Barbi and Hef on the set of Playboy After Dark, 1968

Hef was to find his next Special Lady -- a brunette this time -- in Los Angeles, where, as coed Barbara Klein, she showed up on the set of his new TV show, Playboy After Dark. Shortly afterward, at Hef's suggestion, she changed her name to the more showbiz-friendly Barbi Benton. By that time, they were a couple. "When he asked me out," Barbi recalls, "I was 18 and he was 42. I said I'd never gone out with anyone older than 24, and he said, 'That's all right. Neither have I.' We hit it off right away, and it lasted for eight years!" Barbi earned the distinction of Hef's Extra-Special Lady.

During the previous few years in Chicago, Hef had become known, rightly or wrongly, as something of a recluse. Barbi helped get him out of the house, onto an airplane -- his own jet-black jet, the Big Bunny -- and across the ocean on a seven-and-a-half-week grand tour of Europe and Africa that may never see its equal. Back in California, she found him a house. He fell in love with it, directed it to be landscaped according to his specifications and dubbed it Playboy Mansion West. Soon he was spending as much, if not more, time there than in his original Mansion in Chicago.

Hef and Barbi in St. Mark's Square, Venice, 1970