Playmate Holiday House Party

Wonderful and Exciting things have happened to Playboy during its eighth year of publication. We count among them hefty increases in circulation (now guaranteed at 1,150,000), advertising linage and revenue; the launching of Show Business Illustrated, the most important new magazine of the past half-dozen years; established plans to expand the Playboy Club operation to 50 major cities throughout the world. The year's dramatic capper was provided by a signed contract with Tony Curtis to produce and star in a film based on the Playboy operation, scheduled for shooting this coming spring. Curtis will play Editor-Publisher Hugh Hefner, the man behind it all.

With so much to celebrate, some very special salute to our Eighth Anniversary seemed called for. Hefner decided on a gala house party. He had the perfect setting for it -- the Playboy Mansion, a magnificent house in the center of Chicago's Near North Side. And what could be more in keeping with the spirit of the occasion than inviting a dozen of the magazine's most dazzling pin-up beauties, the Playmates of the Month, to be the guests of honor for a weekend frolic.

The girls arrived on the scene one wintry Friday afternoon from near and distant corners of the country: Manhattan mannequins Sheralee Conners (Miss July 1961) and Carrie Radison (Miss June 1957) flew in from Gotham, as did Latin Quarter lovely Elaine Reynolds (Miss October 1959); from Hollywood came movie and TV actresses Delores Wells (Miss June 1960) and Kathy Douglas (Miss October 1960); heading East from California, too, were Teddi Smith (Miss July 1960) and Christa Speck (Miss September 1961), who was so entranced with Chicago she decided (text continued on page 125) to give up bank clerking in Los Angeles and stay on as a Windy City Playboy Club Bunny. Up from Miami came Joyce Nizzari (Miss December 1958) and westward from Pittsburgh jetted Linda Gamble (Miss April 1960). A trio of Chicagoans were close at hand to fill out the royal roster -- Elizabeth Ann Roberts (Miss January 1958), who attends pre-med school in Chicago, Joni Mattis (Miss November 1960) and Susie Scott (Miss February 1960), both of whom are Bunnies at the Chicago Playboy Club.

The girls put in an early appearance in eager anticipation of a weekend that would culminate in Saturday night's king-sized wingding. The house -- with more than 40 rooms and a round-the-clock domestic staff -- is a Chicago showplace just a few blocks from the Playboy Building and Chicago Playboy Club. It has been the scene in the past of memorable parties thrown for staffers of Playboy and Show Business Illustrated, ad and communications execs (text, concluded on page 209) House Party (continued from page 125) from around the country and a lengthy list of show business personalities. Frank Sinatra and fellow Clan members Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis, Jr., have been on hand; Steve Allen, Shelley Berman, Tony Bennett and Vic Damone have also dug the Near North scene; TV hoss-opera heroes Hugh O'Brian, Chuck Connors and Steve McQueen tied up at the Hefner corral; ditto Phyllis Diller, Stan Getz, Lenny Bruce, Joe E. Lewis, Buddy Rich, Howard Keel and a host of others. Tony Curtis and Mort Sahl had been invited to this Saturday's very special shindig.

After the girls had been shown to their rooms, they were given a tour of the premises. The Playmates were captivated by Hefner's collection of abstract-expressionist paintings, which includes the works of such moderns as Pollock, de Kooning, Tworkov, Resnick and Rivers. Throughout the house, there is a felicitous amalgam of the traditional and the contemporary, typified by the juxtaposition of a giant piece of modern sculpture and a burnished suit of 16th Century armor. The outsize oak-paneled main room, constructed in England a half century ago and shipped in sections to Chicago, has an enormous marble fireplace; 20 feet overhead, hanging from the beamed ceiling like a quartet of orbiting satellites, are stereo speakers in plexiglass globes, from which emanate the sounds of a 20-foot-long custom stereo installation.

On the floor below, the visiting Playmates got their first glimpse of the free-form pool and its bamboo dressing rooms, waterfall-hidden cave (called the "Woo Grotto" by Time magazine), and sunroom and steam bath. Adjacent to the pool on a still lower level, they were shown the subsurface bar that can be reached, conventionally, by a stairway or, more directly and delightfully, by a fireman's pole whose terminus is cushioned by soft leather padding. In this bar, with its low-lit, palm-frond and ti-leaf motif, guests can take their ease on deep couches that line the walls or observe human marine life through a picture window that gives a bathysphere's view of the pool.

After their tour, the girls relaxed and freshened up in their rooms for the evening ahead. That night Hefner escorted them to the Playboy Club, where they had dinner, caught the double show in the Penthouse and the Library and returned to their home away from home for relaxed late-hour hot-toddying and corn-popping around the hearth, and tree-trimming.

Saturday got off to a lazy start; the girls didn't rub the sleep out of their eyes till late morning and then luxuriated with breakfast in bed. Hefner had conferences at the Playboy offices and left his Playmate guests with the run of the house and the promise that they would be completely undisturbed all afternoon. The girls took advantage of their maleless surroundings and went native, enjoying the pool, sunroom and steam bath in garbless abandon. After hours of swimming, sunning and steaming, they returned to their rooms to read, nap and make small talk, before getting ready for the party planned for that evening.

Later, at the eighth anniversary festivities, the Playmates were joined by company staffers and show business nabobs for a freewheeling long night's journey into day. With a swinging combo providing the modern sounds for dancing, a sumptuous buffet supplying sustenance, and the pool and bar offering liquid diversions, the party rapidly gained momentum. By the time it drew to a close in the sun-flecked hours of the morning, the main room had taken on a Mardi Gras air, with swim-suited dancers in casual contrast to the more formally attired revelers.

It was a memorable celebration of a memorable Playboy year, a year that presaged for Playboy, its enterprises and its friends, even happier things to come.