Inside the Playboy Mansion

And so one man created two houses and all men would forever want to go to these houses, to be inside. Last time I was inside, at the second house, desperate men outside were trying to climb the towering walls to get in. It was a Party night, so they could not be blamed---prosecuted perhaps, but never blamed. I remember nights in Chicago when I stood outside of the first house, staring, imagining, wanting in so bad. I stood outside the iron gates, a dream-drunk college dope, and thought of something the man who lived in that house would often recall: "I remember, in the days prior to the magazine," he had liked to confess, "walking the streets of Chicago late at night, looking at the lights in the high-rises and very much wanting to be a part of 'the good life' I thought the people in those buildings must be leading." This was consolation, of course, small but reassuring enough. I thought: Even he understands! This exquisite torment---he knows! Then again, that which was once considered urban good life had, in this very home, under the roof and the sway of this man called Hefner, become Good Life supernova. More than that even. I think of the phrase coined by one beloved habitué of both houses, the eminent historian Max Lerner, who would survey life on the premises, east and west, and duly exult: "Pretty goddamned fucking marvelous!" Well, yes, but understatement still.

Oh, to be at Hef's! This is all any grown boy, sound of mind and libido, [text continued on page 204] Inside the Mansion [continued from page 89]

Life was more delectable in those houses than it had ever been anywhere else in the world.

ever really wanted, ever really wants. Somehow, if you are very clever or very lucky, you get yourself there. (I had my ways; I made sure of that, thank you.) But we have all been there. We have all been privy. Across five decades, by way of gleaming paper stock, on these pages hungrily thumbed, we were granted admittance, given glimpses, permitted peeks. And then there were the television specials---free network passes into paradise tangible. Hef saw to it that we saw it, too. (Certainly this was his plan, to make men and women alike behold possibility, but still---other guys with such vision mightn't have been so, well, hospitable.) Here, laid before our wide eyes, were the domestic fixtures, naked and architectural, hot and (most) cool, of his two Playboy Mansions---of our two Playboy Mansions, yours and mine---pads deliriously palatial, repositories of ultimate male fantasy, hulking shrines to all sybaritism. Every published picture and videotaped revel would tell a new secret. But the most important secret of all wasn't really much of a secret: Life was more delectable in those houses than it had ever been anywhere else in the world. For a guy, especially.

I think of a toast coined recently by one grateful habitué of both houses, the dashing actor Robert Culp, who exhorts on special occasions of male camaraderie at Playboy Mansion West: "Gentlemen, gentlemen, be of good cheer, for they are out there, and we are in here!" Upon reflection, it seems to me that Culp is gloating. Understandably.

To be inside: Parties. Gadgets. Grottoes. Games. Beautiful women. Hidden passages. More parties. Bunnies. Bounty. Famous people. Playmates. Pillow fights. Peacocks. Movies. Monkeys. Cool jazz. Warm Jacuzzis. Waterfalls. Nude sunbathing. Nude moonbathing. Much, much nudity. Orgiastic sex. Still more parties. Dionysus would have blushed. This is the world of Hugh M. Hefner, spinning on its coveted access. Now, quite happily, there is occasion again to pass through the portals, to consider all that has been Mansion Life, to ponder the significance of one man's real estate holdings. I refer to the publication of a time-capsule treasury, a large shelter book of secret peeks within the walls, entitled Inside the Playboy Mansion---third in a series of lush Playboy nostalgia volumes. This book is large because so too are the legends, not to mention the private pictures of play and pleasure, Hef-style. It is simply an interior history of American hedonism, a family album for the gainfully uninhibited. What also emerges, by no coincidence, is a depiction most intimate of personal evolution in the Hefner life---his loves, his losses, his battles, his dreams come true---set inextricably against the backdrop of the two houses he famously hated to step outside of. He liked to be, you know, inside. Understandably.

Cartoon from this magazine, 1970: A man has clambered to a mountain peak to beg wisdom from a cross-legged guru. Guru tells man: "In a place called Chicago, there's a man who lives in a mansion full of beautiful women and wears pajamas all the time. Sit at his feet and learn from him, for he has found the secret of true happiness."

Let us begin in Chicago, where all things Playboy must. It is here that Hefner was born---as were his magazine, his key clubs, his television show, his sexual freedom, his house. The House. The original! Here was the Playboy Mansion, no geographical caveat necessary! It loomed, it glistened, a stately turn of the century brick and stone monolith, imposing its majesty on a leafy street of swells who were going to be forever outswelled. Six years into his empire building, in a 1959 year-end letter sent to investors, the manor's prescient future occupant---this 33-year-old workaholic editor-publisher-dreamer---wrote, almost as afterthought: "On the personal side, we've bought a house at 1340 North State Parkway, which should make the living considerably easier and more pleasant. It is a magnificent place, with a giant main room that will be great for parties; we're building an elaborate indoor swimming pool downstairs that will make this mansion the talk of all Chicago. It should help me get away from the office scene a bit and relax a little more."

Um. Evidence would indicate that he did, in fact, get away from the office scene. And, yes, there would be relaxation. To assure such, every crevice of the vast structure had been redesigned to render life almost structureless. Sealing himself within his new grand vacuum, work and play fused together, intermingled, danced as one, frugged up a storm. Regimen knew no boundaries and this was beautiful. Why commute? Just move the paperwork off the bed and make room for the girls. There was no time squandered, only time savored. "Separates me from the wasted motions," Hef said of the ingenious setup. He would also say later, most memorably, "The Mansion ended up working so well that going out came to seem like a useless exercise. What the hell was it I was supposed to go out for?" Legends ensued: "When was the last time I left this house, Lee? Three and a half months ago?" (He had to ask; he asked anyone around him, quite proudly at that.) "How many times have I been out of this house in the last two years? About nine times." (He usually answered himself, ever the impatient one.) This was 1965. Mythos varied: I have heard he left eight times in nine years, five times in seven years, ten in six, whatever; one got the point. He took a girl into the front yard during a blizzard to build a snowman: The panic! "When we got back," he recalled, "we learned that the news had spread through the house like there'd been a prison break---'He's gone out! Hef's gone out!"'

Fine pedigreed writers came to gawk at the spectacle. How could they resist? Here was a man in total control of his own environment, who had everything right where he wanted it. I mean, everything. Unheard of. Tom Wolfe, who dubbed Hef "King of the Status Dropouts," christened the house "Lollygag Heaven." Of the aforementioned King, Wolfe wrote, as only Wolfe could: "Thirty-nine years old! A recluse! Bona fide! Right this minute, one supposes, he is somewhere in there in the innards of those 48 rooms, under layers and layers of white wall-to-wall, crimson wall-to-wall, Count Basie-lounge leather, muffled, baffled, swaddled, shrouded, closed in, blacked out, shielded by curtains, drapes, wall-to-wall, blonde wood, honey-shuck, magnolia or something, all those earphones, screens, cords, doors, buzzers, dials, Nubians---he's down in there, the living Hugh Hefner, 150 pounds, like the tender-tympany green heart of an artichoke."

He was never lonely therein. "Physical isolation isn't the same as psychological isolation," he would explain. Indeed, everyone came to Hef's, to see, to play, to watusi or canoodle. Names from Frank Sinatra to Johnny Carson, the Rolling Stones to Barbra Streisand, Muhammad Ali to Joe DiMaggio. I mean, everyone. You don't have the time. They entered at street level, ascended a marble staircase to find that white French door affixed with perhaps the most notorious brass plaque in the history of threshold passage. Smaller than you would think, the warning came in Latin: "Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinnare." (But of course: "If you don't swing, don't ring.") Yonder beckoned the grand ballroom--- "the size of a basketball court," Hef liked to point out---where two suits of armor stood sentry over bacchanals unending. There, amid the paintings of Picasso and De Kooning, amid the carved oaken filigrees and mammoth corniced pillars, jazzmen wailed, martinis rattled, Bunnies grooved. These Happenings happened just one flight above the indoor tropical pool whose hidden cave of hidden love---the Woo Grotto, to be sure--- was visible only to those who spied down through a trapdoor, also hidden, in the ballroom floor. (Exclamations of woo, and the variation, woo-woo, issued inevitably from peeps on high.) Meanwhile, those who swam elsewhere in the pool could be appreciated through a picture window in the subterranean Underwater Bar, most easily reached by way of sliding down a brass firepole. (Both Dean Martin and Batman reportedly stole Hefner's pole notion for their respective TV shows.) Other accoutrements abounded: Girls, girls, girls, of course; plus game room, bowling alley, steam room, sauna, third-floor Bunny dormitories (oh, convenience!), red-liveried housemen, 24-hour kitchen, spiral stairways, hi-fi stereo console the length of a limousine with phonic features to fill four paragraphs---suffice it to say, state-of-the-art in hissless bliss.

All stuff most fabulous, but none more so than The Bed.

Hefner's Chicago Bed---this was a historical feat of whimsy and engineering, a technological wonder worthy of Smithsonian installation. Perfectly round, eight-and-a-half feet in diameter, it rotated---revolutionary!---clockwise, counterclockwise, at the twist of a dial in the headboard controls, purring softly, moving, turning. "It goes 33 1/3, 45 and 78!" Hef told rapt visitors to the master quarters. (Also, it vibrated and massaged.) Without moving an inch, he changed his room, spinning atop The Bed, subdividing areas of a white-carpeted universe (remove shoes, please)---hi-fi and twin movie screens this way; conversational couch that way; Italian marble fireplace and polar-bear hearth rug here; desktop dining on the sleek walnut headboard there. Sectional permissiveness! "Hef--- in a James Bond world," wrote Wolfe, who saw The Bed for exactly what it was: "The center of the world!" Off the north wall hummed the Electronic Entertainment Room replete with, well, everything, including early Ampex videotape recorders---what, 20 years ahead of schedule, when your basic VCR cost 20 grand per. Pad down a secret spiral staircase to his prized gold-fauceted Roman Bath, which comfortably seated eight beneath gentle drizzle, then repair a few steps to an undulant water bed, another American first on the premises. ("He gets so much action," Dean Martin once noted, "he's got the only water bed with whitecaps.") As such---as with all Mansion indulgence---Hef could do, or view, whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it.

Whenever was big: No sun shone in the house. Draped out and ignored, time of day meant nothing here. The man of the Mansion liked to stay up for days on end, editing, Philosophizing, discoursing, loving, game playing. (Sixty-hour Pepsi-fueled, dexedrine-en-hanced Monopoly marathons! Not for sissies, fellows.) "The wee hours were the whee hours," quoth Hef, "because while the rest of the world was asleep, romantic dreams were more likely to come true." Thus, party nights became party mornings. Norman Mailer, who observed his share of them, wrote of one: "The party was very big, and it was a good party. The music went all the way down into the hour or two before breakfast, but no one saw the dawn come in, because the party was at Hugh Hefner's house, which is one of the most extraordinary houses in America. I never saw the sky from that room, and so there was a timeless, spaceless sensation. Timeless, spaceless, it was outward bound. One was in an ocean liner which traveled at the bottom of the sea, on a spaceship wandering down the galaxy along a night whose duration was a year."

•

It never should have ended. It had to. Pallor---however defiant, however triumphant---will wear upon a man's soul. The Great Indoors, the Pneumatic Era, the Chicago Hermitage began to fatigue its chief proponent. His residency waned; he needed fresh air; he took flight. On the Big Bunny, his glorious jet black DC-9 (with airborne round Bed, with Jet Bunnies attending), he flew--- west mostly, to Los Angeles, home of his formative Hollywood dreams, where show business wanted his business more than ever. He flew there and flew there until a house was found to keep him there. Paradise Found: January 1971. Ladylove Barbi Benton saw it first; Hefner, besotted by the splendor, purchased it in February. A baronial Tudor manor perched atop the greenest of slopes, swathed in five acres of what would become Eden---here, then, was the perfect Hollywood sequel: "A new Playboy Mansion for a new decade," he would say, "interconnected to nature as the Chicago Mansion could never be. I had found the place where I would live out my life, and do my best to create a heaven on earth."

Playboy Mansion West would forever be the prettier sister, the sun-drenched blonde versus the dusky brunette, appropriately curvier of terrain---and, man, what foliage! Heaven could only hope. Cynics would only gush. Spy magazine: "If ever a place was not just a place but a state of mind, this place is that place." Rolling Stone: "A crenellated, mullioned slab of Olde Englishry, a gray gleam of ersatz granite in the southern California sunlight. To the back, the image dissolves, reforms. Sexy vicarage metamorphoses to miniaturized Versailles." Let me translate: Here was Europe, one block off Sunset Boulevard. Here, in the muffled crook of Charing Cross Road---shimmering epicenter of Holmby Hills---was a foreign serenity. Yet even its attendant history seemed to call Hefner home. By fine coincidence, construction of his magic castle had begun in the year of his birth. This he took as a sign. Also, neighbors of yore had been his idols of youth---Harlow, Disney (another Chicago-born dream merchant made good), Bogie and Bacall. Indeed, the Bogarts had lived just over the back wall, where their original Holmby Hills Rat Pack convened, where Sinatra legen darily passed wee hours very whee. But better Holmby whee was to come.

Make Mansion West a Shangri-la, Hugh Hefner did decree. And so he would design his Eden from scratch, take a great barren backyard (save for southern California's only stand of redwoods) and install an oasis, verdant and wet. Like a god possessed, he oversaw all minutiae: "Where the Hell are my Lily Pads?" he famously inquired at one happy juncture. The property that had come sans pool soon had its own swimming lagoon with waterfalls spilling over a Grotto of steaming whirlpools beside koi ponds set inside rolling lawns where flamingos mixed with peacocks, cranes with ducks, a llama nibbled flowers (and also Playmate elbows---don't ask; weird animal), and---poetry, please---rabbits ruled. Or romped, at least. And oh, what romping went on. Wildlife flourished, yes; but also Wild Life, amongst and betwixt consenting adults, of course---this was what gave the lay of the land, if you will, its legacy.

Naturally, then, our most libertine decade---the Seventies---found its primal laboratory at Mansion West: Monkeys swung in the trees, but humans swung everywhere else. Hef had arranged the accommodations---even the Game House had mirrored love nooks. Meanwhile, his own master Bed West, not round but extra vast, with carved nude nymphs in oak relief, with automated curtains and mirrors and headboard all shiftable---this thing was the sultan's magic carpet! Still, nothing lured besporting events like the Grotto. Four Jacuzzi baths burbled within, tenderizing moments most tender. Candlelit romance amid boulders! Stone ledges with big cushions! "If those rocks could talk ..." I heard Hef tell Leonardo DiCaprio not long ago. (To finish the sentence might finish careers.) But it is fair to say: Those rocks have seen most everything and most everyone (celebritywise) making waves, usually without clothes. Of course, there was the night of Hef's 58th birthday when 18 gorgeous naked women waited in his Grotto to fete him, and him alone, as hidden speakers (inside fibrous rocks, natch) blared To All the Girls I've Loved Before--- the popular tune that had been officially dedicated to him, and him alone.

"Ah," as Hef would say, then and now, "just another typical day at the Mansion."

Truth universal, from Beverly Hills Cop II, 1987: Eddie Murphy, as Detective Axel Foley, crashes a Mansion West bikini party in pursuit of felon. (Chris Rock works as parking valet in Hefner's fabled circular driveway.) Stepping into the backyard, where semiclad Playmates frolic, Murphy is thunderstruck: "Jesus Christ!" He clutches his own crotch: "Wake up!" he orders crotch. "This is what we always talked about, so look alive! You may never see it again."

The never part always gets me. Time took the Chicago Mansion, which has now gone condo. I ask Hef how he feels about that. "Not good," he says woefully. "It's not progress." He had kept it for years, unwilling to let go, though he all but never returned there. For a minute, in 1975, it was put on the market: "Given the choice," columnist Bob Greene wrote at the time, "I would rather see the White House burn down." The Mansion stayed, but stayed largely unused, for another nine years, until it was donated, as a dormitory (dormitory!), to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was, at least, the same school where, in a 1946 sketch class, Hef gazed upon his first naked female in the flesh. (He is nothing if not a sucker for such symmetry.) About a year before art students seized Hefner Hall, as it was rechristened, I wandered the house and looked for nude ghosts. I poked through artifacts under dustcovers and sat on the Bed and spun and nearly wept. It wasn't even my stuff, but I think maybe it kind of was. Now the Bed is in storage, awaiting a millennium Playboy memorabilia tour. I know this because I've sort of mentioned the Bed a lot to Hef. He humors me, I think.

But---wait---I intend no dirge here. For lush life lives eternal in the West! Parties persist, but with rejuvenated gusto. "Maybe we're going back to the Seventies," Hef keeps saying, ever dreamily, thus legendarily. His own life has seen changes---now two young sons have happy run of Shangri-la when they wish. "It really is a perfect place to grow up," their father has said. "I know, because I grew up here." But, of course, he himself will never not be a boy---at least, in part---because the boy who he is reminds us that boys have better worlds. Hefner's world is still the world men most want to inhabit, to be inside. I see jaded guys get giddy therein.

At the most recent Midsummer Night's Dream party, for example, hundreds of first-timers---men and women alike---prowled about in sleepwear, gawking amid the reverie and the lingerie, conjuring the past they'd missed. Famous newcomers like Jim Carrey, George Clooney, Bill Maher, Cameron Diaz, Leonardo, et cetera, et cetera--- you don't have the time---even they seemed to share this sense of wonderment. "I can't believe I'm at the Playboy Mansion!" Clooney actually blurted at one point, as if to pinch himself. Many hours later, at five in the morning, he was still there, hanging with Carrey and a handful of stragglers. Hef couldn't get rid of them.

I know this because, um, I was still there, too. Tough place to leave, you know.

Comedian Dick Gregory on Being Welcomed to the Mansion

You have to go back to that era, the early Sixties, and realize how big Playboy was. Crowds would stand across the street just to watch people go into the Playboy Club. Now, 99.9 percent of the people at the Playboy Club didn't even know where the Mansion was, so to be able to leave the Club and go to the Mansion---as a black, I'd only witnessed this in movies when I was a child. I never realized that meat came that large. I was awed. And there was always plenty. There was no such thing as, you get there at four in the morning and the plates are almost empty. The people there were so nice; I guess they took on the atmosphere of the Mansion. I was there many times and I never saw anyone argue, never saw anyone drunk---and the whiskey flowed like water. You might have something depressing on your mind. But when you got there it just disappeared. To be able to sit and look at people in the swimming pool, through the window in the Underwater Bar, like you were looking at a television set, was incredible. It was a great part of my life and it prepared me for going around the world, meeting with kings and queens and going into palaces. I could say, "Well, you know, it's a lovely place you have, but I have been here before."

Playboy Executive Dick Rosenzweig on the Justice's Wife's Tour of the Mansion

Through one of the organizations I was involved with in Chicago, I met Justice Potter Stewart, who was on the Supreme Court for many years, and someone asked if I would give his wife a tour of the Mansion. This was during the day, and as I was taking her down to show her the pool, I heard some kind of laughing and scratching going on. We got downstairs and there was Shel Silverstein, nude, with two, three or four nude Playmates, or maybe Bunnies, in the pool. I honest to God did not know what to do. I think I turned white. Mrs. Stewart, on the other hand, was completely ready for this. That's what she expected to see. It was very funny, actually, though it didn't seem funny then. There was no reaction at all from Shel and the girls. First of all, they didn't know who she was. And second, they couldn't have cared less.

Playmate Bunny Patti Reynolds on Celebs at the Mansion

We girls were really, really popular. I met Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dale Robertson, Tony Bennett and Warren Beatty at the Mansion. Went out with Warren. He was good. But Vic Damone, he was better.

Hef on the Stones'

The night the Stones arrived, I had a long talk with Mick Jagger about American politics. Keith Richards, by contrast, was entirely out of it every time I saw him. Bill Wyman possessed a justly famous passion for girls, but he contained himself long enough for me to teach him backgammon. But the Stones hadn't come for politics or backgammon. They came for girls, and a great many girls came for them. One Bunny told this story: "I saw Mick at poolside, wearing one of those shorty robes, and I was struck dumb. He asked if the cat had my tongue, and I blurted out, 'I want to bite your ass.' He laughed and flipped up his robe and said, 'Have at it, love' and I did." Bobbie Arnstein told of Mick Jagger's wandering into her room with sex on his mind. She said she was tempted, but she'd been eating cheese, and when he kissed her she pushed him away because she feared her breath smelled awful. Jagger tumbled onto a chair, which happened to contain a birthday cack. Bobbie last saw him slinking out of her room with gooey white icing over his leather-clad posterior.

Hef Pal John Dante on the Picture of Hef in the Jacuzzi

I think I inspired that picture. It was Hef's birthday---I forget which one--- and Sondra said to me, "What can I give Hef for his birthday?" She racked her brains, and I said, "Sondra, do you want to do the best thing that you can for him?" And she said, "Yeah, what?" And I said, "Get as many Playmates as you can and take them into the Jacuzzi and do him."

Playmate Sondra Theodore on Sharing Hef

I was treated pretty badly by a lot of the girls who are now my very close friends. They saw me as a threat and pulled some pretty mean tricks on me. I learned to deal with it, and eventually they were forced to see I wasn't this conniving little chick trying to steal Hef. So we cut through all that and had many great evenings hanging out together. It made Hef so happy to see that the girls could, believe it or not, get along and deal with the situation. I said to the other girls, "Well, if we love him, we will try to make him happy, and he likes harmony." So we worked it out, but it was the most difficult task to conquer about being Hef's girlfriend.

Hef's Executive Assistant Mary O'Connor on the Return of the Playmates

I love having the Playmates back up at the Mansion. It's the vitality of it, how pretty they are. For me, it's invigorating. It makes me feel young. The Playmates make everything come alive, with all their craziness and everything, and the way they dress, and their little psyches. And I missed that the most when it shut down. Now that it's coming back, it's wonderful. Today Julia Schultz was out in the driveway dusting off her new car. So we all had to look out the window at the car. And she came up to the office to say hi. We haven't had Playmates up here for nine years. It just was wonderful. In the old days, I even loved the promiscuity. I thought it was fun. If you want to go to bed with somebody the first time you're out with him, I think you should do it.

Playmate Julie Mccullough observes Hef on the Town

The interesting thing is, now everything old is new again, so to speak. A lot of stuff that was popular way back---swing dancing, Twenties and Thirties and Forties music---is popular again. So, of all times for Hef to be getting out on the nightlife scene, this is a good one because the stuff he likes is back in vogue. The old movies, the old styles of music and dancing are a revelation for young people. Very popular. And it's amazing the number of women who want to jump Hefner all the time. When he goes out, he's like---wow!---totally surrounded by women. But I think he'll slow down from that a little bit, too. He's just getting out and seeing the world, and once he's seen it, I think he'll start having people come to him again.