Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's first true love was movies

On Mondays, it's Manly Night, in which the audience is smaller and older -- mostly Hefner's circle of longtime pals, people like tough-guy actor Robert Culp and Ronald Borst, a leading collector of old horror film posters. In recent weeks, they have watched the old "Flash Gordon" serials, which, of course, Hefner remembers in sexual terms. "The women I have been most enamored with over the years," he says, "looked very much like Dale Arden."

The old movies stay the same, but the mansion audience doesn't.

"The group changes by and large only by making new friends and having old friends die," Hefner said. "Don Adams and Mel Torme used to be part of the group. . . . This literally is a second home for a great many of my friends. I think on my passing a lot of my friends are going to be lost socially."

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Refining an image

The Playboy mansion and its master have become symbols of refined debauchery, and Hefner has carefully cultivated that imagery. "The Girls Next Door," an E! channel show that brought cameras into the mansion (a la "The Osbournes") to record Hefner's relationship with a trio of curvy blond girlfriends, began its fifth season in October. A sixth season is on the way and, after much-publicized strife, there is more public interest than ever in the strange love rectangle. There's also "Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream," the biography by Steven Watts, who was given unrestricted access to the tycoon's vast archive of self, which includes journals and scrapbooks dating to his youth.

Hefner has a deep voice, an impish grin and the small, delicate hands of man whose mansion has Jergens cherry-almond lotion in every one of its bathrooms. He is not as tall as he used to be and he hunches forward, but the only moment he looks frail is when standing next to the bare-breasted statue of Barbi Benton that lords over his library.

The library shelves are dominated with books on Hollywood history, and it's surprising, perhaps, that Hefner hasn't put himself in their pages in a bigger way since moving west in 1971. Like Howard Hughes, he could have bought a spot in the dream factory, but Hefner has mostly been content with just watching.

The great exception to that was his unlikely role as a key producer for Roman Polanski's grim and gory 1971 "The Tragedy of Macbeth." A top executive at the Playboy Club in London had championed the idea of Hefner getting involved in the project, which became Polanski's first film after the 1969 murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, during the Manson family attacks.