Read Online Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese - Free Book Online

remorseful and embarrassed as she was in recounting this, she also felt great relief, even freedom, but when she looked into Hefner’s eyes she saw that he was beginning to cry. She reached toward him and embraced him. She said that she loved him, though she repeated that he should choose someone else for a wife.
    But Hefner shook his head. No, he said, he wanted only her. Though he did not admit it, he wanted her now more than he ever had before, being very alarmed by the competitive presence of another suitor. He pleaded with her to stop seeing the other man; and Mildred, filled with confusion and guilt, agreed to do so. She wanted to believe that her brief affair was uncharacteristic of her true nature, and she was grateful to Hefner for wanting to proceed with their wedding plans.
    They were married on June 15, 1949, in the Saint John Bosco Rectory in Chicago. Mildred wore a white gown, and smiled as she later posed for pictures with Hefner and their families. Their gray-haired mothers wearing orchids, their fathers in dark-suited sobriety, stood together outside the church, squinting in the sun, affecting expressions of forced familiarity.
    After the ceremony, Hefner in his father’s car drove with Mildred to Hazelhurst, Wisconsin, for a brief honeymoon at Styza’s Birchwood Lodge. Then they returned to Chicago to begin a life together that would never be as romantic as it had once been.
     
    Among their problems was Hefner’s failure, after graduation from college, to find a job that he liked. His various ideas for a cartoon series were rejected by the newspaper syndicates, and the only job that he could find was in the employment office of a carton company. When he realized that the firm would not hireblacks, he quit in protest. Since the job market was then overcrowded with war veterans, and since Hefner preferred remaining at home working on new cartoons rather than accepting unsatisfying employment, they lived off the money that Mildred earned from various jobs, including that of teaching in a Chicago grade school that Hefner had once attended.
    To minimize expenses they stayed in the house of Hefner’s parents, a move that they thought would suit them temporarily until Hugh Hefner could begin to sell his cartoons or establish himself in a suitable career. But more than two years later they were still there, occupying a bedroom next to the elder Hefners’ on the second floor of the small two-story brick house on a quiet street on the outer edge of Chicago’s Northwest Side. The house had been built for $13,000 in 1930 when Hugh Hefner was four years old, and it was the only home that he had ever known, though now as he occupied its tight quarters he felt the loss of the expansive dreams of his youth, and the loss, too, of much sexual interest in his wife.
    But Mildred blamed herself for this. She rarely felt like making love to him in that house, knowing that their bed sounds could easily be heard by his parents in the adjoining room, and she also believed that her indiscretion with the other man had diminished Hefner’s romantic fervor, as well as resurrecting some of her own Catholic girlhood guilt feelings about sex and pleasure. She had enjoyed sinful sex, she reasoned sardonically, and now she was being punished. Her penance was in living a passionless married life in the claustrophobic home of her in-laws, where her husband drew cartoons in his room all day, as he had as a boy, except now she was noticing a degenerate trend in his drawing. He was producing for his own amusement pornographic cartoons of Dagwood and Blondie. He was also bringing home sex magazines and making no attempt to conceal them from her, as he undoubtedly once had, and still did, from his mother.
    His mother, who was too polite to pry, was no comfort to Mildred during these years, nor would it have occurred to Mildred to discuss her marital problems with either of Hefner’sparents. As close as they all lived physically, they