The Professor and the Playboy

When a frail, elderly, scientist tells you his picture was once in Playboy magazine, well … you might well show disbelief: if he had once inhabited a passable body it must have been long ago, and wasn’t Playboy for pictures of girls? You check him again for any hint of transsexual journeys. No, it’s all simpler but long ago and far away: I was once a regular performer on Hugh Hefner’s weekly TV show, Playboy After Dark, in the days when Hefner was only middle-aged, his publishing empire still thrived and, more interestingly, he was a force to reckon with in American liberalism.

So when the children ask, “What did you do in your Hollywood years, Daddy?” I pull out a DVD of Playboy After Dark - Amazon has everything - but there is no sense of anticipation on their part, though there is on mine. There I am, sitting on a sofa ten feet away from Cher, who is singing her heart out, with my arm round Lindsay Wagner, who later found fame as the Bionic Woman. This cuts no ice with the children who have never heard of either. Nor do cries of, “But Cher is still working”; though I am not sure that is still true.

All this distant fun would enhance my reputation more with colleagues of a certain age, who would go straight to technicalities like, “And how did you get a job like that?” to which the answer is simple: the town has two trade dailies, as every child used to know, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. You buy a copy, read the advertised audition listings and get on down.

All this leaves something out, because Playboy After Dark was a very peculiar show. It ran for ten years, roughly through the Sixties, and was always hosted by Hefner himself. It had no nudity, no dirty jokes: it was just Hefner and guests in a series of large rooms intended to model an ideal ‘bachelor’s pad’ of the period, with musicians, comedians, and occasional writers, who would sing, play or do stand-up comedy. Watching and appreciating was a semi-permanent team of twelve good-looking, thirtyish, people of both sexes. They were the dancing, smiling party guests who, in a lucky week, also got some lines in a comedy sketch.

I was lucky, because the scriptwriter for the show was Tony Hendra, who went on to edit Spy and National Lampoon, and who assumed that a former fellow member of the Cambridge Footlights must be able to do sketches; it was in the blood. The show was made on the stages of KTLA Channel Five with episodes ‘back-to-back’, which meant that you made two weeks’ episodes in two days and then had twelve days off. I was a post-doctoral researcher whose grant funds had run low, so the twelve-day break was perfect for commuting back to Stanford, 400 miles to the north, where the Departmental Secretary eventually recognised me from watching the show, though it seemed to do my academic reputation no harm.

For those who have heard of Hefner only recently, in his reclusive dotage (but with Bunnies) in the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, sending occasional bulletins on his fragile virility, it is hard to imagine the man he was in his pomps: the supreme amateur chat show host. He was far more interesting to watch than Johnny Carson or any regular host because he didn’t have to be doing this; he had a real job! Far from being a professional entertainer, he ran a multi-billion empire of magazines and clubs; all this was just before he handed it over to his daughter Christine, who ran everything, albeit downhill, for the next 40 years.

Hef was doing this, rather like me on a much more modest level, because he was enjoying himself. He could indulge his taste in music and comedy in his own front room like a Medici prince of old. The guests are mostly forgotten now, but they were among the best US entertainers of the day: Tony Bennett, Don Rickles, Ike and Tina Turner, Tiny Tim, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Canned Heat. Many are dead; a few, like Tina Turner and Eric Burdon (one of ours) are still working. In my ignorance of northern accents, I let Burdon know I thought he was a Scot: he wasn’t pleased.

Hef’s chat was polished and had good timing, but he was not totally professional; this made him sound all the more sincere and interesting. With his conservative suits and pipe, his air was that of the youngish academic: a bright Oxford College Fellow in the sciences, being smooth and charming at a Feast. I remember when a famous author was a guest, Hef picked up one of his books and read a passage out before asking a question: chat show hosts don’t do that now.

Even in the late Sixties his clubs were showing their age. With the rise of youth culture, with which he could not keep up, then that of the Christian Right and the decline of his publishing empire, the signs were there even at the height of his show. He probably saw the show as a ‘lesser vehicle’ for his political views, the magazine being the greater: he had the satirist Mort Sahl on when no one else would touch him. Hef had a peculiar public position in those days, a not-quite-respectable, but committed advocate for all libertarian positions; he was against all US wars and state incursions into the freedom of the individual. None of that would have been remarkable here, in our world of opinionated publishers, but it was unusual in the US then and now. He gave freely to causes of the left, in US terms, and historians of television have said that his was the first show where blacks and whites mixed and talked freely, and even drank real champagne on TV - an unheard of thing.

The parties after the show were in his club on Sunset Boulevard; there was no Playboy Mansion then, and he still lived officially in Chicago, where he came from. He gave a small champagne party when I left, as he did for any member of the team; we were together a lot. The children asked, “And did you get to go out with all those girls?”; of course not, everyone was much too ambitious for that. One woman regular went on to make a film with John Wayne and there was, of course, The Bionic Woman, had I but known it at the time. I was really writing a book on Artificial Intelligence all the while, and in Hollywood that was perfect cover because no one was what they seemed and everyone said they were really writing a book or a screenplay or a script. And you couldn’t say, “But I really am.” Oh no!

- Warwick Yolks