Thy Neighbor's Wife (5 page)

Hefner was able to decorate his room with such voluptuaries, with his mother’s acquiescence if not approval, because his schoolwork had suddenly improved and he also now seemed determined to pursue certain vaguely artistic goals that his mother was reluctant to discourage. His drawings and cartoons, which had once merely cluttered the house, were now appearing in the grammar school newspaper that he edited and in the large illustrated personal diary that he meticulously kept up to date with facts and observations about himself and his classmates. Inactive in sports and still shy around girls, Hefner remained socially close to his contemporaries by becoming their chronicler.

He progressed in this passive way through his first two years in high school, after which he gradually began to assert himself, to emerge as a personality, to participate as well as observe. He acted in class plays and satires that he also helped to write. He became president of the student council, vice-president of the literary club. He did radio broadcasts for the Board of Education, and contemplated becoming a network broadcaster or a movie star. He learned to dance well, to relax more around girls. One of the girls that he dated had recently been photographed in the school newspaper, following her election as the student most representative of Steinmetz High School. While she had not greatly appealed to him before the contest, her triumph quickly affected him, made her enticing to him—she symbolized the desires of the student body, she was an object of adoration, and he was lured by her limelight. He dated her often, and one night in the darkness of a movie theater he began to touch her, to reach up under her skirt and feel between her thighs. This was his most aggres
sive sexual moment in high school, one that he would always remember, even though he got no further.

In 1944 he graduated from Steinmetz High in the top quarter of his class of 212 students, and was voted the third most likely to succeed. His plans for college were postponed because he soon would be called into the Army. World War II was more than a year away from ending in Europe and Asia. His mother, who knew that she would worry incessantly about Hugh’s safety if she remained inactive at home, got a job in a research laboratory of a Chicago paint company. While Hugh was also somewhat apprehensive about the Army, he welcomed the opportunity for travel, having so far not ventured beyond Chicago. But two weeks before his induction, while attending a party, he met a girl who suddenly made him wish that he had more time left as a civilian.

She was a pretty brunet with large brown eyes and a slender, graceful figure. She wore her long straight hair with bangs, and she had a friendly manner that put him quickly at ease. Her name was Mildred Williams, and, though she had been in his graduating class at Steinmetz, they had never really met, which seemed incredible to Hefner, who was particularly attracted to her kind of wholesome good looks. He danced with her many times at the party, escorted her home, and dated her in the time he had left before his induction.

He wrote her often during the summer of 1944 from Fort Hood, Texas, where he took basic training and was alternately bored and appalled by his life as a soldier. A rather idealistic young man of eighteen who neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and whose limited sexual experience had so far precluded even masturbation, Hugh Hefner quickly found himself surrounded by the vulgarity and cynicism of a typical military barracks. While he adjusted to it, he did not indulge in it. He went to service club dances but did not pursue the women around the base. He spent his free time going to the movies, drawing cartoons or sketches, and writing long reflective letters to Mildred Williams, who, though he hardly knew her, had become intimately involved in his fantasies and his future expectations.

On furloughs he came home to see her, and she did not disappoint him. Although her standards of sexual propriety kept him at a distance, this merely added to the challenge and mystery that she represented. As a practicing Catholic she did not believe in premarital sex, and as a practical young woman in her freshman year at college she was wary of complications that might detract from her studies. Though she possessed the carefree look of the All-American girl, Mildred had been reared in an unhappy overcrowded home with an autocratic father who could not adequately support his five children on his salary as a Chicago bus driver, and a religious mother who was sustained by her faith that life would somehow get better. But it never did. Mildred thus acquired an early belief in self-reliance, an assumption that any improvements she sought would most likely come through her own initiative. She was never lazy. She studied hard in school and also held jobs in the late afternoons and on weekends to earn money for college. At the University of Illinois she worked during the evenings at the library, planning to become a teacher. She did not join a sorority, had no time for dating. During the summers she worked without a vacation, even refusing to take time off from her job when Hefner was in town on furlough. While he fretted and sulked, he privately admired her dedication, it being comparable to his own mother’s efforts many years ago in achieving a higher education without the help or encouragement of her rural parents in Nebraska.

Hefner was no less aspiring about himself, and following his discharge from the Army in 1946 he enrolled at the University of Illinois and planned to take the maximum number of courses each and every term, including the summer terms, so that he could complete the four-year curriculum in two and a half years. He wanted to make up for the two unproductive army years during which he had lingered in various bases in the United States as the war ended overseas. As a twenty-year-old student on the G.I. Bill he was anxious to regain his personal momentum, to define
his life’s goals, and to resume the almost Victorian courtship of Mildred Williams.

His understanding of her so far, aside from their limited time together during furloughs, had been acquired largely through the mail in the many letters she had written, nearly all of them highly idealistic in tone, discreetly affectionate, encouraging—letters that relieved his loneliness in the barracks and convinced him that she was indeed the embodiment of the romantic image that he had created.

But even his high expectations were exceeded in 1946 after he had rejoined her on the Illinois campus, and began dating her every weekend, and meeting her each night on the library steps, walking slowly with her hand in hand through the most glorious autumn of his life. He was enraptured, thrilled by her looks and manner, and excited too by the world around him, the new freedom of college life, the deferential treatment accorded him by other students as a returning veteran, and the sense of overwhelming optimism and confidence that inspired so many Americans at that time, the first year after the triumphant war.

Hefner took up stunt flying as a weekend diversion at an airport near the campus, and within a year he had earned his pilot’s license and was maneuvering his biplane through startling turns, stalls, and loops. He sang with a student dance band, imitating the style of Frankie Laine. He started a college humor magazine, earned excellent marks in class, majoring in psychology, and he felt for the first time that he was physically attractive. His cartoons and articles were published in
The Daily Illini
, and as an intellectual exercise he wrote a play about a scientific discovery proving that God did not exist; the play ends with the government vigilantly suppressing the information because it thought the public could not live with the truth.

When Hefner wrote this he was an agnostic, which he would remain thereafter, departing from his fundamentalist Methodist background. But he believed that his rejection of his family tradition was just part of a larger social revolution that he saw developing all around him. He had read in the newspapers that the
industrialist-filmmaker Howard Hughes had challenged the Hollywood moral code by releasing his movie
The Outlaw
, in which a voluptuous actress named Jane Russell climbs into bed with a man. Hefner’s favorite magazine,
Esquire
, which the Post Office wished to ban from the mail as obscene, had won its case before the Supreme Court and was free to distribute without harassment. The recent discovery of penicillin as a cure for venereal disease had suddenly lessened the inhibiting fear that for centuries had been associated with sexual profligacy. And the Kinsey report on men, based on data accumulated after more than 12,000 interviews, revealed that, despite much puritanical posturing in America, its citizens were secretly very sexual. Fifty percent of all married men had slept with women other than their wives while married, Kinsey stated, and 85 percent of all men had experienced intercourse before marriage. Nine out of ten men masturbated, and, in a statistic that shocked many readers, 37 percent of the male population had achieved an orgasm through at least one homosexual act.

These and other findings resulted in the condemnation of Dr. Kinsey by clergymen, politicians, and editorial writers, but Hugh Hefner was greatly impressed with the book, and in his review of it in
Shaft
, the magazine he began in college, he wrote: “This study makes obvious the lack of understanding and realistic thinking that have gone into the formation of sex standards and laws. Our moral pretenses, our hypocrisy on matters of sex have led to incalculable frustration, delinquency and unhappiness.”

This last statement could have applied to Hefner himself, for in spite of his various achievements on the campus during his first two years, he was sexually frustrated. At twenty-two he still had not experienced intercourse. He had repeatedly tried to seduce Mildred, but each time she had pleaded, sometimes tearfully, that they wait a while longer. It was not only her religion and the fear of pregnancy that influenced her thinking but also her wish that their first lovemaking be a splendid occasion, a private celebration in romantic surroundings, and not, as was the case with most students, a furtive hasty happening in a borrowed car.

Hefner at first agreed with her and admired her attitude. She was, like his mother, uncommonly idealistic, a serious, strong, and trustworthy young woman who in marriage would become, as he wished, exclusively his own possession. But as the months passed, Hefner could no longer contain his sexual drive and curiosity, and during weekend dates in Chicago their heavy petting in his father’s Ford gradually extended to mutual masturbation, and then fellatio. On a Sunday night as they were returning to the campus on a Greyhound bus, and after their kissing and caressing in the darkened vehicle had become increasingly passionate, he urged her to perform fellatio on him right there at their seat, under a blanket. As surprised as she was by his request, she was even more surprised by her willingness to accede to his wish without reluctance or awkwardness, so eager was she at that moment to please him, as well as being herself excited by doing this act so daringly behind the backs of unsuspecting passengers. As she lowered her head in the darkness and took his penis in her mouth, she felt not only love for him but a dramatic awakening of her own liberation.

Though she no longer attended Mass regularly, she did not interpret this as a sign of declining morality but rather an increasing commitment to the man she would one day marry and from whom she was now learning much about the art of giving and receiving pleasure. She marveled at how much Hefner seemed to know and care about sex. He was endlessly reading marriage manuals and erotic novels, nudist magazines and books about sex laws and censorship. From him she heard for the first time such phrases as “erogenous zones,” and with him she experienced her first orgasm, through cunnilingus.

During an afternoon in Chicago when his parents were not at home, he took her to his bedroom on the second floor and pulled down the shades; then from the closet he brought lights and a camera, and, after a minimum of coaxing, Mildred slowly removed her clothes and stood nude before him. Quietly, excitedly, he began to take photographs of her on the bed and against the wall where the Petty pinups had been, and soon she responded as
naturally as she had on the bus, striking her own poses, appreciating her graceful body as much as he, though nonetheless amazed by her willingness to do what months before would have been inconceivable and wildly shocking.

Though she never saw the pictures and had no idea what use Hefner made of them, she continued to have positive feelings about her sexual episodes with Hefner even after she had reflected upon them; since she was now a senior in college, she believed she was more than ready for these experiences—as she was ready, too, after her final examination in the spring of 1948, to join Hefner in a hotel room in Danville, Illinois, and spend the night making love.

Convinced of their compatibility and planning soon to become engaged, Hefner returned to the Illinois campus during the summer of 1948, while Mildred accepted her first teaching assignment at a small high school in the northwestern part of the state. Since neither of them had cars, and both were very involved with schoolwork, they did not see one another every weekend. When they did meet it was usually in Chicago, where their relationship and future wedding had already been acknowledged and approved by their parents, although in attaining this harmony Hefner had compromised to a degree his views on religion. He had at Mildred’s request agreed to take religious instructions from a priest and to allow their children to be raised in the Church. It was not Mildred so much as her mother who felt strongly about this, and Hefner was at first opposed because he regarded Catholicism as a tyrannical force against sexual freedom and the rights of personal privacy. He had often expressed this opinion in letters to Mildred, in which he questioned the infallibility of the Pope, disagreed with the Church’s policy on birth control and abortion, and denounced the Church’s history of censorship, from the Middle Ages to the present, of thousands of erotic books, pictures, films, and other forms of expression. But while his feelings about Catholicism were unchanged as the wedding plans were made, he was too preoccupied at the time with college to make an issue of it; and also, knowing how far Mildred
had privately departed from the dictates of her religion, he foresaw no problems with her after their marriage.