William Cash

Hugh Hefner was the king of soft porn – and luxury living

I got to know Hugh Hefner quite well when I lived in LA in the nineties and was a fairly regular visitor to the Playboy Mansion. As the Times of London’s Hollywood Correspondent, I was a regular on the guest list for The Playmate of the Year awards and occasionally was asked over for one of his supper evenings in his private cinema – with drinks served by waitress-style bunnies. During one Playmate of the Year awards in 1992, I wrote a piece for The Spectator about covering the LA riots from his study as the city went up in flames.

Hefner’s life philosophy was that ‘Life is too short to live somebody’s else dream’. But reading through the early obits, people think that Hefner was just talking about his liberal attitudes to sex and turning the Bachelor Lifestyle into an art form… but he wasn’t. He was also referring to his philosophy about the ‘service lifestyle’ he pioneered at the Playboy Mansion.

My point is Hefner’s legacy is not only about being a progressive cultural pioneer who made soft pornography acceptable for the middle classes. But rather his ‘Room Service’ lifestyle at the Playboy Mansion – swimming pool, team of butlers, personal chef, cinema, jacuzzi etc – was twenty-five years ahead of the modern developer obsession, with what developers like Candy & Candy call the ’24-hour service lifestyle’, or what Finchatton call a ‘ world-class serviced residence’.

When I first visited the Playboy Mansion back in the early 1990s, there were exactly the sort of close-circuit TV cameras on the gates, and banks of more security cameras inside – along with satellite dishes – that you would expect to find today at an oligarch’s house in Cap d’Antibes. And well before Trump had his first jet, Hefner had converted an entire commercial airplane into a private plane.

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