Carrie Leigh

Let's face it, Playboy Mansion West is an imposing piece of work. Five and a half lush acres in Holmby Hills, will zoo, hidden grotto, beautiful people. One gets the idea that Hef watches Dynasty to see how the less fortunate live. This is home to a man who doesn't go out for Big Macs, dosen't care if he care if he ever sees Herb and thinks jogging is something you do to your menory. On a recent visit, we strolled the grounds. In the Library, Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner and writer Leo (Yeager) Janos were collaborating on Hef's autobiography. Near the bathhouse, workmen were laying the foundation for an underground exercise room. At the pool, a Playboy Channel crew was setting up a shooting. Then we met the lady of the house, Carrie Leigh.

For or the past three years, Carrie has been Hef's special companion. Maybe she is the reason he is thinking about exercise. We asked her what it was like to be center stage in a perpetual episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. "When you fall in love," Carrie began, "you don't think about how you're going to handle living in this big Mansion, with its constant stream of beautiful girls and celebrities. You just sort of fall right into it. It's love. And then, later on, it hits you---'Hey, wait a minute! There're a few things I have a deal with her.' " How does a 22-year-old deal with a man old enough to be her, uh, lover? How does a woman whose life's just beginning deal with a man who's writing his life stroy? How does she establish equal footing?

Energy is the answer. Take the simple matter of games: "I play gin with the guys here two or three nights a week," she said in her best John Wayne twang. "I'm the only girl who's allowed to play in those games. And I've been winning more than losing. They love having a woman in the game who knows what she's doing." After one particularly impressive evening, film director Richard Brooks presented her with a framed blowup of a queen of spades, with the caption Carrie is my name---gin rummy is my game.

Hef and Carrie have also expanded each other's taste in music. He introduced her to jazz. She responded with her latest pop favorites---Grace Jones and Tears for Fears. They sing to each other. Can you imagine a Jones version of My Funny Valentine or a Fears rendition of Thank Heaven for Little Girls? Carrie and Hef enjoyed movies the way Cacil B.De Mille intended them to be enjoyed---on the big screen, with popcorn. At (text concluded on page 166) Carrie Leigh (continued from page 123) home. They pillage the Mansion's private collection and often watch two or three films a night. Their solild-gold favorite of the moment is the recent variation of filmnoir mysteries of the Forties, Body Heat. (For those who need to know everything, their favorite TV show is Moonlighting.)

Hefner is a self-professed incurable romantic, and Carrie provokes and inspires him. He sends her roses, a dozen every Friday. A diffferent color, a different message, each week. Hef is searching for new shades of the spectum. If anyone has a line on turquoise roses, please contact the Mansion.

If you ask Carrie about the passion in the relationship, she isn't shy about responding. "Well, Hef is a very sexy man," she conceded, "but I think sometimes I like it even more than he does. I like waking him up in the middles of the night. 'Hef!' In the morning: 'Hef!' Sometimes, I even try to get him out of his meetings.

"I think it was sexual attraction that first got us together, but it's turned into something a lot more special than that. There are so many different sides to Hef. He's so sentimental and boyish. I like those qualities in a man.

"I'm rather complicated for a woman my age---with a lot of insecurities and changes in mood. Hef is the first man I've ever known who can handle me no matter what mood I'm in. He understands me, and I think I understand him, too. I don't know how long the relationship is going to last, but it's been three years and so, far, it just keeps getting better."

Carrie's a long way from home---Toronto, where she was born almost 23 years ago. She bagan a modeling caeer at the age of 14, so she grew up early and has lived on her own since her mid-teens. She tried marriage and it didn't work. A modeling assignment for Playboy resulted in the April 1983 cover fro the magazine. We saked her to fly to Californis for a Playmate test. During her stay, she was a guest at the Mansion. "I was playing Monopoly," Hef later told Rolling Stone. "It was one of those things where you look across the room and ... something happens. My relationship with [Playmate] Shannon [Tweed] had ended just a few weeks earlier, and I was determined not to get involved again. But the mutual attraction was obvious. We fell for each other."

Shortly therafter, Hef asked Carrie to move to Los Angeles. Her life at the Mansion is a contemporary Cinderella story, with a continuing cavalcade of new-found friends and celebrities, surrounded by the flora and fauna of a Southern California Shangri-La. There's a poolside buffet and a first-run film on Friday and Sunday evening for 50 invited guests. One recent Tuesday, there was a charity affair for Children of the Night Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Willaims in attendance. The following Monday was Fight Night, with 100 sports enthusiasts, including Bruce Willis, Magic Johnson, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, watching Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns successfully defend and win, respectively, the middleweight and superwelterweight titles in a boxing extravaganza on pay TV.

"Going downstairs is like going out to a party every night---without ever leaving the grounds," Carrie says. "But when we go upstairs to our quarters, that's the best time of all. Hef likes to have dinner in bed around midnight. We watch tapes of our favorite films or television shows on a pair of big screens that are built into the bedroom walls."

During the day, Carrie works out in the Mansion gym (she's a physical-fitness devotee), takes acting lessons and pursues her modeling career. She has already posed for some of the world's top photographers, form the dean of the Hollywood glamor chroniclers, Gerorge Hurrell, to the inetrnationally famed avant-garde lensman Helmut Newton.

The origimal plans for a Playmate pictorial were replaced by this special 12-page featurem, shot by seven photographers---Richard Fegley, Phillip Dixon, Charles Bush, Stan Malinowski, KenChernus, Larry L. Logan and Harry Langdon---each of them capturing a different facet of Carrie Leigh's remarkable persona.

" 'Going downstairs is like going out to a party every night---without leaving the grounds, 'Carrie says."