Hefner to End His Days as a Playboy With Wedding to Playmate
Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner paced his Los Angeles mansion with his trademark soft drink in hand Saturday as the final hours of his bachelorhood ticked away before marriage to Kimberley Conrad, 1988’s Playmate of the Year.
Conrad already has gotten one of her wishes, with the estate’s comely entourage politely dispatched from the 5.3-acre Playboy Mansion in the city’s Holmby Hills section.
“She’s made it clear that this is her home and people just can’t wander in and out now like they always have,” Playboy spokesman Bill Farley said several hours before the afternoon ceremony. “They must be cordially invited.”
As for Hef: “I can tell you with certainty that he is pacing around the mansion with a bottle of Pepsi in his hand as we speak,” Farley said.
Hefner passed on holding the traditional bachelor party before the wedding, and Farley quoted him as saying: “Bachelor party? I’ve had a bachelor party for 30 years; why do I need one now?”
Early Saturday, workers were making last-minute preparations for the traditional ceremony between the 63-year-old founder of Playboy and Conrad, 26.
Farley said workers were winding garlands of flowers down the banister of the mansion’s grand staircase, where Conrad would make her entrance wearing an off-white taffeta gown with a train embroidered with the couple’s initials.
Farley said the marriage captures the spirit of the 1990s.
“Hugh Hefner, the perennial bachelor, is getting married at a time a lot of his magazine readers are getting married,” he said. “The trend for the 1990s is commitment.”
Hefner was married once before, for 10 years to Millie Williams, and they had two children--Christie, 36, and David, 34. “I am, most important, excited about it because he’s so happy,” said Christie Hefner, chairwoman of Playboy Enterprises.
Outside the mansion Saturday, a huge white tent had been erected alongside the home’s exotic grotto and workers were arranging the imported cheeses and smoked fish the 450 wedding guests would munch on while dancing to a 25-piece band, Farley said.
Cable TV Highlights
The news media was not invited to the event. An advisory issued last week detailed how pictures by former White House photographer David Hume Kennerly and a news release would be distributed. And half an hour of taped highlights of the wedding was scheduled to be shown on the cable Playboy Channel’s pay-per-view service July 15.
Hefner was tamed in part by a mild stroke in 1986. He stopped smoking his pipe and switched to a caffeine-free diet soft drink, but he still wears his trademark purple silk pajamas day and night.
He lifted the blinds on sex when he started his Playboy empire in 1953, a decade before his bride was born, with his famous men’s magazine featuring nude pictures of women accompanied by risque text.
The magazine now has a circulation of 3.5 million and a national Playboy Channel cable TV audience.