Checking in With Hugh Hefner
Somebody stop Hugh Hefner. He’s throwing parties again, hopping from club to club, getting his picture taken with Cameron Diaz and Dave Grohl one night and Jack Nicholson and Perry Farrell the next. He’s popping Viagra and dating identical twins, plus a third busty blonde. They are in their twenties and are very understanding when he wants to bring additional women into the mix. He is 72 years old.
After almost ten years of family life and supposed monogamy, Hef, as he likes to be called, is back on message and living The Life. To some red-blooded bachelors, the Playboy progenitor is the ultimate object of envy. “I want to be him,” says Vince Neil, the Mötley Crüe singer who’s “eternally engaged” to a Playmate. To others, he’s a visionary workaholic and a lucky womanizer. And to some, he’s just an old man still chasing tail.
In the forty-five years since he started Playboy and made his mark on modern history with the simple suggestion that nice girls have sex, too, Hef has become an artwork of his own creation — a living playboy, an icon as durable as the bunny logo itself. He furnished his universe with the trappings he’d always coveted — the silk robes, the round bed, the grotto of hot tubs, and the endless supply of celebrities and girls — and cast himself in the leading role of a fantasy based on movies he’d seen as a child.
His set is the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles — an invitation-only adult Romper Room, where we find Hef sitting in the library in his second skin of a red smoking jacket and black silk pajamas. On the table in front of him are the accessories that replaced his pipe after his 1985 stroke: a bottle of Diet Pepsi and a plate of cookies.Surrounded by pictures of his ex-wife Playmate Kimberley Conrad, Hef is full of energy, his left hand constantly stroking his chin while his right drums on the cookie plate.
Of course, this isn’t Hef’s first rebound. There was his joyful leap into bachelordom after the breakup of his first marriage, to Millie Gunn; the festivities that followed the end of his relationship with Barbi Benton, in 1976; and then, in true Playboy fashion, getting back in the game after his stroke. The difference this time is that he is older and everyone else is a half-century younger. Hef is a living museum piece that loves being on display. And you can touch it. There are no alarms, especially if you are blond and well-endowed.
Did you have any idea that you’d get so much attention just for going out partying?
No, no. I think that’s one of the reasons that I am doing the club scene more — particularly after having been off the scene completely by being married for the better part of a decade. I was not prepared for the reaction. A separation is always traumatic, so to come out of that tunnel and find that a whole new generation is waiting for me to come out and play is very nice. A lot of the new celebrities feel they’ve missed the party — missed the swinging time. And that’s the way I felt when I was growing up in the Depression, looking back at those images from the Roaring Twenties.
I also think the response [to his return] has to do with the time frame: Six years ago, it would not have been the same. Whatever was going on during the Reagan and Bush eras has changed. Now, as Prince suggested some time ago, it’s 1999 — it’s party time.
How did you meet your girlfriends, Brande, Sandy and Randy… . . .
. . . I’m Randy.
Sorry, I meant Mandy.
When I was clubbing. I met Brande [Roderick] at the Opium Den, a club that she had not frequented very often. And in May, about a month later, I met the twins — Sandy and Mandy Bentley — at the Garden of Eden.
What made them stand out?
They’re very special ladies, very special ladies. With the twins, they are actually college kids — nice Catholic girls from Chicago, my hometown. The night I met them, I said, “You girls dropped from heaven.” Then they had a drink with me. I got their first names but not their last names or phone numbers, and suddenly they were gone. It took me a month to find them.
Where did they turn up?
In school. One of them is in a premed program in Las Vegas; the other was in a private Catholic school in Chicago. coaxed them each into coming out here, and now they’re here almost every weekend.
How did you coax them? Love letters? Boxes of candy?
No, just talking to them on the phone. It’s a very special relationship. Mandy has just moved here, and Sandy’s coming out as soon as her semester is over.
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