“It won’t be cheap to renovate,” I said. “It’s like a small hotel.”
“I love Rodgers and Hart,” Hef said with a grin. Pipe in his teeth, he looked like a skinny and very lost Mark Trail. “Let me show you the crowning touch.”
That turned out to be a second-floor ballroom with decoratively carved woodwork, a marble fireplace, massive French doors, open beams, pillars, and huge bronze chandeliers.
“Imagine this wonderful space,” Hef said, “ and forty rooms.”
“Enough for Ali Baba,” I said, “and all his thieves.”
He laughed, maybe even finding that funny. “So… can you fix me up with security, while we’re remodeling?”
“Sure. I have people we use.”
Within months, as the new decade began, the mansion took shape. He added suits of armor to guard either side of the entrance to the grand living room that the ballroom became, adorning its paneled walls with massive modern art pieces by de Kooning, Pollock, and others (seemed the boy cartoonist preferred abstract expressionism these days).
The bedroom and apartments were refurbished lavishly and most had fireplaces. Hef’s master bedroom had a round, rotating bed, its headboard home to controls for the latest in TV and stereo. He told me he got more work done there than the office; I said, “I’ll bet.”
Below the former ballroom he put in a palm-bedecked swimming pool, with a small, waterfall-protected, recessed grotto. A sunken bar whose primary light source seemed to be backlit framed centerfold photos provided a massive window on underwater swimmers, who were mostly shapely young women in-and sometimes out of-bikinis.
I was by no means a regular, but the weekly parties-starting in the spring of 1960-were attended by several hundred guests: show business types, upper-echelon magazine staff, pro athletes, plus occasional politicians, novelists, poets, journalists, and other liars.
And of course beautiful young women, Playmates who now worked for Hef’s company, some as receptionists and secretaries, others as traveling Playboy PR ambassadors, quite a few employed as “Bunnies” at his new, very successful Playboy Club, on nearby Walton Street, for key-holders only. The Bunnies wore one-piece satin swimsuit-like outfits, lots of bosom and thigh exposed, plus cute rabbit ears, bow tie, cuffs, and a tail fluffier than Bugs Bunny’s.
I picked up a few at these parties, and dated one or two. Some were stupid, some smart, some in-between, but all were lovely and most were cooperative-neither hookers nor nymphos, just girls looking for opportunities. Marriages and movie contracts and various other arrangements blossomed for them at the mansion and the club.
Though Hefner spent a fortune on food, drinks, and help at his weekly shindigs, the entertainment cost him nothing, coming courtesy of his showbiz guests-folksingers and stand-up comics from Mr. Kelly’s, always, big-name acts over from the mobbed-up Chez Paree, usually.
Right now, September of 1960, I was seated on a sofa next to Hef, who was in a continental-style tuxedo, pipe going, occasionally sipping a glass of something that might have been a mixed drink but was probably Pepsi.
“Just nine months ago, Nate,” Hef was saying with his wide thin smile, eyes as bright as these of a ten-year-old who just got a train set for Christmas, “my baby didn’t exist.”
“Nine months is about right for a baby,” I said.
I was in my own After Six tux, and most of the men here were similarly dressed, though a few were in business suits. The look for both sexes was fairly formal, though in a surrealistic touch, dripping-wet couples in bathing suits and towels would come sloshing through at will, laughing, presumably heading somewhere to dry off.
Sitting on the arm of the sofa with her arm draped around Hef was a lovely blonde girl in her early twenties wearing a sort of obscene pink prom dress, her full bosom half out, white-blonde hair in a sprayed bulletproof bouffant. She had a very innocent face, and he was calling her Cynthia; she wasn’t calling him anything-we’d been sitting ten minutes and she hadn’t spoken. But her smile was swell, and her laugh created memorable jiggling.
The music was a little loud-a black combo Hef had recruited from the South Side, in sky-blue tuxes with black lapels and cuffs, was playing and singing “The Twist.” Not long ago, rock ’n’ roll was a subject of much derision here. But “The Twist” had changed that. Or anyway the way Hef’s female guests did the Twist had changed that.
“You know some people look at this,” Hef said, waving his pipe like a wand, “and all they see is sex.”
I was watching a dark-tanned, busty brunette in a blue bikini, her hair a beehive tower, do the Twist with a fiftyish guy in glasses eyeing her the way a dog does a squirrel. He was some kind of associate editor at the magazine.
“How did they get that idea?” I asked.
He ignored my sarcasm, or maybe didn’t pick up on it over the loud music. There was considerable chatter, as well-we were near the endless buffet table. Food smells were pleasant. Bunnies were circulating taking drink orders.
I said, “I had a few people over the other night myself. Would have called you but I’m particular.”
“You don’t think I know I’m the luckiest human being in the world?” He painted the air with his pipe smoke. “But I’m also doing the world, this modern world, a favor-people who work hard should get to play hard. You get one time around this merry-go-round, and if you don’t make the most of it, who do you have to blame?”
“Now you’re a philosopher.”
“This is a new decade, Nate. Pretty soon we’re going to have a new president.” He grinned, and his eyes danced with manic delight. “I think we know who that’s going to be.”
“Nixon’s ahead in the polls.”
“Tricky Dick won’t win. What Playboy represented in the fifties was my personal dream-sexual pleasure, material abundance, without guilt. But now it’s time to break down other barriers-take civil rights, for example…”
Shrill, giddy laughter and applause rode over Hef’s speech, and “The Twist” ground to a halt. Tonight’s guests of honor had arrived, fresh from the Near North Side’s Chez Paree-Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. (Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford weren’t on the Chez bill), moving past the suits of armor down into the living room, stopping to talk to men they knew and girls they wanted to know. Somebody was doing the fingers-in-the-teeth whistle: Hef’s bouncy blonde.
Everybody crowded around a little performance area adjacent to a piano, bass, and drums, where a trio of musicians awaited, and without preamble, the Summit (they didn’t call themselves the Rat Pack) went into an abbreviated version of its Vegas show.
First Dean went out to sing while the other two faded back to a nearby liquor cart. After drunkenly asking what all these people were doing in his room, the big well-tanned handsome crooner, in a tux with loose crossover tie, did a lighthearted “Volare,” then several song parodies (“You made me love you… you woke me up to do it”). He was delivering a straight “June in January” when Davis, sans tux jacket, strode over, mimicking Martin’s ex-partner Jerry Lewis (“ Deeeeeeean !”) and Dino responded accordingly (“Jer-you’ve changed! But at least you’re still Jewish…”). The two walked off arm in arm and Sinatra took their place.
It was always a surprise how small Frank was, and even more surprising how quickly you forgot that when he sang. His tux tie was still snugged in place, but he was loose as he did a jazzy “Chicago,” getting the expected wild response, then “Luck Be a Lady,” which played surprisingly well without a big band.
Then Dean carried Sammy out in his arms and presented him to Sinatra as a token of appreciation from the NAACP, and this got howls, particularly from Sammy.
The little Negro-and he made a giant out of Sinatra-was probably the most talented of them, and he sang a very earnest “Hey There” (a hit of his) and then “Birth of the Blues,” doing some flashy dancing. Finally he went into “The Lady Is a Tramp” and had lapsed into a Sinatra impression when the other two came out and shut him down.