Recently, I came across some YouTube videos from a 1959 television
show, “Playboys' Penthouse,” featuring Hugh Hefner as host. The show oozed style,
with a cool jazz soundtrack and Playboy “bunnies,” fully clothed, slinking
around in those fashionable, quintessential 1950’s-style Mad Men dresses. It
looked like a classy cocktail party that people felt privileged to attend. A sexual
undertone permeated the atmosphere, prompted by association with the Playboy
lifestyle, but people in the 1950s actually still adhered to a somewhat obsolete
notion called “discretion,” so the show contained nothing overtly sexual.
Actually, I would know about some porn. In the 1980s, I stayed at the house of
someone who subscribed to The Playboy Channel and, while flipping through the
channels by myself, my curiosity got the better of me. I watched a few too many videos with a
mixture of arousal and disgust, witnessing sexual permutations I had never seen before and would actually prefer to forget. Porn exists as a business because it achieves
an objective, but in the end, it felt desperate and pathetic. I never watched The Playboy Channel again.
Years later, I did read a couple of articles about The Girls Next Door
supposed “reality” series and watched a couple of episodes. The show portrayed
a lifestyle that seemed deliciously fun, like a perpetual romp in an adolescent
boy’s idea of a Sexual Nirvana, all blondes and boobs and nonstop fun. But like
anything that promotes an immoral lifestyle, the tempting hype masked a dark
pit of lies that are just now beginning to crawl out of the abyss.
I remember a story I heard once in church as an illustration
of temptation’s deception. A man told about lusting after a woman’s shapely
form in India, but when she turned around, he saw that she was severely
disfigured by leprosy, and the repulsion of that reality jolted him out of lust’s
grip.
I always suspected that The Girls Next Door was just an
alluring facade covering a leprous core. Indeed, it turns out that The Girls
Next Door was more of a drug and jealousy-fueled cesspool than a big, happy
family or sexual Nirvana.
Former Hef girlfriend Holly Madison recently released a book
where she described life in the mansion as akin to being in a prison. She
described her first miserable sexual encounter with Hefner: “There was zero
intimacy involved,” she says. “No kissing, nothing. It was so brief that I
can’t even recall what it felt like beyond having a heavy body on top of mine.”
Despite being surrounded by a bevy of beauties, she
describes Hefner as more adept at Viagra-fueled masturbation than at pleasing
or getting pleasure from women, whom he manipulated and pitted against each
other.
And another former “Girl Next Door,” Kendra Wilkenson, reported
that sex with Hefner felt like a "clock in-clock out" job and that she had to get thoroughly drunk
or high to tolerate it—recalling a night when, after Hefner came to her bed for
some brief, perfunctory sex, he inexplicably started to weep.
I don’t know why he wept and perhaps he doesn’t know either,
but I suspect that he had a moment of clarity where the emptiness of his
supposedly have-it-all life flashed before him. Perhaps he realistically saw
himself as a decrepit old man, standing on the precipice of eternity, with
nothing to show for his earthy journey except a lifetime of fleshly indulgence,
superficial, broken relationships, and the promulgation of destructive, pornographic
propaganda.
Perhaps he realized that his string of father-hungry,
silicone-enhanced girlfriends and/or ever-revolving wives were seeking vicarious
fulfillment through notoriety and would never have given him the time of day
had he lived in obscure poverty. So they
didn’t really love him, did they? Or
if they did, he didn’t know how to love them back.
Wilkerson claims of Madison, “The one thing she truly wanted
was a piece of that stock, a piece of Playboy and a piece of Hef’s will.” Or perhaps, as Madison counters, “Hef used money as
a means to control each girlfriend,” and he tried to “buy” her with the
enticement of leaving $3 million to her in his will provided she stayed at the
mansion, an overture she viewed as pathetic.
Lovely, huh? Jealously, blackmail, manipulation, and that’s
just the start.
A feature writer wrote about current Playboy mansion life and
described how Hefner’s environment “looks less like a love nest than the cave
of a hoarder, unable to let go.”
But he will let go eventually because, perhaps ironically
for him, as Job said in the Bible, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and
naked I shall return.” And Hefner is the
perfect example of Jesus' illustration that, “What will it profit a man if he gains
the whole world but loses his own soul?”
The environment today is a far cry from my first exposure to
Playboy Magazine in the 1960s when a neighbor friend showed me a page she had
ripped out of her brother’s Playboy magazine. (On a side note, I shudder to
think about what kids today are exposed to via the Internet.) The page featured
a cartoon drawing of a bunch of naked people milling around in someone’s
depiction of hell. It looked more like a bunch of bored people on an overcrowded
nude beach than a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, or Christ’s description of hell
as a place of “weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” I don’t remember the punchline but it was
probably something about hell not being so bad after all.
Hefner is 89 years old now so, statistically, he’s very
close to finding out exactly what hell is like. In fact, most news outlets
probably wrote his obituary feature years ago.
The Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch
I don’t understand why my husband, who was an
extraordinarily wonderful man, passed away recently at the relatively young age
of 65 while someone like Hef keeps ticking. But I do know that as long as there
is life, there is hope.
Hefner is alive because of God’s abundant grace. Maybe God can
see beyond the bravado and the caricature of a sexual Lothario and perceive a
wounded, lonely man who pursued a tainted fortune to overcompensate for feelings
of rejection and who never really learned to give or receive love because he had no relationship with G-d, who IS love. Maybe the fact that Hefner had everything the
world can offer and found that it is not enough has softened his heart. Or
maybe not.
Regardless, the Playboy “empire” is what Johnny Cash sang
about in the song “Hurt”—an empire of dirt. At some point, Hefner will not be
able to trade his entire empire for even one more moment of life on this earth.
But the most amazing thing to me is that, even at this
moment, God extends grace and mercy to him.
Just as the thief on the cross turned to Christ in the last moments of
life, Hefner can do the same. And if he’s
sincere, and truly desires forgiveness, he can receive it. Christ’s sacrifice is that all-encompassing
and God’s love is that big.
The door is open for “Hef” or anyone else who wants to walk
through it but the day will come when the door closes. Don’t delay.
One of the most poignant songs ever recording and the video just rips my heart out.
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