Hugh Hefner: Interview

Before I spoke with Hugh Hefner for this week’s Sex Issue, I mentioned the interview to a friend, a longtime Playboy reader. He said he’s always thought that Hefner in interview mode comes across as somewhat blithely unassailable: I’m Hugh Hefner—you know, the luckiest bastard alive.

Which, as it turned out, was pretty much his answer to the first question in our Q&A.

But that was just one impression I had of Hefner when he called from the Playboy Mansion—and, frankly, it’s one he seems to cultivate. As indicated by the following excerpt (not in the published interview), Hefner’s keenly aware of the link between his persona and his product. Yet behind the laid-back, world-at-my-fingertips Hef, he of a rotating cast of platinum-blond girlfriends, there's also, clearly, a fiercely driven businessman, who, even at age 83, has both hands deep in the workings of his almost-5060-year-old, Chicago-based publication.

Talking with Hefner, one gets the sense that some of his responses come straight off a script he’s thoroughly edited over years of describing himself and his work. Author Steven Watts makes a similar observation in last year's biography, Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. (Interestingly, the story of self-reinvention that Hefner tells of himself—“There was a moment in time in which I reinvented myself,” he told me. “It was 1959. I came out from behind the desk and started living the life and became, in effect, Mr. Playboy”—sounds pretty similar to the narrative Watts writes.)

Hefner didn’t seem to just read from script, however. The man I spoke to was lively, quick-minded, quick to laugh and—“for the luckiest guy on the planet”—impressively engaged.

An excerpt not in this week’s published Q&A:

TOC: How has sex changed for you?

HH: You have the usual aches and pains you didn’t have when you were younger. When my second marriage failed, I discovered a generation waiting for me to come out and play. The magazine, obviously, like a lot of other magazines, is going through its difficult times, and the company is, too, but the brand is more popular today than at any other time, and part of that has to do with my reemergence.

TOC: You mention the magazine’s troubles. One question asked of Playboy is, can it survive in the age of free digital porn?

HH: I don’t think Playboy and porn have a great deal to do with one another. The brand has continued to be so popular because it’s something more. It is a lifestyle concept that represents personal, political and economic freedom, and it represents that now to both sexes.

TOC: Do you still pick all the Playmates yourself?

HH: Yes, still pick the covers, still pick the Playmates. The home base is still Chicago, but I have contact with my editors every day.

TOC: Do you have an all-time favorite Playmate?

HH: Marilyn Monroe, without question.

TOC: The very first one.

HH: It all began there.

TOC: Do you feel you’ve always been trying to get back to that, or to her?

HH: I wouldn’t say get back to her, but you certainly can see in my own personal tastes that since the end of the marriage I’ve been in very much a blond period, and that hearkens back to the blonds that were popular in the movies when I was growing up. That was obviously epitomized by Marilyn Monroe.

TOC: Is it true you have a plot next to hers?

HH: Absolutely true. The Westwood Cemetery is just a few blocks from my home, and a number of my very dear friends are buried there.

TOC: About ten years ago, you said you’d won the war and the parade after the war and it’s nice to have lived long enough to see that.

HH: Yes, true. George Will walked in at the beginning of an interview and said, “Well, you’ve won.” He was referring obviously to the changing social-sexual values.

TOC: Has sexuality in America changed since then?

HH: I don’t think there’s been a lot of change in the last ten years. The sexual revolution arrived in the middle ’60s, celebrated itself to great excess in the 1970s, and then there was a backlash in the 1980s with the arrival of Reagan in the White House, the Religious Right very much engaged in politics for the first time, the Meese Commission and AIDS. We live in far more liberated times, but the battle goes on. There are still mixed feelings related to images of the nude body.

TOC: Such as?

HH: Well, there is less distribution of Playboy magazine today, and that started in the 1980s with the Meese Commission and the 7-11 stores and threats from the Justice Department and the first references to Playboy in any mainstream way as pornography. And that backlash still impacts distribution and advertising so that there have been instances where an airline stewardess would come up to a reader, male or female, in an airline and tell the reader to put the magazine away, it would offend some people.

Read the published Q&A here.