Hef's Little Black Book Read Online Free PDF

You Wake Up
    For me, the most important room of the house has always been the bedroom. No surprise. It’s where you do your best work and play. At the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago, I had the rotating, vibrating bed. It managed to turn each of the four sides of the room into a different living experience. The joke at the time was that it spun at 78, 331/3, and 45 rpm like the old record players, which wasn’t true. But it permitted me to separately face the television area, the fireplace, the desktop headboard, or the dining area.
    The bed in Los Angeles is larger but more traditional in shape. It can easily accommodate twelve. And its special features can transform it into a little theater—with a wall-size television screen and a control panel that operates the lighting, curtains, drapes, music, and a projection system that includes videotape, DVD, laser, and satellite, cable, and regular TV. Your bed should be the center of the best part of your life.

    The truly best-laid plans: My Mansion West Bedroom.
    Whither the Bed of all Beds? Perfectly round, eight and a half feet in diameter, its rotations made it, well, revolutionary —going clockwise or counterclockwise at the twist of a dial in the headboard controls, purring softly, turning, turning—the laziest susan ever! Without moving an inch, he moved his Chicago bedroom, effectively subdividing a white-carpeted universe (remove shoes, please)—sectional permissiveness! “Hef—in a James Bond world,” wrote Tom Wolfe, who saw the Bed for exactly what it was: “the center of the world!”
    M oonlight Can Become You
    Working and playing all night has its advantages. I started doing it early on, before the Mansion, and learned something important about myself. I would come home at eight or nine in the morning and see people waiting to go to work, thinking how I would hate to be living that other life. I’d rather live by night and sleep during the day because all the good stuff happens at night .
    He lived for whenever, especially in the Chicago Mansion. Draped out and ignored, the sun never shone in the house. Time of day meant nothing there. He liked it that way, liked to stay up for days on end, editing, philosophizing, discoursing, loving, writing memos, playing games. (Forty-hour Pepsi-fueled, Dexedrine-enhanced backgammon or Monopoly marathons! A regular occurrence!) “The wee hours were the whee hours,” he said, “because while the rest of the world was asleep, romantic dreams were more likely to come true.” Thus, party nights became party mornings. Norman Mailer, who observed his share of such nights, wrote of one: “The party was very big, and it was a good party. The music went all the way down into the hour or two before breakfast, but no one saw the dawn come in, because the party was at Hugh Hefner’s house, which is one of the most extraordinary houses in America. I never saw the sky from that room, and so there was a timeless, spaceless sensation…. Timeless, spaceless, it was outward bound.”

    Often, at such parties, the host would never appear—he was Gatsby of Chicago in those days. Or he would appear briefly, then return to his chambers, with or without female accompaniment, to conduct the business of surveying corporate landscape and magazine layouts. He no longer went to the office; his bed was his twirling twenty-four-hour desktop, papers and printouts and color transparencies strewn everywhere. Riding the Bed in 1965, amid the clutter, he explained himself and his work habits to Tom Wolfe: “I don’t take calls anymore, I just return them. I don’t have any inboxes and out-boxes. I don’t have to arrange my life by other people’s hours. I don’t always have to be in some boring conference. I don’t have to go through business lunches and a lot of formalities. I don’t even shave if I don’t feel like it. I don’t have to get dressed. I don’t have to put on a shirt and a tie and a suit every day. I just put on a