A Spaceman And An Old, Played Out Boy
While Americans have been fussing over former and future astronaut John Glenn, cheering his planned return to space this fall in a 77-year-old body, another septuagenarian has been quietly making history of his own.
Without fanfare. Without talk show appearances. Just a man and his dignity facing one of life’s milestones.
Hugh Hefner is dumping the woman he once called his “Playmate for a Lifetime.” Unless Hef is planning to cash it in, Kimberley Conrad Hefner will fall a little short of that goal.
After nine years of marriage and two children, Hefner, 71, and Kimberly, 34, have announced a trial separation. The Hefners “remain close and hope for a reconciliation,” reports declared. I can’t remember the last time that happened.
Get ready, ladies, the lion is on the prowl again, even if his mane is a little scruffy and there’s just a touch of mange. Warning: The menopausal need not apply.
My enduring image of the storied founder of Playboy magazine is a lank-haired man in a satin robe, oiling his way around the Playboy mansion with a cocktail in one hand and roaming fingers on the other, stroking women who sport balloons for breasts.
Like John Glenn, Hef’s celebrity peaked in the 1960s.
Like Glenn, his claim to fame was a launch pad, although of a slightly different nature.
But where Glenn went on to a distinguished career as a U.S. senator when his flying days were over, Hef was an insect encased in plexiglass, an anachronism from the sexual revolution who didn’t know when to grow up and take his place among adults. The portrait in his attic remains youthful, while the real man decays and the satin robe becomes threadbare.
How many American husbands display nude photos of their wives around the house? This rascal does.
In 1989, a tearful Hefner wed that year’s Playmate of the Year, saying, “You are my beloved. You are my best friend,” ending more than 30 years of randy bachelorhood.
Randy indeed. Rivaling such sex machines as Wilt Chamberlin, he once bragged of having been with more than a thousand women. Picture 1,000 women, linked arm in arm like paper dolls, with Hugh Hefner as the common denominator. The sultan and his serial harem.
For comparison, John Glenn has been married to his one true wife, Annie, for 54 years. They were childhood friends.
Glenn goes to work in a suit, not a bathrobe and pajamas.
He fast-walks two miles a day and follows a regular weightlifting program. I don’t know what Hef’s workout routine is but I don’t picture him pounding a Stairmaster.
The spaceman, in fact, has kept himself in such good shape that NASA will send him hurtling through the stratosphere with astronauts half his age and courage. When Glenn blasted off in 1962 for a three-orbit trip around the Earth, the space program was in its infancy. Strapping men onto Atlas booster rockets and launching them like Dr. Strangelove demanded unbridled faith in science.
Did Hef listen to the launch on his radio that day? Was he sipping a martini and thinking the astronaut a little foolish to be taking such a risk? Was he contemplating the risks his own life entailed - gun-toting fathers of virgins, runs in his silk sheets, bruised gin?
Wasn’t he as much a hero to the American male as the fair-haired rocket man?
Chicago’s most famous playboy must have pitied Glenn that day, all alone in his fab rocketship - the ultimate babe magnet. Forget Corvettes and XK-Es. Get a girl in the back seat of a Mercury capsule and you’ve got a sure thing.
Now, 35 years later, Hef is the pitiful one. His playmate for life is moving out. His reputation won’t attract the ladies as it once did. Young starlets are circling Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and directors who can do more for their careers than staple their navels.
Hefner is just a geezer whose booster rocket is bound to flame out before launch time.
The lion sleeps tonight.
xxxx