COVER STORY : The Joy of Sax : Quick, what’s the first word you come up with when you hear the name Hugh Hefner? You said jazz, right? Of course you did.

Hugh Hefner is perched on the edge of a luxuriously overstuffed couch in his mahogany trimmed, baronial-sized study. Nattily attired in now-famous silk pajamas and robe, with a trademark can of Pepsi (decaffeinated, these days) nearby, he is still, at 68, the personification of the self-invented Playboy.

But it’s 1994, not 1954, and Hefner, his somewhat thicker waist balanced by slightly thinning hair, has been married for five years to former Playmate Kimberly Conrad. In the sunlight outside the Holmby Hills Playboy mansion, their two young boys play on the lawn, and the large, ornately wood-paneled chamber that Hefner calls the Great Room is cluttered with toys. The grotto, once the celebrated focal point for legendary adult games, is now just another upscale Los Angeles swimming pool.

And Hefner--who acknowledges having slept with “more than a thousand” women--talks a lot about “romance.”

“Isn’t there something deliciously romantic,” he asks, “about the idea of this last bastion of male chauvinism being turned into a home, with children running around and toys underfoot? Sometimes I look out the window and see the kids playing in the front yard with Kimberly, and I get tears in my eyes.”

For anyone other than Hefner, it would be a curious statement to make while sitting directly across the room from a large, living color, near-nude photograph of his wife in her Playmate persona, proudly positioned near an oil painting of Hefner in the costume of an Italian count.

But Hefner is clearly delighted with this demonstrable proof of autumnal virility.

“I think it’s quite wonderful for me,” he continues, “to have lived the life I’ve lived, and now have the chance to have a third act, to come full circle. I really believe that, in the past, I was always unwilling to commit to marriage because I was afraid to lose the romance. But now I think I’ve managed to romanticize the marriage and the children.”

Marriage? Children? Romance? Is this the same Hugh Hefner who was the free-living, free-loving playboy paragon of the ‘60s and ‘70s? To him, yes. More evolved, more matured, even more aware, perhaps, but living a life today which he feels flows naturally from his former lifestyle.

“I believe that having a sense of who you were helps to tell you who you are,” he explains. “And that’s another romantic perception. But that’s always been a part of what I’m all about.”

One part, at least. The other part was a two decades-plus, self-described “adolescent dream of a life” that was spun out to the accompaniment of cinematic images and a jazz soundtrack.

“Jazz and movies,” says Hefner, with a smile. “More romance--the two things that fed my dreams when I was a kid.”

This week, Hefner’s keen interest in “the two things that fed his dreams” continues via his hands-on sponsorship of the first Playboy Jazz Film Festival: “From Bix to Bird,” which runs Tuesday through Thursday at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood.

The determination to put together the festival--with the assistance of producer Mark Cantor, a well-known jazz film archivist--is another “romantic decision” for Hefner, one which is underscored by the constant companionship he has found in jazz and films.

“What it really comes down to,” he says, “what this jazz film festival really represents, is the simple fact that I’ve never found anything that I’ve cared more about than the music from my youth. I loved the Beatles, sure, but I never became--except for dancing purposes--a hard rocker. To me, there is something incredibly celebratory, and so wonderful about really good big-band swing and Dixieland.”

The festival will cover big-band swing and a wide range of other jazz forms. Included in the three-day bill are the world premiere of Jean Bach’s “A Great Day in Harlem,” which chronicles the taking of a remarkable group photograph in 1968 of nearly 30 major jazz musicians, interestingly the photo assignment came from Playboy’s greatest rival at the time, Esquire magazine; “Bix Beiderbecke: The Documentary”; “New Orleans,” in its first L.A. theatrical screening in many years; Brigitte Berman’s Academy Award-winning Artie Shaw profile, “Time Is All You’ve Got,” and powerful documentaries on Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

“If there’s one sound that stands out for me among these films, it’s Bix Beiderbecke’s trumpet,” Hefner says. “To listen to good Beiderbecke is like listening to a gorgeous human voice. It’s too delicious. It’s like what some people say about symphonic music--it’s the difference between a good book and a tabloid newspaper.”

At least one of the films on the festival program, a 1933 Bing Crosby film titled “Too Much Harmony,” provided Hefner with the opportunity to restore a rarely seen, pre-Hays Code musical that had direct associations to the Jazz Age. “It has some wonderfully sexy stuff in it,” says Hefner, “stuff that never could have been done a year or two later.”

H efner is clearly enthusiastic about these films and the music they represent. Jazz and film have been essential elements to him--and to the Playboy mystique--since the first issue of the magazine was published in December, 1953.

That issue contained a piece on the Dorsey brothers, and almost every subsequent Playboy contained something related to jazz: stories on Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker; a picture story about the Stan Kenton band on the road; pieces written by Dave Brubeck and Benny Goodman. The subject of the first “Playboy Interview” was Miles Davis, and the interviewer was Alex Haley.

“When I started,” Hefner says, “I just wanted to put out a men’s magazine. But by the end of the ‘50s, it was so successful that I seized it as a vehicle for changing the direction of my life. And that crucial change in my life was also associated with jazz, because it all began within a space of about six months after the first Playboy Jazz Festival in August of 1959.”

The festival, held in Chicago, featured a remarkable lineup that included Miles Davis, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Coleman Hawkins and Dave Brubeck. It was described by critic Leonard Feather as “the greatest single weekend in the history of jazz.”

“That fall,” continues Hefner, “I started ‘Playboy’s Penthouse’--the syndicated TV show--which used a lot of jazz acts. I bought the original Chicago Playboy mansion in December of that year, and in February of 1960, we opened the first of the Playboy clubs, which became important jazz venues.”

Despite the fact that Playboy’s birth at the close of 1953 came when a generation of postwar youth was turning to rock ‘n’ roll (both Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and Elvis Presley’s initial Sun Records releases appeared in 1954), the magazine stayed with jazz because, as Hefner put it, “the guy who was editing it was into jazz.”

Equally important, rock ‘n’ roll simply wasn’t the appropriate accompaniment for the Playboy lifestyle as it was envisioned by Hefner. Cool jazz, perhaps most definitively depicted by Cy Coleman’s smooth and easy, and--to anyone who watched the shows--instantly memorable theme music for the Playboy television shows, seemed a far better choice for the cocktail party escapades of the ‘60s swingers. When rock music did eventually creep into the picture, it generally served as accompaniment for polite displays of the twist and the hully-gully.

Hefner was well aware of the differences between the cool jazz he favored and the teen-oriented rock ‘n’ roll that was emerging throughout the decade.

“What was important to me,” says Hefner, “was the connection to the music that I personally loved. But I also liked the fact that there was an elitist aspect to it which separated us from the bubblegum rock that was becoming popular in the ‘50s. The good music in that time frame was on LPs, while the kids were buying dumb music on 45s. So I think there was a certain kind of snobbery to our association with jazz too.

“Leonard Feather wrote an early piece for us on rock ‘n’ roll and jazz and said, in effect, that there is good music of every kind, but that rock goes back to primitive forms that jazz has left behind. And of course that was my prejudice at the time too.”

Hefner was also prejudiced in favor of big-band music as well, which may explain why the Playboy Jazz Poll, begun in 1956, initially was structured with an oddly anachronistic big band instrumentation.

The selections resulted in such curious mixtures as a trumpet section with Herb Alpert, Al Hirt and Miles Davis. Given Hefner’s affection for swing music, the instrumental structuring of the poll is not surprising. But there is something jarring about the annual two-page spread of cartoon-like drawings depicting, for example, Lionel Hampton smiling benignly at a funereal-looking Ginger Baker, which occurred after the poll went to a Jazz and Pop format in 1969.

Jazz memories seem to have a mellowing effect on Hefner. Recalling his first hearing of Billie Holiday, he pauses and leans back, eyes glistening with the still-poignant recollection.

“I remember the exact moment and the exact song when I first heard her,” he says. “The song was ‘Travelin’ Light,’ because I was a senior in high school--it was 1943--and I was driving back from Sunday school with the radio on.

“It was the only time I could get to use the car, only for special occasions, like a Sunday-school class. So we’d pay the Sunday-school dues and then go park somewhere. We were driving back from church, and this incredible song came on. I was just blown away. I didn’t know who it was.

“The next day I went to the record store and found out, of course, that it was Paul Whiteman’s orchestra with a vocal by someone named Lady Day. Well, I very quickly discovered who Lady Day was and started collecting her records.”

For Hefner, jazz became the music “that didn’t have boundaries,” the music that was “slightly outside respectability” and the perfect underscore for the fulfillment of his life’s fantasies.

Films had a similar effect: “Those movies I saw when I was a kid represented a time of wonder, a time of optimism, a time when all things were possible.

“The Astaire/Rogers pictures and the Art Deco thing had a tremendous impact on me,” he recalls. “Everybody at nightclubs always wore tuxedos. Everything closed with a happy ending, and love was expressed through song and dance. All those things fed my fantasies. They described a world that made me feel--having grown up just after the Jazz Age, just after Scott Fitzgerald’s era--that I had arrived a day after the party. And I’ve spent a good part of my life trying to relive that party.”

His efforts to do so are fully apparent. Even a casual glance at the Playboy mansion, with its high, gated outer portal, its sweeping, circular drive and sumptuous, double-door entryway, calls up visions of Gatsby’s digs. And Hefner is quick to acknowledge that the visual elegance of Fred and Ginger in “Flying Down to Rio” and “The Gay Divorcee” clearly impacted his view of the Playboy parties as gatherings for sophisticated people.

Hefner’s origins were less than urbane and sophisticated. He was born Hugh Marston on April 9, 1926, grew up on the West Side of Chicago at a time when the area was rural, and the streets were illuminated by gas lights. Voted class “humorist” at Steinmetz High School, Hefner was raised in an atmosphere he identifies, without much humor, as “a typically American, Methodist, repressed home, in which no real emotion was ever shown.”

But music and films were always present.

“I think the one common interest we had was the movies,” he recalls. “And songs. The only way I ever saw my parents express emotion was singing, around the piano.

“The feelings were there,” continues Hefner, more darkly pensive now. “We knew we were loved. But there was no touching, no feeling, not even any verbal expression of emotion.

“I think that very early on in my life, at an unconscious level, I escaped from that rather sterile environment into the dreams and fantasies that I saw in movies and heard in music. And I think that, in a very real way, romantic love, as expressed in those songs and movies, became the equivalent of any kind of love for me. And I think that much of my life--even the more obsessive side of it--has been a pursuit of that kind of romantic dream.”

Hefner’s first serious effort to capture his own romantic dream came in the ‘40s, when he became engaged to and married his first wife, Millie Williams. As with so much of the Hefner chronology, the story links directly into his later life with Playboy.

When he enrolled at the University of Illinois in 1946 after two years of Army service, Williams was ahead of him. Doubling up on courses, he graduated in 2 1/2 years, while also serving as managing editor of a campus humor magazine, Shaft.

“But Millie still graduated a semester ahead of me, and went off to teach,” recalls Hefner. “We became engaged in December, even though I wasn’t aware that at the same time she was having an affair with a coach at her school.

“Around February--we were going to be married in June--she told me about it. And here’s the movie connection again: We’d just been to see a Loretta Young movie called ‘The Accused’ about a teacher who’s guilty of something or other. And it pushed those buttons. I was absolutely devastated. It was the single most devastating moment of my life.”

Hefner sighs, and pauses to take a thoughtful swig of Pepsi before continuing.

“So,” he says, “I was my parents’ child, to some extent, after all, in those early days. I’m sure that in some way, that experience set me up for the life that followed. Part of that life was a consequence of the repression of childhood. But another part of it was simply that if you don’t commit, you don’t get hurt.”

H efner, nevertheless, decided at that time to commit. He married Williams in June, 1949. Their 10-year alliance produced two children: Christie, now the chairman and chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises, was born in 1952; David, a computer programmer, arrived in 1955.

As the magazine’s circulation skyrocketed, Hefner’s marriage began to come apart. By the time of his divorce in 1959, he was ready to take his game to another level. Playboy’s success provided the perfect international stage for the presentation of himself as a living embodiment of the Playboy Philosophy.

“I was in an ideal situation with an ongoing interconnection with beautiful women who were attracted to me,” he says (without any false modesty), “and I to them.”

Asked if he sees any contradiction between his belief in romance and his pursuit of the Playboy lifestyle, Hefner hesitates for a moment, obviously craving the pipe that served as a useful prop before its abandonment after his stroke in the mid-’80s. He finally shakes his head no.

“Not at all,” he says. “It’s not at all inconsistent. I realized, very early on, that because Playboy was dedicated to the play and the pleasure part of life, that there were people out there who perceived that what we were saying was if it felt good, do it--pleasure without any responsibility.

“And that’s why I started writing the Playboy Philosophy in the early ‘60s--to try and say, ‘Not at all, this is not what we mean. What we’re really doing is exploring the possibility, for the very first time in our society, that it might be possible to be single and still live a moral life. That maybe there are other ways of living alternate lifestyles. That maybe there can be a morality that is related to what is both good for people and society.”

The views represented in the Playboy Philosophy are, according to Hefner, the extensions of views he began to formulate during his high school years.

Once again, a movie set the stage.

“When I saw ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ I couldn’t understand how it was possible for us to be fighting a war, and still live in a society in which there was no integration, in which schoolteachers made rules which I didn’t think were democratic.”

It didn’t take very long for his differences with the system to make an impact upon Hefner.

“I think that by the time I got to the latter part of high school,” he says, “I became convinced that when you grew up, you lost all your dreams, and compromised, and turned into something else. And I knew I didn’t want to do that.”

So, when the opportunity arose, in the late ‘50s for Hefner to live out his dreams, he embraced it wholeheartedly.

“It was almost as though all the creativity that I’d experienced in my youth--with little magazines and cartooning and making 8-millimeter films--as though it all stopped when I graduated from high school. I went into the Army, and into college, then into marriage. Then, finally, it was the magazine, and the doors it opened that started the creativity all over again.”

‘Creativity” is only one of the words that could apply to Hefner’s personification of the Playboy image in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Constantly in the media, soaring around the globe in his lush Playboy jet, “The Big Bunny”, proudly displaying rotating circular beds in the Playboy penthouse and quasi-country English digs at the Playboy mansions, Hefner was surrounded by celebrities, intellectuals and, always, beautiful women. If he just missed the Jazz Age parties of the ‘20s, he more than made up for it in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

“It was a real magic time,” he says with a smile, “almost a window of opportunity in those two decades between the invention of the pill in the early ‘60s and the arrival of AIDS in the early ‘80s. It was almost like a time of Eden, a time of real sexual innocence and exploration and adventure.”

The magic disintegrated in the ‘80s. Playboy suddenly seemed irrelevant to a generation that initially took sexual emancipation for granted, and then was confronted with the fearful inhibitions of AIDS. Hefner’s financial empire was shaken by Playboy club licensing problems and the magazine’s diminishing circulation, and his free-and-easy image was tainted by the suicide of a trusted associate and his linkage--however indirect--to the Dorothy Stratten tragedy, in which 1980’s Playmate of the Year was murdered by her estranged husband.

In 1985, he had a stroke. Recovery was fairly quick and apparently complete. But soon afterward, Hefner announced his marriage plans. In 1988, he turned over the reins of Playboy Enterprises to daughter Christie, and in 1989, in a high-profile ceremony at the Holmby Hills mansion, he married Kimberly Conrad.

Hefner no longer participates actively in most of Playboy’s far-flung commercial enterprises. But he continues to play a significant role at the magazine, still choosing both centerfolds and covers. Much of his spare time is spent working on an autobiography which, at this writing, has “reached the 1980s.”

But as we near the mid-point of the Generation X ‘90s, one wonders how relevant jazz, classic films and, for that matter, the 40th-anniversary issue of Playboy really are?

Hefner leans back, starts to reach for his nonexistent pipe, goes for a Pepsi instead and grins sardonically.

“Well, they’re all viewed as something from the past, sure,” he says. “And they’re all very American. Jazz remains the one true American art form. And I think that the movies and Playboy represent, to much of the rest of the world, the best of the American dream. And sometimes, as often happens, the rest of the world has a higher regard for that dream than we do.

“That’s not to say I don’t think there is wonderful stuff being produced today, because there is. But I think something’s also been lost. And I think it’s our sense of wonder. People are more afraid to dream now.

“Fortunately, there are still some dreamers around, and I count myself among them,” concludes Hefner. “And it’s my hope and expectation that--before we go to hell in a handbasket--we will begin to look back at this century and see some of the best of what we’ve done, in jazz, in film, in art and design and literature and, yes, in Playboy, and get back to an appreciation and understanding of some of the really exciting things that have happened, and that are still happening.”