#14 HUGH HEFNER’S KARMA–Part Three: The Crypt of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe, 1953

The grave’s a fine and private place,

 But none, I think, do there embrace.

–Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”

Advance into the territory of pubic hair only increased Playboy’s circulation.

Hefner by the mid-1970s, well into his role as iconic hero living the Playboy life, nevertheless had fallen in love.  Despite what had to be hundreds or even thousands of attractive women he’d known and, you know, fucked, you can count on less than one hand the ones he’d loved, and quite likely he loved Barbi Benton more than the others.

In a dramatized scene in American Playboy (the authorized version, remember), Barbi returns from a music tour to find Hef in bed asleep with two unclad women.  At the foot of the bed, she says flattly, “Tammy…Linda,” who awaken and instantly skedaddle out the door.  Barely missing a beat, Hef tells her, by way of excusing the scene she’s come in on, “You know I love you,” and, somehow, we even believe him.

I find myself curious about “Tammy” and “Linda”—two in a long line of Tammys and Lindas, marching through that bedroom.

Benton comments in interview footage on Hef’s double standard: while he insisted on her faithfulness to him, he was under no such obligation.  She describes this as what broke them up.  It also contradicts the “Playboy philosophy” of individual choice and sexual freedom. That’s exactly what he and others fought for in the sexual revolution—consenting adults are free to have sex anyway they like—that’s now our accepted morality, but it didn’t used to be not so long ago.

Nevertheless, he regarded himself as answering to no one, and Barbi had to toe the line. You can’t imagine the Rolling Stones going on tour having agreed to those conditions (or at least actually following them), so why should Barbi?

But there you see something clinging on from that previous, pre-feminist generation of American men (think Mad Men), where the guy gets both his control and his adventure time, and the woman waits patiently alone.

Something further lurks here—really, what certainly could be called sex addiction as the outcome of his hedonism.  Like leaving a coke addict in a house with an enormous pile of powder atop the kitchen table, it’s not likely that he could say no for very long.  Old video shows him mobbed by naked beauties in the steaming waters of The Grotto at the LA mansion.  Saying no wasn’t his strong point in a world built for saying yes! yes! yes!

Love over endlessly available, sybaritic sex?  It was probably not really a choice; his habitual pattern had fully established itself, and that’s…karma.

Karma develops once set in motion.  And once you crest the arc of your high, the easy inertia is down.

From the beginning, when he took his party public, it wasn’t exactly surprising that drunken assholes would assault Bunnies. That seems inevitable, even with a concerted effort to protect the women.  Sexual pleasure, the theme Hefner so championed, insisting on its naturalness, its humanity and freedom from shame, snowballed into something not so humane within Playboy Mansion confines.

I remember back in the early oughts seeing Hefner, surrounded by a half dozen platinum women in skin tight dresses hemmed high, captured on celebrity cam at the Lakers game.  What was the message?  Playboy Mansion Girls’ Night Out?  Hef’s mandala/harem?  That I glow with the youth of countless blondes though I’m deep into my 70s?  Pure habit?

It was always an unconscionably naïve view that the Playboy Mansion partied on free of suffering, but I’m sure that’s the view of the unquestioning faithful.  In rebuke to that, MeToo catches up to Hefner five years after his death in Secrets of Playboy (2022), a docuseries based on interviews with young women and others who worked at the Mansion, thus overturning the rock of his world to reveal its underneath.

A number of things seemed to have become routine by sometime in the 1970s.  Any women who passed through the Mansion he considered there to satisfy his various bedroom appetites (enter German Shepard…).  It’s not clear that this affected all the women, and perhaps any number of them got through unscathed (many defend him), but there are numerous accusations of getting drugged and raped by Hefner or his cronies (among them, good friend Bill Cosby); also drugged, they got forced into orgies; some were taken off-site to “mini” Mansions where they got pressed into signing contracts, photographed and video-taped having sex, with the media subsequently sold into the porn realm, providing a steady stream of cash; any untoward, potentially explosive episodes like drug overdoses or rapes by VIPs got suppressed and cleaned up by the efficient Mansion staff, part of an almost Scientology-like level of image control; Hefner deliberately brought in journalists to his parties who inevitably did something they might regret if publicly exposed, tempted in a realm where every corner existed under permanent surveillance and recording.

I could go on.  That’s ultimately the story of the Tammys and the Lindas: subject to manipulation, interchangeable objects of sexual abuse, and, of course, monetization.  This seems no different, possibly worse, than the sleazy shadow that attends the sex trade world of strip clubs, prostitution, porn, and even modelling.

Perhaps the most resonant summation of Hefner comes from Keith Richards, of all people, who famously set the Chicago Mansion on fire cooking dope in the bathroom:  “We’ve worked the lowest pimps to the highest.  The highest being Hefner, a pimp nonetheless.”

A pimp nonetheless.  Somehow I trust Hefner believed his proclamations, that they weren’t purely cold manipulations to deflect attention from his true ambitions.  With a lot of undigested darkness, he ends up betraying what he so earnestly meant to stand for.  He saw himself as a cosmopolitan sophisticate, and in relation to women a romantic and desirable boyfriend.  However, his gnawing obsession permanently asserts itself; he nestles into his affliction while maintaining his carefully curated image projected publicly on multiple platforms.

Control ends up being a triumphant aphrodisiac, as de Sade argued.  It’s the true temptation that happens when you get everything you seem to want, absolutely echoed in the behavior of many who’ve succumb to that rush throughout history (think Donald Trump)–a flow of power, money, and pussy that goes right up Hef’s nose like the finest blow.  There’s a sharp bifurcation between Hefner’s very carefully constructed public persona (itself a powerful engine for his wealth) and the sociopathic indulgence in pleasure that condoned and propagated the abuse of young women. He had both a fanatical sexual desire, lifelong and indefatigably pursued, until he’s Grandpa banging away at deeply-disinterested teenage girls–or literally inert ones—as well as the puppet-master who loves playing the game but couldn’t stop anyway even if he tired of it.

Holly Madison, one of Hefner’s girlfriends, complains how he pressured every one of them to look the same, and when she cut her hair, trying to distinguish herself, he angrily upbraided her for violating the strict appearance code.  How many of these identical women would he have to screw his way through until he finally got satiated?  How many would he order around and pimp out until his ferocious need to possess this ideal woman finally got assuaged?  He only knows how to possess, throw away, and replace that perfect platinum blonde–somehow never getting any closer to her image as it floats in his mind’s eye.

Tibetan lamas will go so far in their discussions of karma as to suggest that one should prefer the hell realm to the god realm because in hell, at least your negative karma gets burned off, but among the gods all you’re doing is using up the accumulated virtue that put you in that position to begin with, and when it’s gone, it’s gone, with the only direction down.

No amount of Viagra can keep you getting it up once your last breath expires.  I’d love to see an account of Hefner’s final moments, when he has to go on without Mansion or Playmates or wealth and fame.  Is he terrified?  Does he enter the bardo chasing that perfect blonde?

No longer so meticulous in later years, he’d let the Mansion slowly decay.  Once the whole party had vacated the premises, the emptied realm of paradise fell to vandals who stripped it of furniture, sheets, sex toys, anything they could tear off the walls.

Hefner had bought a crypt for $75,000 located next to Marilyn Monroe’s, and so got laid to rest alongside the long mouldering sex symbol of his generation.  He’d initiated his fortune with images of her revealed skin, and consciously identified himself as enamored with the cinematic experience Hollywood made of her, that flickering goddess on the screen, eternally vivacious and charming and otherwise dead by age 36, unable to sustain being who the world expected her to be.  It would likely not comfort her to find the eternally lascivious Grandpa pimp in the crypt beside her, but the actuality of crypts means the pursuer and pursued, the user and the used, have come to nothing.  The flesh has lost all delight, and strong karmic winds have come and gone.