Hef's Little Black Book (10 page)
Read Hef's Little Black Book Online
Authors: Hugh M. Hefner
It’s all relative. I thought I was hugely successful in the first year of the magazine because I managed to get enough money to publish the second issue and the third. Then the letters started coming in from people applauding the concept of the magazine when it was still being put together with very little money. But what I couldn’t possibly have imagined were the years that followed and what an empire it would become.
I felt as if I’d been born for it. I felt like Clark Kent going into that phone booth and then bursting out with that big S on his chest. When you accept that feeling, then you can believe a man can fly.
T
hrough the Eyes of the Master: What to Look for When Looking at a Nude Photograph
It depends very much what you’re looking for. First and foremost, you look at the face. Is she beautiful in the photo? Doesn’t matter how nicely posed the rest of it is. If the face is good, then it’s a matter of body attractiveness. One assumes before you’re shooting a centerfold that she’s a beautiful girl, but has the camera captured that? Throughout most of
Playboy’s
history, the centerfolds were shot with an 8 x10 camera, which has a slow shutter speed, making it difficult to get spontaneity.
The best poses are the ones that don’t look too stiff, but should be able to make you stiff. That’s about as good a credo as I can share.
B
ad Times Remind You to Enjoy the Good Times
So many things can get you down. Then you start feeling sorry for yourself. But the reality is, if you wake up in the morning and you’re alive and healthy and feel good about it, you’re already far ahead of the game.
I have managed to remain optimistic during troubled times—not simply in terms of romance, but in terms of business and everything else—by the recognition that you can tell how good things are only by comparing them with when they weren’t so good.
Y
oung Dreams Will Age Well Along with You
You can give up and settle for less if that’s what you want to do. What we call maturity, in many cases, is just compromise.
For me, my eternal optimism has seen me through. Much of it has to do with staying connected to the dreams of childhood, staying in touch with the boy I once was, and loving that boy and his dreams. It makes everything all the more satisfying. I could be living exactly the same life and be getting a lot less satisfaction out of it if I wasn’t really still in touch with the innocent boy dreaming the dream.
He decided that he would forever live a boy’s life, a boy’s dream, so as to never become jaded or cynical. He would never allow himself to feel overly sophisticated. “I probably am today and will always remain a little bit of the youngster,” he said long ago and evermore. “This is something that is too soon dead in most all of us, and I’m doing my best to keep it alive in me.” He now wanders his large property and is truly touched by little things that remind him of his boyhood backyard—ants and butterflies and crickets, backyard stuff. Et cetera. And then he gets to go upstairs to his bedroom and see naked women waiting for him. He gets to see all the things his inner boy had dreamt of.
Try living such a life, and make millions while doing so, and see if the world doesn’t come after you, looking for some retribution. It does, will, and certainly did. He would become among the most censored men in history—for daring to throw sex into sunlight, for pulling it out of shadows and alleys; a simple and revolutionary (and maybe healthy?) notion, since he was the first one to think of it, only to be persecuted for doing so forthrightly, on nice paper stock, accompanied by good literature and fine illustrations and urbane life advice. He was considered to be trouble, in a
Leave It to Beaver
era, and eras beyond. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI started a file on him early on. Nixon later placed him on his enemies list. Meanwhile, the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, the state of New York, the state of New Jersey, all of Great Britain—at one point or another, they all
came after him to levy punishments of one kind or another, as it was clear that he threatened a puritanical morality that creaked, was on its last legs, especially as compromised Bible-thumpers of the religious right kept getting caught in bed with compromised ladies.
In the mid-eighties, Ronald Reagan’s commission headed by Edwin Meese successfully managed to have his magazine banned from convenience stores. That encumbrance, as with all others before it, dissolved in short order, went away, not that the setback wasn’t felt; he experienced a
minor stroke in March 1985. There were female problems in the same time frame as well, with an obstreperous Special Lady. Then he got back up and reconfigured his world. “I put down the luggage of my life,” he said. “I quit burning my candle at both ends and started savoring every day.”
a
nd When All Is Seemingly Lost…
You just have to rise again. You have to keep getting up
.
F
riendships Last for a Reason
Making a friend for life is more a matter of what kind of a friend you are. You certainly in most cases can tell—you just connect on every level, especially in terms of shared interests and sensibilities.
But particularly when it involves the opposite sex, everything is not always out on the table, and you’re never really sure. You may remain a friend for life, but platonic friendships tend to last longer than romantic connections.
He has often referred to those who are endlessly welcome at his home as the closely knit Family of Friends, aka The Gang. Their names are kept on the Gate List, permitting them access to the Master’s Shangri-la at any time, although lately they mostly come when expected. (They announce themselves to a speaker embedded in a boulder at the main gate—the Talking Rock!—and security staff then triggers the lowering of the drawbridge.) In the old days, there would usually be a friend or several sleeping over—Tony Curtis, Shel Silverstein, the historian Max Lerner, et cetera—living in the house, enjoying semipermanent residence, sometimes recovering from addictions (or broken loves), taking meals, taking lovers, playing games all night with him, in case he felt the need.
A Chicago nightlife impresario who came to work for the Playboy Clubs, a sweet rogue named John Dante, for instance—he was one of the closest, one who would live in both houses, play games, and be an ever-present ear for Hef. In 1968, Dante began squandering money on football bets like never before, and suddenly he was in bookie hock for $38,000 and also mostly broke, and was therefore scared shitless of thugs looking for the return of green. (Dante was the sort of guy who talked like that, rest his soul.)
He would recall: “I didn’t even want to think about how much I owed, but it was hanging over my head like a guillotine—and I knew that by Tuesday morning the calls
would start coming in: ‘Moe Gagliano is on the line from Denver,’ and if I didn’t take the call somebody would show up at the front door.” (Don’t swing, don’t ring, please!) He somehow bought himself a week, only to get out of town, take the big powder, split from the company, the Mansion, the Life, completely on the q.t.—hey, maybe even sign on as a steward on an ocean liner bound for Italy, just to disappear. He said nothing to Hef, kept playing all-night Monopoly with him and laughing it up, but finally blurted the what-was-what to Hef’s number one, secretary Bobbie Arnstein, telling her to keep mum, which she of course did not do.
“I was lying on my bed talking to myself when’s there’s a knock at the door,” he said. “For a second I think it’s
them
, but it’s Hef, with a very somber expression on his face.”
And so said Hef, walking in, sitting down, staring into his friend’s red-rimmed eyes: “Let’s talk. What happened?”
The whole story came out—or, well,
“I told him the whole fucking story,”
per Dante.
Said Hef: “Why didn’t you come to me?” Then: “How much do you owe in all?”
The check was in Dante’s hand the next day.
But before Hef left the room, he told the desperate and humbled and frightened associate: “Try not to do it again, John. You’re too good a friend to lose.”
And then Dante wept and wept. And wept a little more.
Y
our Wedding Day Should Wait a While, for You
You don’t really know who you are until your thirties. Most often, settling down with a mate at an earlier age is a mistake.
Ideally, young men—and women, too—ought to first spend some significant time away from home, living on their own as a single person to find out who they are and what they really want out of life.
If you put off making the commitment, you are more likely to stay committed longer.
While all too young, he knew not who he was, but had a feeling at the same time that he knew who he would someday become. He sensed something else was coming. Yet he conformed, for that minute. Did what he was supposed to do, for that minute, or for ten years of that minute, for as long as it would last. Still, where he was, June 1949, when he married Miss Millie Williams: “The thought of a young man simply moving out of his home and into an apartment and living as a bachelor and pursuing one’s own aspirations was not an option in those days. Bachelors who were still unmarried in their thirties were suspect, and women in their thirties and unmarried were considered old maids. So in our early twenties, all of us got married at the same time. All my peers, my classmates, we got married within a year or two of one another. Thankfully, this doesn’t have to happen anymore.”