Playboy Interview: Hugh Hefner
Editors Note: This article was originally published in the January 1974 issue of Playboy magazine.
From the moment Playboy first hit the newsstands in December of 1953, it was obvious that Hugh Marston Hefner’s new publication—a 48-page, undated issue with a cover and center spread featuring Marilyn Monroe—wasn’t going to be just another magazine. It was Hefner’s own vision of what a men’s magazine ought to be: a judicious blend of fiction, nonfiction, humor, art and photography—all reflecting a healthy appreciation of the opposite sex and of what he called “the great indoors.” There had never been anything quite like it on the market; something about it struck a chord with the 70,000 readers who made the first issue a sellout. Within months, in an era in which publishing empires were crumbling, Playboy was thriving; it went on to become the industry’s biggest post-World War II success. As Time magazine commented in a 1967 cover story about Hefner: “He was the first publisher to see that the sky would not fall and mothers would not march if he published bare bosoms; he realized that the old taboos were going…. He took the old-fashioned, shame-thumbed girlie magazines, stripped off the plain wrapper, added gloss, class and culture. It proved to be a sure-fire formula.”
So much so, in fact, that in less than a decade, its creator had become not only a multimillionaire but the subject of countless profiles in other publications. He had also become the most flamboyant practitioner of the affluent, sexually uninhibited lifestyle he presented in his magazine. During the Sixties—while Hefner hardly ever ventured out of the self-contained total environment he’d constructed for himself in his Chicago Mansion—the magazine grew into a diversified empire, with a string of Playboy Clubs in 19 cities and hotels in Jamaica, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Chicago and Miami Beach.
As the decade ended, Hefner “came out”—with gusto—purchasing the world’s most luxurious private plane, a customized DC-9 he calls the Big Bunny. He’s used it to take a number of trips to Europe and Africa and to commute from Chicago to the latest addition to his personal and corporate world, the Playboy Mansion West, a five-and-a-half-acre estate from which he supervises the company’s further expansion into films, television, records and other areas of the entertainment business.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the conspicuous success of the magazine and its offshoots, Playboy and its Editor-Publisher have been subjected to criticism from various quarters. First there were the sexual puritans, who were shocked at the sight of bare flesh, however tastefully displayed. Then came the religious commentators, who took issue with “The Playboy Philosophy.” As flak from the right died down, it appeared from other quarters: the radical left, denouncing Playboy’s “materialism,” and the shriller fringes of the women’s liberation movement, reviling its supposed sexism. Both leftists and feminists chose to ignore the commitment of the magazine—and the Playboy Foundation, established in 1965 as an activist force in the battle for preservation of constitutional rights—to the very causes they espoused.
Even more than critics, though, Playboy has spawned imitators—most of them unabashed rip-offs of what they see as the Playboy formula. Some are prospering, but Playboy readership, meanwhile, has continued to climb toward an all-time high of some 26,000,000 monthly—more than the total of all its imitators combined.
With Playboy approaching the end of its second decade, we decided to ask our Editor-Publisher—who selects all the names for this feature—to approve our suggestion for the subject of this 126th “Playboy Interview.” We couldn’t think of a more fitting occasion than our 20th Anniversary Issue for the controversial target of so much attention from the press to speak for himself in the pages of his own magazine: discussing what the past 20 years have signified to him personally, to Playboy and to its readers, and what the next 20 years may hold. Not without some reservations—which he confides in the interview—Hefner agreed.
For this unprecedented assignment, we picked freelance writer Larry DuBois, a 31-year-old former Time writer and correspondent whose penetrating Playboy Interviews with Jules Feiffer, Jackie Stewart, Roman Polanski and Jack Anderson convinced us that he had the experience, ability, tenacity and good humor we knew this job would entail. We were right about it and him. Here’s his report:
“In the Butler Aviation terminal at O’Hare airport outside Chicago, where the private-plane set is pretty blasé about your average limousine, people still snap to attention when a huge Mercedes 600—license number HH1340—pulls up, and when the owner steps out, the place practically freezes like a snapshot to watch him stride briskly through, followed almost at a trot by a couple of beautiful blondes—one his girlfriend, the other his highly competent secretary, who’s madly taking notes as he dictates a memo on the fly.
“A few hours later, over Los Angeles, he and his friends are finishing their last game of Monopoly, and as his plane zooms in low over the freeway, traffic slows to a crawl when drivers catch sight of that sleek jet-black DC-9 with the Rabbit’s head on the tail. It belongs, of course, to Hugh Hefner; everybody knows that. It’s the most famous private plane in the world, he’s the most famous publisher in the world and he leads one of the most publicized personal lives of anyone in public life.
“Then why do people always ask, when they find out you’ve met him, ‘What’s he really like?’ It’s a good question, and the fact that it gets asked so often is as good a demonstration as any that, while Hefner has managed to make his name perhaps as well known as that of his magazine, the conflicting stories about him have obscured his identity so effectively that most people don’t have a clue to what sort of man he actually is. After getting to know him as well as anyone but his oldest friends, I still don’t have any final answers to that question myself, but I can say that in many ways, he is an even more remarkable figure than his legend. And trying to reconcile one with the other turned out to be an unforgettable experience.
“Last March, I showed up at Hefner’s Mansion in Chicago, expecting to be there for the first of a couple of two-hour interview sessions. I ended up staying six months. I’m still not sure exactly how that happened. Part of it, I must admit, was the irresistible, almost extraterrestrial seductiveness of a sybaritic environment hermetically sealed from the strife and seasons of the outside world. But the main reason I stayed—and stayed—was that I realized soon after arriving that this was the only way I’d ever walk out with an interview I’d want to see published anywhere, let alone in Hefner’s own magazine.
“During our first tape session, he responded to my questions about the magazine and its critics with all the facility and polish of an uncommonly shrewd politician; but it was obvious to both of us, I think, that if we went on like this, I’d have just another slick interview with the thinker and theorist; we’d never pass beyond that. He’s got a tremendous reserve, I found, and he’s not about to surrender much of himself to a stranger. So he invited me to be his guest at the house for a while so we could get to know each other better.
“We quickly became friends, and I enjoyed myself enormously. Hefner’s world really is fun. After months of playing backgammon and pinball, getting to know his friends, feeling the special rhythms and patterns of his private world, the tone of our interview sessions became very personal—sometimes serious, sometimes jocular, always enthusiastic and untiring. ‘Being around Hefner,’ one of his friends had told me, ‘is like plugging yourself into an electric socket.’ He was right. The man is 47, but his energy is staggering and he seems to know one emotional pitch: flat-out, hard-charging, turned on.
“Some days we’d talk far into the night. Other days, when business matters were piling up, he surrendered himself totally to meetings with executives that turned into 24-hour marathons; and when the last bunch stumbled away at 10 in the morning, as likely as not, Hefner would make a dash for the game room to rendezvous with his pals and do a fiercely competitive and often raucous six hours on the pinball machines before retiring to his quarters with a girlfriend. So much for the popular notion that beneath all the glitter, Hefner must be jaded or bored. He’s not.
“Whatever he’s into at the moment, his powers of concentration are—well—overwhelming. Until you’ve had his attention, says one of his old staffers, you’ve never had attention. His mind is so quick, so totally focused on whatever he’s doing that if it doesn’t involve you, you might as well not exist. One night, a pretty young TV correspondent who had interviewed Hefner earlier in the evening and experienced that riveting attention of his approached him at the Monopoly table to say good night. For at least a couple of minutes, she stood at his side waiting for him to look up and acknowledge her. Finally, growing uneasy, she tapped him on the shoulder; he jerked his head around and practically jumped to his feet to shake her hand. It was one of those moments that could have been interpreted as rudeness, but it wasn’t. He’d been so involved in that Monopoly game that he hadn’t even noticed her standing six inches away from him.
“And so it goes. That kind of energy, enthusiasm and concentration make him an incredibly compelling personality. Though none of these qualities has ever been explored much by writers who’ve tried to portray Hefner, they shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been around him longer than an hour. But there was one tremendous surprise for me, which is a side of him that I hadn’t seen recorded anywhere, even though I’d read everything there was to read about him. When he’s not serious, the man is positively zany. A routine night of playing games with him is as funny and off-the-wall as—and not unlike—a Marx Brothers movie. And in a conversation with him about, say, that day’s Watergate news, he offers the same kind of mordant satirical perceptions you might expect from a Lenny Bruce, who happened to be a cherished friend of his. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if Hefner had the kind of personality that opened up in a crowd, he could be a very successful stand-up comic.
“But he saves all this for his close friends and, believe me, it wasn’t easy to get it on tape. Much of what I consider the best of our interview sessions, in fact, came from questions I asked as a result of bantering at the Monopoly table, playing backgammon, splashing in his Jacuzzi Grotto in Los Angeles, riding in the Mercedes to and from airports. If he hadn’t been willing to share those moments with me, I wouldn’t have been able to share them with the reader.
“As a result, I think you’ll be able to get some sense, if not of what Hugh Hefner is really like, then at least of what it’s like to be around him. I think you’ll also see that it’s a forceful, funny, absolutely extraordinary experience. Like his legend, Hefner is larger than life, the kind of elusive, contradictory, sometimes maddening, sometimes just mad genius it required not only to build a $200,000,000 business empire and to create a private world that’s been called—rather unimaginatively—a ‘Disneyland for adults’ but also to have an absolute ball playing with it all.”
