Monogamy? I think it's possible - The Playboy mogul tells Celia Walden about his upcoming wedding, the new club and why Kate Middleton would make a great bunny.
'A stag night?” Hugh Hefner repeats my question incredulously. “I’ve been having a stag night for the past 50 years, so no, not this time, young lady.”
When the 85-year-old Playboy founder marries 24-year-old former Playmate Crystal Harris next week, he insists that it’ll mark the end of half a century’s carousing. “I wasn’t planning on getting married again but we’ve been together two-and-a- half years and I can’t imagine meeting anyone I’d get on better with. People make so much of the age gap but we have a lot in common. Yes, there’s a certain 'student-teacher’ quality to our relationship, but surrounding myself with young people helps keep me younger.”
He pauses, pensive all of a sudden. “Plus, you know, you reach a point where you think: 'Maybe it’s time to settle down’.” Sitting beside her boss in the study of his West Hollywood home, Hefner’s PA, Mary, suppresses a snort.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner (centre) arrives at Stansted Airport on June 2, 2011 in Stansted, England. The photograph is a recreation of a picture originally taken in the 1960's, with ten of the new London Bunnies. Mr Hefner is back in the UK to mark the launch of the new Playboy Club in Mayfair, which opens on June 4
On my first visit to the Playboy Mansion four years ago, when Hefner threw a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, the dress code was “underwear only” and these same mahogany furnishings were strewn with semi-naked female bodies of a not dissimilar hue. In a Bedouin tent erected on the lawn, where waitresses wearing only a thin layer of iridescent body-paint served up platters of sushi to guests, our host presided from a throne-like armchair, encircled by his then harem, Holly [Madison], Bridget [Marquardt] and Kendra [Wilkinson].
Over the years, the girlfriends have been too numerous to tally, even Hefner conceding that he “stopped counting a long time ago”. On the marriage front, however, the Chicago-born media magnate has been positively abstemious by celebrity standards, having been married only twice before: once to college sweetheart Mildred Williams and again to Playmate Kimberly Conrad.
Here in the States, his forthcoming wedding is being hyped as “bigger than William and Kate’s”. “I thought the royal wedding was such a glamorous event,” he chuckles. “We could do with a little more of that kind of thing nowadays – it injects a little romance into people.”
Would the Duchess of Cambridge have made a good recruit, had she not been snapped up? “As a bunny, you mean?” he rejoins eagerly. “Absolutely. She’s a beautiful little lady and very glamorous.”
Although the Playboy Mansion attracts more visitors than Buckingham Palace every year, Hefner and Harris’s wedding promises to be a little more intimate than William and Kate’s. Only 300 people have been invited to witness the pair exchange vows on June 18, and the mogul’s three sons, David (59, from his first marriage), Marston (21) and Cooper (20) are to be groomsmen. “That means a lot to me,” Hefner says quietly, “and they’re thrilled about the wedding.”
All of this is touching stuff, and it’s hard to look at Hefner’s face – that of a tom-cat who just keeps getting the cream – and feel any real sense of outrage, but why is a man whose life and livelihood revolve around rejecting monogamy getting married at 85? “Because I’m totally capable of being a good husband. I can be devoted, sensitive…” Faithful? “Yes.” He looks surprised. “Absolutely. I do think that monogamy’s… possible,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “I just don’t think it’s the natural way of things.”
Recent high-profile marriage breakdowns – such as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver – don’t seem to have dented his new-found optimism. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The only immorality is in the lying: it’s in the hypocrisy.”
It’s a desire to fight hypocrisy – and react against the puritan background he was born into – that has driven Hefner. From conservative, Midwestern, Methodist stock (his parents were teachers), Hefner accepts that he “fell a little far from the tree”. “I accepted their general ideals, but I had a real problem with that repressive attitude towards sex.”
As a teenager growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War, Hefner spent his afternoons at the cinema, engrossed in Marilyn Monroe’s behind, Jean Harlow’s bust and Dorothy Lamour’s legs. So there was, at least, one brunette?
“Oh yes,” he chuckles. “Because I’ve been in my blonde period for so long, people get the impression that they’re all I really care about. But my first wife was a brunette and besides,” he adds, with a smile, “the truth is that most blondes began as brunettes.”
After a stint in the army and a degree in psychology at the University of Illinois, Hefner got a job selling cartoons to magazines. It was his mother, curiously, who agreed to back him when he decided to start up Playboy, lending him £400. The magazine hit the top shelves in 1953 with a partially nude cover shot of Monroe and the brand – embodied by Hefner, already living the archetypal bachelor’s life at the Playboy Mansion – was an immediate success.
It wasn’t until Penthouse provided competition in the Seventies that sales began to fall, and although Playboy Enterprises – which includes branded television and radio, casinos and merchandising – has fizzed and faltered over the decades, the business was valued at £135 million in January when Hefner finally took his empire private.
Whether the Playboy brand is still as seductive to Brits as it was when the first London club opened in 1966 – attracting the likes of Julie Christie, Rudolf Nureyev and Woody Allen – remains to be seen. On Saturday, Hefner opened a new club in Mayfair, a “retro gentlemen’s paradise” (with an annual membership fee of £15,000 a year) boasting a restaurant, bar, barber’s shop and smoking terrace.
I’m curious to know whether Hefner thinks our attitude to sex is any different from America’s. “Historically there’s never been a great deal of difference,” he says. “We share this total hypocrisy: we’re both fascinated by all things sexual but we also have a problem with sexuality and connect all this guilt and shame to it. The thing about Playboy is that it manages to plug into a more romantic, Fifties side of sex.”
The words “romance” and “glamour” crop up a lot in Hefner’s speech. When he talks of old screen stars, musicals and the love songs he adores, his voice threatens to break. He strikes you then as a man-child who has been consumed by the same woman-shaped nostalgia for the past 70 years.
I’ve got to ask: has he ever had therapy? “I haven’t, but yes I do think it’s possible that a lack of love in the home transformed itself into a desire for romantic love later on. I was raised in a house where there weren’t a lot of hugs, and my brother and I were both very aware of that.”
Does he feel loved now?
“Oh yes.”
Every morning, when “the Hef” breakfasts in bed on corn flakes with chopped bananas, he says he has the same thought: “I must be the luckiest guy on the planet.”
Reinterpreting the original concept behind the brand and making Playboy “a brand for playboys” is a clever move to make now, when masculinity is on its way back.
“Do you know that Girls of the Playboy Mansion [a television series] was more popular with women than men?” he asks me. And why does he think that was? “Because the next generation of women grew up and they were sexually liberated.”
The feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who once likened a woman reading Playboy to “a Jew reading a Nazi manual”, may no longer be as vocal, but the judging by the “EffOffHef” campaigners brandishing bowls of rabbit droppings outside the club last week, attitudes haven’t changed as much as he thinks. What would he say to the feminist movement which accused him of degrading, objectifying and abusing women? “Quite simply: you got it wrong,” he shrugs. “And the reasons are understandable. But the sexual revolution was for both sexes: women were the victims of repression, too.”
And yet the EffOffHef campaigners would hardly see him as a champion of women now, would they? He chooses to disregard the sarcasm: “I’m a champion not just of women but of women’s rights,” he says forcefully.
“Look, I’m celebrating life. I accept that it isn’t for everybody but my belief is that it doesn’t matter how many boyfriends or girlfriends you have if you treat them well. In the end, I want to be remembered as someone who has had some positive impact on changing social sexual values.” ( telegraph.co.uk )
'A stag night?” Hugh Hefner repeats my question incredulously. “I’ve been having a stag night for the past 50 years, so no, not this time, young lady.”
When the 85-year-old Playboy founder marries 24-year-old former Playmate Crystal Harris next week, he insists that it’ll mark the end of half a century’s carousing. “I wasn’t planning on getting married again but we’ve been together two-and-a- half years and I can’t imagine meeting anyone I’d get on better with. People make so much of the age gap but we have a lot in common. Yes, there’s a certain 'student-teacher’ quality to our relationship, but surrounding myself with young people helps keep me younger.”
He pauses, pensive all of a sudden. “Plus, you know, you reach a point where you think: 'Maybe it’s time to settle down’.” Sitting beside her boss in the study of his West Hollywood home, Hefner’s PA, Mary, suppresses a snort.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner (centre) arrives at Stansted Airport on June 2, 2011 in Stansted, England. The photograph is a recreation of a picture originally taken in the 1960's, with ten of the new London Bunnies. Mr Hefner is back in the UK to mark the launch of the new Playboy Club in Mayfair, which opens on June 4
On my first visit to the Playboy Mansion four years ago, when Hefner threw a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, the dress code was “underwear only” and these same mahogany furnishings were strewn with semi-naked female bodies of a not dissimilar hue. In a Bedouin tent erected on the lawn, where waitresses wearing only a thin layer of iridescent body-paint served up platters of sushi to guests, our host presided from a throne-like armchair, encircled by his then harem, Holly [Madison], Bridget [Marquardt] and Kendra [Wilkinson].
Over the years, the girlfriends have been too numerous to tally, even Hefner conceding that he “stopped counting a long time ago”. On the marriage front, however, the Chicago-born media magnate has been positively abstemious by celebrity standards, having been married only twice before: once to college sweetheart Mildred Williams and again to Playmate Kimberly Conrad.
Here in the States, his forthcoming wedding is being hyped as “bigger than William and Kate’s”. “I thought the royal wedding was such a glamorous event,” he chuckles. “We could do with a little more of that kind of thing nowadays – it injects a little romance into people.”
Would the Duchess of Cambridge have made a good recruit, had she not been snapped up? “As a bunny, you mean?” he rejoins eagerly. “Absolutely. She’s a beautiful little lady and very glamorous.”
Although the Playboy Mansion attracts more visitors than Buckingham Palace every year, Hefner and Harris’s wedding promises to be a little more intimate than William and Kate’s. Only 300 people have been invited to witness the pair exchange vows on June 18, and the mogul’s three sons, David (59, from his first marriage), Marston (21) and Cooper (20) are to be groomsmen. “That means a lot to me,” Hefner says quietly, “and they’re thrilled about the wedding.”
All of this is touching stuff, and it’s hard to look at Hefner’s face – that of a tom-cat who just keeps getting the cream – and feel any real sense of outrage, but why is a man whose life and livelihood revolve around rejecting monogamy getting married at 85? “Because I’m totally capable of being a good husband. I can be devoted, sensitive…” Faithful? “Yes.” He looks surprised. “Absolutely. I do think that monogamy’s… possible,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “I just don’t think it’s the natural way of things.”
Recent high-profile marriage breakdowns – such as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver – don’t seem to have dented his new-found optimism. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The only immorality is in the lying: it’s in the hypocrisy.”
It’s a desire to fight hypocrisy – and react against the puritan background he was born into – that has driven Hefner. From conservative, Midwestern, Methodist stock (his parents were teachers), Hefner accepts that he “fell a little far from the tree”. “I accepted their general ideals, but I had a real problem with that repressive attitude towards sex.”
As a teenager growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War, Hefner spent his afternoons at the cinema, engrossed in Marilyn Monroe’s behind, Jean Harlow’s bust and Dorothy Lamour’s legs. So there was, at least, one brunette?
“Oh yes,” he chuckles. “Because I’ve been in my blonde period for so long, people get the impression that they’re all I really care about. But my first wife was a brunette and besides,” he adds, with a smile, “the truth is that most blondes began as brunettes.”
After a stint in the army and a degree in psychology at the University of Illinois, Hefner got a job selling cartoons to magazines. It was his mother, curiously, who agreed to back him when he decided to start up Playboy, lending him £400. The magazine hit the top shelves in 1953 with a partially nude cover shot of Monroe and the brand – embodied by Hefner, already living the archetypal bachelor’s life at the Playboy Mansion – was an immediate success.
It wasn’t until Penthouse provided competition in the Seventies that sales began to fall, and although Playboy Enterprises – which includes branded television and radio, casinos and merchandising – has fizzed and faltered over the decades, the business was valued at £135 million in January when Hefner finally took his empire private.
Whether the Playboy brand is still as seductive to Brits as it was when the first London club opened in 1966 – attracting the likes of Julie Christie, Rudolf Nureyev and Woody Allen – remains to be seen. On Saturday, Hefner opened a new club in Mayfair, a “retro gentlemen’s paradise” (with an annual membership fee of £15,000 a year) boasting a restaurant, bar, barber’s shop and smoking terrace.
I’m curious to know whether Hefner thinks our attitude to sex is any different from America’s. “Historically there’s never been a great deal of difference,” he says. “We share this total hypocrisy: we’re both fascinated by all things sexual but we also have a problem with sexuality and connect all this guilt and shame to it. The thing about Playboy is that it manages to plug into a more romantic, Fifties side of sex.”
The words “romance” and “glamour” crop up a lot in Hefner’s speech. When he talks of old screen stars, musicals and the love songs he adores, his voice threatens to break. He strikes you then as a man-child who has been consumed by the same woman-shaped nostalgia for the past 70 years.
I’ve got to ask: has he ever had therapy? “I haven’t, but yes I do think it’s possible that a lack of love in the home transformed itself into a desire for romantic love later on. I was raised in a house where there weren’t a lot of hugs, and my brother and I were both very aware of that.”
Does he feel loved now?
“Oh yes.”
Every morning, when “the Hef” breakfasts in bed on corn flakes with chopped bananas, he says he has the same thought: “I must be the luckiest guy on the planet.”
Reinterpreting the original concept behind the brand and making Playboy “a brand for playboys” is a clever move to make now, when masculinity is on its way back.
“Do you know that Girls of the Playboy Mansion [a television series] was more popular with women than men?” he asks me. And why does he think that was? “Because the next generation of women grew up and they were sexually liberated.”
The feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who once likened a woman reading Playboy to “a Jew reading a Nazi manual”, may no longer be as vocal, but the judging by the “EffOffHef” campaigners brandishing bowls of rabbit droppings outside the club last week, attitudes haven’t changed as much as he thinks. What would he say to the feminist movement which accused him of degrading, objectifying and abusing women? “Quite simply: you got it wrong,” he shrugs. “And the reasons are understandable. But the sexual revolution was for both sexes: women were the victims of repression, too.”
And yet the EffOffHef campaigners would hardly see him as a champion of women now, would they? He chooses to disregard the sarcasm: “I’m a champion not just of women but of women’s rights,” he says forcefully.
“Look, I’m celebrating life. I accept that it isn’t for everybody but my belief is that it doesn’t matter how many boyfriends or girlfriends you have if you treat them well. In the end, I want to be remembered as someone who has had some positive impact on changing social sexual values.” ( telegraph.co.uk )
