Three points need to be made about Hefner’s oft-repeated contention that Playboy is like a family. First, it is a family in which Poppa Bear gets to go to bed with his daughters. Secondly, it is a family in which the turnover in daughters is high. Thirdly, it is a family in which no tensions, resentments or power-struggles are admitted to or tolerated: at Playboy, everyone is happy all the time. Of every conceivable human institution, a family is what Playboy least resembles. True, Hefner’s daughter Christie is now the figurehead of the company; true also that he has recently opened his arms, Dynasty-style, to a second, putative son (though he admitted to me that there was, of all things, ‘a problem’ with young Mark). But they’re grown up now: they’re on the payroll, under the wing, like everybody else. Hefner isn’t paternal — he is exclusively paternalistic, wedded only to the daily exercise of power.
At the time of the interview I had not read Bogdanovich’s The Killing of the Unicorn. More to the point, neither had Hefner. I assume that his tone would have been very different — less spirited and aggrieved, more furtive and beleaguered. The Bogdanovich memoir is a labour of love, verging on a kind of sentimental mysticism, and its central accusation (that Hefner bears a measure of responsibility for Stratten’s death, not only metaphorically but directly too) carries more emotion than weight. Some unpleasant facts, however, are now on record; and one is less disturbed by the sexual delinquencies than by the corporation automatism, the com-mercialised unreality with which Playboy glosses everything it does. Expediency, double-think, self-interest posing as philanthropy — this is the Playboy philosophy, powder-puffed and airbrushed by all the doltish euphemism of conglomerate America.
You are an eighteen-year-old from some dismal ex-prairie state, a receptionist from Wyoming, or a local beauty queen – Miss Nowhere, Nebraska, perhaps. Your boyfriend’s salacious Polaroid suddenly transforms itself into a first-class air ticket to Los Angeles. Límoed to the Mansion guest-house, you are schooled by smiling PR girls, aides, secretaries. No outside boyfriends are allowed into the Mansion – and these are, indisputably, ‘healthy young girls’. Natural selection will decide whether you will be orgy-fodder, good for one of the gang, or whether you have what it takes to join the elite of Hefner’s ‘special ladies’. Signed up, set to work in the Playboy Club or on the promo or modelling circuits, you will find the divisions between public and private obligations hard to determine. You will also experience a wildly selective generosity, the also-rans routinely overworked and underpaid, the front-runners smothered in celebrity purchases — jewels, furs, paintings, cars, and what Californians call a ‘home’. If Hefner wants you to be a special lady then so does everyone else at the ranch. And when the call comes for you to join the boss in the inexorable Jacuzzi, it isn’t Hef on the line: it’s his night-time secretary — This process used to be called seigneurism. ‘Warm and caring’? Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
‘Without you’, Hefner once joked to a gaggle of Playmates, ‘I’d have a literary magazine.’ Yes, but what would he have without the literature? He’d have the Playboy Channel for one thing, and all the footling vapidity of unrelieved soft core. Sexcetera, Melody in Love, Pillow Previews, Alternative Lifestyle Features, ‘nudity’, ‘strong language’ and what are laughingly known as ‘mature situations’. Christ, a week of this and you’d be like Don the PR man … And so we leave him, strolling his games parlour (there are bedrooms in back), his paradise of pinball, Pepsi and pyjama-parties — the remorselessly, the indefinitely gratified self. It is in the very nature of such appetites that they will deride him in time. One wonders what will happen to the girls when they grow up. One wonders what will happen to Hefner, if he ever gives it a try.
Hef at seventy. Ner at ninety. Now wouldn’t that be something special?
Observer 1985
Paul Theroux’s Enthusiasms
‘I have always disliked being a man,’ writes Paul Theroux, in a brief essay called ‘Being a Man’. ‘The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion.’ Not only pitiful: also ‘stupid’, ‘unfeeling’, ‘right-wing’, ‘puritanical’, ‘cowardly’, ‘grotesque’, ‘primitive’, ‘hideous’, ‘crippling’ – and ‘a bore’, too, what’s more. Although there is some truth in these iterations, the adult male has no practicable alternative to being a man — certainly no cheap or painless one. But maybe Mr Theroux has found a way round being a man (I concluded, towards the end of this hefty selection of occasional pieces, Sunrise with Seamonsters). Being a boy!