The Boss of Taste City

The American boy lies, on his left side, dreaming.

Someday, when I have enough money, I am going to have a house with a massage room, a steam room, a bar, and a bedroom big enough for two 7075. The floor will be covered with a white rug four inches thick, with a polar-bear skin near the hifi. And the bed, oh, maneroonian, the bed will be adequate for an exhibition match between the Green Bay Packers and the Los Angeles Rams.

Downstairsville, there is a two-story, chandeliered, oak-paneled living room with teakwood floors and a trap door through which you can drop twelve feet into a kidney-shaped indoor pool. "That," I'll tell my visitors, "is where we throw the old, discarded girls." At the end of the pool is a waterfall, and you can swim through it twosies into a dark, warm grotto which has wide ledges at the sides, softened with plastic-cover-ed cushions.

The preposterous dream has materialized in a $400,000 Victorian house on Chicago's North State Street, complete from the half-acre bed to the woo grotto. No wonder its owner says "Life is beautiful." He is Hugh Marston Hefner, 34, editor and publisher of Playboy Magazine, a sort of editorial whee, whose candy castle--aswarm with Playboy's celebrated center-spread Playmates--symbolizes the expansion of his young empire into show business. Scarcely a year in operation, Hefner's members-only Playboy key club has become the largest employer of entertainment talent in Chicago and is the prototype of more girl-filled clubs to follow in virtually every major city in the country. Moreover, Hefner has just announced that in the fall he will start publishing a new biweekly magazine called Show Business Illustrated. "Like Playboy, it will offer status, romance, and girls--all that a guy works for in our society." Will S.B.I, be collecting plenty of sex? Down, playboy. "If girls were the only motivation for buying our magazines," says Hefner, "they wouldn't sell. People would buy sheer smut. We, on the other hand, are Taste City." Fundamental Things. Taste City has many flavors, and they can all be savored at Hefner's Playboy Club. All the customers have membership keys, the closest thing to a Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, and no one except an occasional sick accountant seems to notice that all this costs $50 a key and $1.50 a drink. The place is aquiver with girls dressed as rabbits, the subtle symbol of Playboy. They wear more or less what field rabbits wear, and they have what Chicago businessmen call "majestic mezzanines." When an expense account walks in, a coney comes up to him and says: "Good evening. I'm Barbara. I'm your bunny." But is she really? No, she is really Hefner's. All bunnies--many of whom have appeared in the magazine--are absolutely forbidden to date the customers.

However, says Hefner, "that does not hold true for the boss." What the customer gets is good entertainment. Also, according to Hefner, he gets status--merely by being there. "Few status symbols are left in the world," he says. "Sure, these are material things, but awfully fundamental, and the sort of things that made this country prosper." Common Stock. Hefner, at any rate, has prospered. A Chicago accountant's son, he is a graduate of the University of Illinois, did free-lance cartooning and whetted his appetites on Esquire's staff before starting Playboy (now worth more than $10 million) with roughly 10,000 borrowed dollars. In seven years, he has shot past Esquire (Playboy's circulation is 1,100,000, Esquire's 859,000). Hefner's enterprises now push sterling silver Playboy cufflinks with bunnies on them, Playboy party kits, three Playboy-produced jazz LP albums, a weekly syndicated television show, and a new Playboy Travel Service, set up to run coeducational tours abroad that "will include all those things that the hip guy wants to see: bullfights, sports-car rallies--but no bunnies." Somehow, it has occurred to Hefner that he is the Tony Curtis of publishing and he has arranged for Curtis to do the Hugh Hefner story on film. Moving by Cadillac limousine or Mercedes-Benz 300 SL between his office and the house that flesh built, Hefner is actually a living promotion stunt, the most conspicuous playboy of the Middle-Western world.

He has five servants who, in shifts, work 24 hours a day, sometimes dusting a framed share of Esquire common stock on his bathroom wall, over a sign that says: "In Case of Emergency, Break Glass." As a precaution, he will set up a nationwide modeling school and agency, which will serve as a vast bunny farm. Having put a wife and two children behind him (he was divorced two years ago), Hefner claims that he would make himself "take a sanity test" if he should contemplate marriage again. Instead, he loves his work. "My doctor says I do it 'with a bright flame,' " he boasts. Needless to say, he has never had a vacation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.