Hef's Little Black Book (12 page)

Sometimes, too, quieter toys made an impact. For instance, the Killer Ben-Wa Balls Incident, a classic Mansion moment. One Special Lady had received a pair of Japanese ben-wa balls from a friend and, well, inserted them one evening and, well, forgot they were in place, forgot all about them. Hours later she found herself in the Bed astride, well, Hef’s face while he pleasured her. “We were going at it,” she recalled, “and all of a sudden he was shoving me off and gagging—
ack, ack, ack
—and I realized that they’d gone down into his throat. They almost killed him. I just kind of Heimliched him and got ’em out. It seemed funny afterward, and I had them framed with background of Purple Heart velvet and the motto LEST WE FORGET.”

a
Funny Thing Happens on Your Way to Love

And then there is the business of baby oil. No Mansion cupboard since the sixties has been devoid of it. Row upon row of Johnson’s baby oil bottles standing sentry, awaiting the Master’s next urge. In point of fact, the Chicago Mansion’s
Round Rotating Bed headboard contained, in the far left corner, a plentiful stash of bottles. It is merely the stuff of slick sensual legend on his premises, and here is why: “Perhaps the only sexual quirk Hefner has is his fetish for baby oil,” recalled Playmate Marilyn Cole. “He would spend hours rubbing it all over me like a master chef tenderly basting a chicken. It was his way of making me ready for him. It also had a somewhat unfortunate side effect. If a girl spends half the night getting covered in baby oil, she inevitably ends up with very greasy hair.” Or from Playmate Marcy Hanson: “Oh, God, the baby oil! It’s a bitch to get it out of your hair. It can take days and days. Each of us had her own way of getting it out—everything from champagne to baby powder to ‘Fuck it, let’s do it again.’”

T
o Serve and Protect Like a Man Requires Noticing

R
eflections on the Little Blue Pill

He would declare Viagra the best gift he ever received. Never mind that his virile endurance has always been his pride and joy. One woman long ago said that he could go to it in such epic and extended fashion that it almost got “borin’.” What man would not take that as praise?

As it turned out, this new gift arrived in his life precisely at the most opportune moment. His separation from Kimberley Conrad Hefner had been announced three months earlier, and in the tumultuous interim, he found himself to be hermetically unsealed, leaving the tall gates and stone walls behind, charting the new real world again—and discovering that young women were still as interested in him as he had always been in them. He said of that same moment: “So many young people were waiting for me to come out and play. It was like spotting Elvis at the supermarket.”

And so on April 9, 1998—his seventy-second birthday, as spry and rejuvenating a birthday for him as ever before—new blue pharmaceutical magic was presented to him, because if not to him, then to whom? Never was there a more appropriate test pilot for such a blue-yonder flight. He flew and did not stop: “It redefines the boundary between fantasy and reality. I think Viagra is the best recreational drug in America.” He would even share blue bounty, for experimental purposes, with the Ladies in his Bed. “They insisted,” he said. “In theory, it should work as well for women as it does for men, but the results are thus far inconclusive. I think we need to do a little more research.”

He always did know how to work it. Or play it.

B
ut Staying Hard Without a Blue Pill Needn’t Be Hard to Do

n
umbers Don’t Matter

People understood early on the kinds of parties he might wish to attend, this new renegade of bohemian upscale decadence—whatever such a thing could mean at such a time. “I went to my first orgy in 1957 on my first visit to Hollywood,” he recalled. “It was a beatnik affair held in my honor at a home filled with models and starlets. It convinced me that everything about Hollywood that I ever fantasized about was true.” A female participant in that event would, however, remember that when the night ended, there was Young Mr. Playboy, mogul in the making, curled up in front of a fireplace, nude, sleeping beside a cat. As in: These Things Take Practice. He practiced well and with vigor. At the Chicago Mansion, he practiced on the Round Bed with carefully selected partners—friends, eager dormitory Bunnies, and others. Then he moved practice downstairs to his enormous Roman bath, where bubbles would foam and soft music would play and there would never be fewer than ten women to four guys—the Hefner ratio, this, and only because of utter trust in the other guys. Some pairings would then wander a few yards away from the bath and over to the water bed—among the first such undulating sleep mats in the world—and continue what had already begun amid wet soap. (Quoth Dean Martin, during an NBC-TV Hef roast: “He gets so much action, he’s got the only water bed with whitecaps.”) Said John Dante, his Playboy Club executive and Monopoly pal, and one of the trusted chosen in group experimentations, back then and thereafter: “We had a ball.
You’d be kissing one girl—kissing two. You’d have two lovely faces on either side of you, God almighty—it was the most fantastic happening you can ever imagine—beautifully made up, one more gorgeous than the other, perfectly formed bodies, stroking you, sucking you, fucking you. But Hef was the main thing. He was playful about it all. It was strictly fantasy time, indulging all of the senses from food to smell to taste. He enjoyed seeing all of us get pleasure—men and women alike. How bad can that be?”

Such scenes became almost a Mansion West constant beginning in late 1976, upon the final departure of Barbi Benton, who had never been inclined to play with others. “Hef used to ask me if I was ever interested in having a third party join in,” she would recall, “and I had no interest in that—guys or girls, for my birthday or his. No way.” He took on his newfound liberation with blissful abandon: “I was more committed than ever to noncommitment. This was my real swing period. It was not simply a third girl, but every variation on a theme—and I do mean everything imaginable in the realm of experimentation. We literally had a little community of group sex, a circle of a dozen friends who were into scenes.”

Thus was born the eternal Mansion mystique, wherein anything could happen and usually did—but only if you wanted it to. Still, he was always gentle and deferential, concerned about the feelings of those who partook and those who did not. “Sex was never mandatory with Hef,” said Playmate Monique St. Pierre. “It was always optional. It wasn’t
as if he didn’t have enough women.” Still, players who played during that halcyon playtime uniformly wax wistful about it: “It was just a fabulous time of free love,” said Marcy Hanson. “Everything you read about or thought about really did happen. But in such a loving way. It wasn’t seedy, like when you think of Larry Flynt or that other jerk, Guccione.”

T
he More Can Very Much Be the Merrier

A Mansion orgy, then, was always happily consensual, full of good cheer and humor, lacking inhibition and later regret. Still, while all involved were sating each other, the gratification of one in particular was understandably paramount. “The girls all loved Hef and wanted to make him feel like a sultan,” said John Dante, who witnessed much as well as participated frequently. He once recalled a vigorous roundelay in the sprawling Master Bed during which eight females had come to play with the Master and Dante and another fortunate friend. And it was good. As it always was. And it was crowded, as it often was: “Everybody was on top of everybody else. You didn’t know who was where.” And it was an hour on, as it also often was. And Dante was atop a female, deeply in flagrante delicto, as it were. As was the Master, somewhere else amid the scrum. “All of a sudden, I hear,
‘Uhhh, uhhh, uhhh!’
Hef is about to go. All of the girls in the bed, including the one that’s under me, start saying, ‘Come on, Hef! C’mon, baby! Come on!’” Which is exactly what then did occur, as it always did. “And all the girls are laughing, including the one under me. I look into her face and go back to what I was doing with her. And she looks at me, and what I read in her face is, ‘Hey, schmucko, it’s over!’” So she disengaged from Dante while remaining beneath him, while the Master called downstairs for food. “And she says to him, with me on top of her still, ‘I’ll have a cheeseburger and a malted milk.’ Hef repeats in the phone, ‘One cheeseburger, one malted milk.’ And that was it. After Hef came, it was over.’”

T
here Are No Guidebooks for Swinging, So Proceed with Caution

For one who never learned to swim, he would commune in water more famously than most. But then he had created perhaps the most famous Grotto in modern civilization in order to achieve that distinction. Plus, as he would point out, “You don’t swim in the Grotto. It’s all standing, sitting, and lying down.” It is all that and human wave making. It is the Jacuzzi of all Jacuzzis, the cave of love, hidden behind a waterfall, connected to the pool via an underwater tunnel, and yet separate unto itself because of its legendary frolics. Secreted away in the stone walls are five synthetic boulders that pipe intimate music—the singing rocks!—while those who swirl in the warm waters make beautiful music. Upon obtaining his Shangri-la in Holmby Hills, he decreed that a Grotto was required and that it be constructed to resemble something that “had emerged from the sea millions of years ago,” according to its architect, Ron Dirsmith. “When it was finished, it had an ethereal,
timeless quality, almost like being in some kind of church. Hef related to it
philosophically.
It was a very serious moment.” And then the sex started.