with him, including some of the sex scenes, even though he was in ninety percent of them. Hef could talk anybody into anything if he tried.”
The Best Adult Videos Are All About You
The most erotic films, first of all, don’t have much plot and, second of all, have everything to do with the attractiveness to you of the participants and the attractiveness to you of the nature of the sexual activity.
As for the status of his vast library of Mansion Bedroom home videos, the news should sadden certain historians: “I got rid of them in the eighties. I thought it was time and didn’t want them falling into the wrong hands. Some of the women on the tapes were married with children by then, so we deep-sixed the tapes. Dumped them in the ocean. And even I don’t know the location. The tapes are gone, but the memories linger on.”
Keep the Sandman in His Proper Place
It’s a good idea not to fall asleep while you’re actually having intercourse. Not very polite. It’s not a good idea to fall asleep in the middle of a conversation with a girlfriend, either.
You Need to Wake Up the Morning After the First Night with Some Class, Boys
Who was it that said that five minutes after he had sex, he wished the woman would turn into a poker table and five of his buddies?
I don’t agree. The period after orgasm—if you’re with somebody you care about—is a very sweet time. Cuddling is very important. In the morning, if it’s someone you’ve just been with for the first time, the last thing a girl wants to hear is “I’ll call you” when she thinks it’s not true. If it’s the first time, then what is looked for afterward is something sweet and romantic and reassuring, just the way it was before the sex.
Hef’s Requisite Postcoital Meal
What I have to eat in the middle of the night, following sex: eggs sunny side up, with bacon, crisp. Hash brown potatoes. Buttered toast, grape jelly, a cold glass of milk, and applesauce. Followed by French toast. All served on a bed tray after sex, and then I sleep like a baby.
EPILOGUE
How to Live Long and Influence Playboys
Mortality is the most unfai
r thing on the planet. All that makes it bearable is that it’s universal. Still, there’s a certain inequity in terms of when your time is up.
Truly, the key to longevity is taking care of yourself. But first and foremost, pick your parents with great care. Because if your parents live a long time, chances are you will, too. Also, stay out of hospitals. People die there.
To be Hef has ever been to defy odds. It is all in the genes. He came from strong genes, ones that encode long life. His mother lived to be a hundred and one years old. That alone would give him special hubris regarding mortality. His lifestyle gave him even more hubris in that regard: “Age is largely a number. If you are healthy, then how old you are has very little meaning.” In his seventh decade, after siring two fresh scions, after surviving a marriage that came apart, he would begin to sow oats anew, begin dating again, be seen out painting the City of Angels crimson, clubbing, as they say, be seen out dancing and dancing, and then dancing some more, with young, beautiful women. As he would say: “My life is every bit as good and maybe even a little better in my seventies than it has been in the decades past. That thought would have been inconceivable to me when I was younger. My golden years have really turned out to be the golden years.” He laughs last.
* * *
Shel Silverstein on Explaining Why Hef Will Never Die
DEATH GOES TO THE MANSION
The late irrepressible poet, artist, singer, and longtime Playboy contributor—and beloved Mansion habitué—Shel Silverstein often spun yarns during board-game marathons and once, in the late sixties, crafted an extemporaneous lark about what would happen if the Grim Reaper dared to turn up at the doorstep of the Chicago Mansion, looking for the proprietor—the playboy of playboys who kept strange, impossible hours and had a famous dislike for keeping business appointments.
Hef's Little Black Book Page 8