Living The Wet Dream
Founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine Hugh Hefner looks back on a life less ordinary and explains how he’s really ‘a romantic’ at heart.

Quite frankly, I think I’m probably the luckiest guy in the world.”

At the ripe young age of 81, Hugh Marston Hefner, the founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, claims to be living the American dream. In actual fact, with a little help from Viagra, he’s living the American wet dream.

World famous, stinking rich and boasting a genius-level IQ of 152, Hefner (better known as ‘Hef’; though apparently his closest friends call him ‘Ner’) lives, works, parties and copulates in the Playboy Mansion West, a massive, 30-roomed, gothic-style castle on a beautifully manicured 5.7 acre estate in the most expensive part of Beverly Hills.

Rarely seen out of his trademark black silk pyjamas, Hef shares his home with three young and pretty girlfriends, Bridget, Holly and Kendra (the stars of the hit reality-TV series The Girls of the Playboy Mansion) and an ever-changing chorus-line of buxom Playboy Bunnies (all of the centrefolds for his magazine are shot on the property).

An army of 80 helpers – including butlers, security, chefs, zookeepers, landscapers and gardeners – cater to his every need and ensures that pretty much everything in Hef’s world is exactly as he would like it to be.

Hef’s estranged wife, Kimberly Conrad, and two teenage sons live in the house next door. Christie Hefner, his daughter from his first marriage, is CEO of Playboy Enterprises, and looks after her father’s vast business portfolio, leaving him free to pursue his own interests (namely sex, movies and more sex).

The man’s home is a castle. Michael Jackson had Neverland. A gentleman of rather different tastes, Hef exists in Alwaysland. If he doesn’t have something, chances are that that’s because he doesn’t want it. Needless to say, he rarely leaves the house.

“No, no, I do get out,” he tells me. “But it’s worth noting that this is an indoor/outdoor property.”

“If beauty is truth/and surgery the fountain of youth/What am I to do?/Have I got the gift to get me through/the gates of that Mansion?” – U2, ‘The Playboy Mansion’.

Getting though the gates of that mansion is no easy task. Hot Press first requested an audience with Hef – or Mr. Hefner, as his staff solemnly refer to him – several months ago. So began a long slow dance with his various PR departments.

First you talk to his people’s people’s people. When you’ve passed that audition, you talk to his people’s people. Finally, you talk to his people – who want to know, again, what’s your circulation, who the interviewer will be and who else you’ve interviewed. They want to see samples of the magazine.

Finally, if you pass all of the tests, you get to talk to his rock.

Hef’s rock is situated to the left of the massive gates to the Playboy Mansion. “State your business!” it barks, as my car purrs into its domain.

“I have a journalist here to interview Mr. Hefner,” the driver says.

“Name?”

“Oh-laugh Tie-ran-something. Em... from Ireland.”

“Please wait, sir,” the rock crackles.

As I wait, I flick idly through the most recent issue of Playboy. Miss September is a large-breasted, Brazilian-waxed, 26-year-old African-American named Patrice Hollis (whose ‘turn-offs’ include “bad breath, short guys, a bad attitude, cockiness”). Patrice is photographed in a variety of poses, ranging from wholesome girl next door to seductive vixen. However, compared to what’s out there today, there’s nothing lewd or vulgar about the nude images.

Of course, everybody reads this particular magazine for its articles and there’s no shortage of those. In amongst the regular columns and features, there’s a couple of lengthy pieces on college football and the adult voyeur website RedClouds, in-depth interviews with actors Clive Owen and Jaime Presley, and a short story by Tobias Wolff. Not bad value for $5.99.

A few minutes later, the rock speaks again. “Alright driver, here’s what’s gonna happen. In 30 seconds the gates will open, admitting you to the property. You’ll drive straight through to the front of the house. You’ll be met by security. Discharge Miss Tyran... em... Olaf at that location. Then continue through the arch, straight down for 100 metres to the far gates. You will leave the property immediately. Are we clear?”

“Yes sir,” says the driver.

As the gates slide open, a panicky thought occurs: did I only get this interview because Hef thinks I’m a girl?!

I’ve deliberately arrived half-an-hour early in the hope that I’ll either get more time with Hef or at least a decent tour of the grounds. As things work out, I get both.

A friendly PR girl named Teri Thomerson is waiting for me at the door of the house and she happily takes me on a walkabout. There’s much to see. We visit the zoo (mostly monkeys and peacocks), the aviary, the tennis courts, the koi pond, Hef’s Hollywood star (a replica, obviously), the forest.

We’re in adolescent fantasy land. The Game House is a small building, housing Playboy pinball machines, a pool table and an array of full-size arcade games (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger and Centipede). The luxurious trampoline carpet is about three inches deep and there are small bedrooms – designed to resemble the cabins of a ship – at the back. For those guests who wish to relive their teenage years, there’s even a small room modelled on the back of a van (complete with tacky mirrorball).

There’s a mocked-up giant-sized five-dollar bill with Hef at its centre displayed prominently on the main Game House wall. It was a gift from his former employers at Esquire magazine. Back in the early 1950s, Hef requested a $5 raise from his editors there. When they refused, he left and started his own magazine. Within less than a year, sales of Playboy had seriously outstripped Esquire. As one of the dismayed Esquire editors famously moaned at the time, “Hefner out-titted us.”

The Grotto is probably the most famous area of the mansion. Four separate hot tubs, a waterfall, a flotilla of blue inflatable dolphins bobbing in the turquoise pool. You stand under the hot Californian sun, look at it all and think, ‘Yes, I could probably force myself to live like this’.

Once the tour is concluded, we go into the Mansion itself. Teri takes me through the screening room (a serious movie buff, Hef screens old films every weekend) and leaves me in the library. The library sports leather couches, a double backgammon table, a large Renaissance-style portrait of Hef clutching a copy of Playboy, and numerous framed magazine covers from over the years.

The bookshelves are lined with a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica, numerous Playboy publications and an eclectic scattering of old hardbacks.

In the corner of the room, a beautiful young blonde in a tiny pair of white shorts is working away on a computer terminal. I make the mistake of politely asking her name and she shoots me a filthy look. Oops! This is Holly Madison, Hef’s ‘number one girlfriend’ and a bona fide celebrity in her own right. She’s obviously unimpressed that I failed to recognise her. I blame the clothes.

Within a couple of minutes Hef appears. In the flesh, he’s a short, moderately handsome, grey-haired man, and doesn’t look a day older than 69. Needless to say, he’s wearing black silk pyjamas and a velvet smoking jacket. All that’s missing is the bottle of Diet Pepsi (the pipe was abandoned years ago).

Hef is straight to business. He shakes my hand firmly and then throws his arm around my shoulder. A photographer materialises and takes two quick pictures. “There you go,” Hef says, patting me on the shoulder. “Proof!”

(A week or so later, a Playboy representative rang to apologise, saying the pictures hadn’t come out. I probably should have squatted down a bit).

We sit across from each other over the backgammon table and exchange pleasantries as I set up my recorder. Hef harrumphs a lot and makes various old man noises. I’d been warned that he’s slightly deaf.

“Have I ever been to Hawaii?” he asks, looking puzzled. “Oh, Ireland! Sorry, I misheard you. Em... no, I have not. But I’ve been invited to speak a few times at one of the universities there. And I know it took a long time for Playboy to be legal in Ireland. I was very aware of that.”

Apparently, on a per capita basis, Ireland is one of your biggest markets...

“Well, that’s what you get with a little repression (laughs). But I understand all that. My best buddies in both grade school and in high school were both Catholic and my first wife was Catholic so I understand. Repression comes in a lot of different bottles, but it’s all essentially the same brew.”

Born in Chicago in 1926, in fact Hefner knows all about repression. “I was raised in a typical Midwestern Methodist home with a lot of Puritan repression,” he explains. “There wasn’t much love and affection at home.”

An undistinguished student, more interested in socialising and drawing cartoons, he went to Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High School, and then served in the US Army during the closing months of WWII. Stationed by a typewriter, he served as an infantry clerk and didn’t see any combat.

After his service, he majored in psychology at the University of Illinois. There, he edited the college paper and also occasionally sold cartoons to magazines. In 1949, he took a course in women and gender studies, writing a paper examining US sex laws in light of the newly published Kinsey Institute research on male human sexuality (years later, he’d donate significant amounts of money to the Kinsey Institute). He says that the kernel of the idea for Playboy came to him around this time.

That same year, at the age of 23, he married fellow student Mildred Williams. Their marriage lasted 10 years and produced two children. Shortly before their wedding, Mildred admitted that she’d had an affair, something he described as “the most devastating moment of my life.” In an attempt to save the relationship, she gave him free rein to have one too.

Do you think that everything since then has been a reaction to that moment?

“Yes, yes I do,” he says. “But I’m fascinated with that. The reason that I majored in psychology in college is because I have always been fascinated with why people behave the way they do. But I think that I am now doing what I was ideally suited to do, and I’m also doing what other guys would kill for! So I bless and am grateful for some of the conflicts and problems that actually took me in this particular direction.

“I mean, if my parents had not been very conservative and religious and had given me a lot of love and affection, where would I be? I think that, sometimes, the problems take you to a better place.”

But you’ve known heartache?

“Yeah, sure.”

Good! Serves you right, you jammy bastard!

He doesn’t look amused. “I don’t make any joke about it. I wouldn’t trade places with anybody in the world. I’m not a fatalist, but I do think that I’m doing what I was meant to do. There’s certainly nothing else I would rather be doing.”

In the first years of his marriage, Hefner supported his family by producing cartoons and working first in the subscription department and then as a copywriter for Esquire. Denied that infamous $5 raise, he decided to quit and start up his own men’s magazine.

He raised a bank loan of $600 (using his furniture as collateral) and managed to persuade 45 different investors to come up with another $7,400. Surprisingly, his conservative and religious mother gave him $1,000.

“She never really fully understood the magazine,” he says. “It’s interesting, as a matter of fact, when I was looking for money to start the magazine in 1953, I went to my family and tried to get a loan or an investment – and my father said no because he didn’t think it was a good investment. It was my mother who took me aside and said that she had some money of her own, and she gave me a cheque for $1,000. The company launched with a total investment of $8,000 – a thousand from her and a thousand from my brother were the largest investments that I got. So even though she didn’t really believe in the magazine, she believed in her son.

“And my dad later on came to work for me – he was a certified public accountant, so he came to work for me and became the treasurer of the company. And when my father passed away, I learned to my very pleasant surprise that he had – because they’d wound up with a fair amount of money because they’d invested in Playboy – left the Playboy Foundation a third of his estate. Which was very nice.”

The first issue of Playboy was put together on the kitchen table of Hef’s cramped Chicago apartment. He’d originally planned on naming his new magazine Stag Party, but he was forced to change it when Stag magazine objected. A friend suggested Playboy as a title and a bunny as a logo (because rabbits have a lot of sex).

Unable to afford to pay anybody to take their clothes off, he instead bought some old shots of Marilyn Monroe (“with nothing on but the radio,” as she later quipped) taken a few years before she became famous.

Did he ever actually meet Monroe?

“No,” he sighs. “My brother was actually in her acting class – Lee Strasberg’s acting class – in New York. But sadly she died before I got a chance to meet her.”

Maybe they’ll meet in the afterlife. Somewhat eerily, Hef has already bought the crypt beside the LA grave of his first ever centrefold star and plans to be buried there at Pierce Bros Westwood Memorial Park. “We’re going to spend eternity together,” he smiles.

You wouldn’t prefer to be buried on the grounds of the Mansion?

“Well, in addition to Marilyn, several other very dear friends are buried there, and the cemetery is very close by here.”

The first issue of Playboy was published in December 1953. He didn’t put a date on the cover. “Because I literally only had enough money for the first issue, I figured I’d leave that out.”

His so-called ‘Playboy Philosophy’ was explained in his first editorial. Although he was still married, it was basically a call to arms for independent young bachelors. “We like our apartment,” he wrote. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

A totally new kind of men’s magazine, Playboy was an instant success, selling more than 50,000 issues. “It far surpassed my wildest expectations,” he says, happily. “I wouldn’t be here today if that issue hadn’t sold so well.”

So the book My Struggle by Hugh Hefner would be fairly short?

“Yes, yes,” he chuckles, amusedly. “Volume one, issue one... end of story.

So it hasn’t really been a roller-coaster, has it? You took off and simply kept going up!

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” he laughs. “We’re on a real ride again but, you know, there were periods. We have never really played on a level playing field. In other words, [Playboy in] America continues to be in some quarters controversial in ways that it isn’t in much of the rest of the world. We don’t get the same kind of newsstand display, or the same kind of advertising, that we enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s. There was a backlash, and that backlash was particularly evident in the 1980s and much of the 1990s.”

Was that AIDS-related?

“No, I don’t think so. I think it simply had to do with the moral majority and the Christian Right connecting to some extent with the anti-sexual part of the women’s movement. In other words, the fact that it arrived at the same time as AIDS in the 1980s is just a coincidence.

“AIDS didn’t get Ronald Reagan elected. Reagan put in the Meese Commission at the Justice Department and all of that happened because Reagan was elected by, in part, the moral majority and the Christian Right. And that was, politically, a conservative backlash to the freedom and the move to the left that occurred in the latter part of the 1960s and the 1970s. You get that conservative backlash. And from that point on, religion – or at least the right-wing portion of it – has been very organised in this country and played a very real part in politics.”

Are you religious yourself?

“No. Spiritual. But I think we live in a world that none of us really fully understands and we try to make as much sense of it as we can.”

Do you believe in a God?

“Not a Biblical God. But I don’t think we know what this is all about. But you’re asking am I an atheist? No. Because you look at all of this [gestures out the window]. Some of my most religious or spiritual moments, quite frankly, come from walking in the back gardens with the animals and the trees, etc. I mean, to just look at the very nature of Nature. It’s all too awe-inspiring to not feel as if there’s something. But then to codify it and turn it into children’s stories to some extent diminishes the wonder of what it’s all about. One hopes that at some time somewhere in the future we will know, but certainly at this point I don’t think we do know.”

Flush from the success of Playboy’s first issue, Hef immediately hired staff and commissioned some original nude photographs. The second issue sold even better. The third sold better again. Within 12 months, he’d made the first of the many millions to come.

However, he wanted to produce something better than just a mere wank mag. In 1956, looking to raise the tone, Hefner hired Auguste Comte Spectorsky, an East Coast sophisticate, as his editorial director. Spectorsky brought in fiction from the likes of Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac and the like. Playboy quickly became far more than soft porn, even if the depth was lost on most readers. Indeed, if you took the girls out of the picture (which was, of course, unthinkable), it was essentially a literary magazine.

Did you ever meet Kerouac?

“No. We published several pieces of his – both fiction and non-fiction – in the Fifties. But I don’t think our paths crossed.”

How about Nabokov?

“We’ve corresponded, but I don’t think I’ve ever met him. When you’re talking about famous people, sometimes you’re not quite sure whether you’ve really met ‘em or not. But we’ve definitely corresponded. Nabokov wrote a number of pieces for us. He was a butterfly collector and he once, in a letter to me, drew a butterfly that looked like the Playboy rabbit at the end of one of his letters.”

Hef tells me that F. Scott Fitzgerald was his hero growing up. Did he ever think of writing fiction himself?

“That’s the road untravelled,” he sighs. “When I was in high school, even in late grade school, I created a lot of comic books and wrote a lot of short stories – most of them mystery stories and horror, etc. But it’s the same thing as with the cartooning – because at one point I wanted to be a cartoonist – I think that the magazine and the editing of the magazine supplied that need, and I am better as an editor than I would be as either a cartoonist or a writer.”

Have you ever published any of your own cartoons in the magazine?

“Yes, at the very beginning. But then I stopped buying my stuff because it wasn’t good enough. (Laughs)”

By the beginning of the 1960s, Playboy was growing at a phenomenal rate, selling more than a million issues per month. With very deep pockets, Hef quickly began to build up an empire – and, following his amicable divorce from Mildred, a very public image as the most envied bachelor in America.

He hosted a popular syndicated TV show called Playboy’s Penthouse, purchased the first Playboy Mansion in Chicago (he didn’t move to California until 1975) and opened the first Playboy Club.

The Sixties were extremely profitable for that decade’s biggest swinger. By 1971, when Playboy Enterprises went public, the magazine was selling a phenomenal seven million copies a month. There were 23 Playboy Clubs, resorts, hotels and casinos with more than 900,000 members worldwide. The company’s assets included book publishing, merchandising, a modelling agency, a limousine service, a record label, and a TV and motion picture company.

Hef acquired a jet – a black McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30, which he called the Big Bunny – and used it to travel the world. Undoubtedly, he soon became a member of the Mile High Club. Reputed to be involved with an average of 11 of each year’s centrefolds, he was having a lot of sex. While he has admitted to experimenting with bisexuality around this time, he slept mainly with women.

What’s the longest period of celibacy you’ve had?

“My marriage, I guess. (Laughs) The only time that I wasn’t getting a lot of sex was when I was married. An experience a lot of us could identify with.”

As a fully qualified sexpert, what would be his recommendation for the most fulfilling kind of sex?

Hef straightens up in his seat and smiles coyly. “Well, I think there are many roads to Mecca. I think that it depends on what your particular dreams are. Most of it comes from early childhood. You know, I think your love maps are drawn from very early experiences and fantasies. And then you play them out for the rest of your life.”

And what are yours?

“Most of mine, quite frankly, being raised in a very typical conservative home with a lot of repression, I think that most of mine came from the movies. The movies and the music of my childhood. I was born in 1926 so I grew up during the Great Depression and the early part of World War II. It was a very romantic time. And I think that’s essentially who I am. I’m a romantic at heart. Romance in terms of both boy meets girl, but also the adventure of the romance, like in those wonderful musicals.”

Or boy meets girls. . .

“Yeah, that’s right,” he chuckles.

Have you ever tried cyber-sex?

“Nah. I think that cyber-sex is for people who don’t have the real thing. But I think the variations on the theme are expanding and that’s a good thing. To some extent they’ve always been there in one form or another, but now it’s not so hidden and I think that’s positive.”

Although he’s now in his 80s, with three stunning girlfriends on call and the help of a little blue pill, Hef claims to enjoy sex as much as ever. He probably just doesn’t have it as much as he used to.

Has your lifestyle slowed?

“Well, I’m down to three girlfriends – I had seven about four years ago. But I’ve slowed down naturally in terms of, you know, the passing of the years, but also I’m in a different place just in terms of my head now. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was workaholic time. Then I had a stroke in the 1980s.”

Which you later called “a stroke of luck”...

“It was, because I used it in a very positive way. Although I also think that that was the reason I got married again. The second marriage was prompted by, at that point, feeling my years and seeking a safe harbour.”

By the 1970s, largely thanks to Playboy, the sexual floodgates had opened and numerous other ‘one-handed’ magazines started to appear, most notably Larry Flynt’s Hustler. However, Hef refused to lower to the challenge by going pink (showing the girls’ vaginas) and kept his publication reasonably decent. Playboy’s Bunnies were naked, as ever, but their legs remained closed.

“That just wasn’t the road I wanted to travel,” he explains. “I was not trying to create a sex magazine. There had been lots of publications before Playboy that included sexual content. What I was trying to do was create a magazine that gave sex a good name and had something positive to say about sexuality. And simply making the magazine more explicit wasn’t going to solve that.

“What surprised me, quite frankly, after more than half-a-century, is that even the nudity in Playboy is still as controversial in America as it used to be. And that is one of the things that limits us to some extent in terms of the advertising that we get and the distribution that we get.”

Today, Playboy sells about three million copies a month – not bad when you consider the competition posed by the Internet and the vast array of other men’s magazines out there.

How involved is Hef now in the day-to-day running of the magazine?

“Well, we have offices in both Chicago and New York. But I’m still very much hands-on in terms of the general layout of the magazine.”

Needless to say, Hef’s hands are on more than just that...

“I approve all the covers, approve all the Playmates, all the pictorials. I pick all the cartoons, do the party jokes, approve the letters. So I have a continuing influence. For the last couple of hours before you arrived, I’ve been in telephonic connection with my editors on various things for the magazine.”

Is that what keeps you sharp?

“I think it helps, yeah. I think that one of the things that keeps me young and vital is the work – keeping your mind busy and doing what you love.”

Throughout the conversation, Hef regularly slips into corporate speak: “The magazine and the brand represent a certain kind of lifestyle that I think is the future and something I think is very important.”

Of course, not everybody was delighted with Playboy’s phenomenal success. The feminist Gloria Steinem (who once went undercover as a Bunny and wrote a scathing report) has commented: “There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”

It was a spectacularly stupid statement and not one that Hef paid much heed to. An unashamed libertarian, he’s been attacked from all fronts numerous times over the years and has always given as good as he got.

“I was arrested once – over pictures of Jayne Mansfield,” he says. “But that wasn’t really what it was all about. What lay behind it was the fact that I was editorialising against the Chicago police and the Mayor’s office because they had arrested Lenny Bruce. So I was giving them a bad time, so they decided to come around and give me a bad time.

“All the problems and the conflicts, etc., are also why I’m still in the centre of the storm after all these years. One would not expect, having had such success in the ‘50s and ‘60s, to still have it going in such a remarkable way – and for the brand to be so hot again after all these years.”

Of course, while Hef has generally kept his nose clean, there have been various Playboy-related scandals and tragedies over the years. In the 1970s, his private secretary Bobbie Arnstein committed suicide after involving Playboy in a drug scandal. In 1980, the Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten, was brutally murdered by her rejected husband. Most recently, former Playmate Anne Nicole Smith died following an overdose.

“I wouldn’t say we were close, but obviously we cared about her,” Hef sighs. “She was really a curiosity. A girl who came from a very ordinary Texas background and caught the fancy of the media. It’s very difficult to define what celebrity is about today. I mean, you can be a celebrity by simply showing up on television a few times and getting the fancy of the tabloids, etc. But she was definitely one of the Playmates who’ll be remembered.”

When’s the last time Hef shed a tear?

“Shed a tear? The last time I saw a sentimental movie. I’m a very sentimental person. I wear my emotions on my sleeve – proudly so – and I think that’s the way it oughta be.”

Presumably, a few tears were shed when his second marriage broke up. In 1989, Hef got married again, having proposed to Kimberly Conrad (Playmate of the Year 1989) at the Mansion. This union produced two sons, but the couple separated in 1998. He says that the break-up initially got him out of the house a bit more.

“At the end of my marriage in ‘98, I did start simply going out to clubs, etc. In the last few months I’ve backed off a little bit from that, starting to take it a little bit easier, but it’s easy to do because I’m busy doing the TV show (The Girls of the Playboy Mansion) and I’ve got the girlfriends here. Most of what I’m looking for is already here.”

He tells me that he’s been a Democrat for longer than he can remember. “My folks were Republican, so I was a Democrat from when I was a little kid and couldn’t even vote. (Laughs)”

What’s Hef’s take on President George W. Bush?

“He’s not my president. This is a very sad period in American history. Again it’s the moral majority and Christian Right thing – and we got it in spades with Bush. I mean, Bush is a more extreme version of his father and of Reagan. By contrast, both Bush Sr. and Reagan were very good presidents.”

Have you met many presidents?

“I’ve met a few,” he shrugs. “Carter, and Hillary and her husband. Hillary isn’t the President yet, but her husband.”

Who do you support for the next Presidency?

“Well, I’ve given money to both Hillary and to Obama. So we’ll support the Democratic ticket.”

Do you support the troops in Iraq?

“I support the troops, but I don’t support the fact that they’re there.”

What do you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger?

“He’s a very good governor. He’s a friend, too. In his early days here in Hollywood, he used to hang out in the Mansion.”

Did you ever have any interest getting involved in politics yourself?

He erupts into laughter. “People have asked me that question and the reality is that I would never trade my life for that life! I mean, you’d just have to be doing a whole lot of things you wouldn’t want to be doing, that’s all. To spend all your time shaking hands with people you don’t want to shake hands with – no. I get involved in politics in a second-hand way by trying to do what I can to get the right people elected, but I would never want to be a candidate.”

In fairness, he has better things to be doing. When he’s not having sex or conducting important Playboy business, Hef spends a lot of his spare time watching movies. Movies are Hef's first love and he’s got a library of over 4,000 films to prove it. He’s been involved in various movie productions over the years – including bankrolling Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and Monty Python’s first film And Now for Something Completely Different. In 1980, he earned his Hollywood star on the Walk of Fame for his efforts in getting the iconic Hollywood sign repaired. A few months ago, it was announced that Brian Grazier is to make a film of Hef’s life.

Who’s playing him?

“I’ve suggested the possibility of Hugh Jackman, but I don’t know. I’m excited about it. I really love the movies – the old ones especially, but I watch the new stuff too. We watched a really hilarious film last Sunday, a surprise hit, an English film called Death At A Funeral – outrageous and very funny and I recommend it. But my own special favourites are the old classic films. Casablanca is my favourite film because it touches all the buttons. It has patriotism and unrequited love and humour and a great song.”

At the age of 81, he may be slowing down but, following a slow ‘80s and ‘90s, his Playboy empire is beginning to expand again. Last year they opened a new casino in Las Vegas. Is Hef a gambler?

“No, because I see the advantage of being the house. There’s a reason why Las Vegas has all those big luxurious hotels. They are built on the money of the people who are losing at the tables. We were in gambling with great success from 1965/66 on. We had a casino in London and then wound up with several more in London and around England throughout the latter ‘60s and ‘70s and into the early ‘80s.

“We had to get out of the business in England because things got really conservative there. But we’re back into it again now with the Palms in Las Vegas and we’ve a few other things – including England – under negotiation.”

What ambitions does he now have?

“To continue to live as long as I can, and continue doing what I’m doing now, and savour the enjoyment of it all. I’m in a wonderful personal relationship, the brand is hot again [raps knuckle off table]. My mother lived to 101. If you want to live a long time, the first thing you do is pick your parents well.”

In terms of staying alive, does he keep an eye on genetic research or investigate new medical techniques?

“No, nothing special. Just take care of myself, get regular physical check-ups. I take blood pressure medicine and take care of myself.”

What’s been his proudest moment?

“Proudest? Well, the thing that I’m proudest of – it’s not a moment, but the thing that I’m proudest of is that I feel as if I’ve had some positive impact on the changing social-sexual values of our time. That’s certainly what I take the greatest pride in.”

Any words of advice to young people?

“What I’ve always said is that I’m a dreamer. There are a lot of pressures as you’re growing up – peer pressures, family, society – that urge compromise, and I think we’re here for a just a short period of time, and whatever one’s particular dreams and aspirations are, I think that’s the route you’ve got to take. Because life is short.”

As he shakes my hand and gets up to leave (presumably to go and have sex with Holly, Bridget or Kendra – or possibly Holly, Bridget and Kendra), he has one final thing to say. “I know I’m living out a lot of other guys’ fantasies. But what you need to understand is that I’m living out my own as well. That’s really what it’s all about.”

And with that, Hef is gone. Nice fellow. Fair fucks to him!