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Hef’s House Explained
    Playboy cartoon, 1970: A man has clambered to a mountain peak to beg wisdom from a cross-legged guru. Guru tells man: “In a place called Chicago…there’s a man who lives in a mansion full of beautiful women and wears pajamas all the time. Sit at his feet and learn from him, for he has found the secret of true happiness.”
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    Pallor—however defiant, however triumphant—will wear upon a man’s soul, alas. The Great Indoors, the Pneumatic Era, the Chicago Hermitage eventually began to fatigue its chief proponent; he needed fresh air; he took flight. On the Big Bunny, his glorious jet-black DC-9, he flew west, to Los Angeles, birthplace of his formative Hollywood dreams, where show business wanted his business more than ever. He flew there and flew there until a house was found to keep him there. Paradise found: January 1971. Barbi saw it first and advised him of it; besotted by the splendor, he bought it in February. A baronial Tudor manor perched atop the greenest of slopes, set on five and a half acres of what would become his Eden—this was his Hollywood sequel: “A new Playboy Mansion for a new decade,” he would say, “interconnected to nature as the Chicago Mansion couldnever be. I had found the place where I would live out my life, and do my best to create a heaven on earth.”
    Playboy Mansion West would forever be the prettier sister, the sun-drenched blonde versus the dusky brunette, appropriately curvier of terrain, and what foliage! Heaven could only hope. Here, in this soft crook of Charing Cross Road—pristine epicenter of Holmby Hills—he would design his Shangri-la from scratch, take a great barren backyard (save for Southern California’s only stand of redwoods) and install an oasis, verdant and wet. Like a Midas possessed, he oversaw all minutiae: “Where the hell are my lily pads?” he famously inquired at one early juncture. Soon the property that had come sans pool had its own lagoon, with waterfalls spilling over a Grotto of steaming whirlpools beside koi ponds set in rolling lawns on which flamingos mingled with peacocks, cranes with ducks, a llama nibbled flowers, and—poetically—rabbits ruled. Wildlife flourished, but so too did the Wild Life, amongst and betwixt consenting adults—and this, of course, is what gave the lay of the land, if you will, its legacy.
    Naturally, then, the libertine seventies found their test laboratory at Mansion West: Monkeys swung in the trees, but humans swung everywhere else. Hef had arranged the accommodations—even the Game House had mirrored love nooks. Meanwhile, his own Master Bed West, not round but extra vast, with nude nymphs carved in oak relief, with automated movable curtains and mirrors andheadboard—he would ride the box springs therein like a sultan on his magic carpet!

    My Shangri-la in the Land of Dreams: Playboy Mansion West.
    Still, no setting lured besporting events like the Grotto. Four Jacuzzis burbled within, so as to tenderize moments most tender, amid boulders and candlelight. “If those rocks could talk…” He would often muse and tantalize at once. (To finish the sentence might have finished careers.) But it is fair to say that those rocks have seen most everything and everyone (celebrity-wise) making waves, usually without clothes. Of course, there was the night of Hef’s fifty-eighth birthday, on which eighteen beautiful naked women waited in his Grotto to fete him, and him alone, as speakers hidden in the rocks blared “To All the Girls I Loved Before”—the popular song that had been officially dedicated to him alone.
    As he would say then and ever, “Just another typical day at the Mansion…”
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    The mansion West Toast to male Camaraderie
    As coined for special occasions of fraternization by grateful Mansion habitué and Hef friend actor Robert Culp: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, be of good cheer, for they are out there, and we are in here!”
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    T he Center of the World Is Where