Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.latimes.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Hugh Hefner: The Taming of a Playboy Movies: Documentary details the life of the Playboy magazine Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 06:17:07 EST Message-ID: HEADLINE: Hugh Hefner: The Taming of a Playboy Movies: Documentary details the life of the Playboy magazine Publication Date: Wednesday November 11, 1992 BYLINE: CHRIS WILLMAN "I love a happy ending," says the man in pajamas, fairly beaming. This is the sentimentalist Hef talking, and the bedtime fairy tale in question is his own story, as flatteringly framed in the very respectful documentary "Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time," which has just finished unspooling in the private screening room of the Playboy Mansion. The lights have come up and there suddenly is the man himself beside you on the plush leather couch, extending a friendly hand, introducing himself by the world's most recognized single-syllable nickname. The climax of the movie (which opens Friday at the UA Coronet) leaves us off literally where we are right now, in a legendary house of hedonism that has lately been transformed into a family-values kind of place, thanks to the presence upstairs of a wife and two infant sons. Matching children's car seats are perched on the stone benches on either side of the front door, and for the home transportation needs of the pre-school set, there is a Little Tikes red go-cart in the foyer. Which doesn't mean that the nude Matisse or the weirdly erotic Dali ("Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity") hanging nearby have been taken down, or that the tasteful topless print of Mom (1989 Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad Hefner) in the exercise-area bathroom has been removed. Having led the charge of the sexual revolution, Hef is happily redefining himself, at 66, as the faithful head of a nuclear household, an irony he appreciates as much as any of his detractors. But don't try to turn it around on him. Feminists, fundamentalists and other nemeses of the Playboy founder might wish the documentary, co-produced and directed by Robert Heath, were framed less in terms of a fairy tale than tragedy, in which an admitted philanderer's conversion to the virtues of fidelity late in life might constitute a last-minute act of repentance. But Hefner, looking back with satisfaction in his reflective "September years," by no means disavows his premarital misadventures. "I think that it's possible to be moral and sleep with a lot of people, and that it's possible to be immoral and sleep with one person," Hefner says, steadfastly declining to declare his current chosen monogamy in any way ethically superior to his previous incarnation as the premier playboy. "It's possible to be immoral in marriage and moral out of marriage. Those aren't the real questions. The real moral questions are how you treat people, whether you really do exploit them." Having supplied eloquent apologetics for sexual liberation most of his life, Hefner has quick answers at the ready for those who would assert that, yes, he does exploit those young ladies who've graced his fold-out pages over four decades: "When you take a photograph with a person with their clothes off and you call that exploitation, when you give it a negative label, you've turned it into some kind of political symbol. But it can only change the perception. If you do that with your sexual imagery in a society, then you begin to support the guilts that we feel about our sexuality, about our bodies." And what of those Play-naysayers who don't necessarily object to nudity, but purport that Hefner's idealization of bodily perfection has created a standard of female beauty that few can ever hope to live up to, with or without surgery? "Well, what can one say to that? You're gonna stop emphasizing the beautiful? You might as well say, 'Gee, Sports Illustrated is really a prejudiced book because they only run pictures of really good athletes, and I can't run that fast.' Are we gonna start supporting the notion that ugliness and averageness are to be deemed the most acceptable? "I think the bottom line of all this," he elaborates, "is that you need beauty and dreams--erotic and other--to make life worthwhile. You need those magic, bigger-than-life, more-beautiful-than-life images and ideas to make your daily life worth living . . . And it is out of the dreams that the most magic and wonderful things happen." Having been at work on an autobiography for seven years, Hef is prepared to wax Freudian on the subject of Hef with the best of 'em. He says his primary influences were his "puritanical" mother on one side and the escapist allure of romantic fantasy films and pop music on the other. "Much of my life has been like an adolescent dream of an adult life," he says. "If you were still a boy, in almost a Peter Pan kind of way, and could have just the perfect life that you wanted to have, that's the life I invented for myself . . . . "I was raised in a very conservative, repressed home--not just sexual repression, but the inability to show love in any kind of physical or emotional way. And I think that much of my life has been an overreaction to that. And I've tried to express some of that to my mother. (She turns 97 this month.) I've tried to say, 'Look, Mom, whatever you didn't do right, thanks, because it could hardly have worked out any better,' " Hefner says with a hearty laugh. So does he actually believe that he might have actually gone a little too far in this boy's dream of a life? "Of course. A guy who spends his life chasing girls? Of course. But it's not the worst way to spend your life. I think that most things are accomplished by obsessions. . . . "I think that the emotional needs and the quest for love in one form or another were the driving forces of my life . . . And I think the need to somehow explain it is probably what the Playboy Philosophy is all about. That's the Puritan part of me . . . The documentary is another chapter in that ongoing apologia. "Once Upon a Time" grew out of an episode of the "American Chronicles" series that David Lynch and Mark Frost did for Fox; Hefner decided to expand it into a feature. Though not technically a Playboy production, Hefner worked closely with the filmmakers. Despite the warts-and-all parts, it's very clearly an authorized version. Reviews in cities where it's played have been mixed. Fellow Chicago natives Siskel & Ebert both gave the film their thumbs-up, while the more skeptical New York Times found it "more vanity production than fairy tale . . . but still perversely interesting." "Really, in one sense, it's an autobiographical film," says Hefner, explaining the movie's sympathetic viewpoint. "It's a genre somewhere in-between. It's very clearly my life as perceived through my eyes and through eyes that view the life in terms that are similar to mine." Even Hefner's detractors wouldn't argue with his assertions that he and his empire have changed the fabric of American society as we know it. The differences are all in the spin. "Today it's possible for young people to grow up and not feel as if they have to get married right away. They can be nice, good kids, and if they feel it's appropriate they can live with one another and find out if they really care for one another before making the commitment of having children and (messing) up their lives. When I was growing up, that was not an option, and any sex that existed was very furtive. We paid a heavy price for that. Playboy has played a major role in changing those values . . . . "Playboy in the '50s was sort of a secret club. It was a place where you felt as if there was a connection, where somebody was speaking in a voice you believed in and understood. There was really nothing else out there back then. It was all McCarthyism time, togetherness time, PG time." Assessing current climes is a tougher gig. "We live in a country that believes that sex is the one area of human expression and behavior that isn't protected by the Constitution. They make one exception, and it's just the way the courts have interpreted it. We define obscenity as explicit images or ideas related to only one part of human behavior: sex. You grow up in that kind of society and it seems, 'Well, that's the way it ought to be.' But if you really think about it, it's a bizarre way for it to be." American sexual battles aside, there's a whole new front behind the former Iron Curtain. Playboy is racing into these newly open territories right alongside the other Western missionaries. "There's so many other parts of the world like what we were in the '50s. We're actually opening a factory in China right now to take care of the demand for Playboy products. And it is not a coincidence that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia, the first magazines published in Poland and Czechoslovakia were Playboy. "Because for the rest of the world, Playboy represents personal freedom and economic freedom, and they see those two as indivisible--part and parcel of the whole enchilada. It isn't just the sexual freedom part of it, but all those ads represent that good life, the American dream that they aspire to." Hefner is content to watch most of these skirmishes from the sidelines nowadays. He rarely leaves his six-acre Holmby Hills estate. That would seem to have little to do with any lingering effects from his 1985 stroke; he seems sharper than ever. Rather than a fingernail-growing, glove-wearing Howard Hughes type, he's better characterized as the lifelong evangelist for the pleasures of the good life, luxuriating in the fact that the good life will come to him. "It was one of the things I said back in the '60s when I was working at home and had all the gadgetry there: 'I'm living an upscale version of what a lot of people will be doing in the future.' " In the documentary, the domesticated Hefner confesses to missing the "good old days" when Playmates and stars ran wild. The swimming-pool grotto stands empty most days now, populated only by ghosts of orgies past. There are no bunnies in bustiers prowling the premises now. "No, you see bunnies, but they're little furry ones and they jump around," he quips. (The back yard is literally a zoo.) "You know, the bunny thing--this is almost like an Orson Welles, 'Citizen Kane' Rosebud thing. When I was a kid, I had a happiness and security blanket that was my favorite thing, and it had little bunnies on it. I was sick with a mastoid operation, and after I got well my parents gave me a dog, and I put the blanket in the box with the dog because I loved the dog so much, but he was sick and died of some kind of disease. So they had to burn the blanket. Now you can almost get this silly image of looking at the furnace, seeing that bunny blanket burning up, and the kid goes on and creates a bunny empire . . . " Rosebunny? This article is copyright 1992 The Los Angeles Times Home Edition. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM