Play It Again, Hef

This is a tale of two laps, both of them belonging to Hugh Hefner.

There’s the lap you’re probably familiar with, the one that’s filled with toothsome blonds when time permits. More on that later.

There’s another lap that’s lesser known, and the current occupant is Rick Jewell. No, gutter minds, this is not an elliptical Dick Morris-like revelation. Jewell is the upstanding first occupant of the Hugh M. Hefner chair for the study of American film at the USC School of Cinema-Television.

“Philosophically, he’s sitting in my lap,” Hef says.

We hereby introduce that other Playboy philosophy, the one that cheerily revels in film and fantasy, two of Hef’s favorite F-words. Hefner frolics with both on a regularly scheduled basis, punching the old fantasy time clock on Friday and Saturday nights. That’s when his minions transform a Playboy Mansion living room into a screening room, where the films are not blue but black-and-white. (Sunday night is reserved for the more prosaic yet colorful first-run variety.)

“I’ve always loved classic films,” Hefner says, coiled on a tank-sized leather couch. “The two major influences in my life really were Mom and the movies. There was home and the fantasies that came from films. I related to them coming from a home that was very repressive, where there wasn’t much of a show of affection.”

Tonight, we are making up for Hef’s lost time. After a buffet of rare beef and steamed vegetables, 30 of his friends hunker down in the dark. They listen to Hefner give a peppy talk, a la Alistair Cooke, about the 1939 film “Idiot’s Delight,” from notes supplied by film buff Richard Bann. They watch Clark Gable and Norma Shearer fall in love in a resort in the Alps as World War II dawns, the two singing hymns at the piano while bombs burst in air behind them.

Why can’t real life be like this?

“I think my notions of love came from the movies by and large,” Hefner says. “I think it fueled the dreams.”

The dreams that inspired a magazine dedicated to perfect 10s. The dreams that brought him to Hollywood. The dreams you might expect the Original Playhound to be sweetly dreaming still as he peers into the jaws of 72.

But hey, the man’s not dead yet. Mere days before his separation from wife Kimberly was announced last month, that pesky National Enquirer caught an “unidentified blond” sucking his fingers at a fund-raiser for Aids Project Los Angeles at the Garden of Eden club.

Hef is generally a mansionbody, but when he does get out and about, he likes to travel in packs. Just recently, he cavorted with a cornucopia of playmates at the Tempest in Hollywood, where his beloved big-band music reigns on swing night--heretofore known as family night. That’s Thursday to you mere mortals.

Needless to say, Classic Film Night is somewhat more sedate. Playmates are apparently not card-carrying members of Hefner’s Casablanca Club. Clubbies get about as tasty as Robert Culp, comedian Chuck McCann, big-band leader Ray “Bunny Hop” Anthony, Ralphs supermarket heir Walter Ralphs and the ever-juicy Vince Bugliosi, a longtime Hef-ite and former prosecutor who sent Charles Manson to jail.

“I’ve been to Christmas parties at other places,” Bugliosi says, “and I’m telling you unequivocally that you hear more vulgarity and drunkenness at a typical party in middle America than you do up here.”

With that, Bugliosi took off for a mansion office for a racy evening working on his upcoming Random House book on the Paula Jones case while his wife watched the film.

As a steady diet, Casablanca Club gatherings apparently were a bit too sedate for former playmate Kimberly, who likes to ski and party with her pals. Still a relative baby babe at 35, she doesn’t have nearly as much past to fill her days with as her husband does. She does spend time with the couple’s two boys, Marston, 7, and Cooper, 6. Kimberly likes classic films. She doesn’t live them. And that was only one of their May-December differences.

“We both love each other very much,” Hefner says. “There’s no third party involved in the thing. One thing that happens to a marriage when you have children is the children become the center of the mother’s life. That’s not the primary thing, but your interests change.”

But here in the world of December, it’s always May. Or April, the anniversary month of “Casablanca,” when Hefner likes to turn his dining room into Rick’s American Cafe and ply his guests with caviar and champagne.

Hefner has been celebrating the film classic’s birthday for five years, since the club came into being. And he’s been putting his own money into creating new old club fodder, bankrolling the restoration of more than 20 films from the ‘30s and ‘40s at $20,000 to $50,000 a pop. Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe will live spiffy new lives thanks to Hefner’s donations to UCLA’s Film Archive and the George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography & Film in Rochester, N.Y. And students can study them--as well as Hef’s other favorite film topic, censorship--with the help of the $1.5-million endowment for his USC chair.

So pooh on Stephen Hawking, who put the kibosh on the idea of time travel, figuring that we’d be inundated with tourists from the future if we could hitch a ride to the past.

Hawking obviously hasn’t been to the Playboy Mansion lately.

Says Hef: “One of the wonderful things about this century and particularly the latter part of it is the technology has provided us a time machine for the very first time. So you can live, if you’re so inclined, a part of your life through the music and the movies in whatever particular era you like. And that’s very exciting.”

*

We’ll Pass: Monica Lewinsky.

OK, enough.

*

The Stone Age: Not that we have a birthday coming up or anything, but you know you’re getting old when the rebels of rock are touring in museum spaces instead of stadiums. Madonna’s gold-lame Dixie-cup corset from her Blonde Ambition tour and an Alice Cooper guillotine were on view last week at UCLA’s Ackerman Grand Ballroom as part of Rolling Stone magazine’s national Covers Tour. The tour was co-sponsored by AT&T; and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

Our favorite mummified artifact: “Alice Cooper Severed Head courtesy of Brian Nelson/Alice Cooper Archives.”

Alice Cooper Archives?

Of course, the stars of the tour were the dozens of magazine covers chronicling rock history in the making, including the iconic 1981 photograph of a nude John Lennon embracing Yoko Ono.

In the exhibit, Annie Leibovitz recalled making one of her most famous photographs: “They had just finished their ‘Double Fantasy’ album, and I remember seeing the cover and being very moved by it, so, of course, when they lay down together, and John was nude curled up against her clothed, it was much more poignant. He looked much more vulnerable.

“I remember peeling the Polaroid and him looking at it and saying, ‘That is it. That is our relationship.’ ”

Hey, all we know is never trust any magazine over 30.

*

Busy Idol: Back on the classic film front, Kirk Douglas must be the cuddliest star of his generation. This week, the film idol and philanthropist scooped up yet another honor for his rare ability to be a hero offscreen as well as on: the Steven J. Ross/Time Warner Award at a luncheon at the USC School of Cinema-Television.

For starters, Douglas is a guy who can hold on to friends. There was Karl Malden, ne Mladen Sekulovich, who helped him pick out the name Kirk Douglas to replace the marquee-unfriendly Issur Danielovitch. There was veteran publicist Warren Cowan, who “eloped” with Douglas to Las Vegas many moons ago. Cowan was best man at Douglas’ marriage to his French bride, Anne, who took Kirk as her “awful wedded husband.”

And there were friends and well-wishers aplenty--Jack Valenti, Ray Stark, David Wolper, Quincy Jones, Warner Bros. honchos Bob Daly and Terry Semel, USC President Steve Sample, USC film school Dean Elizabeth Daley and Turner Entertainment chief Roger Mayer. One son, Peter, who was planning to attend was trapped in Santa Barbara by heavy rain.

You do have to love a guy who takes the podium to explain the plus side of surviving a stroke. “When you have a stroke you must talk slowly to be understood,” Douglas said. “And I’ve discovered that when I talk slowly, people listen, thinking I’m going to say something important.”

Needless to say, he has. Gerald Levin, chairman and CEO of Time Warner, a significant donor to the film school, lauded Douglas for his early stand against the Hollywood blacklist.

“His insistence that Dalton Trumbo the screenwriter be named in the credits [of ‘Spartacus’] defied the blacklist,” Levin said. “It was Kirk Douglas who helped [end] the cowardly system that terrorized and tyrannized this industry for almost a generation.”