Hugh Hefner

"You've caught me with my pants on," Hugh Hefner said with a sad smirk. There are days (or entire decades) when Hefner greets the midday sun in silk pajamas and a robe, but on this particular December afternoon, well, the playboy just wasn't in the mood.

IF HUGH HEFNER hadn't existed, the 20th century would have had to create him. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the 20th century would have wanted to create him either way. As the postwar era dawned, so too did an array of cheap, limitless entertainments, and in 1953, Hefner launched Playboy magazine.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has donated $2 million to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. The money will fund a central exhibition space in the new headquarters of the school and an archival repository for student films and historic documents, the university said. The existing repository, which bears Hefner's name, holds more than eight decades of student films, including some by George Lucas.

OCTOGENARIAN playboy Hugh Hefner emerges from the inner sanctum of his mansion wearing -- what else? -- black silk pajamas and a cloud of men's cologne. Flanked by his trio of blond and buxom lady friends, he settles into a plush leather sofa. The lights go down. Someone at the back of the room flicks on the movie projector. Forget about porno. This night, they're watching the 1933 comedy "Dinner at Eight," one of Hefner's early favorites.

Look up "cool" in the way-back dictionary, and this is what you get: "Playboy After Dark" -- Kennedy-era magazine magnate and bachelor icon Hugh Hefner hosting a "sophisticated weekly get-together of the people that we dig and who dig us." It's only an aspirational, suburban cool -- not whatever the real thing might be. Playboy's centerfold nudes are, after all, carefully airbrushed representations of the Girl Next Door. And their TV host is actually less urbane role-model than dorky neighbor.

The top box-office star of 1934 was neither of the sex symbols Clark Gable or Jean Harlow but gray-haired, 54-year-old humorist and political wit Will Rogers. The former cowboy, wild west show performer and trick rope twirler entered vaudeville in the early 1900s and became one of the stars of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. In 1918, he made his film debut and went on to appear in more than 60 features and short films until his untimely death in 1935.

THEY won't pick up a horn or sing a song, but they will be two of the most visible personalities at the Playboy Jazz Festival this weekend: Hugh Hefner and Bill Cosby. Hefner is inseparable from Playboy, of course, as the magazine's founder and a dedicated jazz fan.

Tuesday is National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day. It doesn't make sense for the wardrobe- challenged. "Unless they want me to show up naked," says Laker forward Luke Walton, "I can't participate in that holiday." No worries for Hugh Hefner, at right. He doesn't appear to do anything that would qualify as "work" in the 9-to-5 sense of the word, but he keeps a pile of PJs at the Playboy Mansion West in Holmby Hills.

Regarding "The Kinsey Effect" [Nov 15]: I think one of the biggest influences on the sexual revolution was left out -- Playboy and the Playboy advisor. Hugh Hefner glamorized sex and made it fun. Kinsey was to me a creepy guy, a voyeur giving us clinical news that was totally sexless. Mike Salisbury Venice