Thy Neighbor's Wife (56 page)

After a midnight supper, which had been carried on silver trays by butlers into the game room—and had been served on the glass tops of the pinball machines that Hefner and some of his guests continued to play while eating—the group drifted down to the underwater bar for drinks, swimming, and conversation. Hefner stayed close to Karen; and gradually the other people, sensing that he wanted privacy, left the two of them alone. It had been after one o’clock when they arrived, and three hours later they were still there, sitting together and talking softly at a small table under the hazy blue-green light glowing through the pool. He seemed avidly interested in learning more about her past, her schooling, her friends, how she had endured the hardships and the many deaths in her family. Although his questions were endless, he did not appear to be merely probing in the professional manner of a magazine editor—he seemed sincerely interested in knowing her intimately, eager to hear from her what nobody had ever taken the time to hear, and he listened for long periods without interrupting, allowing her to develop her thoughts in an unhurried way. She also listened while he discussed his own past, his disappointing marriage, his hopes for his children, and his current love affair in Los Angeles with Barbi Benton. Karen was especially appreciative of his candor regarding Barbi, a subject that a less honest man might have conveniently ignored on a first evening with someone new. As it happened, Karen was well aware of Barbi Benton, having seen her with Hefner on the Johnny Carson show, where their eventual marriage was mentioned as a possibility, although Karen remembered doubting at
the time that Hefner would ever destroy his renowned bachelorhood for Barbi Benton or anyone else. And now, a year later, with Hefner in person, seeing how he enjoyed his life in his mansion filled with toys, Karen was even more convinced that he was a poor candidate for marriage—which was not meant as a criticism on her part; on the contrary, she relished the idea of being close to a rich and busy older man who had somehow retained a youthful vigor for fun and frolic. And as the hours passed in the underwater atmosphere of this timeless place, Karen was aware only of her pleasure and comfort in his company; and when he suggested that they return to his apartment to watch a movie, she stood and took his hand. Later, when he asked her to spend the night with him, she accepted without hesitation.

The marvelous mood of their first evening extended through the following day and into the next night; and much to Karen’s delight and surprise, they remained compatible lovers and congenial companions throughout the entire week—interrupted only by his business meetings and her hours of training at the Playboy Club. But before she had been fitted for her Bunny uniform, Hefner asked if she would mind quitting her job so they would have more time together at night; he assured her she would not have to worry about the loss of salary, suggesting she could earn much more as a magazine model adorning the pages of
Playboy
. When she agreed to pose, Hefner instructed his photo editor to arrange for her test shots; and after days of shooting, Karen Christy became the
Playboy
centerfold for the December issue of 1971, for which she received $5,000.

Her sudden emergence as Hefner’s lover in Chicago caused some astonishment and envy among the Bunnies in the dormitory; but as they realized that Hefner was serious about her, they resigned themselves to her privileged presence, and in time they came to like her. Though she now had access to a limousine and had charge accounts at his expense in Chicago stores, she remained essentially the same country girl she had been on the day
of her arrival from Texas. She often walked around the mansion in bare feet, shorts, and a T-shirt. If influenced at all by her new surroundings, it was only evident in her abandonment of her brassiere, and in her developing skill at the games that Hefner and his close friends spent so much time playing—backgammon, Monopoly, and the pinball machines. She spent her days as she had done since her girlhood, watching soap operas on television, including “Another World,” her favorite show, which she had begun watching at fourteen while living on her grandmother’s farm; and if occasionally she missed it due to spending the afternoon in bed with Hefner, she knew that she could see it later at her convenience because the house engineer had been instructed by Hefner to tape its every installment.

When Hefner left for Los Angeles, as he did every other week, Karen expressed no resentment about his continuing interest in Barbi Benton; although as the months passed, and as Karen was becoming more emotionally involved with Hefner, she felt an increased loneliness and she privately wondered what, if anything, Barbi knew about her. But the telephone calls she received each day from Hefner when he was in California, and the gifts he gave her, reassured her. During their first month together, he had given her a diamond watch inscribed “with love”; and his Christmas gift to her in 1971 was a full-length white mink coat. In March 1972, on her twenty-first birthday, he gave her a five-karat diamond cocktail ring from Tiffany’s. He also gave her an emerald ring, a silver fox jacket, a Matisse painting, a Persian cat, a beautiful metallic reproduction of the
Playboy
cover on which she was featured; and for her Christmas gift in 1972, she received a white Mark IV Lincoln.

With the money she was earning from her modeling and public appearances for
Playboy
, she bought for his Monopoly board such specially designed items as hand-carved hotels shaped like the Playboy Plaza Hotel in Miami, and tiny individual statues of the six people who were most often seen seated around the board; in addition to Hefner, whose two-and-a-half-inch-high sculptured likeness wore a colorful bathrobe and smoked a pipe,
the other figurines represented Karen, Bobbie Arnstein, and John Dante, and two old Hefner friends and habitués of the mansion, Gene Siskel, the Chicago
Tribune
movie critic, and Shel Silverstein, the cartoonist and children’s writer. She also commissioned a Chicago artist to do a three-dimensional portrait of Hugh Hefner, a large oil painting that showed him seated in a chair wearing a silk robe and smoking a pipe, while above his head was a cloud of white smoke in which was a small nude picture of Karen Christy. When she presented him with the gift, she amused him by pointing out that the section showing her was detachable, and that whenever he became tired of looking at it he could easily replace it with an inset of someone else.

But throughout 1972 into 1973, during their every-other-week reunions in Chicago, Hugh Hefner tired of neither her picture nor her presence, and he also began asking her to join him on airplane trips. He took her to Orlando, Florida, to see Disney World; to a resort hotel in the Caribbean, where he was being honored at a convention of magazine distributors; and to New York City, where there was a backgammon tournament. While in New York, after Karen had expressed a wish to do some shopping, Hefner reached into his pocket and handed her his wallet, then left to attend a meeting. In the wallet was $3,000. But as Karen wandered through stores along Fifth Avenue, she found herself checking the prices and resisting the impulse to buy; as outlandishly generous as Hefner was capable of being, Karen also knew that he was quietly conscious of how money was spent—and, not wanting to take advantage of him, nor to waste money herself on things she did not really need, she later returned the wallet with only $200 missing.

Karen Christy’s sensitivity to certain conflicts in Hefner’s nature, to his varying moods and unexpressed wishes, contributed greatly to the harmony of their relationship. One day when they were playing Monopoly in the Chicago mansion, a butler announced that Hefner’s plane was ready to leave for Los Angeles; and Karen, though barefoot, quickly followed him out the door and accompanied him in the limousine to the airport. As Hefner
boarded the plane with his business associates and friends, one of them playfully suggested that Karen come along for the ride—which, with Hefner’s sudden approval, she did. During the flight west, she and the others resumed their game of Monopoly and enjoyed a festive lunch, while the pilots, following Hefner’s instructions, radioed ahead for a separate limousine that would take Karen to a Beverly Hills shoe store, and then back to the Los Angeles airport, where an airline ticket would be waiting for her return trip to Chicago.

After this flight, Karen sometimes traveled from Chicago on commercial planes to join Hefner at the Los Angeles airport, and then fly back with him on the Playboy jet so that they could gain extra hours of pleasure together. Time—not money—was of primary importance to Hefner if love and pleasure were involved. He had often said following his fortieth birthday—when his personal fortune exceeded $100 million dollars—that money was no longer a factor in his life, but time was; and that he would spare no expense in gaining time to fulfill his romantic desires. Once, when Karen was visiting her relatives in Texas, Hefner dispatched a Lear jet at the cost of more than $10,000 to pick her up in Dallas and bring her to the Los Angeles airport so that she could be with him on the Playboy DC-g jet headed back to Chicago.

On another occasion, when he returned to Chicago without her, he was surprised to see that the trees outside the Chicago mansion were festooned with yellow ribbons, a decoration inspired by a song currently popular around the nation—“’Tie a Yellow Ribbon”—a recording of which Karen had bought for him weeks before; the song described a returning lover for whom the sign of continued affection was a yellow ribbon tied to an oak tree, and Hefner had immediately responded to the song, and asked that it be played repeatedly on the mansion’s big stereo. But since the song was on a 45 rpm recording that was not made for continuous play, Hefner asked one of the butlers to stand next to the stereo and, as soon as the record was finished, lift the
needle and put it back to the beginning. The butler spent an entire evening replaying the song.

As
Playboy
magazine in 1973 approached its twentieth anniversary in publishing, with its monthly circulation at 6 million, Hugh Hefner continued to divide his time evenly and happily between his two mansions and his two women. At forty-six, he seemingly had enough time, money, power, and imagination to control every aspect of his life except his final fate; and as a onetime movie usher who had wishfully dreamed in a darkened theater of escaping the tedious world of reality, he had finally achieved his long-sought ambition: Hugh Hefner was now living a movie. Sheltering himself in elaborate sets, controlling the lights and the music, he was the leading man in a Captain’s Paradise that continued uninterruptedly through the unnoticed hours of succeeding weeks and months.

In the larger world outside, as inflation and higher taxes victimized American families, it seemed grossly unfair to many people that a man like Hugh Hefner should have it so good, that his businesses should continue to expand and flourish—as his publicity department proclaimed—while he concentrated on chasing women and playing Monopoly. Although there were numerous men who were far wealthier than Hefner, the public was either unaware or unenvious of them since they rarely appeared on television and never called attention to the fact that they were enjoying themselves. Typical among them were the Rockefeller brothers, who seemed burdened with responsibility; J. Paul Getty, a feeble old man who appeared to be lonesome in his every public photograph; and Howard Hughes, a paranoiac recluse hiding in hotel rooms while dependent on sober Mormon male nurses. The photographs of harem-keeping Arab potentates sometimes published in Paris
Match
and American newsmagazines showed men who were invariably obese or scowling, complaining of personal ailments and fearful of armed fanatics. The power brokers in American politics, when they kept mis
tresses on the payroll, seemed to be sooner or later exposed in the press and sometimes further vilified in confessional autobiographies by the ladies themselves.

But Hefner’s constant and well-publicized philandering with his female employees and centerfold starlets was heralded in
Playboy
as an “alternate lifestyle,” and with each passing year he seemed to be undermining more defiantly the Judeo-Christian tradition that associated excessive pleasure with punishment. Though his aging body was allegedly subjected to the exhaustive daily demands of frisky females, he never looked better in his life. Though he ate much junk food, he never gained weight; and his consumption of caseloads of Pepsi apparently failed to erode his teeth. While he confronted many problems as the head of a major corporation that had several subsidiaries, with thousands of employees around the nation and overseas, he rarely hinted that he was under pressure, nor was he known to have ever visited a psychiatrist.

The successful launching of a raunchy, gynecologically specific sex magazine called
Hustler
, whose founder, Larry Flynt, believed that
Playboy
would soon become obsolete—and the fact that
Penthouse
now had a rising monthly circulation of 4 million—did not alarm Hugh Hefner; and after his editors had reacted to such competition by publishing pinups in
Playboy
that seemed too brazen by Hefner’s standards, he reminded his staff that he did not want the girl-next-door to look like a trollop.

Even when there appeared to be legitimate causes for concern in the casual way his corporation was functioning, Hefner’s natural optimism and enormous ego prevented him from taking quick corrective measures. He saw positive signs in each unfavorable report: To the news that Playboy’s movie division had lost millions in producing such films as
The Naked Ape
and Roman Polanski’s version of
Macbeth
, Hefner emphasized that his company had gained valuable experience from these ventures and he also pointed out that
Macbeth
had been named Best Film of the Year by the National Film Review Board; and in responding to evidence that his key clubs around the nation—and his resort ho
tels in Miami Beach and Jamaica, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Great Gorge, New Jersey—were with few exceptions unprofitable, Hefner said that he was not discouraged, that better days were ahead. Meanwhile he continued to support with unimpressive results a book division, a music publishing and record company, movie theaters in Chicago and New York, a limousine service, a model agency, and a firm that manufactured gadgets and gewgaws bearing Bunny emblems. His Playboy Towers Hotel in Chicago was loosely managed and losing money; and
Playboy
magazine’s somewhat kinky sister publication,
Oui
, which was introduced in 1972 to more directly compete with
Penthouse
, was apparently more successful in luring readers away from
Playboy
, which during the year following
Oui
’s appearance went from a peak monthly circulation of 7 million down to 6. And while
Playboy
magazine remained the most lucrative men’s magazine in the world, and additional millions were being earned overseas by Playboy’s three gambling casinos in England, the Playboy corporate stock had dropped a dozen points in as many months on the New York Stock Exchange—circumstances that Hefner attributed not to the condition of his company, but to the national recession, inflation, and poor leadership in Washington. When an interviewer asked him if, in view of what seemed to be happening to his corporate investments, he might soon return to the Playboy building as a day-to-day executive, he insisted that his office days were over. “I have something more important to do,” he replied. “It’s called living.”