My Life with Playboy

Hugh Hefner and I founded our magazines at the same time, 50 years ago in the summer of 1953. Both got going on a shoestring. Hef, by his own account, had less than $200 in the bank—the total investment in Playboy was just under $8,000. Our group in Paris had scratched together $1,500 to start The Paris Review, a literary magazine. Hef's first issue had the famous calendar shot of Marilyn Monroe. Ours had an interview with E.M. Forster, the great novelist who had not written a novel since 1924. Within months Hef's circulation was in the 100,000s—an immediate success, "an event waiting to happen," in Hef's words. Our circulation was about 300. At its peak Playboy's circulation was 7 million; ours crept up to 15,000, which is about all one can hope for with a literary magazine.

Thus it came as a considerable surprise when in the early 1960s A.C. Spectorsky, who was the editorial director of Playboy, offered me his job. His great passion, I was to discover, was lounging about on sloops, and though he was relatively young, in his 40s, he had it in mind to leave Playboy so he could float about on his yacht in the Caribbean and such places.

Why he had me in mind for the job I have no idea. Nonetheless I told him I was greatly flattered. News of the magazine and its flamboyant founder was the talk of the country. I told him it would mean a horrendous change for me—moving to Chicago, giving up a writing career, which I was just beginning, as well as forgoing the editorship of The Paris Review. I was single at the time, which was a plus, obviously, but on the other hand there was the problem of informing my mother—not to mention my father, a rather stern Wall Street lawyer—that I had finally found a decent job in Chicago: "And what is that, son?"

One of the pleasures of being offered the job was that it gave me a number of chances to stay at Hefner's Playboy Mansion on North State Parkway. I was fascinated by the place—invariably by the expectation that something was going to happen. The curtains were drawn so that one had the sensation that it was always night. The Centerfold Playmates stayed in the Mansion, and many of the Bunnies who worked at the Playboy Club lived in a kind of dormitory arrangement on the top floor.

On my visits to see Spectorsky I was put in one of the two large rooms on the second floor. One was the Red Room (sometimes called the Rose Room) and the other the Blue Room, each with matching decor. They shared a single bathroom. The Playmate of the Month was invariably in the other room; her toothbrush stood in its glass on the sink. I never could figure out what I would say if our visits to the bathroom coincided.

I remember my friend Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist and dramatist, describing being shown to the Red Room by a butler who then turned and asked Jules if there was anything else he wished.

"When are the girls arriving?" he asked half-jokingly.

Not long after, Feiffer, who had just taken a shower, heard a knock at the door. With a towel wrapped around his middle he opened the door and found himself face-to-face with a lovely long-legged young woman wearing a white blouse and white shorts.

"I had this room before you," she said. "I think I left my radio in here."

"She came in and fetched it," Feiffer said. "And that was the closest I ever came to sex in the Mansion."

The focus of my attention then shifted to the swimming pool in the basement. There was an underwater bar with a large viewing window that looked out on the still, watery depths. A curved stairway led down to the bar. For a more abrupt descent, a trapdoor in the baronial hall above could be raised, and one could slide down a fireman's pole to the floor below. I'd heard, or possibly imagined, that the occasional Playmate—and surely the Bunnies—got carried away and did this.

My favorite haunt was in the pool itself, behind a little waterfall that spilled out over the mouth of a grotto. I would creep in there and stare out through the curtain of water, waiting for something to happen. An hour would pass. I remember the faint smell of chlorine. My skin wrinkled from the chill, and I began thinking of myself as a huge predatory toad as I waited for a Bunny to come down from the dormitory and arc, clothesless, into the pool. If this happened, or if perhaps a dozen girls had plunged in to caper about, throwing a colorful little beach ball around, my plan was to burst through the waterfall, a sudden manic apparition to their startled eyes. This never happened, of course, and after a while I would repair, shivering slightly, to the underwater bar. There I would wait a quiet hour. No one came down the pole or even joined me in the bar. One evening, perched on a stool, I was startled when a tremendous crash, quite audible through the glass, splintered the pool's opaque surface, and a body barely visible in its cocoon of bubbles descended to the bottom of the pool. Almost instantaneously a second body joined the first. Both slowly rose to the surface, and when the bubbles accompanying them dissipated I found that I was looking at two naked, very stout male torsos (their heads remained above the surface) that belonged, I was to discover later, to two comedians. Their legs, pale in the artificial light and as fat as sausages, struggled to keep them afloat. I turned back to my drink.

I never met the comedians. When I went upstairs, they had disappeared like phantoms. Oddly, in my daily rounds of the place I rarely saw anyone. I never met Hef. He was running his empire from the great circular bed somewhere in the Mansion. I wondered if Spectorsky had been in to see him about his new editorial director. At one point, as we lazed about in a calm out on the lake aboard his sloop, he had suggested that he be the editorial director for the first half of the year and I run things for the second; we would alternate until I got the hang of things.

That was my last trip to Chicago. Spectorsky's invitations ceased. Apparently he had found someone else. I was left with my memories of the place. Friends were intensely curious. The Mansion was supposed to be the living embodiment of the magazine. They'd heard that the parties started at one a.m. and went on until dawn. Alex Haley, the novelist, had spoken of once staying in the Mansion and peeking out the slats of a shade to see curious people standing in the street outside and looking at the facade of the building, half expecting, as he put it, that an orgy would tumble out onto the streets.

"Well ... tell us. What was it like in there?"

I arched an eyebrow. "The Playmate of the Month and I shared a bathroom," I said. "The Bunnies live in the attic." That was all I had to say. They turned away consumed with envy.

•

When Hef moved the whole shebang to California, it was altogether different. In Chicago it had obviously been bad timing on my part. No doubt parties did go on from one in the morning until dawn, girls with no underwear sliding down the pole into the bar and so forth, but all that kind of merriment had apparently happened on the evenings after I left. On the other hand, the first time I went to the Mansion West I stepped out onto the front lawn to find naked sunbathers, a dozen or so, around the pool; a white llama stepped daintily among them. On the slope beyond: African crowned cranes, peacocks, flamingos. The living embodiment of the magazine indeed! I was particularly taken by the juxtaposition of the sunbathers and the llama, who, alas, eventually died from eating a monogrammed bath towel.

I was there because the photo editor had asked me to try my hand at taking photographs of potential Playmates for the magazine's famous Centerfold. These, along with other candidates, would be shown to Hef, and he would choose what went into the magazine. The photo editor had suggested that I disguise my entries by signing my transparencies with the name Henri Derrière. I thought Henri Derrière as a nom de plume was a bit obvious, and I offered the less suggestive Charles Phillipe.

I took pictures for over a year. I'm rather ashamed to admit that I had a Playboy business card printed with my name and the words Associate Photographer underneath. In fact, other than showing it off to friends as a joke, I used the card officially only once. In Tampa, Florida I brought it out, almost on impulse, and handed it to the receptionist behind the desk at the hotel where I was staying. She was very pretty. She looked at the card and listened to my somewhat stuttered explanation. Would she like to pose? To my astonishment, she agreed. She said, "Oh, well, I'll do it. For a lark!" I rushed out and rented a camera.

When she arrived at my room she shucked out of her clothes as nonchalantly as if stepping out of a bathrobe for a bath. She turned out to have two prominent tattoos, one large butterfly on her rump and a red rose on a hip-bone. She said she'd had a "tattoo freak" for a boyfriend and had the tattoos done "for a lark."

"Sometimes they startle people," she said.

I was sure Hef would disapprove of the tattoos (unless they were Playboy Rabbit Head logos), so I asked her to arrange herself in poses that wouldn't show them. We tried props, the hotel Bible from the bedside table, to hide the rose. The results, when I looked at the transparencies, were not encouraging—a pretty girl in strange, awkward postures. In one of them her hand was clutched on her backside as though, at the moment the shutter clicked, she had been hit by a muscle spasm.

Nonetheless I put them away in my portfolio. There were others I'd taken of obliging friends doing it "for a lark."

One friend of mine agreed to pose on the kitchen counter amid an interesting arrangement of pots and pans. Domesticity was the vague concept.

Hef's viewing of potential photographs for the magazine takes place, or did then, in the Mansion's dining room, a portable photo viewer set on the dining room table, plugged in and aglow with opaque light. His photo editors arrived with big manila envelopes, each marked with the name of a potential Playmate and her photographer. I noticed with dismay that one of the envelopes was marked "Henri Derrière." Derrière! My choice of Charles Phillipe had been overruled. It was placed with the others on a Queen Anne sideboard.

It was fascinating to watch Hef at work. He had a brass magnifying eyepiece engraved with his initials and M. West for Mansion West. He moved the eyepiece, a kind of jeweler's loupe, very quickly over the transparencies that had been taken out of the envelopes each in its turn and placed on the viewing panel. He kept up a running commentary, often peppered with somewhat clinical evaluations: "Well, we have a little problem with the fanny here, don't we? It's a cute little problem, though," or "The lips are nice and full, but isn't there a cheekbone problem?" or "I don't think this is the type of girl who lies against satin sheets."

Hef then came across the first of my pictures. He started back from the table as if stunned by what he'd just seen, and a strange sound emerged from his mouth, a kind of strangled cough that I recognized as the laugh of a man overwhelmed with mirth. When he recovered he picked up the slide. "Derrière," he said. "I am not acquainted with his work."

I don't know which slide of mine created such a stir. It might have been the one with the girl lying among the saucepans, perhaps the young woman trying to hide the tattoo on her behind. Whichever, my portfolio was considered inadequate, vastly so, and the photo editor took me aside afterward and said we'd start afresh with a Playboy model who knew what she was doing, had no tattoos and knew enough not to pose among kitchen appliances.

Hef gave me some interesting advice. He told me that a successful, if subtle, ingredient in the early days of the Playboy Centerfold had been the unseen presence of a man—a lover, presumably—just out of camera range. The idea of a man being on the premises (his hat on a chair, a pipe on a bedside table) was very much in the Playboy tradition. He showed me some examples in Playboy back issues—a man's hand coming out of the foreground to offer the Playmate a light for her cigarette, the out-of-focus form of a man (full-length) in evening clothes reflected in a boudoir mirror, who was, in fact, Hefner himself.

He went on to say that the practice had been discontinued. In the moral temper of those times it was thought too suggestive to have pipes and hats, much less the image of a man standing in a bedroom door, accompanying an unclothed Playmate. So that sort of evidence was removed. The girl herself was asked to provide the suggestion in her own mind.

The young woman whom the art department provided me for the Centerfold shot was named Kevyn Taylor—long-legged, slightly freckled, an outdoors kind of girl, not one at her best lying against satin sheets. She was perfectly suited to the scene I had in mind for the photograph, one of a young, unclothed woman standing in a field, having just slipped off a horse. It's been a daydream that has floated about in my mind for years, especially during my callow youth. Even these days, the thought of walking onto a field in autumn, hunting pheasant, a shotgun cradled in my arm, stirs my imagination. Such is the magic of the Playboy organization that the photo editor was able to provide more or less what I had in mind—a meadow of waist-high grass in Topanga Canyon, California. A horse, though, was not provided. The male presence would have to be imagined. I suggested to Kevyn that she imagine that a figure heavily encased in armor had just emerged on a horse from the field's edge.

The Centerfold pictures are taken with an 8"x10" Deardorff camera—a large boxlike affair that is settled on a thick-legged tripod. It comes with a black sheet that the photographer drapes over the back of his head as he peers through the camera at the focusing screen on which the subject appears. Having taken a crash course in the instrument, I never could get used to the fact that the subject appears upside down on the screen. It was explained to me that a camera works the way the human eye does—the eye transmits an image that is upside down, and the brain makes the proper adjustment. For some reason the Deardorff does not have a compensating mirror to correct the image, so what I saw from under my sheet was Kevyn and the meadow disturbingly upside down. In a way I was relieved not to have the horse of my daydreams standing next to her to add to the topsy-turviness of what I was seeing on the focusing screen. Moreover, the field of focus was so sensitive that at the slightest touch of a knob the tip of Kevyn's nose or the tip of her breast, say, would slide into fuzziness.

It was a sultry afternoon, and I remember an assistant rushing out from time to time with a towel to brush aside a swarm of sweat bees that rose out of the grass and settled around Kevyn's pubic hair.

From under the hood, one picture seemed no better than another. The art department picked the best of them, and it eventually appeared in the magazine—not as a Centerfold, obviously, but in color and interesting enough. It was accompanied by another shot I'd taken of Kevyn in a tree (which pleased me more as an alluring combination of shapes and shadows).

Kevyn told me the night before our shoot that she was fond of hiking and that the best time she'd ever had hiking was walking naked through Big Sur, California with a girlfriend.

My heart jumped. "Naked?"

"She wore boots and socks. I wore leather shoes."

I asked if anyone had seen the two of them.

She gave me a glance and then said that a couple hiking along the pine trails had spotted them. "The guy looked up and saw me standing there. It must have surprised him."

I grinned and said that without knowing it she had added to the store of my daydreams, that now I had a second sharp image to go along with that of the girl standing in the tall grass next to her horse.

I never thought to ask what Hef thought of Charles Phillipe (a.k.a. Henri Derrière) as a photographer. But I am in his debt for allowing me the chance to try to photograph the Centerfold. When I give a lecture, a hand goes up at the end, and invariably someone wants to know what it's like to photograph a Centerfold. The men lean forward slightly. It is an American daydream.

•

The daydream for young American women who have the twinge to be an actress or a model always includes the "moment of discovery"—the tap on the shoulder from an agent or a director, very often in the most mundane of circumstances—walking through an airport, in a park, watching a basketball game.

Very late one night when staying at the Mansion West, I came up from the grotto—lurking about among the votive candles—to discover Warren Beatty in the foyer, lying on his back just inside the door, his head resting on a knapsack. He was apparently asleep. I have known Warren for many years. He had been in the Soviet Union, it turned out, to see if he could film parts of Reds, his film about John Reed, there, particularly in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad. The Soviets said he could do so if he agreed to play John Reed in their version of the American Communist's life. Warren had looked at their script, which was patently anti-American, including flash-forwards to the Vietnam war. When Warren turned down the role, the Russians denied him the locales he wanted—the Russian scenes in Reds were eventually filmed in Finland. He had returned from these discussions to find that his own house was under such heavy construction repair work that he had come to Hef's, where he knew he could get a night's lodging. I didn't know this at the time—only that he had mysteriously turned up, flat-out on Hef's marble floors. I went up and bent over him. "Warren," I said, "is that you?" His eyes snapped open. "Whigham," he said. "Horace Whigham."

(concluded on page 312)Plimpton(continued from page 258) I had no idea what he was talking about. Had he mistaken me for someone else—perfectly understandable, having been aroused from a deep sleep? Apparently not. Horace Whigham was a character in his film, a rather obnoxious, oily magazine editor (could this have been typecasting?) who tries to seduce Louise Bryant, who was played by Diane Keaton. In that split instant—hearing my voice, opening his eyes to find me leaning over him—he had made a casting decision. None of this made any sense to me at the time (Whigham?). Later, of course, he explained what he had in mind, and I eventually ended up playing that small role in a film that won three Academy Awards.

Sometimes when one talks with theater and movie people, their "moment of discovery" (often referred to as "my first big chance") becomes the topic. I can hardly wait to break in.

"Ahem ... well, I was staying at Hefner's once, and I came walking up from the grotto...."

•

I have often wondered how I could repay Hef for his hospitality—for the movie nights, the tennis games, the swimming pools, "the moment of discovery," the grotto with the votive candles, the parties and so on. Finally, a few years ago, I got the chance. For another magazine, I had been asked to write about a new French product unknown in this country, most likely even to Hef—a testosterone gel that, when rubbed onto the skin like a salve, was supposed to markedly improve one's libido. What was new about the gel was the place of application. Up until the French salve, testosterone came in a pouch that was most effective when attached to the scrotum, an uncomfortable and cumbersome arrangement. The gel had one alarming side effect, however: If the stuff got on a girl's body during lovemaking, her testosterone level would rise. The chances of masculinization increased—her body fat could redistribute, her voice deepen, her facial hair thicken—all of this quite possible if the lovers were maniacally active. A chemist I talked to gave me a graphic example: "A hair could pop out of her forehead."

To guard against this, the manufacturer suggested that users of the gel wear a T-shirt to keep it from getting on a partner's body. Somehow the notion of Hef slipping out of his dressing gown and getting into a T-shirt did not square with what I had imagined of his lovemaking procedures. Nonetheless, surely he would like to hear about the gel.

I had the chance when I went out to the Los Angeles book fair a few years back. Hef invited me over to watch the championship fight between Michael Grant and Lennox Lewis and to stay around for the disco party afterward. He had separated from his wife Kimberley and was cohabiting with a pair of 22-year-old twin sisters. The twins didn't come down for the fight. Hef sat alone in the darkness on the large couch immediately in front of the large movie screen. I remember a dwarf, an early guest at the party, perched on the far end of the couch. After the fight, which Lewis won easily, Hef gave me a tour of the disco area, a tent on the front lawn.

I mentioned the twins, that I hoped I'd get the chance to meet them.

"Well, we're four now," he said.

"Four! Four of you up there!"

He nodded. He wasn't boasting, just a statement of fact.

"They've imposed a limit," he said. "The girls have. They say that four is enough."

"Hef," I said, "I've been wearing this French testosterone gel. A new product. You rub it on your shoulders."

His eyes widened. To my delight he said he was wearing the testosterone patches. Rather suavely (after all, I was lecturing the man who was the paragon of sexual prowess), I began to describe the gel and how it was applied. I warned him about getting the gel on any of the four, that it was wise to wear a T-shirt. This latter news didn't seem to faze him. His secretary telephoned later in the week. She said that Hef was eager to try the gel.

Last spring during the book fair I dropped in on Hef to pay my respects and to find out how the gel was working. It was the weekly movie night, when Hef puts on old classics for a few of his close friends. He came downstairs in his purple dressing gown. He has not changed over the years—the same wide smile, the warmth of his greeting. I sat next to him at dinner. He told me he was showing The Citadel later that evening, the 1938 film starring Robert Donat.

"Hef," I said, "do you remember that French testosterone gel I recommended that you spread on your shoulders?"

He nodded. "I've given it up," he said.

The appalling thought crossed my mind that up there in the great circular bed, two, three, perhaps four of the young women had developed deep voices....

"It had a bad odor," Hef said. "I'm back to the patch."

"Oh."

I asked if any unfortunate symptoms had turned up, if any of the girls had been affected by the gel.

He looked puzzled. He had forgotten about the gel affecting the female testosterone level.

"No excess facial hair?"

"I would have noticed," he said. 'just the odor."

So there it was. Fifty years of association, and I had repaid him for all his kindness by stinking up the great circular bed. But then again, I could comfort myself with the knowledge that it is not all that easy to reward a man who has everything.

My skin wrinkled from the chilly water, and I began thinking of myself as a huge predatory toad as I waited for a Bunny to come down from the dormitory and arc, clothesless, into the pool.

The Great Pretender

George Plimpton, who died shortly after finishing this article for Playboy, spent much of his career trying his hand at dangerous jobs for which he wasn't qualified. The results of these adventures in "participatory journalism"? Disastrous, just as Plimpton intended.

Beaten to the Punch

Stunt: In 1959 Plimpton challenges Archie Moore, the light-heavy-weight champion (141 KOs), to three rounds in a New York City gym for a Sports Illustrated story.

Result: Egged on by a prankish reporter who claims that the neophyte Plimpton really knows how to fight, Moore busts the writer's nose with a few jabs seconds after the opening bell. By the end of the round, Plimpton is weeping. Moore holds Plimpton up for the remaining rounds, reminding the writer to "breathe, man, breathe."

Outplayed

Stunt: The writer joins the New York Philharmonic as a random percussionist in 1967, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, of whom he is "absolutely terrified."

Result: While playing the sleigh bells during a performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, Plimpton is so overcome by fear that he misjudges the beats and screws up the opening. An enraged Bernstein fires him. The conductor later reconsiders, and Plimpton, "out of desperation and nerves," blows it again, playing the gong way too loudly in Tchaikovsky's Second in Winnipeg, his final performance.

Pounded on the Mound

Stunt: Plimpton takes the field at a 1960 All-Star exhibition baseball game at Yankee Stadium. His plan: Before the official game starts, he will pitch to eight batters from each league. He promises $1,000 to the side that gets the most hits.

Result: After Richie Ashburn and Willie Mays pop out, Frank Thomas belts a soaring home run into the upper deck. After a total of eight batters (and just two outs), Plimpton is relieved by Yankees coach Ralph Houk. He publishes Out of My League the following year.

Blitzed

Stunt: The 1963 Detroit Lions sign Plimpton to a $1 contract. He trains for four weeks as a 36-year-old free-agent quarterback out of Harvard. Confident that he will be decimated, Lloyd's of London refuses to insure him.

Result: The writer checks into a preseason scrimmage and takes his place behind the center. Over five plays he loses 29 yards, gets slaughtered in the process and leaves the field as the crowd cackles with laughter. He later scores big with the book Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback.

Tossed off

Stunt: In 1970 Plimpton joins the Clyde Beatty–Cole Bros. Circus, the largest in the world, as a trapeze artist.

Result: During his first "fly-off" in training, he tumbles 40 feet onto the net and injures himself, "losing lots of meat off his face," according to a circus rep. At his first and only performance, in Philadelphia, he successfully flies 30 feet through the air and is caught by the "receiver," only to crash and burn on his way back, flopping onto the net. The stunt later airs on TV during the two-hour special Plimpton! The Man on the Flying Trapeze.

I mentioned the twins, that I'd hoped to meet them. "Well, we're four now," Hef said, and he wasn't boasting.