Hugh Hefner Is More Ordinary Than You Think

It is about two in the afternoon at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, and Hugh Hefner is still in his pajamas for the very good reason that Hugh Hefner is always still in his pajamas.

He grew up in a middle-class suburb of Chicago at a time when the suburbs were mostly prairie — he is 84 — and he never abandoned the simple dreams of his adolescence: He would wake up late, he would wear his PJs and his bathrobe all day, he would drink Pepsis whenever he wanted to, and he would sleep with a lot of very beautiful women.

Go sue him.

He is a down-home, likeable and, in a sense, very ordinary person. In a different era, "playboys" were international jet-setters. They dated screen stars, played polo, drove race cars, skied, sailed yachts and were regular features at the parties of the rich and famous.

Hef likes to stay home. He has always liked to stay home. True, once he became rich, he made sure his homes were magnificent. The one in Los Angeles is a Gothic-Tudor castle on six acres. He donated the original Playboy Mansion on Chicago's near north side to the Art Institute for a dormitory when he abandoned the Midwest for the West Coast. But once inside his home, wherever it is, he doesn't really like to go out much.

In the era before VCRs and DVDs, he had a giant, professional movie projector set up in his Chicago mansion, and when the movies were done playing in the Loop each night, a projectionist would come up to his house and play them for him and his friends.

He almost never dated anybody famous — though a few became at least semi-famous after they dated him — and he didn't race cars or sail yachts or ski. He bought an enormous passenger jet and painted it black, except for the famous white bunny logo on the tail, but he hardly ever flew it anywhere except between Chicago and Los Angeles, where he taped a TV show called "Playboy After Dark."

"That's the reason that I got the Big Bunny, the black DC-9, the coolest private jet ever," Hefner once told a reporter. "Like a flying apartment."

Like a flying apartment. So he would never have to leave home.

When I went to Los Angeles to do political stories, I would try to stop by the mansion and talk to Hefner.

When I dropped by in 1988, he was watching an episode of "Murder, She Wrote" on his VCR, but he stopped the tape long enough for an interview.

I asked him when he began to really attract women, and his answer was so frank, I had to laugh.

"I had a dramatic change with women as soon as I started the magazine and I started dating the Playmates," he said. "By the '60s, I was wealthy. Bunnies were living in the house. I was a celebrity. And I realized that what I was as a senior in high school was a dress rehearsal for my later life."

What he was as a senior in high school was a boy in love.

"That summer, I fell head over heels for a girl," he said. "She was a jitterbugger, a bobby soxer. I learned to jitterbug with her. But she wanted me as a friend, not a boyfriend. The girl I really wanted wasn't interested in me."

The rest of his life became a search for that girl. Not a flashy screen siren. Not some famous rock star. Just the girl next door. Which is what his magazine was all about. (Assuming the girl next door was willing to take off her clothes in front of a photographer.)

After the Army (yep, Hef is a vet), and after the University of Illinois, Hefner got married, but it ended after 10 years. He did not marry again until 30 years later, after he began the magazine and had women running all over the mansion and was a celebrity.

His marriage to Kimberley Conrad, Miss January 1988, lasted 21 years, though there was an 11-year separation, Hef wanting to stay married for the sake of the couple's two young children. (He also has two children from his first marriage.)

Hefner got divorced in March of this year, and on Christmas Eve he got engaged to Crystal Harris, 23, Miss December 2009.

The media focused on the large age difference between the two — he was 60 when she was born — but few stopped to consider what to me was much more significant: Why does Hefner still bother with marriage? To many, especially celebrities, it has become a highly dispensable ceremony.

But not to Hef. Not to the boy who falls "head over heels." He has found his girl next door once again, and like the boys of times gone by, he intends to do the right thing by her.

Laugh if you will. But I say: Best wishes, you two crazy kids!

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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