Hugh Hefner: Blows Against the Empire

Hugh Hefner gestures with a sweeping motion of his arm at the moonlit landscape of his five-acre backyard. “See if you can get a sense of this,” he says. Four baby ostriches scamper near dark pools where muscular Japanese koi teem below the surface. A tethered monkey crouches at the base of a tree. Silhouettes of hulking macaws on tall perches mark the horizon. A suit-clad security man carrying a walkie-talkie is barely visible in the shadows. Hefner’s velvet slippers and the cuffs of his black satin sleepwear soak up dew as he gazes at the glistening expanse. He inhales and exhales deeply. The 59-nine-year-old is high on property and wildlife.

Then he turns to his girlfriend, Carrie Leigh, who turned 22 the week before. She is talking to a journalist. The two are seated on lawn furniture and bathed in yellow light from a leaded window. Carrie is wearing a lavender dress of a spandexlike fabric with a deep V cut down to her navel; the garment is held together with a succession of black bows. Her long black hair is teased and curled and abundant around her face and shoulders. Hefner bends down, his face between his lover’s and the journalist’s, and buries his nose and lips in Carrie’s hairline. “I love you,” he says in a muffled stage whisper.

Hefner, who boasts he has lived his life in a state of perpetual adolescence, will be 60 next month. In the past year, which has shown him the greatest emotional extremes of his life, he has survived a major stroke, fought a $5 million slander suit brought by a 16-year-old girl and suffered some of the worst press of his career. It is Hefner-bashing season, and journalists are launching their cleverest stylistic barbs at this target who never moves from one spot: his six-bedroom English Tudor in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. “[His] whole lifestyle, on paper, resembles nothing so much as a study in terminal depression,” wrote a young British writer recently, an observation that reflects the disillusionment with Playboyism that Hefner’s constituency of youthful males increasingly exhibits. Admiration and envy during Hefner’s ascendant, golden years — “the Chicago days,” as he calls them — have given way to general distaste.

The malaise has spread to the company. The empire Hefner built on what he calls his “adolescent dreams,” and what many would call the commercial exploitation of naked women, is teetering on the brink: revenues have dropped nearly 50 percent in the last three years, readership of his magazine has slackened from a high of more than 7 million a month in 1972 to 4 million today and his colonial outposts, the Playboy Clubs, are a disaster. It appears the emperor has no clothes, and hardly anyone is afraid to say so.

But Hefner is, on this night and in the days to come, in a celebratory mood. His good vibes are as maddeningly palpable as those of a recent life-enhancement-course graduate. He’s a walking juggernaut of human potential. He has triumphed in the most bitter battle of his life, a quarrel he admitted was “just so bad-taste Hollywood” that it sickened him, yet compelled him to fight on, even against the advice of his closest associates and his cherished daughter, Christie. “I’m not interested in hurting people,” he had thundered in the white heat of battle. “I’m interested in getting back my character, in getting back my good name. Such as it is. It’s rather important to me!” And tonight it is clear that in Hefner’s mind good name and character are quite recovered.

“There has never been a casting couch connected to Playboy,” says Hugh Hefner.

Two miles from Hefner’s property, a four-minute drive along Sunset Boulevard, lies the vanquished: Bel Air resident Peter Bogdanovich. The movie director who made films like The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, whose career is considered to have sparkled and then lost its radiance, really didn’t stand a chance. Bogdanovich cast the first stone. But unlike David, he failed to slay his Goliath; he just made him mad. The claims and counterclaims of their feud cut deep, right to their masculine souls. Bogdanovich accused the most famous playboy of the Western world of having to rape a Playmate, the late Dorothy Stratten, to get sex. But Hefner would insist, “I am, publisher of Playboy or no, a very shy man. And I could no more force myself on a woman, psychologically or physically, than could the man on the moon.”

He, in turn, accused born-again feminist Bogdanovich of child molestation, à la Roman Polanski. The director, Hefner announced at a well-attended press conference last spring, seduced Stratten’s then-13-year-old sister as a “pathological replacement” for Stratten soon after her death.

The two men have not spoken for five years. One of their last conversations occurred when Hefner called the director to tell him Stratten, Playboy‘s Playmate of the Year, who was living with Bogdanovich, had been murdered by her husband, Paul Snider — who then turned the gun on himself. Their final words of condolence were exchanged at Stratten’s funeral at the Westwood Cemetery, where the 20-year-old Canadian was buried near Marilyn Monroe on August 22nd, 1980. Afterward, Hefner remembers, “Peter retreated into editing They All Laughed,” the movie Bogdanovich made with Stratten shortly before her death. “What that must have been like, looking at the Moviola, cutting those images. . . .It must have been absolutely overwhelming,” he adds in a moment of empathy.

Four years later, Bogdanovich emerged as a feminist with all the fervor of the newly saved in his book The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980. He had embarked, in his own words, on “months and years of investigation,” during which he “found out more and more about Hefner’s role.” “If I had to confront my own responsibility,” the director wrote, “there could be no way to ignore his.” Unicorn was a passionate account of Stratten’s rise at Playboy, Bogdanovich’s love affair with her, and her murder. Mostly it was an indictment of what its author felt was the exploitative nature of Stratten’s relationship with Playboy and especially with Hefner, who, Bogdanovich wrote, forced himself on Stratten in his notorious Jacuzzi “grotto” the first night she spent in his house. The director believed that Stratten had married the man who would kill her to protect herself from the “wolves” at the mansion.

Bogdanovich’s fury is especially comprehensible once you grasp his feminist sensibilities. He buys the continuum between centerfolds and ax murders: the notion that when women are presented as passive receptacles of male sexual pleasure, anything can and will happen, that what trivializes women can kill them too. If the pornography mentality killed his girlfriend, then isn’t the granddaddy of the genre, Hugh Marston Hefner, culpable too?

Masters of imagery, manipulators of fantasy, Hefner and Bogdanovich drew on their strengths. Theirs was an escalating battle of words and images fought on the airwaves and newsstands. Ultimately, it was a war of public relations, except that Hefner’s PR machine was so much richer and more practiced than his adversary’s. Even their truce was public-relations choreography. Both sides toyed with the idea that a public show of amicability should take place on the fifth anniversary of Stratten’s death. “That would be an ideal hook — where these two great men could come together — basically kiss and make up,” postulated Hefner’s executive assistant, Richard Rosenzweig. “Maybe we could hold a joint press conference at Dorothy’s grave site,” Hefner had remarked in a moment of sarcasm.

In the end, official settlement came with the issuing of press releases from each side. Few appeared to care. “The fireworks are over? Too bad,” seemed to be the reaction of the Hollywood press. The fight had been so much more fascinating than its resolution. What was ignored was that hardly anything had been resolved: whether anyone was raped or seduced, for instance. Stratten’s still-grieving family was left bereft of justice or compensation, as it was after her death. And Bogdanovich was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Hefner is, by now, an icon. his satin pajamas and 10-ounce Pepsi bottles are American kitsch, like Elvis’ ducktail. Myths take shape around him, a few of which he willingly fosters, such as the number of stars on the cover of his magazine symbolizing the number of times he has slept with the Playmate inside. In fact, in recent years Hefner has become less involved in the selection of Playmates; a middle-aged woman, photo editor Marilyn Grabowski, selects the candidates. Hefner okays them, sometimes six at a time, at infrequent editorial sessions. On the eve of his 60 birthday, the eternal adolescent finds himself struggling with conflicting imperatives: the need to ensure his “good name” and the need to live up to his reputation. He wants it both ways, and he’s frustrated by a “repressive, hurtful society” that refuses him that privilege. “There has never been a casting couch connected to Playboy,” he will say in a moment of annoyance, “although it would be one of the greatest temptations of our time. The people who write about me are notorious for that kind of phenomenon. Which is not to say I have not been romantically involved with a number of Playmates over the years. I have been. But I would say that the ‘father’ kind of relationship is the rule rather than the exception, and has been the rule for the last thirty years.”

The exceptions have been rather dramatic. Last year, a former Bunny told the Justice Department’s newly formed Meese Commission on Pornography — which Hefner characterizes as a “dog-and-pony show” promoting “sexual McCarthy-ism” — that her group-sex experiences with Hefner and his cronies in Hefner’s bedroom ultimately caused her severe emotional distress and turned her into a lesbian. Now she is a born-again Christian. When Hefner is asked if the events she described in his bedroom occurred, he replies that he certainly recalls orgy episodes, but that he cannot remember the woman. “If she was there, it was because she wanted to be,” he says, adding with tempered but unmistakable pride, “Believe me, there were a lot of people who wanted to be there.”

Bogdanovich’s attack had myth-shattering connotations for Hefner. In Hefner’s universe, he is to sex what Martin Luther King was to race. Months before his triumphant stroll through his private Eden, he is sunk into the threadbare couch in his library, his shaggy head framed by a shiny bust of Barbi Benton from her crown to her large pink nipples on the windowsill behind him. “I have lived a rather full and wonderful life,” he says. “It has certainly involved a great deal of sexual adventure, and it played a very real part in what came to be called the sexual revolution. But I do not exploit human beings.” As sunlight dapples the room’s interior, he seems almost to equate the sexual revolution, which he believes he spawned, with the founding fathers’ deeds. “To say the sexual revolution didn’t work is like saying democracy didn’t work,” he says, as if the freedom to sleep around is as integral to the nation’s functioning as the Voting Rights Act. Bogdanovich’s book, far from giving Hefner his due, cast him as a Walt Disney of “homogenized pornography” and as a depraved Machiavelli in his relationship with Dorothy Stratten. “Playboy,” the director said, “turns every girl next door into a hooker.”

Bogdanovich’s charges and insinuations cut so deeply, when those of others have not, Hefner implies, because they impugned his heartland-bred integrity. “I’m a Midwestern boy,” he says, “a very all-American kid who was raised by farm people in Nebraska, by Puritan-Protestant parents. I’ve been very capable of dealing with the controversy of Playboy over the years, and even reveled in it. But once it turns into something very personal, something that questions my character, it is potentially devastating to me.”