The Ghostwriter of the Sky Tackles the King of the Playboy Empire

Leo Janos will tell you right off that his upcoming autobiography of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner “makes no claim that all those years we thought he was in the round bed with girls, he was in the round bed with boys. He really was in the round bed with girls.”

In fact, as Janos plows through decades of scrapbooks and Playboy magazines, he isn’t preoccupied with Hef’s sex life, which he finds basically “pretty boring,” or with other facets of the public Hefner.

But, Janos promises, “The pre-pajama years are going to knock people’s socks off. That’s where all the surprises really are,” in a youth “as far removed from the public perception of Hugh Hefner as is possible to get.”

It seems a big leap for Janos, the best-selling biographer of macho test pilot Gen. Chuck Yeager (“Yeager”), to chronicle the life of the most famous playboy of them all. But Leo Janos never went out looking for either man.

“My agent happened to have dinner with one of the Bantam editors the day Yeager was signed,” Janos explained. When approached about doing the book on Yeager, Janos asked, “You mean the race-car driver? I think I was thinking of Cale Yarborough.”

When set straight, Janos’ initial response to writing about the first man to break the sound barrier was, “Good God, that was 30 or 40 years ago. Why would I want to do a book about him?”

“Yeager,” published in mid-1985, has sold more than 1 million copies in hardcover. Janos said, “People were hungry for a hero.”

Playboy bought first serial rights--enter Hugh Hefner. And now comes “Hef: An Autobiography,” the working title for the book scheduled for fall 1988 publication and for which a megabucks advance has been reported. Janos isn’t saying how much but acknowledges it is “a very significant amount of money.”

In choosing a biographer, Janos said, the most important thing to Hefner was the writer’s age. Hefner, he said, is “the last of the great romantics,” which to him explains his penchant for much younger women--”He always wanted to be the guy who would introduce them to Humphrey Bogart. I mean, he lives in the past, Billie Holiday records, Harry James. To walk an innocent through all that stuff and record the sense of wonder that he had known as a teen-ager, to be the mentor of nostalgia. . . .”

(But didn’t Hefner also exploit women? Perhaps, Janos acknowledges, but he believes that, for many, bunnydom was their life’s highlight. He mentions a letter sent to Hefner by the mother of a former bunny in which her daughter asked to be buried in her bunny costume. “Can’t you understand that?” Janos asked. “I can.”)

At 53, Leo Janos is one-time speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson, former Time magazine correspondent and pre-”Yeager,” author of only one book--a notably unsuccessful true story of a drug-crazed teen-ager who killed his mother and grandmother.

Janos pondered the popularity of the autobiography as literary form and attributed it in part to “public impatience with TV and the media, a distrust,” a desire to learn about these people “without having ‘you guys’ get in the way.”

With “Iacocca,” there was also what Janos calls “the instructive element”--large companies bought it as sort of an employees’ handbook. (“Hilarious,” Janos observed. “If any of them ever tried to act like Iacocca, they’d all be fired.”)

Then, he said, there is the “inspirational aspect,” the reader discovering of some VIP that “he’s a schlepper, just like me.” (Here, the young Hefner qualifies, he noted, as “a down-and-out 27-year-old who’d never had a decent job.”)

Finally, he said, “There’s just a fascination to read about other people’s lives. It’s like getting your hands on somebody’s diaries.”

Right or wrong, Janos said, readers believe autobiographies “really tell it the way it was.”

Is that what Hefner is doing? Janos smiled and said, “Yes, the way he sees it.” He added, “There were many, many times in his life when he looked like a jerk. I want those moments, too. He has to be convinced.”

There is a common denominator among people who get books written about themselves, Janos pointed out, and that is “enormous egos. There’s no one who’s a shrinking violet who’s ever been the subject of an autobiography.”

The next subject for Janos? After finishing “Yeager,” he drew up a list. It included Joe Dimaggio (“I’m a Bronx boy”), Leonard Bernstein (“I’m into classical music”), and Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Co..

He turned down Texas oilman and corporate takeover king T. Boone Pickens Jr. Janos explained that “I just didn’t understand the business world. . . . I’d have been absolutely at his mercy.” He also rejected former White House deputy press secretary Larry Speakes, perceiving a “lack of candor.” Besides, Janos said, “he’s interesting only for a job he had.”

The men and women who interest him, he said, are those “who really have impacted their times.” Hefner qualifies, he said, although “the jury is out” as to whether his impact has been for better or for worse.

In the world of autobiography, Janos said, the collaborating writer must maintain “a delicate balance” between creativity “and a sense of who’s in charge around here” while trying not to become the “forgotten fellow.”

Even though Yeager was “very magnanimous” about sharing credits, Janos said, “If you have two and a half minutes on the ‘Today’ show, question number four isn’t going to be, ‘Tell me, what is Leo Janos really like?’ ”

The good biographer, Janos believes, is one who can “make someone comfortable so they open up,” can quickly size a person up and “put the right words in that person’s mouth. An autobiography is ‘the world according to.’ Basically, you’re a playwright. You’re putting together a main character in his language.”

First of all, said Janos, who was relaxing on a holiday in the den of his Brentwood home (he never writes on holidays, or weekends), “you read everything you can” about your subject. In two or three months, “a bell rings” and you can start to write.

“Yeager” was written chronologically, a portrait of the man from childhood, preceded by an attention-grabbing italic opener in which Yeager is jettisoning his fuel over the Mojave Desert during a near-fatal attempt to break the sound barrier.

Hefner’s Diaries

With Hefner, Janos said, “We’re going to open with his stroke (in March, 1985), which was his bomb.” Then, Janos will tell the Hefner story beginning with boyhood in “a very repressive Methodist home.” Hefner has made the job easier--”He kept a diary from age eight or nine, all the way through college. We know the exact moment, the exact hour, when he kissed his first girl, the exact moment he first petted a girl, what it was like.”

The child Hugh Hefner was “very much like he is today,” Janos said, “introverted, shy, filled with his own fantasies and imagination.”

Hefner’s story intrigues Janos because “it’s an intensely American story,” one of growing up in the ‘40s with that decade’s sexual taboos. Janos observed, “He’d be much less interesting if he’d never married and had been a skirt chaser from college.” He did marry, in 1949 (“He was a virgin,” said Janos) but he and Millie divorced in 1954. (“She didn’t love him,” Janos said, but married him “in the context of the times.”)

Janos also points out that Playboy, a profit-maker from the first issue in 1953, was launched with a $1,000 loan from Hefner’s mother after his straitlaced accountant father turned him down. (Later, Janos noted, Hefner’s father became corporate treasurer but, Hefner told Janos, never once opened a copy of Playboy).

But does Janos like Hefner, admire him? Does the writer have to like his subject? It is, Janos believes, necessary “to basically admire and approve of their accomplishments.” Just as he “really respected” Yeager, even though he found him hard to get close to, he admires Hefner’s drive and perfectionism.

Hefner and Yeager “both were excessive in what they liked to do,” Janos observed, “and they worked harder than anybody else. Both were perfectionists; old-fashioned virtues that I just love. These guys paid their dues and worked their tails off. To me that’s much more important than really liking them.”