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Authors: Hugh M. Hefner
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about it, knew about it, was waiting for it, learned it enough, then had decided in fact that Los Angeles needed a backgammon discotheque as the seventies dawned, and he opened a club minus Bunnies (not that the waitresses weren’t spectacular) called Pip’s, where he hunched over his game board. He and this game would never part, as he even now pulls down a board and marches it poolside to make trouble every warm summer Sunday. Near the nude sunbathers, but of course.
Part 4
THE BUSINESS OF LIFE
Dreams and the World
H ere then was a young fellow (twenty-seven years old!) with an idea, a dream, an impossible dream, inculcated in him, defining him, eating him alive, with nothing else to do but just to go do it, to go make it happen. Also, and this is important, he had no money with which to do it. (He bleared his eyes at jobs that mattered not at all—promotional copywriting! please! —that drove him mad, while he dreamed dreams of elsewhere.) So he borrowed against his furniture, for God’s sakes! That gave him six hundred bucks, to begin with. He culled a few grand more from friends, from acquaintances, from his own folks (nice and most puzzled folks who could not bear to think of what their boy was about to do), by way of goodwill, of sheer force of will, because his eyes burned with this dream. People had to believe, had no other choice if they paid attention, and those that did became rich. (He was always one to share his bounty.) “If a guy didn’t dream impossible dreams, life would hardly be worth living,” he depicted himself declaring in his private cartoon-paneled autobiography, illustrating the moment of Playboy’ s birth (the personal cartooning did not end after high school, you see). Then he had his cartoon self add, “Especially because—sometimes—even the most impossible ones come true!”
And at that moment, he had no idea of what was truly to come.
F ollow the Brightest Light You See in the Dark
When I was a boy growing up on the far West Side of Chicago, the beacon from the tallest skyscraper on Lake Shore Drive used to sweep across the sky at night. There was something mysterious and mystical about that beacon. It represented a world of sophistication and adventure that I could only dream about. That beacon was like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. The connections between F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and my own young dreams were powerful ones. I wanted to live in that world and chronicle it as Fitzgerald had done the roaring twenties.
And of course that’s exactly what I did. Later I even acquired the skyscraper with the beacon. It became the Playboy Building. And that beacon? It became the Bunny Beacon.
His would be a true-blue American story—a great one as well, Horatio Alger style (with sex, but still…)—because he quested, because he risked, because his gut told him secrets and he listened to his gut, as all humans should but all too rarely do. He was a straight arrow, born of kindly and repressed parentage, Glenn and Grace Hefner, good Methodists, simple folk and proud of it, thank you, who asked for little, who made a boy who asked for a little more. (Lights in the sky!)
T he Calling
I came to a moment in time in which I realized that I did not simply want to become my parents. I did not want to simply become what someone else expected me to be. I wanted to march to a different drummer. Each of us in our own way has to find some reasonable accommodation to what other people expect of us. But first and foremost, if you don’t pursue your own dreams and become the person you want to be, it’s over in much too short a time.
And so, married too soon, bogged down, boggled with his lot, he rolled up his sleeves, sat down at a card table, stared at his L. C. Smith typewriter, and started spinning a yarn, a concoction of bluster and hope that would become pure fortune. He had wanted to call his magazine Stag Party, with a logo that featured
Part 4
THE BUSINESS OF LIFE
Dreams and the World
H ere then was a young fellow (twenty-seven years old!) with an idea, a dream, an impossible dream, inculcated in him, defining him, eating him alive, with nothing else to do but just to go do it, to go make it happen. Also, and this is important, he had no money with which to do it. (He bleared his eyes at jobs that mattered not at all—promotional copywriting! please! —that drove him mad, while he dreamed dreams of elsewhere.) So he borrowed against his furniture, for God’s sakes! That gave him six hundred bucks, to begin with. He culled a few grand more from friends, from acquaintances, from his own folks (nice and most puzzled folks who could not bear to think of what their boy was about to do), by way of goodwill, of sheer force of will, because his eyes burned with this dream. People had to believe, had no other choice if they paid attention, and those that did became rich. (He was always one to share his bounty.) “If a guy didn’t dream impossible dreams, life would hardly be worth living,” he depicted himself declaring in his private cartoon-paneled autobiography, illustrating the moment of Playboy’ s birth (the personal cartooning did not end after high school, you see). Then he had his cartoon self add, “Especially because—sometimes—even the most impossible ones come true!”
And at that moment, he had no idea of what was truly to come.
F ollow the Brightest Light You See in the Dark
When I was a boy growing up on the far West Side of Chicago, the beacon from the tallest skyscraper on Lake Shore Drive used to sweep across the sky at night. There was something mysterious and mystical about that beacon. It represented a world of sophistication and adventure that I could only dream about. That beacon was like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. The connections between F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and my own young dreams were powerful ones. I wanted to live in that world and chronicle it as Fitzgerald had done the roaring twenties.
And of course that’s exactly what I did. Later I even acquired the skyscraper with the beacon. It became the Playboy Building. And that beacon? It became the Bunny Beacon.
His would be a true-blue American story—a great one as well, Horatio Alger style (with sex, but still…)—because he quested, because he risked, because his gut told him secrets and he listened to his gut, as all humans should but all too rarely do. He was a straight arrow, born of kindly and repressed parentage, Glenn and Grace Hefner, good Methodists, simple folk and proud of it, thank you, who asked for little, who made a boy who asked for a little more. (Lights in the sky!)
T he Calling
I came to a moment in time in which I realized that I did not simply want to become my parents. I did not want to simply become what someone else expected me to be. I wanted to march to a different drummer. Each of us in our own way has to find some reasonable accommodation to what other people expect of us. But first and foremost, if you don’t pursue your own dreams and become the person you want to be, it’s over in much too short a time.
And so, married too soon, bogged down, boggled with his lot, he rolled up his sleeves, sat down at a card table, stared at his L. C. Smith typewriter, and started spinning a yarn, a concoction of bluster and hope that would become pure fortune. He had wanted to call his magazine Stag Party, with a logo that featured
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