Hef and Karen's puppy love in the Chicago Mansion

Hef set up house with Barbi in L.A., but when he was in Chicago, he had company, in the well-endowed person of Miss December 1971 Karen Christy, a platinum blonde Bunny-in-training from Texas in micro-mini hot pants. Hef admits he fell hard for Karen, whom he describes as "right out of the Busby Berkeley Warner Bros. musicals of my childhood. It was the most passionate love of my life -- while it lasted."
Karen knew about Barbi, of course, but Barbi didn't know about Karen. Hef calls this period of his life his "Captain's Paradise," after the movie in which seafarer Alec Guinness shuttles across the Mediterranean between mates in Gibraltar and Morocco. Staffers made sure that Karen visited Mansion West only when Barbi, whose singing career was gaining steam, was on the road. Sometimes, Joni Mattis recalled for a TV interviewer, Barbi's limo would pull up the Mansion's winding drive while Karen's was on the way out the back gate.

Karen and Hef with pet Lambert the llama in the backyard of the Playmate Mansion West

The scheme worked, at least until Time magazine published photos of Hef ("a two-of-everything consumer") with Barbi in LA and Karen in Chicago. Barbi decamped, and although she and Hef patched it up for a time (saying goodbye at last in 1976), things were never quite the same between them. Karen also left, in 1974 -- because, she told a Dallas newspaper reporter, "I was leading his lifestyle, not mine." Hef himself describes the breakups: "When my romance with Karen became too intense, I lost Barbi, and when I tried to put that romance together, I lost Karen."