NUDE GHOSTS

There's nobody home at the Chicago Playboy Mansion

NOBODY’S home at Hef s. His Chicago pad is empty, all seventy-four rooms. No groovy naked chicks. No hip dudesicles in Nehru jackets. No Brubeck on the hi-fi. No Hef. The original Playboy Mansion, at 1340 North State Parkway, is Desolationville. A guy named Marv, who’s the electrician there, lets me in one day and tells me the place is for sale. “Mr. Hefner doesn’t live here anymore.” Marv shrugs. “In the past ten years, he’s been back maybe once. He likes it better in California. So they’re looking to sell.” How much, I ask. Two and a half mil, says Marv. Not nearly enough, Isay.

I mean, this house is history. We are talking about the premiere Hacienda del Swing. We are talking about what lust mongers long considered The Place to Be. Where It All Happens. The Great Indoors. This is where Hugh Hefner became Hugh Hefner. Home of the circular, rotating bed and the swimming pool teeming with nubile bods; home of the subterranean bowling alley and the brass fire pole that Bunnies caressingly slid down. Hef—a cat and his pajamas—turned his legendary libido loose here and set out to free his countrypersons from puritanical slavery by editing a fat magazine. This is where he tried to invent the sexual revolution in the sixties while chugging thirty bottles of Pepsi-Cola a day. His biological clock went haywire here: days began late in the afternoon and waned when the unhip were arriving at their offices in the morning. No sun shone at the Mansion. Hef wouldn’t allow it. Drapes hung over drapes. Nights never ended.

Marv walks me through the house, reputedly built by a gynecologist at the turn of the century. Hugh Hefner moved in about sixty years later. On the second floor, above the wellstocked game room and the pool, a virginal white door bears a brass plaque which reads, si NON OSCILLAS, NOLI TINTINNARE (Latin for “If You Don’t Swing, Don’t Ring”). Beyond the white door, Hefner’s ballroom is dank and dead. Paintings by Picasso and Pollock and de Kooning keep it company. Dustcovers swaddle leather furniture. “This room used to jump,” Marv mutters, flapping his arms. “He knew how to have the parties.”

Everybody came to Hef’s. He was Jay Gatsby in bad velour shirts. He was Dionysus with a pipe. He liked to hang out with celebrities; celebrities didn’t mind. Those who rang and perhaps swung: Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, William F. Buckley, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., Johnny Carson, Masters and Johnson, Tiny Tim. And so on. Norman Mailer said the house was “a spaceship wandering down the galaxy along a night whose duration was a year.” He once threatened to punch out Budd Schulberg in a Mansion bathroom. Jesse Jackson, a frequent houseguest, is said to have been so inspired by life at Hefner’ s that he decided to name his operation PUSH .

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A chintzy buffet table now covers Hefner’s fifteen-footlong stereo console in the ballroom. The system was once considered state-of-the-art in hissless bliss. Now it’s a dinosaur. “What a piece of shit,” a Playboy editor chuckled to me recently. Stereos are serious business for Playboy editors. People say Materialism is Hefner’s middle name; it’s really Marston. But why quibble? Hefner liked having stuff and still does, at Playboy Mansion West, in Holmby Hills. ‘ ‘The sad thing is,” laments the editor, “today anybody can be Hugh Hefner. ’ ’

I walk into the record library. More than one thousand LP’s line the shelves, each section labeled with names of artists: Sammy Davis, Jr., Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett, Sonny and Cher, the Four Freshmen, Julius Monk, Gene Krupa, the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. “Everybody thinks Mr. Hefner listened to jazz day and night, ’ ’ Marv offers, “but the truth is, he preferred the Jackie Gleason records to any of them. He played those all the day. Romantic stuff, you know.”

Tom Wolfe christened the house Lollygag Heaven. Snoops prowled the premises hunting erotica; few ever found it. Dick Cavett told me, “When I first visited during the sixties, I couldn’t wait to get down to the pool because of all those photographs of parties with naked Bunnies. When I went down there, I heard heavy breathing coming from the steam room. I stealthily crept in, and there, naked, was Norman Mailer. Alone. ” Others had better luck. According to one tale, Hefner was once showing historian Max Lerner around the place when he pulled open a trapdoor in the ballroom floor. Below, in a secluded alcove of the pool known as the Woo Grotto, a highly placed Playboy executive was reportedly receiving oral gratification from a chlorinated Playmate. Hef, appalled, profusely apologized to Lerner, who must have wondered what America’s foremost pomographer was so embarrassed about.

The Bed, perfectly round, remains in Hefner’s private quarters, which are virtually sealed off from the rest of the house. It is the vanquished epicenter of the Playboy Mansion, The Bed, its owner’s most revered gadget. Here, one learns, is where scores of Miss Januaries and Miss Septembers and Miss Decembers contorted with Hefner—often at the same time. Marv folds down a leather portion of the wraparound headboard and twists a few knobs inside. There is a soft grinding purr, and The Bed starts to spin. Hef enjoyed telling visitors that his giant platter could rotate at three speeds—33 ½, 45. and 78 r.p.m. “It vibrates too,” Marv tells me. I nod and look up at the Advent movie screen on the ceiling.

The place seems to await Hefner, though most of his lieutenants are certain he’ll never return. And yet. . .1 slide open a wooden panel in the headboard of his Bed and see six full bottles of Johnson’s baby oil. I peek into his closet and find twentysix pairs of shoes, mostly black loafers; all of them appear to be new. Monogrammed slippers clutter the floor, and a half-dozen grotesquely colored paisley shirts hang on a rack above. Bowls full of fresh pipes are scattered around his lair. And squat refrigerators, strategically positioned at every ten paces, contain small bottles of the master’s preferred nectar, Pepsi. I fish one out; it feels warm and looks flat. Surely, this must mean something.

Bill Zehme