An open letter to Hugh Hefner

Dear Hef,

I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately. You keep showing up in magazine profiles, surrounded by young women who look as if their personal air bags have deployed. They all have the same hair too: stringy nests of platinum that remind me of what happens when my weed-whacker explodes. In the magazine spreads, these women look like they worship you but don’t actually like you. How can that be? Worship without affection? Maybe money’s involved, though I seriously doubt it.

Once upon a time, I worshiped you, too. By God, you had it all, the mansion in Chicago and all those clubs. We rarely saw you in a suit, just those odd-looking silk pajamas. I never knew a man who wore silk pajamas, but admittedly, the sleeping habits of the American male are largely a mystery to me.

Back then, you gave us a heck of a magazine, expanded the powers of free speech and the artistry of airbrushed photography. You gave us Shel Silverstein and Updike that went unread. You even gave us Barbi Benton, and that alone would’ve been enough.

Most of all, you fired the opening salvos of the Sexual Revolution. With a little help from Kinsey and the pill, you liberated a nation -- changed mores, updated our sense of sin, even redefined love, of all things. We’ve had guys in the White House accomplish far less.

And through it all, you looked as if you were having a pretty good time. Your little black book must’ve had more names than the Declaration of Independence. You gave us Marilyn Monroe, Candy Loving, party jokes galore. You gave us advice on wine and fashion, venereal disease and the etiquette for a proper spanking.

Now look at you. You’re 78 and still going at it. Thing is, it all seems sort of tired now. And you look tired. Why not? You have dental fillings older than Zeus. Your PJs look like my grandmother’s drapes.

Hate to say it, but all these stories about you have become kind of pathetic -- about how you host movie nights at the mansion, then go nightclubbing with your six girlfriends -- or is it seven? I’m too old myself to keep track.

“It’s not dating one girl on Wednesday and one on Thursday, the usual sequential way of an unmarried guy,” you told the Washington Post. “I date them all at the same time. It works for me, and it’s been that way for the last three or four years.... “

Um, at the same time? Now explain for us the math involved with six girlfriends at the same time. That’s six cars, six cellphone bills, six birthdays to remember.

That’s six pillows in your bed, plus your own, and no doubt several stuffed bears, a dozen slippers by your bedside. Probably some special pillows your chiropractor recommended. Isn’t it all a little confusing? Do you ever call out Monique when you really mean Crystal? Amber when you mean Star?

And what about that fatherhood phase? Remember Kimberley Conrad? We do. She was the centerfold you married and once dubbed “Playmate for Life.” She had a figure that could make angels yodel and Bill O’Reilly bark.

It was all kinda sweet, the way you found the woman of your dreams, then made her shed her clothes for the wedding photos. Not bad for a Methodist boy from the Midwest.

But I guess that got old, even though you, apparently, did not.

Now we’re tortured by these stories about your club hopping and those little blue pills you gobble like M&M;’s. Don’t you realize that when you go home with six women, that means five other 78-year-old men are going home alone?

Hef, you’re trying to give us a second sexual revolution when one was enough, thank you. Now you don’t seem so much the leader of the pack as you do the friendly neighborhood druggist -- a little kooky, a little too long around the ether.

So stop, OK? We don’t want you to act your age; we want you to act mine (47). I’ve envied you for almost four decades and now my emotions are verging on pity. We both deserve better. It’s only your legacy that’s at stake.

Need something worthwhile to do, an enchanting Second Act? Why not be the apostle for aging gracefully, for a rich and proper retirement. If any generation needed guidance with this particular issue, it is mine, believe me.

Ogden Nash once noted that middle age is that time in life when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

You don’t remind us of anyone else, Hef. You’re an original in a world of bland clones, a one in a billion. You were born in 1926, the same year as my old man, the same year as Monroe. You’ve outlived and outserved them all. Now it’s time to retire the party boy image and act like ... well, a gentleman.

So do it soon, young fella. While you still have your looks.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.