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the observer, and she offered everything imaginable. She was always available at bedside, was totally controllable, knew the perfect touch in personal places, and never said or did anything to disturb the mood before the moment of ecstasy.
    Each month she was a new person, satisfying the male need for variety, catering to various whims and obsessions, asking nothing in return. She behaved in ways that real women did not, which was the essence of fantasy, and was the primary reason for the prominence of Hugh Hefner, the first man to become rich by openly mass marketing masturbatory love through the illusion of an available alluring woman. It was a convenient way to carry on a relationship. For the price of the magazine, Hefner gave thousands of men access to an assortment of women who in real life would not look at them. He provided old men with young women, ugly men with desirable women, black men with white women, shy men with nymphomaniacs. He was an accomplice in the imagined extramarital affairs of monogamous men, supplied the stimulus for dormant men, and was thus connected with the central nervous system of Playboy readers nationwide, men whose passions were preceded by the preliminary wooing that Hefner did through a magnifying glass at his desk in Chicago, the erection center of the ultimate service magazine.
    For himself, Hugh Hefner had more grandiose goals. He wanted not only to have the nude pictures but also to possess the women who had posed for them. His sexual appetite, long frustrated, was now insatiable. Not content with merely presenting fantasy, he wished to experience it, connect with it, to synthesizehis strong visual sense with his physical drives, and to manufacture a mood, a love scene, that he could both feel and observe.
    With him it was not so much a case of divided attention as it was his dual state of mind. He was, and had always been, visually aware of whatever he did as he did it. He was a voyeur of himself. He acted at times in order to watch. Once he allowed himself to be picked up by a homosexual in a bar, more to see than to enjoy sex with a man. During Hefner’s first extramarital affair, he made a film of himself making love to his girl friend, a 16 mm home movie that he keeps with cartons of other personal documents and mementos, photo albums, and notebooks that depict and describe his entire personal life.
    From his early boyhood, though he was most unattractive and shy, he nevertheless had a high sense of self-esteem, believed he was somehow special, and regarded his existence as a potentially public event that he should scrupulously take note of. He saved his childhood drawings, kept snapshots from grade school through the Army, from college to his marriage to the founding of Playboy . He continues to update this material, saving letters, notes, photographs, preserving them with the care of a curator confident of their historical worth.
     
    What Hefner did not document on film or in writing he witnessed with such attentiveness that he still remembers the texture of his surroundings and sees himself at the center. When he was thirteen, while attending a Boy Scout meeting one evening, he saw through the half-raised shade of a window next door a young girl getting undressed. It was the first time he had seen an undressed female, and he was mesmerized. Decades later, he could still recall exactly how he felt, what he had seen.
    Hefner had never seen nudity at home. His mother was always fully clothed around the house, was careful to change her clothes behind closed doors. When he and his younger brother were taken to the public swimming pool in summer, his father would turn his back to them in the men’s locker room while putting onhis bathing trunks. Hugh Hefner attributes much of his own early shyness to the discomfort conveyed by his parents at the pool, where the mass display of flesh was an affront to their traditional modesty. Adding to Hefner’s self-consciousness about the pool