His trademark is one of the most recognizable in the world, his pajama parties infamous. Now Hugh Hefner, 80, is basking in the glow of his No.1-rated reality show Girls Next Door on E! as he prepares to launch the first Playboy Club in 25 years. He took a moment from his work (and play) to chat with TIME’s Clayton Neuman about relationships, growing up Puritan, and (what else?) sex.
TIME: Tell me about the club that’s opening this week at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.
Hefner: Well, it is the return of the bunnies. It is the first club/casino since the early 1980s, and it comes at a time in which the Playboy brand is very hot again. I think the clubs were popular against all odds for a quarter of a century, and the whole nightclub phenomenon ran its course. When the 1980s turned conservative politically and sexually with Reagan in the White House and the arrival of AIDS, I think there was a backlash to the social-sexual change that took place in the latter part of the ’60s and the ’70s. So I think it was a more conservative time. I think in the last half-dozen years the brand itself, both in America and globally, has become very hot again — I think there’s a fascination with things retro that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago.
TIME: You recently told the Australian press how much you wanted Nicole Kidman to be in Playboy.
Hefner: [laughs]. That was them. Every time I do an interview somebody says, “Who would you most like to have in the magazine?” And then they insert it for me. But of course I would like to see her in the magazine. I would like anybody in the magazine that our readers would most like to see. I think it’s a remarkable thing over the years — it’s been 50-plus years now for the magazine — the number of major sex celebrities who have both appeared in the magazine or become sex celebrities through the magazine. It is a great satisfaction to me to have had such an influence, and from my perspective a positive influence, on changing social-sexual values. It’s what makes life worthwhile. I’m a lucky cat, I know it.
TIME: What has surprised you most about the way Playboy has evolved over the past 50 years?
Hefner: What happened, and I couldn’t have imagined it, but in the last half-dozen years, the brand has become on a global level hugely popular with women as well as men. I think what you’re getting now is an entire generation of young women in a post-feminist era in which the Playboy brand back in the 1970s was perceived in some quarters as chauvinist, is now viewed as a form of empowerment for young women, which was unthinkable for me 20 years ago. Needless to say I think that is wonderful because I always from the very beginning felt that the sexual revolution was for everybody and that women were the major beneficiaries of it because women traditionally were kept in a sexual bondage by our historical attitudes.
TIME: Speaking of historical attitudes, weren’t you raised Puritan? Hefner: I was raised in a very typical Midwestern Methodist Puritan home. My Puritan roots go back ten generations to William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower. One remembers H. L. Mencken’s observation that a Puritan is someone who is very upset because someone, somewhere, is having a good time. And that is as American as apple pie. That is who we are — we still have problems with nudity, we still have problems with sexuality, we’re fascinated with all of that, but there’s a guilt and shame connected to it. And no question I think that the magazine comes directly out of that, and the rest of my life is a response and reaction — and some might suggest an overreaction — to that repression. There was a point in my middle years when my mother tried to apologize for not being able to show more affection when we were growing up, and I said, “Mom, you couldn’t have done anything any better.”
TIME:Your personal relationships get a lot of attention, especially now that you’re into the second season of your reality show, Girls Next Door.
Hefner: I’ve noticed that. When reality shows became popular, a lot of people came to us and wanted us to do one because of the fascination and curiosity about life at the mansion. And I was reluctant to do that. But when [the producer] came up with the idea of doing the show focused on the girls, I thought that was an inspired idea because it took the pressure off of me, because unlike a lot of the people who do reality shows, I have a real life. I’m a busy guy.
TIME: Would you have agreed to do it if you still had seven girlfriends?
Hefner: Not those seven. That would have been a very different show. I downsized intentionally because there was a lot of conflict going on. I was married and faithful through that marriage for eight and a half years, and when that didn’t work out, I came out of it kind of emotionally beat up and bruised, and probably the multiple girlfriends was a reaction — or overreaction — to that. But I must say that it is easier for me to handle the three girlfriends than it was the one wife. One would think there would be some rivalries but there really isn’t. All three are very happy to be here.
TIME: Izabella St. James, one of your former girlfriends, recently wrote a pretty accusatory tell-all autobiography. How did you react?
Hefner: Izabella was a girlfriend for two years — she was one of the seven. But I think my life has always been to some extent an open book, with illustrations. So I don’t have a lot of secrets. Of course I’ve got mixed feelings, but whatever. After a relationship, some people get on with their lives, some people write books.
TIME: You once quoted Woody Allen saying “Marriage is the death of hope.” Then you went and got married again. Why? Hefner: I guess I still had some hope. I think I tried it a second time because I’d had the stroke in the mid-1980s and I was feeling my years and my mortality, and I think that I sought it as kind of a safe harbor. And I worked very hard at it, and I was faithful to it. The fact that it didn’t work had to do with the relationship and her own insecurities, et cetera. I think there are simply many roads to Mecca, many ways of living your life morally and ethically, and when I was married I was faithful to it, but at the same time I have to be honest and say I’m happier now.
TIME: How do you deal with your mortality now?
Hefner: For whatever combination of reasons, I feel much healthier and younger now — having celebrated my 80th birthday, I feel younger than I did 20 years ago. My head is just in a better place. I don’t think a great deal about death any more.
TIME: Now that there are so many alternatives out there, do you still consider Viagra the wonder drug?
Hefner: Certainly for me. I think that there are other brands, but Viagra works for me. There are moments in time at any age when one wishes that one was performing better than they might be, and I think the drug knocks down the wall between expectation and reality. This is the best legal recreational drug out there for guys. It liberates guys in a certain sense as the birth control pill did for women.
TIME: How often are you really in your pajamas?
Hefner: I’m sitting in them right now. I’m sitting in my bed wearing black pajamas. It’s a big occasion when I put on pants — only when the occasion calls for it, and that’s usually when we’re going out to a club.
TIME: I wouldn’t peg your music tastes to something you might hear at a club.
Hefner: Well, when we’re going to the clubs of course we’re dancing to hip-hop and punk. As for my own personal taste I’m still a jazz-oriented guy — I was born in 1926, the first half of the century, which was a romantic time and very jazz-oriented, so I still play a lot of that music at the mansion.
TIME: And in the bedroom?
Hefner: In the bedroom, usually it’s more contemporary. I think I’d need the girls to start reeling off the titles of them, though. They blur together.
TIME: Can I come to the mansion?
Hefner: Possibly. Do a good piece and you’ll get an invitation.
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