Hugh Hefner's wasted life

I was wasting time waiting for a prescription yesterday and thumbed through the current issue of GQ at the pharmacy. I ran across an article on Marston Hefner, the son of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Marston will start college in the fall. He's a handsome kid, but comes off as a Keanu Reeves simpleton. Look at his eyes. They're vacant. Poor kid never had much of a chance, I guess. Very "Ice Storm," this.

I found this passage to be a remarkable commentary on what Hugh Hefner has amounted to, at the end of his life:

Hugh Hefner shuffles into the library, berobed and besilked, looking every bit his 82 years. He lowers himself onto a striped couch and sits with his good ear toward me. Nary a shag carpet has been updated since he moved into this place in 1971. The lights are all on dimmers, every surface covered with wood paneling or hewn from rugged stone. Behind him is a nude bust of his ex-girlfriend Barbi Benton. Over in the famed Grotto, there’s a control panel with orange buttons that regulate the water jets, like a prop from a James Bond film, and on that control panel is a rotary dial—not for making phone calls but for changing LPs. No music plays today. No one is frolicking.

Hef is here to talk about Marston, his third child. (He has two kids from a previous marriage—“The first two children just sort of happened,” he says—and another son, 16-year-old Cooper, with Kimberley Conrad.) Hef picks up a sheet of paper that’s been placed in front of him on the coffee table. Talking points from his publicist. About Marston. For our interview.

[snip]

How old are the kids in that photo?

“I don’t know,” he says.

Given Hefner’s considerable experience with the opposite sex, I wonder what nuggets of fatherly wisdom he may have passed along to Marston.

“Stay away,” he says. “Look out. They’re trouble. [laughs] No, I didn’t say any of those things. Well, I don’t know. I think most of it has been by example.”

But did you ever sit Marston down and do the whole birds-and-bees thing?

He shakes his head.

Did you ever try to explain the fact that, just after the separation, you started dating seven blond women?

“Not really. What is there to say?”

There was never any conversation about monogamy or marriage?

“What kind of conversation would that be?”

What kind of signal does that send?

“I think the signal that it sends, quite frankly, which the boys liked, was that instead of somebody replacing mama, I dated a bunch of girls.”

After about forty-five minutes, Hef appears to be losing steam. I turn off the tape recorder, and he rises from the couch. As he does, he rips the kind of fart that one does not even attempt to hide from. No one in the room blinks.

Sounding the trumpet valedictory for the Playboy philosophy, ah reckon.

This was the man who was held up as an icon of 20th century male sexuality. Broken-down, shuffling, doesn't know his own children (reading between the lines, it's hard to tell if Marston can't stand his old man, or is just vaguely sickened by him), farts in public. What a wasted life.