My night with Hugh Hefner, the arthritic casanova

by Tanya Gold

Last updated at 09:05 25 May 2006

Hugh Hefner's 80th birthday party is in the Play Room club in London's Soho. It's the fourth party out of seven in the Playboy king's birthday tour of the world.

The invitation is black and glossy - it screams silk sheets, bachelor pads and fast cars - and features a picture of Mr Hefner in his 1960s prime staring naughtily at the camera, sucking on a pipe.

"Mr Hefner and his lovely girlfriends request your presence at this exclusive, private event," it says. "This is a rare opportunity to attend a Playboy party with Mr Hefner himself."

On my way to play I pass pink, stuffed flamingos, bouncers with Playboy lapel pins and a buffet of under-dressed Cybergirls - the British Playboy website pin-ups who stand grinning under the chandeliers. Flesh is currency here and Hef is clearly loaded.

Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra - the latter Hef's old friend, now singing in heaven - are playing, glasses of champagne whizz around, and everywhere I can hear murmuring - "Hef is coming"; "What is Hef like?"; "Hef is stuck in traffic".

'Who is Hef?'

I stop and stare at a portrait of Hef, styled like his hero James Bond. Who is Hef? Who is the Playboy of the Western World?

He was born in 1926 in Illinois during the Great Depression to a family of devout Methodists. His father was an accountant and his mother a farmer's daughter.

Hef has said he was never cuddled as a child but, from the age of 12, he wrote magazines in the back kitchen. He founded Playboy in 1953, with Marilyn Monroe as his first cover girl, and sounded one of the trumpets for the Permissive Revolution - free love, expensive drinks and arguing about politics in Jacuzzis.

The sayings of Hef include: "I played some significant part in changing the sexual values of my time"; "The rabbit symbol has been embraced by women as a form of their own personal sexual empowerment"; and "The major beneficiaries of the sexual revolution were women". He is twice married, twice divorced and has four children.

A PR girl steps forward to clarify some aspects of Playworld. "Hef has three girlfriends at the moment," she says, giving me a picture of three seemingly identical blonde women.

"That is Kendra, 20, the Sporty Spice of the group." She waves at one of the blondes. "She is into sports. Then there is Holly, 23, who lives with Hef in his room. She is the favourite and she shares his bedroom. Then there is Bridget, who is 31." The PR girl looks apologetic, as if embarrassed by Bridget's extreme elderliness.

"They all star in the reality TV show Girls At The Playboy Mansion and they'll be filming here tonight."

Ah, I understand. Hef isn't A living a life. Hef is living a reality TV show. She leads me to the VIP area - the set. "This," she says, "is Hef's area."

Hef's area is two zebra-striped couches, covered with Playboy cushions. On the table are Playboy glasses, Playboy napkins and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

As we stand and wait for Hef I meet Kate, 22, a Cybergirl from Cardiff. She is wearing a football strip and stilettos because, she explains, she is "a member of the Playboy World Football Team". Does she enjoy it?

"I love my job," she says. "It feels like one big party. And they take me away to lots of nice places."

Kate says she spent a week at the Playboy Mansion in LA, Hef's fake Tudor palace where he walks around in silk pyjamas, plots the growth of his empire and watches a lot of television. "The best moment," she says, "was going into the grotto (Hef's much-used hot

tub) knowing that so many iconic people had been in it."

'The perfect gentleman'

What is Hef like? Kate blinks her beautiful eyes. "Utterly welcoming and professional," she says. "Genuinely the perfect gentleman."

The crowd parts; Hef is here. The arthritic Casanova is rolling into his birthday party, accompanied by The Three Girlfriends, his brother Kief, who looks extraordinarily happy, and Joe, his bodyguard of 32 years.

"It's an adventure being Mr Hefner's bodyguard," Joe says as he organises getting Hef safely into his area. I imagine him picking women off Hef like flies off a steak. "Don't quote me," he adds.

The party sit down, Hef pours himself a drink and we crowd round and stare, taking pictures on our phones. At a Hef party, cameras outnumber people three-to-one.

I watch the girlfriends. The novelist Martin Amis went to the Playboy Mansion once. He saw the Playmates and gasped: "Compared to these girls, the ordinary woman looks lived-in and only half completed, eccentrically and interestingly human."

He's right: Kendra, Holly and Bridget are astonishing, and the men at Hef's party look stunned - as if the centrefolds they have dreamed of have walked off the page.

"The concept of these women is desirable," says Oliver, 29, gazing. "They exist to please men. But it is a fantasy. I'd want to be Hef for the weekend but not for a lifetime."

The party thickens. Hef gets up and starts dancing. It is a Sixties dance - legs bent and drawn together, fists clenched and jamming into the air.

The girls rise and dance, too, gently so as not to knock him down. Eventually Hef is in a girl sandwich. "Nice work if you can get it," sings the stereo. "You can get it if you try."

At last I am beckoned forward to meet the man. Hef doesn't rise, but he smiles and pats the empty seat beside him. I shake his hand and wonder where it's been.

The photographer comes to take our picture and the girls automatically move to face it - synthetic flowers drawn towards the light. After the photograph he indicates he will accept a question. I lean into him. He smells nice — reassuring, avuncular, rich.

"Er, what is the meaning of Playboy, Mr Hefner?" He cups his ear and strains towards me.

"What?" "What is the meaning of Playboy?" I'm shouting at Hef, who stares at an electric pink bunny on the wall as he ponders my question.

"The meaning of Playboy is," he clears his throat, "be liberated". Whispered in the Playroom Club under Piccadilly it sounds like an edict. "And hold on to your dreams."

I know I should ask him about his political campaigns (Playboy was anti-Vietnam, pro-abortion and anti-censorship). I know I should ask if, having had more than 1,000 lovers, he can even feel lust anymore (his PRs claim he uses Viagra and likes to have sex "every day").

Does he ever get tired of perfection and long for a dimpled buttock and a sagging breast, a brief break from glossy corporate sex?

But Hef is a bit deaf and I am a bit tired, so I merely ask: "Am I pretty enough to be a Playmate?"

He puts down his drink and appraises me."You have to do the test," he says. The test? "You take off all your clothes and we take your picture. Then we will know."

The bodyguard nods; my audience is over. I shake hands with the girlfriends; their manicures bite me. I wish him happy birthday, and many more to come, and walk away. I wander round the fantasy world. I pick up a copy of Playboy - they are lying on the tables - and see the naked girls. "Heather is working as a waitress while she earns her cosmetology licence," I learn.

Another Heather "grew up on a pig farm in Pennsylvania and can shovel manure with the best of them."

I talk to other guests about feminist politics and wonder who, if anyone, is being exploited here (the stuffed flamingos?) But mostly we watch. We watch Kendra and Bridget dancing - in orange and acid green, they look like a giant watermelon with four legs.

It isn't a birthday party, I decide. It's a television show to promote Hugh Hefner, Playboy. It's Mr Hefner's childhood dream, born in a kitchen in Chicago. Hef is, actually, in the end, exploiting himself.

As I see a couple kissing passionately (isn't that a bit monogamous for the Play Room?) I yearn to know what will happen to Playboy when Hef dies. (Hef won't mind dying; he has bought the burial plot next to Marilyn Monroe and will rot near to the ultimate blonde.)

Will another Playboy rise to take his place, or will the adolescent, Middle American dream of ever-willing girls and pain-free love die with him?

Hef gets up to leave; it's almost midnight. The girlfriends rise and they walk together out of the Play Room. "But if this ain't love," blares the stereo as Hef waves a final goodbye, "then why does it feel so good?"