From The Vault Of Art Shay: Hef
By Art Shay in News on Dec 5, 2012 5:10PM
\r\nI took my 16-year-old late son Harmon along to the State Street mansion, to expand his horizons, and hitch-hiking on Hef\'s overhead strobe lights, caught Hefner looking over my shoulder at my address book for hot numbers. A publisher has to start somewhere. I borrowed that 1950\'s suit from an organ-grinder I knew who was my approximate size.\r\n\r\n
A package arrived for Hef from a pushy manufacturer. It was the very first sophisticated vibrator soon to become a joke and a staple in the sex trade. Obviously Hef and the Marilyn Monroe look-alike bunny, letting him demonstrate, didn\'t read the instruction book.\r\n\r\n
In the Mansion garage, Hef\'s Mercedes was at the ready, as was his Labrador named Jeff.
In the fabled Main Room, Hef\'s guests await a screening of the latest James Bond movie. A few years later Hef\'s PR department invited Florence and me to a wild \"Hollywood party\" beginning at midnight, We arrived sleepily, saw a sprinkling of \"names\"—William Buckley , Adlai Stevenson, Joan Blondell—but aside from some of the dancing, not unlike one of our own playroom gatherings. We left at 2 a.m. Noon the next day Hef\'s secretary calls: \"Wasn\'t that wild? Buckley doing that headstand! \" Into my embarrassed silence she said, \"You left at TWO?\" And laughed. \"Nothing begins around here before 3 a.m.!\" We promised to stay longer next time.
This is the first picture of Hef alone in his famous rotating bed.
At his 50th birthday party Hef and his brilliant business successor, daughter Christie, celebrate together.
Hefner in his business office-cum-bedroom, relaxes between editing chores. This picture, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, was also purchased by the Man himself. He must have liked it better as a lasting image of himself, than Marisol\'s artistic variation on the cover I still bleed about when I think of the bulging catalogue of my Almost-A- Home-Run pictures.\r\n\r\n
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art has Hugh Hefner on his mind.)
My old bouncy acquaintance, the sexual icon Hugh Hefner, 86, was in the news this week for becoming re-engaged to the 26-year-old blonde bombshell, Cynthia Harris, despite having auctioned off her first engagement ring for a mere two-thirds of its reported price. Without getting Hugh mad.
Matter of fact: The only bad vibe raised by my 1967 Time cover shoot of the great man was my disappointment in Time first hiring me to do the cover and story illustrations and, when they saw my pictures (or maybe even before they saw them), hiring the famous, beautiful sculptor, single-named Marisol (from Paris), to convert my images into a wooden sculpture involving his pipe (Marisol one-upped me, using two pipes ). Time put a picture of the sculpture on the cover. A Time first—and a great—success.
Marisol's creation , now said to be worth a million bucks, was done by a beautiful religious woman who came to sculpting from a flagellated girlhood—she walked on her knees until they were bloody—a variation on the more mundane wrist slice-and-dice of suicidal American teens.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.
