Secrets of Playboy, episodes 1 and 2: "The Playboy Legacy," "The Girl Next Door" (The Intellectual Property Corporation, Arts & Entertainment, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched the first two episodes of the much-hyped TV series Secrets of Playboy on the Arts & Entertainment channel. The shows, “The Playboy Legacy” and “The Girl Next Door” (from an early-2000’s “reality” TV show called The Girls Bext Door produced by Playboy for one of Arts & Entertainment’s ancestor channels, E!), had an awful lot of Casablanca about them – “I’m shocked, shocked to find there was a lot of sex going on at the Playboy Mansion!” – and overall it was an attempt to reinvent Playboy founder Hugh Hefner for the #MeToo era, which as one interviewee mentioned Hefner missed by only about six months. Actually the show was considerably more fair-minded than the promos made it sound: it featured the light, as well as the dark, side of Hefner’s complicated legacy, notably his stands against racism and sexism. Hefner not only editorialized in favor of the civil-rights movement, he did a TV show in the late 1950’s in which Black and white performers visibly mingled on screen and he refused to allow the Playboy Clubs to be segregated.

I remember my father telling me he’d been to a Playboy Club once as a guest and had found it boring – as a child I’d read about the experience and found its promos made it seem like a modern-day Shangri-La, so it was disappointing (to say the least) to hear my dad tell me it was just dull. Hefner’s whole attitude towards sex seems to have been flash-frozen in his teens, when a woman he desperately wanted to date instead went on a hayride with a close friend of his, and though one interviewee on this program compared it to the “Rosebud” moment in Citizen Kane it sounded more like The Great Gatsby to me: a frustrated poor guy becomes rich and throws fabulous parties in search of the lost love from his adolescence. At the same time the whole so-called “Playboy Philosophy” (which Paul Krassner, fellow envelope-pusher but on a far, far smaller scale with his little magazine The Realist, once described as “more rationalization per square tit than any other magazine”) comes off today as just a silly adolescent sex fantasy in which a thin veneer of liberation is spread over sexual exploitation. In fact, my husband Charles just read the above and suggested that Hefner deliberately set up a world where he could be constantly stimulated and opportunities to have the sort of sex he wanted – casual, often in groups, and quite frequently just mechanical . would abound.

The shows both featured women who claimed to have been Hefner’s victims: in episode one it was Jennifer Saginor, daughter of Hefner’s longtime doctor, Mark Saginor. Jennifer described herself as having a Lesbian affair witn one of the retinue of women designated as “Hefner’s girlfriends” and then having sex with Hefner himself as she was admitted into the sanctum sanctorum of his fabulously appointed bedroom. She said she was only 15 at the time and it was the first time she’d ever been penetrated by a man. In 2006 Jennifer Saginor tried to publish a book called Playground: My Childhood Lost Inside the Playbuy Mansion, but she found that a number of people whom she had wanted to interview suddenly canceled under pressure from the Hefner empire, and so her book was weaker than it might otherwise have been. For episode two the lead exposé artist was Holly Madison, one of Hefner’s “girlfriends” from 2001 to 2008. The show featured her extensively and mostly presented her as just another victim, but with positive elements in her experience, especially when she was chosen to howt the TV series The Girls Next Door and she found the host’s job exhilarating. Like Jennifer years earlier, she got rather mechanistically deflowered by Hefner in front of his retinue even though she also got deluded into thinking that somehow she would be the one he would marry and could have him all to herself.

The show depicted the sheer amount of video footage shot at the Playboy Mansion and the various rooms therein, all of which were wired, and suggested that a large amount of Hefner’s power came from the sheer amount of derogatory material he had collected on various individuals who might have otherwise been in a position to expose him. It also mentioned that Hefner’s security people were either current or recently retired police officers, and they would use their police contacts to make sure Hefner never got busted for underage partners and other sexual transgressions. Also, for all, Hefner’s lip service to women’s equality and liberation, one of his favorite avocations (shared by a lot of his friends as well) was literally to put leashes on women and make them crawl around on all fours like dogs. One of Holly Madison’s odder recollections was about Hugh Hefner’s obsession with Charles Manson: Hefner collected video of Manson’s court appearances and reportedly admired Manson’s ability literally to get women to kill people at his direction. (I remember Charles getting upset that in prison Manson was able to get other inmates to sign autographed photos instead of signing them himself – and I reminded him that Manson was in prison in the first place not for killing people himself but for getting other people to do it for him.) The show featured a chilling clip taken before the murders showing Manson’s girls with guns and telling the camerapeople how they’d been trained to use them. While in a more normal setting one would have thought it was Manson who would have been in awe of Hefner, not the other way around, for some reason Hefner was awed by Manson’s ability to take ordinary human beings with (presumably) ordinary consciences and turn them into stone-cold killers at his whim.

Hugh Hefner’s legacy is considerably more complex than the version we got here – and the version actually presented on the program was more ambiguous than the one we got from the promos – and I remember when he died The Nation magazine ran an obituary from one of their women columnists who said, among other things, that there never could have been a woman who would have been allowed to do what Hefner had done: maintain a Hollywood mansion and fill it full of hot studs available at her command, and pose as an icon of sexual liberation while doing so. That incensed me because it didn’t take me long to think of a woman who had done just that, becoming a major movie star in the process, writing the scripts for her own films (and demanding that her credit as writer be in letters 75 percent of the size of her credit as star), and attracting so much attention from the moralists of her day that the Roman Catholic Church organized something called the “Legion of Decency” to put her out of business. And what’s more, she did it 20 years before Hefner did. Her name was Mae West.