Word: hefners
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This largely buried argument is all that connects the book's welter of anecdotes. A Chicago teen-ager named Harold Rubin is limned practicing self-abuse over photographs of nude women. He is joined in the narrative by the newly married Hugh Hefner, who wanders the streets and gazes at apartment windows where women might appear. Hefner makes room later for John Bullaro, a married Los Angeles insurance executive who bicycles to Venice Beach on Sundays to ogle sunbathers...
...instance, did Nude Model Diane Webber's great-great-grandmother die? (An Indian shot her in the back.) Did General Custer carry life insurance into the battle of Little Big Horn? (Yes, a $5,000 policy with New York Life.) What covered the circular bed in Hugh Hefner's private DC-9? (A coverlet made of Tasmanian opossum...
About all these men have in common is the fact that they talked, at enormous length, to Gay Talese. He responds by decreeing them typical and elevating their itches into a national problem. What must be done to provide sauce for these ganders? Hefner has built a sybaritic, self-enclosed world, described by Talese with popeyed wonder. The author found another answer in the "permissive paradise" of Sandstone, a 15-acre retreat near Los Angeles that flourished in the '70s on a diet of communal nudity and sex. The Sandstone philosophy was not, Talese insists, a clever license...
Finally, Talese fails to draw the conclusions his evidence provides. He shows how Hefner's freedom to disport has pained his partners. He admits that Sandstone was hard on some who went there. What he does not say is the obvious: given power over others, hedonists can be as tyrannical as censors. The injunction to perform can be as chafing as the commandment to abstain. Talese thinks that the war between men and women could be called off if women would learn to like "recreational sex." He does not add that this fantasy of surrender is a boring substitute...
Although the SEC is unlikely to press its inquiry now that Hefner has agreed to repay the company, Playboy is still contesting an assessment of about $13.4 million in taxes due the Internal Revenue Service between 1970 and 1976, including $ 1.4 million that taxmen say Hefner owes for his use of the mansions. Nor is this an end to trouble in the hutch. Bunnies are no longer multiplying like rabbits, and for the first time Playboy Clubs are having to hustle for bustle. Evidently, being a bunny these days, like being a playboy, is not what it used...