LOS ANGELES _ Years ago, I pulled into a long driveway in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, then stopped in front of an imposing wrought-iron gate. I had been directed to announce myself to a large boulder on my left, which I did. The gates swung open.
Suddenly, I was outside the storied Playboy Mansion, a beautiful stone chateau that had become synonymous with orgiastic bacchanals (is that redundant?) tossed by its owner, Hugh Hefner, who died Wednesday at 91. Those parties _ decorated by scantily clad young women _ were rites of passage for scores of horny Hollywood types and professional athletes.
As I parked, I realized something was not quite right. A bright plastic baby swing hung from a graceful tree near the mansion's imposing front door. Children's toys were scattered about. Hefner was married _ to Kimberly Conrad, a former Playmate of the Year. Their son, Marston, was a toddler.
People magazine had treated their 1989 marriage as a modern-day miracle: "Next week, Hell freezes over," it declared.
After Hefner's brief foray into domesticity, he reverted to his former sexual libertinism. He was frequently photographed with an evolving trio of buxom blonde young women. I'm sure there's nothing sexier than being treated interchangeably by a man who has got at least half a century on you.
Hefner married again, in 2012, to a woman 60 years his junior, who has now become his widow.
Anyway, I'd come to the mansion to interview Wendy Hamilton, a 23-year-old from Detroit who had been selected to be Playboy magazine's Miss December 1991. I was told by the magazine people that I was the first reporter they'd ever allowed to witness a centerfold shoot, which I had done some days earlier in the studios of the Playboy building on Sunset Boulevard.
It was the least sexy photo shoot I'd ever seen, but it was the culmination of a girlhood dream for Hamilton. When she was 10, she saw her father's Playboy centerfold calendar in the garage and solemnly told him, "One day, Daddy, I am gonna be one of those girls."
Who knows how many other little girls were infected by the idea that taking off their clothes for men would be the pinnacle of achievement?
