When a few friends reached out this week to let me know that Hugh Hefner had died, it was not shocking to me given that his health had been in decline, but the sting of losing such an influential and colourful friend was immeasurably painful. I had last visited him in the spring to watch a movie, and although his mind was razor-sharp, his 91-year-old, silk-robed body was failing him.
My introduction to Hef and the Playboy Mansion came in January, 2005, in the most unexpected way. I had just had the world-premiere screening of my film The Last Mogul in Palm Springs, Calif., and we were getting great reviews. The Hollywood Reporter's review calling it "Oscar-worthy" had caught Hugh Hefner's attention and he wanted a private screening. My assistant yelled to me: "Hugh Hefner is on the line," and I said, "Sure it is, put him through."
Famous for my own phone pranks, I assumed it was a friend and I carried on childishly like Hef was an old pal. Thirty seconds into the call, he had convinced me it was indeed the founder of Playboy on the phone and he was inviting me to screen my film at his Los Angeles mansion, for him and his friends, on a Saturday night of my choosing, complete with a private dinner in my honour. I had met many celebrities over the years, from Sinatra to Jagger, but none had invited me to their home, much less the iconic Playboy Mansion that required no address and had a "Bunnies at Play" sign as you drove up the steep driveway.
When I screened my film there a month later, I learned a few extraordinary things about Hef, things that very few people really knew. Saturday night at the mansion was hardly the expected frolicking orgy and games in the infamous grotto. This was Hef's night, religiously reserved to screen his favourite films from his vast collection of classics for his closest friends, a group that included a smaller and older group of long-time pals, like actors Robert Culp and Don Adams and singer Mel Tormé. Hef screened films three nights weekly, including Sunday – which drew the largest crowd due to the newest films being screened by a special arrangement Hefner had with all the studios.
Hefner loved that I loved film and old Hollywood, and told me that I was now on the list to visit the mansion on Saturdays. He jokingly pointed out that he was 79 years old, so I should visit more often than not. And for the next 12 years I would receive the most profound and insightful education in American cinema, one that no school or film critic could offer.
Hef had one of the largest private collections of American classics ever assembled, and every Saturday-night screening began the same way. A classic American buffet of fried chicken, meat loaf, steamed vegetables and apple pie was served promptly at 5:45 in the master dining room, followed by the main attraction at 6:45. As we got comfortable in the rich velvet chairs and couches in the Norma Desmond-like screening room and gobbled up fresh, warm popcorn, Hef would introduce each film with a clever, Dick Cavett-style delivery of lists of trivia and statistics associated with it. (It was not lost on me that Cavett, Hef's pal Johnny Carson and Hef himself were all repressed boys from the Midwest.) He would then wave his hand and his full-time projectionist knew it was time to kill the lights and fire up the Italian 35mm projection system.
After the film, we would stay and have thrilling conversations about the casting, direction and filming approach. Hef knew every detail about every film he showed and was a virtual cinema encyclopedia. He would point out insider stuff – how Orson Welles pioneered a specific camera angle by digging a ditch in the sound stage, or how Bette Davis secured a certain role by seducing the director. He taught me to look at what was not so obvious in the frame and what the director and cinematographer were subliminally injecting into a scene. He would point out the symbolism behind the huge fireplace in Citizen Kane, or that the Shakespeare reference that ends The Maltese Falcon was suggested by its star, Humphrey Bogart. He also had delicious gossip, such as the nugget that on the set of The African Queen everyone in the cast and crew got sick – except for leading man Bogart and director John Huston, which they attributed to the fact that they basically lived on imported Scotch. According to Hef, Bogart later said, "All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whisky. Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead."
I found myself cancelling dinners and making excuses to not miss another Saturday night at the movies with Hugh Hefner.
He was my tour guide for at least 75 films at the mansion, many of which I saw for the first time. I sat in awe, usually one row behind him, watching beautifully restored prints of films like The African Queen, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Grand Prix, The Man with the Golden Arm, Little Caesar and dozens more.
Hef was so passionate about collecting and preserving film that he gave $1.5-million (U.S.) to endow the University of Southern California's Hugh M. Hefner Chair for the Study of American Film, and he gave the University of California, Los Angeles, $1-million in 2006 for the school's Film & Television Archive. He also quietly funded a number of documentary productions and film-preservation efforts. No surprise for a man who had a celluloid fixation and a Maltese Falcon statuette and bust of Boris Karloff in his bedroom.
As Hefner got older, the film intros and post-screening conversations got shorter and the volume of the films grew louder. On one visit I noticed the screenings now had closed captioning so that Hef wouldn't miss a word of dialogue. He was now frail, but he always called me "Toronto" and forgave me for making a film about his arch-enemy, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione.
So I now bid farewell to an unlikely film professor who happened to start a vast empire with $8,000 and a velvet smoking jacket, and somehow gave me an enviable film education in a gothic mansion, bathed in a glow of old Hollywood and a beautiful friendship.
Barry Avrich is a Canadian filmmaker and author.