RSVP : It’s Nancy Sinatra . . . in the Flesh

The Playboy Mansion was the site of a poolside cocktail party Thursday night for cover girl Nancy Sinatra, who takes her gravity-defying act to the pages of this month’s Playboy, and apparently she is even more dangerous without her legendary boots. Yes, folks, yet another of Mia Farrow’s children has gone to bad.

For anyone who was beginning to wonder, the ‘70s are still back, though they seem to have picked up a Neo-Gothic patina. Think “Ed Sullivan Meets Night of the Living Dead.” The air at poolside hung heavy with the scent of Aqua Net, and there was a generously stocked bowl of bobby pins next to the sink in the powder room.

A self-described guru named K-2 (“like the mountain”) arrived wearing a white, probably fire-retardant “Saturday Night Fever” suit, with a blond acolyte in tow.

“The human brain is detrimental to life itself,” K-2 enthused in a thick German accent, breathless from boogieing down to Sinatra’s tunes.

Sinatra performed a short set from her re-heeled opus, which has just been released as the CD “One More Time.” Afterward, when she made her way through the adoring crowd of Playboy intimates, a man she identified as “my doctor” was at her elbow. “I’m tired,” she said at one point, sounding ghostly and Garbo-esque, then sighed with a mysterious, fin de siecle vacuity. “This trip for the Playboy tour is going to be easy, because I don’t have to do sound checks or perform.” And she probably doesn’t even have to wear a fluffy tail.

Plenty of bunny rabbits frolicked on the mansion’s sprawling lawn, but alas, no Bunnies. “It goes against everything I believe in, but where are the Bunnies?” one woman was heard to say crossly.

The peacocks were the most sexually explicit creatures in attendance, not counting the rumored ill behavior of several lesser primates. “I hear there are monkeys down there by the hot tub,” one lost-looking screenwriter said in tones of hushed awe.

Hugh Hefner was there, though he was not wearing pajamas, and he explained the Sinatra phenomenon thus: “Playboy is over 40, and we’re convinced that sex is not all that related to chronology.”

Just how old is Sinatra, anyway? Her “old” friend Mel Torme said, “I’ve known Nancy since 1962. We met on a boat going over to Hawaii, and we’ve been fast friends ever since. I didn’t know how old she was then, and I don’t know now. I don’t think it really matters.” He’s right--it doesn’t, no more than it matters whatever happened to Baby Jane (whom, let it be noted, we never saw naked).