Game ’boy

Photo: Elayne Lodge/PEI; Photo Illustration: Jamie DiVecchio Ramsay

The Girls Next Door, E!’s reality show starring Hugh Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends, just began its sixth season. A new doc about the native Chicagoan, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, debuted last month at the Toronto International Film Festival. And Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, 6 Volumes (a signed, limited-edition release from Taschen—yours for just $1,300) comes out in November.

The man, by the way, is 83.

We end our Sex issue by chatting with the indefatigable Playboy founder.

Time Out Chicago: What would the 27-year-old who began Playboy think of the 83-year-old today?
Hugh Hefner: The luckiest guy on the planet. [Laughs] He’s a kid who made his dreams come true and also changed the world in the process. Who could ask for better than that?

TOC: How did you change the world?
HH: Are you so young you don’t remember?

TOC: In your words.
HH: In my own words, I played some significant part in changing the social-sexual values of our time. I had a lot of fun in the process.

TOC: On this season of Girls Next Door, you’ve got three new girlfriends, including 20-year-old twins. How do they compare to the last three?
HH: Better. [Laughs] It’s hard to really compare new love and old love. With Crystal Harris, I think I’ve found what I thought I had with Holly [Madison]. I thought I found in Holly the girl I would spend the rest of my life with.

TOC: Have you often thought that?
HH: Rarely, rarely. When my second marriage [to Kimberly Conrad] ended and I came out of it a little emotionally beat up and bruised in 1998, I think the multi-girlfriends following that was an overcompensation for the pain I had suffered in the marriage.

TOC: So you’re still compensating—you still prefer multiple girlfriends.
HH: Much better than the one wife, yes. It gives you options. It’s probably to some extent a protection and [Laughs]—this is your sex issue you’re doing, isn’t it? Well, there’s more sex with more girlfriends.

TOC: You can always go to the next one.
HH: Yes, there are fewer headaches with multiple girlfriends. I get a headache.

TOC: Do you think women’s interest in you is motivated by their own ambitions or that it’s genuine—or does it matter to you?
HH: It depends on the women! Without question part of it is wanting to be in the magazine, to hang out at the Playboy Mansion, to hang out with a celebrity. I get more attention and fan mail from young girls who want to become my girlfriends now in my 80s than I did 20 years ago. A lot of it has to do with the television show.

TOC: To what do you attribute being sexually active in your 80s—Viagra? Something else?
HH: Well, it is certainly Viagra in part. But it also is good health—my mother lived to be 101—and a good attitude.

TOC: I’ve read that you’ve slept with most of any given year’s Playmates.
HH: It depends on the year. I’ve certainly been romantically involved with a number of the Playmates, but you didn’t have to sleep with Hefner to become a Playmate. The one was not connected to the other.

TOC: Of course, you and Playboy have been the object of feminist attacks, especially in the ’70s. Have you outlived antiporn feminism?
HH: A new generation has grown up that isn’t buying it, but that curse is still there, that antisexual element of the women’s movement in the ’70s and ’80s.

TOC: Do you think the argument that Playboy objectified women ever had any validity?
HH: Not ever. Never.

TOC: Despite the naked women.
HH: Well, it’s a men’s magazine. [Laughs] And also, let me make something clear: Women ,are sexual objects. If women were not sexual objects, there wouldn’t be another generation. Women are a good deal more than that, but the attraction between the sexes is the beginning of civilization—it’s what the world is all about!

TOC: So that goes both ways, right?—men as sexual objects for women.
HH: I guess so—let me show you some of my mail! [Laughs]

TOC: For our sex issue, we’re asking people about their first times. Could you tell me about yours?
HH: My first time was with Mildred Williams, the lady I was about to marry. We were at the University of Illinois, and we traveled to Danville, Illinois, and stayed at a hotel. I must’ve been around 21.

TOC: How was it?
HH: Disappointing. It was a little painful for her. But it got better.

TOC: And keeps getting better, apparently.
HH: Yes, I would say that. It’s practically perfect.

The Girls Next Door airs Sundays at 9pm on E!

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