When candy loving, our 25th-anniversary Playmate, visited Chicago last spring, she mentioned that she'd long wanted to visit the original Playboy Mansion on posh North State Parkway, from which, during the Sixties and early Seventies, Editor-Publisher Hugh Hefner conducted the business of his burgeoning Playboy empire. It just so happened that on the weekend of Candy's arrival, the Mansion, frequently used by Playboy and other organizations for everything from business meetings to fund-raising dinners, had an empty calendar. So, since Candy's pleasure is also ours, we turned her loose in the 74-room house to seek her pleasure. And Candy discovered something that those of us who live in Chicago know well: Even though Hefner himself has moved West, his Chicago headquarters still have a very special magic. "I felt as if I were in James Bond's house," Candy says. "Push a button, there's a hidden door to the bedroom; push another button, there's a picture of yourself over the bed; push another button, there's a Jacuzzi."
The solitude and relaxing atmosphere of the Mansion proved timely blessings for Candy, who admits she was "exhausted" after having been traveling almost continuously ever since the end of last year, when she was selected as the special Playmate for our 25th birthday. By spring, she'd already been to 25 cities in the U. S. and Canada, appeared on numerous radio and television shows (including Merv Griffin's) and even been kissed by Shamu the whale at Sea World in San Diego (now we know what they mean by having a whale of a time).
Candy spent a lot of her own time at the Mansion wet. An avid swimmer, she liked to start and end her days with a dip in the indoor sunken pool and she idled away several hours in Hef's private Roman bath (replete with gold-plated fixtures). "If I were Hefner," she says, "I think this bath would be my favorite place to get away from it all."
Candy was, if you recall, a great observer of Playmates even before she became one, and she immediately recognized two of the Mansion's bedrooms--the Red Room and the Blue Room--as oft-used sets for pictorials. "The whole house is like some incredible movie set," she says, "but at the same time, it's so very, very comfortable. The combination of elegance with the technology Hef built into it makes it a perfect symbol of the lifestyle that made the magazine." You're a perfect symbol, too, Candy. A symbol of 25 beautiful years, with many more to come.
