Tragic Kingdom

The Hideous Autopsy of the Playboy Life

Sondra Theodore was a naïve high school graduate in 1974. A good student, pianist, and Bible-school teacher as a teen, she dreamed of becoming an actress. One day, she told her mom she was going to Howard Hughes's house.

"What?" her mom said. "He's dead."

"Oh yeah, I meant Hugh Hefner."

"Oh, no," said her mom, "don't go there."

Sondra thought her mom was silly, and she and her friend set out for the large gothic-estate home known as the Playboy Mansion. She had never been to a Hollywood party before, and when she first arrived, it was like a scene out of The Great Gatsby.

She'd never been in bed with a man before either, but the man of the house, Hugh Hefner himself, was taken with her, and he invited her to stay the night. It was all like a dream. She stayed the night with him and soon afterward moved into the mansion as his girlfriend. She was nineteen, and "Hef," as his friends called him, was fifty.

Now 65, Sondra is one of several women who recount their stories of life with Hef for the A&E series, Secrets of Playboy. She should have listened to her mother. The "secrets" she and others expose are as appalling as they were predictable.

Disneyland for Adults

According to friends, Hugh Hefner was raised by strict Methodist parents and was more nerdy than naughty growing up. By young adulthood, though, he had thoroughly absorbed the Freudian idea that societal mores, especially the ones related to sex, were repressive. They stood as an impediment to human happiness and therefore had to go. And so, in 1953 at age 27, he sat down at a card table with a typewriter and, using funds he'd scrounged, partly from hocking his furniture, launched the first issue of Playboy magazine. The cover featured a captivating photo of Marilyn Monroe, almost modest by today's standards, and the subtitle read, "Entertainment for Men." All 50,000 copies sold out in short order.

Playboy crafted an image that combined the sexually risqué with class and upward mobility. Issues included photos of women, fetchingly posed in varying degrees of undress, and articles that mostly related to sex or progressive politics. It unapologetically forwarded Hefner's sexual lawlessness based on pretexts such as free speech (the better to publish nudity with), women's "empowerment" (the better to stamp out marriage and children with), and law-enforcement overreach (the better to evade arrest with). In keeping with the idea that the best defense is a good offense, Hefner himself was charismatic and articulate in advancing his "new" ethic and way of life. Within five years, circulation was close to a million and brought in an annual revenue of $4.2 million.

"Playboy became something more than just a magazine for me. It really was a projection of a way of life and what we now call an alternate lifestyle," Hefner explained. "The search for a new ethical set of moral values based on something other than simply rigid rules set forth many many centuries ago is something from which only good can come." When feminists criticized him for exploiting women, he dismissed them as hateful.

He called his enterprise Disneyland for adults, and over time, he grew it into a mini-empire. The first Playboy club opened in Chicago in 1960. As carefully planned and controlled as Disneyland ever was, the clubs were members-only, high-dollar, private affairs, staffed by the iconic cotton-tailed, satin-eared, stilettoed women in bunny costumes. They combined the attractions of girls as cute little playthings with a swanky atmosphere of exclusivity. Over the years, 32 more clubs would open worldwide, along with a handful of Playboy resorts patterned after the same image. Bunnies were supervised by Bunny Mothers and had to meet strict appearance and comportment standards ("When you start looking wilted, you're through as far as Hef is concerned," one Bunny Mother said). They were well-paid, though poorly treated, and as many as 400 might apply for ten open positions.

Life at the Mansion: Playmates & Bunny Hunting

Playboy central, though, was the Playboy mansion, the sprawling Los Angeles estate Hefner purchased in 1971 for $1.1 million. From there, he reigned like a kingpin emperor until his death in 2017 at age 91. In its heyday, the Playboy mansion was party central, a place to see and be seen, a sexual Shangri-La for the pretentious and predatorial. Also, like Disneyland, the image of life on the grounds was one of eternal summer. Days were for pool parties, roller-skating, games, and sports, and nights were for music and dancing and alcohol and drugs and sex.

Lots of sex. Whether you wanted it or not. That was the most common theme to come out of the A&E series.

Playboy models, called Playmates, were encouraged to live on site, either in one of the mansion's 22 bedrooms or in the adjacent Bunny House. They usually came in their late teens or early twenties, and most were gone by age thirty. Hefner always called them his "girls," never "women," and he welcomed them into "the family" by having sex with them.

Holly Madison's experience is fairly typical. She was drop-dead gorgeous, but having moved around a lot as a child, she found it hard to connect with people. She moved to LA in 2001, and when she was invited to a Sunday pool party, she was immediately drawn to the sense of community. She thought life at the mansion would be like living in a sorority house, and she wanted to be a part of it.

Hef invited her to spend her first night with him, in his bedroom, of course, where she found several other people and a giant screen showing porn. Then she was offered a Quaalude (which she later learned they called "thigh-openers"). It was all "very mechanical and robotic." She doesn't like to talk about it, but "the impact that it had on me was very heavy. The next morning, I definitely felt humiliated by the experience." Despite the humiliating heaviness of the prima nocta experience, she moved into the mansion as one of Hef's girlfriends. She was 21 and Hef was 76. She stayed for seven years and describes her psychological state at the end as "shattered."

A Cult of Personality

Does any of this sound like liberation or empowerment to you? Indeed, in hindsight, several women compared their Playboy lives to living in a cult. Consider the following:

Isolation: Hefner was an expert charmer and seducer. If he liked a girl, he would love-bomb her right away. The attention, combined with the glamor and fairytale trappings, drew vulnerable, attention-hungry girls dreaming of stardom into his orbit. He had money and power, and once they were sexually initiated and under his roof, he treated them as his own possessions. Playmates were not encouraged to have social lives outside the mansion, and unless they were out with him, they had a 9:00 p.m. curfew. Since he didn't want them to have outside work lives either, they received a weekly allowance.

Blurred Boundaries: To Hef, love meant sex. If you "loved" someone, you were supposed to have sex with him or her. No sexual behavior was off-limits. If you were in his house, you were fair game for sex, however he wanted you to have it, with or without your consent. You were "family," and that's what family did.

Control: Every room in the house had cameras and microphones, and all the films were kept in a library that was strictly off-limits to residents and staff. Girls were not held against their will, but they knew there was a mountain of revenge porn ready to be released if they created a PR problem. Although Hefner had pushed publishing boundaries on grounds of free speech, he used his money and influence to silence any Bunny, Playmate, or employee whose loose lips might tarnish his image. Even mysterious deaths of Bunnies, Playmates, or former associates seemed to evade media and law enforcement scrutiny. Sometimes Hef would hire an employee solely to spy on one of his girls.

The entire orbit around the man served his desires and objectives. Staff were not allowed to talk to Playmates. They served him, not them. They learned to serve him his drinks, M&Ms, drugs, condoms, and sex toys (and to clean and restock them afterwards) according to his expectations. Sadly, security guards, valets, and other former male staff admitted they were aware the women were being abused, but they did nothing about it so as not to lose their jobs.

Abuse: The objectification was off-the-charts blatant. Women were openly critiqued according to their looks and encouraged to get plastic surgery to improve them (however that was defined). But that's almost negligible compared to the dehumanizing sex the women described, which ranged from gross to disturbing to criminal. Girls were routinely drugged and raped, sometimes violently, by Hef and friends and party guests and celebrities.

A Circus with a Vampire at the Center

To its credit, A&E did a respectable job of conveying the salacious goings-on with dignity and discretion. Even so, some of the details are staggering. Girls were muffled, assaulted, sodomized, and even abducted and gang-raped offsite. There were orgies and sex with animals, and porn stars were hired to come in and have sex with Hef's girls for his viewing pleasure.

Like any addict, over time, Hefner progressed to needing more and more transgressive sex to satisfy his ravenous appetite. One way he got that rush, explained Jennifer Saginor, whose father was Hef's friend and personal physician, was in "finding these girls that were very innocent and naïve and slowly watching them do things that they never thought they would do before, really just breaking them down." Sondra said it got to be "like a circus." "He was like a vampire, sucking the life out of me. Really, he was a monster, the things that he got turned on by."

Sexual Freedom: A Better Way

In the early years, Hefner told an interviewer that his life was all about saying, "Let's celebrate our sexuality." There's nothing wrong with celebrating sexuality, but there is a life-affirming way and many life-killing ways to go about it. Hef chose the latter and left behind him a wake of broken women six decades long.

True, the life-affirming way was set forth many centuries ago, and it does have its elements of rigidity. But some things, like foundations and walls, must be firm to serve their purpose. Compared to the debasement the Playboy women recounted, the rigidity of two people pledging before God "to have and to hold, forsaking all others," looks like the fairytale come true.