popping Hugh Hefner may be enlisting a whole new generation of post-AID swingers to the Playboy lifestyle, but some past Playmates are currently styling and profiling on the legal warpath.
Says the Post, "Hefner's closet has some skeletons, and they've been talking to the press. Ex-girlfriends and Playmates, some involved in lawsuits against him or Playboy, suggest that the swinging lifestyle that Hefner has so publicly embraced anew masks a superficial and ultimately unfulfilling existence."
Terri Welles, Playmate of the Year in 1981, is now being sued by Playboy over her Web site with words like copyright infringement being tossed around. Welles, according to The Post, sees it as evidence of Hefner's shallow view of women. "I think he's a misogynist. But I feel sorry for him," she says. "I think it's a bunch of smoke and mirrors that he says he's so happy with his lifestyle. . . . He thinks, 'I have money. I have power. I have fame. I have all the aphrodisiacs one could need, and I'm still not happy.' Here's a man who had everything, who other men are envious of, yet nothing is ever enough."
Carrie Leigh who, at 19, lived with Hefner for five years in the 1980s has since filed three lawsuits against Hefner. Leigh filed, then dropped, a $35 million palimony suit, then sued Hefner for publishing unauthorized pictures of her. The suit was settled when Hef agreed not to do so in the future, but Leigh is now suing him for breaching that agreement. Pictures of her appear in "Inside the Playboy Mansion," a coffee-table book published by Playboy earlier this year.
Leigh, a Canadian model, moved into the Playboy mansion in 1983. Then, at 59, Hefner had a stroke. Leigh stayed long enough for Hefner to recover, but said eventually she wanted out.
"There was a point where I really looked up to him, like a father figure, until I realized I didn't want that anymore," she says. "I wanted to grow up, do something with my life, and he didn't like that."
Hefner says he still loves Leigh and doesn't understand her current resentment or her lawsuit, which is over pictures, published in the coffee-table book, that had been taken inside the bedroom.
Though she says she left Hefner because she felt the Playboy life was debilitating, Leigh admits the lifestyle was pretty hard to break away from.
"It's almost like a cult," she says. "When you live in an environment like that that's so different from how other people live, you start forgetting who you are and what you believe is right. It's like the song 'Hotel California'--'Mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice. We're all just prisoners here.' You know? 'You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave'? It took me a few years after I did leave to wipe it out of my head."
That lifestyle is precisely the problem, says Terri Welles, whose lawsuit is scheduled for trial in December. "I knew innately that it wasn't healthy. I always thought it was bizarre, even when I partook of it."
She adds, "I think he's had so many people around him for so long that are yes-people, sycophants, that he's bought his own story."
"They're not faithful and committed to their girls. It's so fake and phony, I won't have anything to do with it," says Doria Rhone. Rhone, for three years hosted--and performed on--the phone-in sex show "Nightcalls" when it was the top-rated program on cable television's Playboy Channel.
Rhone says she left the show in 1998 because its producer wanted her to move toward more hard-core porn. "It's unfortunate, because I had a great time working for them. They treated me like a star on a Christmas tree--bodyguards, everything. The minute I stopped working for them, they could care less if I was dead or alive."
According to The Post, Leigh and others from Hefner's past said that Hefner has hidden video cameras in his bedroom which taped hundreds of orgies and other sexual liaisons from the 1970s and '80s.
Leigh says Hefner would play tapes of him with his old girlfriends on two large-screen TVs while he and Leigh made love. She told him it hurt her feelings. She said her feelings of jealousy were outdated. Eventually, Leigh says, she begged Hefner to destroy the tapes that included her.
"By my last year with him, there were no other people having sex with us for a couple of years. I said, 'We might break up, I might go on and have children, and I can't have you having these tapes--someone else might get a hold of them.' "
Hefner claims he destroyed all the tapes in the mid-'80s, after Leigh walked off with one, realizing they might get into the public arena and hurt people who were on them.
Besides keeping a video archive of orgies, Hefner is alleged to have maintained logs of his sexual encounters on legal pads which he kept locked in a private cabinet in his bedroom.
"There were stacks of them," Leigh contends. "On the left, it would say the names of the people. Next to that, it would say the type of sex . . . and to the right of that, he would grade it. A-plus-plus-plus was the highest grade, down to C-minus," Leigh says.
Leigh supposedly showed the logs to Kelli Moore, a friend who lived with her at the mansion. "I thought it was just bizarre," Moore, now the artistic director of a theater in New York, told The Post. "That was just inexplicable to me. Weird."
Says Leigh: "In the beginning I didn't think about it, but by the time I was 22 or 23 I started thinking, 'Why does this man have to do this? Doesn't he believe he's Hugh Hefner?' It was like he never could really believe he was who he was, this made-up character."
Hefner has acknowledged keeping the logs--which he referred to as "diaries"--as just part of chronicling everything in his life. "I'm a writer-editor. I've done that kind of thing since early childhood," he says. "Do you think it's unusual? As a writer, the first thing you do is keep observational notes."
Hefner dismissed the notion that the logs sigannled sexual obsession" "It's as if you think sex is separate and apart from human experience. I think the opposite."
Asked if he believes it is possible to be addicted to sex, Hefner said, "I don't think there is a sexual addiction like drug addiction. But there is compulsion. And there are those who use sex as an obsession, like gambling." Hefner said that didn't apply to him. "When you're obsessed, you allow it to [expletive] up your life. I'm just the opposite," he laughs.
Leigh didn't view herself as that fortunate. "For a couple of years after I left him, I didn't want to have sex. I cut my hair short. I didn't wear makeup," she says. "I got so sick of feeling like an object, a thing to be there to look great for him, that I just didn't want to be bothered with anyone."
Leigh and other Hefner girlfriends from the 1980s say they were also disturbed by Hefner's propensity for sexual encounters with men. Leigh says she interrupted Hefner's liaisons with men a couple of times. The irony that this symbol of heterosexual male virility was involved homosexually was not lost on her, says The Post.
Her real fear was that it indicated Hefner's only true interest in women was exploitive. "It bothered me. It totally flipped me out," she says. "I tried to accept it. He thought it was all okay."
Hefner has acknowledged having bisexual liaisons in the past: "There was some bisexuality in the heterosexual, swinging part of my life," he said. But any notion that he preferred men was 'projection' on the part of Leigh, who was 'obsessed' with gay life, he said. (Leigh has also acknowledged having homosexual affairs during her years with Hefner; she is now married and has a child.)
Says Hefner: "I was testing the boundaries, just knocking down walls. . . . That period of sexual experimentation is long gone."
Leigh and others say, many in Hefner's orbit were drawn in by the license of wealth and celebrity. A former Playmate from the 1980s recalled feeling that hanging around the mansion implied a sexual obligation that left her feeling used.
"I wanted out of there so badly," she says. "I saw what happened to some of the girls who stayed. Every Friday, every Sunday, '[Some celebrity] wants you in Room 2.' You go to Room 2."
But, she adds, nobody held a gun to her head: "I hold myself accountable."
For all the Carrie Veighs, there are others who say Playboy boosted their careers and is supportive of women. "It's like a big sorority," says Carrie Stevens, Playmate June '97. "He's very eccentric. Very kind," she says. "But there's not a bad bone in his body. He's very gentle. He's Peter Pan; he never grew up."
As for the people from his past who say Hefner is manipulative and selfish, Hefner says, of course, he's made some enemies over the years, but "by and large the people who have been touched by my life have benefited tremendously. You'll find legions of people--friends, people who know me casually--who say I'm a giving, loving, supportive person.
"I am much loved. And that has some meaning for me. I pride myself that the way I have lived my life--unorthodox though it may be--is ethical and moral."
