Grubby reality inside Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion

Behind the glamorous fantasy of the Playboy Mansion was a grubby reality. Hef, once so much his own man, was a man owned.

Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, where he once locked himself up for two years.

Hugh Hefner, who died last week at 91, invited Camilla Long to the Playboy Mansion in 2011. Behind the glamorous fantasy of “sexual revolution” she found a grubby reality.

They warned me he was old. But, my God, nobody told me Hugh Hefner could barely get up. On a low chair in the yellow gloaming of his oak-panelled study, Hefner is staring intently at the ceiling, and not in a good way. “Aaaah,” he groans loudly. Apparently he ricked his lower back during a four-person orgy in the early 1980s and has been chaise-longue-avoidant ever since. Even when he proposed to his girlfriend, Crystal Harris, 60 years his junior, he had to do it standing up. “’Cos I didn’t know I’d be able to get up from one knee,” he rasps.

So now here he is, the Norma Desmond of sex, limp as a battery hen in silk pyjamas and velvet slippers, unable to rise, unable to hear - I am given strict instructions to bark questions such as “How often do you have sex?” into his left ear - and largely unable to see, if the rest of the house is anything to go by.

The study, a musty, gussety fumoir lined with desiccated Playboys and pictures of bright-pink nipples, has barely changed since Hef moved here in 1971. Behind the sofa, there’s a painted bust of Barbi Benton, a Playmate of that era, showing off Toby-jug tits. Photographers always ask for the bust to be moved, although Hef seems to think this is because they are prudes rather than because Barbi is pure visual napalm.

“We’ve gotten more hypocritical, more politically correct,” he huffs, crabbing his way to the sofa, where an intercom, once undoubtedly pounded for “mooore condoms”, now lies sad, silent, almost soulful. Hefner himself is small, gaunt, his robe as red as Las Vegas nursing-home curtains.

Hefner in his “musty” mansion.

For years the Playboy Mansion has been little more than a porno Disney, where the original playboy picks Playmates and charges for entry. Next door, the screening room lies quiet and sticky with drink - or is it drool?

In the Shrekky Great Hall, to which he still theatrically descends every day at about noon, soft toys gather dust. Beyond, there’s the lawn, more than five acres of green Beverly Hills cleavage, and, of course, the grotto, once the font of all conquests, now a tepid Petri dish of unspeakable liquors, where later a 24-year-old Playmate with a lipsticked cold sore will primly assure me the water is changed “all the time”. She did come down here once, though, and catch three people making out, she says, pointing to a frayed gym mat. Has she made out with Hef? “Gosh, no,” she gasps.

But then, what did I expect? Like everything here, Miss September 2009 is mere hired bap, paid to give tours, pose for pictures, flesh out parties. Guests at Hef’s famous New Year’s Eve party pay upwards of $US5,000 to attend. The mansion isn’t even his, but is rented from the shareholders for more than dollars 1m a year, “something like $25,000 a month for his room, and $10,000 per girlfriend”, says a former girlfriend, Izabella St James.

The main reason the house is so tatty is that dogs roam free and “renewals have to be approved”. So the carpets are pissed on; the zoo is scabby. Hef, once so much his own man, is now a man owned.

Actually, Hefner goes to comical lengths to persuade me his relationship with Crystal is based on magic, or at least some kind of unique mental connection.

Dropping his voice to a treacly whirr, he talks tenderly about the moment they met, at the Playboy Halloween party in 2008; how he proposed on Christmas Eve with a huge 3-carat-plus diamond hidden in a musical box in the shape of the Disney character Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Crystal’s favourite film; and how they are marrying, he whispers, “because I think she loves me”. [They married in December 2012, though she had jilted him five days before their planned wedding in June 2011. She signed an “iron-clad” prenuptial agreement.]

Hefner in 2006 with then girlfriends Bridget Marquardt (L) and Holly Madison (R).

Hef has always been big on “romance” - or, as you and I might put it, fromage. There is something disturbingly infantile about his fascination with big breasts, toys and good manners. In his study a model plane is stuck at a permanently priapic angle. In fact the entire study seems fake, as if he’s now only playing at being a playboy.

Crystal, by contrast, is largely absent: but for a few hard-eyed snaps on his desk, the aspiring singer and model could easily not exist. St James is convinced Crystal - a former actress who was “conceived in England”, Hefner says, twice, with off-putting precision - is nothing more than “an ambitious woman riding the wave of fame and money. I don’t have any reason to believe she really cares for him. But he knows that unless he puts a ring on her finger, she’ll go.”

Hef has also had his reservations: not that she’ll leave, exactly; more a mystical, elegiac concern about something he calls “romantic continuity”, the fear that, as Woody Allen says, “marriage is the death of hope”. Then he says firmly: “Not that I subscribe to Woody Allen.”

Apparently he is still reeling from his two marriages, the first to Mildred Williams, which ended in 1959, the second to a former Playmate, Kimberley Conrad. The latter was the “love of my life”, he says, but the marriage was a disaster. They were together 10 years - he even managed to remain faithful - but “I don’t think I ever knew the girl, do you know?” He sighs dramatically; waits for an answer; doesn’t get one; ploughs on. “But I don’t regret it, in that I got two wonderful children.”

The infamous pool and grotto at Hefner’s Holmby Hills Playboy Mansion. “A tepid Petri dish of unspeakable liquors”.

He has four in all: Christie and David from his marriage to Williams, and Marston and Cooper with Conrad. Until recently Kimberley lived next door in a smaller version of the mansion; although he had promised her she would be able to live there for ever, he had to go back on his word and sell it.

And though he claims that shipping in a lorryload of trashy blondes when they split up in 1999 was the only way to numb “the hurt and disappointment after that marriage”, the girlfriends have turned out to be a brilliant publicity stunt.

Hef has always loved blondes: Playboy’s first cover, in late 1953, was - famously - Marilyn Monroe. The obsession, he claims, stems from a pre-teen fixation with the starlets of his youth, although I fail to see quite what the grotesque Miss December 2010, spread out on his backgammon table right now, has in common with the shimmering lustre of, say, Jean Harlow.

A sour, suck-face blonde in ski wear, Kendra Wilkinson has squeezy-cheese hair and a light ginger pubic arrangement more suited to an Aberdeen whorehouse than the pages of a magazine that once ran pieces by Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ian Fleming.

Yet she is one of the most wildly successful of all his recent former girlfriends: after she and Hefner split up in 2008, she got her own reality-TV show, married a sport star and had babies. Certainly there is a blunt determination to her that matches Hefner’s own clinical approach.

He used to have seven girlfriends, he says, but had to “thin the herd” down to Wilkinson, Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt, later stars of the reality-TV series The Girls Next Door, after catfighting left him exhausted. “Seven was too many,” he groans. “But I have a big bed!”

Hefner leapt on any innuendo “with demonic hunger, like a kind of sexual metal detector.”

Hef’s sudden filthy asides are one of his least cosy attributes. One minute he’s all rock pools and mermaids; the next it’s old Mr Sticky Fingers. Posing quietly for a photograph with me, he asks whether “it’s polite” that he should be sitting when I am standing; not out of courtesy, as it turns out, but because “otherwise”, he bellows to the entire crew, “I’ll be staring at her tits!”.

Then he laughs like a donkey. And when I edge onto the topic of sex, he instantly suggests: “You’re looking for an invitation, aren’t you?” before telling me my notes “will get soggy” in the Jacuzzi.

In fact, he leaps on any innuendo with demonic hunger, like a kind of sexual metal detector, always on the prowl for a pulse. He loves telling me the greatest number of people he’s slept with at the same time is 12 - so much for the special emotional connection he keeps going on about - and makes it clear if he weren’t settling down with Crystal, he’d happily have a crack at her best friend, Anna.

So why is he settling down with Crystal? Out of pity, hilariously, “because she, you know, deserves it”, he chortles. “She deserves to be my widow.”

So this is the last time he’ll be getting married?

“Eh?” he taps his ear.

“Is this the last time you’ll be getting married?”

“Yes, definitely,” he nods.

St James agrees he has a rather conflicted approach to relationships: “He has all these romantic notions of love, and then he has seven girlfriends and just puts on the porno. Call me cynical, but I don’t think that’s very romantic.”

In fact, few aspects of Hef’s life are terribly romantic. The arrangement he has with his girlfriends cannot be much more than a bald financial exchange: in return for attending parties and performing sexual favours, they get a place to stay, free plastic surgery and a $1,000-a-week “clothing allowance”. (Why do they even need clothes?)

He is very keen on rules and regulations: when St James lived at the mansion, girlfriends had to be home by 9pm. Twice a week they would go out for dinner: slow, stately excursions enlivened by drink and drugs. Hef hates travelling, hates “adventure”, hates leaving the house; even at the height of his influence, he maintained an eccentric level of self-containment, once staying indoors, lights low, for two whole years.

The lobby of Playboy Mansion.

Most of these quirks can probably be blamed on his childhood as the repressed elder son of Methodists. He only drank Pepsi. Even his sex life is by the yard: he always had a tiresomely repetitive agenda when it came to women, but this has now extended to sex on appointed evenings, “about twice a week”, he says.

He’ll crunch down a Viagra, then “the girls do most of the work”. What does he do? He looks unsure. “I’ll . . . pitch in.”

Actually, what usually happens is that Hef will go out for dinner, try to slip a pill about midnight, then race back to the mansion to fling himself on a rubber mat before the effects wear off. According to St James, he’ll have sex with several of them and then watch porno and girls making out with each other.

Do they have to have sex with him? Obviously, Hef’s line here is, if they’re not in the mood “we’ll watch a movie instead”, but past girlfriends have commented on how frosty he gets if anyone keeps her pyjama bottoms on too long. Strange that someone so keen on freedom of expression should be so dogmatic. Does he ever feel he’s being unreasonable?

For a moment, Hefner’s lizardine exterior shifts. The girls put out, he explains, because his celebrity intoxicates them. He is “iconic”. Not just famous; iconic. If he had been this famous and playing the field “20, 30” years ago, he would have cleaned up. “A certain type of celebrity trumps everything else,” he says. “Besides,” and an edge creeps into his voice here, “I worked hard to get here and, if there’s a reward, I deserve it.”

Unsurprisingly, Hefner is horrified by the faintest suggestion that his girlfriends - women who essentially sleep with him for clothes and noses - have anything remotely in common with prostitutes. He doesn’t disapprove of prostitution, exactly - at its best, it can be a kind of chic leisure activity: “You know, having sex a couple of times a week [for money] is probably more fun than working in an office nine to five” - but for his own personal taste, “the freebies are better. And I’m not just looking for sex. I’m looking for some kind of emotional thing.”

Admittedly, he is not entirely deluded: the girls are fond of him for his achievements. But his moment is far past. His attitude to sex and seduction is terminally old-fashioned; when I ask him what kind of pornography he watches, he looks momentarily startled, says: “No ponies”, but obviously that’s all there is on the internet these days.

He only continues, says St James, out of concern for his legacy. “He really wants to die that way. Like, wow, he lived and died like the ultimate playboy.”

And what will heaven look like? Hefner spreads his arms.

- The Times