Mr. Playboy

By As told to Barbara Isenberg

I'm a kid who totally reinvented himself. I'm a direct 10th-generation descendant of William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was one of our Puritan fathers. My folks were Puritans. There was a great deal of repression in their lives and the way they were raised and, in turn, the way I was raised. I escaped early on into dreams and fantasies fueled by music and movies.

When I was in my junior year of high school in Chicago, I had a crush on a girl named Betty Conklin. I learned to jitterbug with her. When she invited another boy to a hayride instead of me, I reinvented myself for the first time. I started referring to myself as Hef instead of Hugh. Instead of wearing clothes chosen by my parents, I started wearing yellow cords, saddle shoes and red-flannel shirts that I didn't tuck in. I became more outgoing and created an ideal high school life for myself: I was head of the student council; I wrote plays and performed in them; I drew comic books called School Daze. In them, I created a world of my friends and myself in which I was the hero.

I got married at 22. In retrospect, that was a mistake. In a symbolic way, I stopped drawing School Daze: the last panel when I got married was "the end." I was putting away childhood things. I was putting away my dreams. That became obvious to me a few years later, when we had an alumni show at Steinmetz High School. My best buddy Jim Brophy and I wrote and performed in the alumni show. Doing the kinds of things I did in high school brought back to a conscious level what I had given up.

I was working at that time as circulation manager for a magazine called Children's Activities. The same week as the alumni show, after I had gone back to work, I remember standing on a bridge, looking out at Lake Michigan and thinking my life was not going anywhere. I felt as if I had successfully become my parents. Tears filled my eyes.

In the following months, I began making plans to start a magazine of my own. From spring 1953, when I started planning what became Playboy, to the publishing of the first issue at the end of the year, it was as if I were possessed. Playboy was profitable from the very first issue, and by 1959 we were printing a million copies a month. That same year, our marriage having failed, my wife and I got divorced.

By the end of '59, I reinvented myself again. Instead of simply editing the magazine, I came out from behind the desk and started living the life. I became the personification of the prototype that I was describing in the magazine. I became, in effect, Mr. Playboy. I started smoking a pipe. I bought a Mercedes-Benz 300SL--the coolest car. I hosted a syndicated TV show called Playboy's Penthouse, bought the first Playboy mansion and opened the first Playboy Club. In the space of a year, I became world famous.

It was not conscious at the time, but the parallels between my reinvention in high school after Betty rejected me and the true reinvention of my life are remarkable. My comic strip was just like the magazine--an idealized story of my life, with myself at center stage. I reinvented myself as this other person and used the magazine as the promotional tool to accomplish that. Instead of the Puritan world that my folks accepted and, from my perspective, paid the price for, I created a world for myself.

You are handed a life, and if you're lucky enough and smart enough, you become the person you want to be. My life is in direct response to the way that I was raised, which is true for everybody. Much of it is still connected to the boy who dreamed the impossible dreams. If you don't remember who you were, you don't know who you are. And I love the boy who dreamed the dreams. --As told to Barbara Isenberg