Hugh Hefner liked to be known as ‘Hef’. The first thing he did when I interviewed him in early May 2011 was to correct me on his name. It came out like a soft bark – "people call me Heeefffæ" – and coughed. It was a warm opener, although the rest of the interview, which took place at a glacial place on speakerphone, took four times as long as it should have.
At the time, Hef was sat on a leather chair in the study of the Playboy Mansion with his assistant, 82-year-old Mary O’Connor, sat beside him. Hef was practically deaf in his right ear by then and O’Connor, who died two years after we spoke, had to repeat every question at least once. I could hear the squeak of leather under his silk dressing gown when he moved on the chair, and occasionally, what sounded like a peacock singing outside in the grounds.
Truth be told, Hefner had been reluctant about our interview from the off. He had been “stung” (the word I think he used), by an interview with another journalist from a rival paper who “just brought her preconceptions on the plane and thrust them onto me. There’s nothing you can do about people like that”. Although a seasoned interviewee, at peace with his legacy and unfazed by anyone who thought he was the “Antichrist”, which of course, back in the day, they did – Hef bandied these sentiments around with sadness. “Men project their fantasies onto me, they live them through who they think I am”, he said.
My first thoughts were that Hef was a dichotomy. Here was a handsome boy from the American Midwest who borrowed $600 and started the most famous men’s magazine in the world, yet seemed oddly surprised at the way it and he were received by Fifties America. Still, he was under no illusion as to what he had built. Hef peddled smut – these words were often used to describe what Playboy was - but he also used his power to become a key figure in the fight for liberal causes such as racial equality, sexual and social reform, and published some of the best and least publishable fiction of our time. When I asked him if he was a feminist he said, “a humanist with some feminist sensibilities.”
Halfway through the interview, Hef said something along the lines of “Playboy was not a sex magazine. Sex was just part of the total package”. It was a line he had certainly rolled out to other journalists before, but there was no doubt he was immensely proud of Playboy’s approach to publishing. He mentioned Charles Beaumont’s story, The Crooked Man, about straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm, and Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Farenheit 451, which he serialised. (At one time, Playboy read like a Booker Prize who’s who: Margaret Atwood had several stories published, Roald Dahl wrote one for it, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Haruki Murakami, the list was endless). He campaigned for widespread condom distribution, for the abortion rights of women, and then there was his extensive work as a civil rights campaigner. A friend reminded me of the time Hefner tricked the founder of the American Nazi Party into being interviewed by a black journalist, an incredible feat. He was also the first person to feature women of colour in mainstream pornography, a spurious, if legitimate, victory. He was also the only man in LA to have a domestic zoo licence.
For the most part, Hef was very gentle, sensitive even, about his work, and what he had created. We had a slightly spiky back and forth over the use of the word pornographer, about censorship and whether Playboy’s success was ever founded on guilt-free sexual celebration (it wasn’t) but otherwise, it was all very pleasant. He became notably buoyant when we talked about women, which we didn’t as much as one might think, although that whole aspect felt slightly performative. It was as if he expected it and was simply playing the role of ‘Hef’ for me. I think he believed in love and married for love. I might be wrong, but he seemed too smart to do otherwise.
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