Halfway through these 10 chapters dealing with three plus years (1968-71) of employment with Playboy Enterprises, the memoir’s remainder now turns to such subjects as the company’s resort at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the glories of Miami Beach, and such diverse personalities as Liza Minnelli, the very psychic Peter Hurkos, George Foreman, Sheila MacRae, Jean Shepherd, Larry King, Jill St. John, Elliott Roosevelt and Murph the Surf, jewel thief and painter.
It became obvious that while my efforts for the magazine as Playboy enterprises press information manager were important, the big push was for the hotels. By the time I came on board, one (located at Dunn’s River Falls, Jamaica) had been purchased, another was planned for Great Gorge, New Jersey, while the company’s first from scratch was nearing competition at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The internal euphoria accompanying the anticipated triumphs was rampant.
Hefner, hired by Esquire magazine in 1951 to write promotional copy at $60 a week, asked for a $15 raise when the publication announced it was moving to New York. That was $5 more than Esquire was willing to pay and Hefner quit. Two years later, with first wife Millie Williams looking on, he planned a men’s magazine. They had met while students at Chicago’s Steinmetz High School and married after Hefner’s graduation from the University of Illinois.
The first issue of Playboy, perhaps best known for including the Marilyn Monroe calendar photo, was published in December, 1953 and sold 51,000 copies. It was not identified as a monthly because Hefner didn’t know there would be more than one issue. Monroe, often referred to as the magazine’s first centerfold, was not. Playmates didn’t come along until Margie Harrison appeared as Miss January, 1954. The success of the magazine was followed in 1959 by Playboy Clubs which in turn inspired the club-hotels.
Featuring fluffy-tailed Bunnies serving moderately priced hefty drinks and food while doing the Bunny Dip (a physical gyration enabling the server to place beverages gracefully on a table while often displaying sensational cleavage enhanced by the pushiest of push-up bras), , the clubs and hotels also offered cool jazz in surroundings inspired by Hefner’s walnut dominant Chicago mansion. Membership keys cost $50. It was a deal for the ogling hip and upwardly mobile.
One of the publicity releases I had written six months earlier to qualify for the job was about the first of two golf courses built at the Wisconsin resort 75 miles northwest of Chicago. With nothing but a scorecard to guide me, I had written three double-spaced pages in Los Angeles about the beauty and challenges of what I referred to as “The Brute.” These many years later, it is still called that. Googling efforts produce no other such named course and I wonder if any other links have been named under such circumstances? Except for a description of the par five sixth hole (it ran uphill rather than downhill), I was able to use the entire release including the resort’s opening date, May 14, 1968. It was my birthday and I had been six months prescient.
The hiring of Bunnies was certainly out of the ordinary. To populate the Lake Geneva hutch, I was assigned to hold Bunny Hunts in nearby communities: Rockford, Beloit, Janesville and Madison. It was at the latter near the University of Wisconsin campus that I encountered a radio reporter of Ted Baxter journalistic inclinations who, recording device in hand, asked how I conducted the searches? Baxter, it may be recalled, was the inane anchorman of the “Mary Tyler Moore” TV show whose seven-year run of huge success began in 1970.
Worth amplification in this tale is the Ted Baxter character immortalized by Ted Knight as the bumbling anchorman whose vanity and lack of anything resembling intelligence plus inclinations to mispronounce words of length was monumental in the field of comedy. In discussing the character with TV station personnel, it was astonishing to learn how many suggested the character was inspired by an anchorman dolt who had once been employed by their station.
The Madison “inspiration” wanted details and, warming to the subject, I told of the famed Bunny Net, a supporting device of great import in successful Bunny Hunts. “The net is constructed of stiff material formed in the image of what we at Playboy have come to believe is the perfect Bunny shapeliness,” I intoned, perhaps inspired by Jackie Gleason’s hilarious invention: Reginald Van Gleason III. “While the net is largely emblematic of perfection,” I continued, “we occasionally drop it over a candidate of such impressive proportions that the falling of the net is impeded.” Baxter asked for those proportions, I gave him numbers more impressive than the 36-26-36 “norm” for those days and I never heard the interview although I was told later it played.
The hotel’s opening was kicked off by a round of golf on the Robert Bruce Harris-designed course whose placid history of development was in considerable contrast to “The Highlands,” second of the resort’s links. The original architect of that one was Jack Nicklaus who ordered a lot of earth moved on the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin. Jack’s decision offended the sensitivities of Playboy Clubs International VP Arnold Morton, a second generation restaurateur later better known for upscale dining spots Arnie’s and Morton’s of Chicago. Arnie, who died in 2005, was the father of Peter Morton who achieved hamburger affluence by creating The Great American Disaster in London, then the Hard Rock Café. The senior Morton was a tough guy who had served as a Ranger in the U.S. Army during World War II and was very knowledgeable about the restaurant business. Unfortunately, he knew little about golf and proceeded to “improve” upon Nicklaus’s work while the Golden Bear was out of town. Nicklaus quit and Pete Dye finished the job, later re-worked by Robert Cupp.
I recall a decidedly strange scene in Morton’s Chicago office. I got a call to get there in a hurry. Morton and a couple of staffers--as I recall Lee Gottlieb and Dick Lochte--were on the phone with someone at CBS who turned out to be Frank Chirkinian, the producer who shaped the look of CBS golf coverage. My being summoned was a matter of vocabulary and, being a golfer, knew the difference between medal and match play. My confreres didn’t. Aware the Milwaukee Open was in trouble, Morton was pitching CBS his vision of a Wisconsin Classic leaving out an eventual re-name, the Hugh Hefner Open with a trophy presentation by a pipe-clutching Hefner.
Morton was one of those guys who liked whatever attention those of us responsible for publicity could produce, but he had his apprehensions. He felt there were too many of us and took exception to “that horde of PR people” early opening day. His attitude, coupled by a sudden shortage of rooms no doubt created by our splendid publicity job, resulted in Morton’s usurping all but one of our rooms. Around 5 p.m. following the round of golf (Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko, in a fit of temper, left the course with two holes to play), we were told our belongings had been moved to one room. Lochte, later a formidable novelist and writer for the Los Angeles Times, Benny Dunn, Pat Simpson, Helmut Lorsch and I found our clothes tossed on the room’s floor.
Dunn, performing in a rare daytime role, had an arresting idea. It took advantage of the room’s lack of curtains, one of many indications that the hotel was opening prematurely.
The room into which our clothes had been tossed was on the first floor and could be viewed by guests walking an idyllic path lined with flora that bloom in the spring tra-la and Benny decided to call attention to our curtain-less room. Humming “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody,” he proceeded to disrobe in view of a goodly number of guests who came to an obvious conclusion: Benny had some impressive physical attributes.
Somehow, rooms were found for the PR horde and we made it though the opening. Entertainment in The Penthouse featured Liza Minnelli, then just a kid who gave impressive evidence she would become a major star. I had searched for and found Minnelli at O’Hare Field the day before the hotel’s opening. Her flight was early and I discovered her in a corner, a fair distance from her arrival gate. She was a tiny and enormously innocent presence with the eyes of a doe caught in headlights. We took a helicopter to the resort and were met by a welcoming committee headed by Dunn who managed to scare the hell out of her. His last moment lurch created such fright she jumped back three feet. It was the pills. Nearly 40 years later, I can’t align the near anorexic Lake Geneva Minnelli with the woman charged in 2003 by her limp-wristed husband with having beaten him up causing, among other things, “scalp tenderness.”
The resort never should have opened when it did, a fact made clear some four months later when wife, Betty, and I took the kids to Wisconsin’s Door County for a vacation. Pulling into a motel in Fish Creek, we presented ourselves at the reception desk where a woman was in animated conversation with a receptionist. The woman was explaining why she and her husband (he on a walker) couldn’t possibly stay in a second floor room. Her story, rife with detail, told of her husband’s fall at the Playboy Club-Hotel in Lake Geneva, some 200 miles south. I was aware of those details told in on-the-money fashion. The area of the man’s fall was an unfinished small pool adjacent to the Sidewalk Café. There was neither a warning sign, nor a rope, not even a railing; there was, however, a nasty sharp point on a protruding piece of metal where stonework was to be anchored.
Other vivid memories of the Lake Geneva resort linger. Fairly early on we presented singer Jack Jones in the main room. In those days he was married to Jill St. John, a neat couple. The day after Jack’s opening performances, he told me how he had completed his second show and wandered back to what he thought was the suite he and Jill were occupying. Jill had decided not to take in the late show and had gone to bed in quarters that had been switched at the last minute. Jill knew but Jack didn’t.
With key in hand, Jack opened his suite’s door and in the dim lighting perceived a couple doing what couples often do at a romantic resort. The astonished couple stared at Jack. The singer winked, and burst into song: “Strangers in the Night,” sung in his rich and recognizable baritone. The performance faded as Jones exited for the front desk to pick up the correct key.
Then, there was Sheila MacRae, an uncommon joy of a singer, who gave up a career when she married Gordon and raised their kids. Sheila resumed her career when Gordie, who sang his way through such films as Oklahoma, Carousel and On Moonlight Bay, drank his way into oblivion.
In the midst of a one-week engagement, Sheila discovered uninsured furs and jewels missing from her suite. She reported the theft to police, waited a couple of days as the cops failed to develop leads, then tried to call psychic friend Peter Hurkos.
Born Pieter van der Hurk in Dordrecht, Holland, Hurkos is best known as a psychic detective whose remarkable powers have been employed in such cases as the Boston Strangler, the mysterious disappearances of silk millionaire Jim Thompson and Florida Judge Curtis Chillingworth and his wife, plus the Ann Arbor co-ed murders. “Odic forces,’ the theory that a criminal leaves behind a trail of emotion, is the psychic’s edge. One psychiatrist suggested: “Give Peter Hurkos a scrap of clothing or a wisp of hair and he might be able to tell you everything a man has done or is planning to do.”
A friend of Hurkos, MacRae had been aided by him via psychic readings which helped her solve career and personal problems. Her attempt to call him from Lake Geneva was curious since he was trying to reach her from Miami as he was leaving for Los Angeles. Hurkos had had a psychic hunch and finally connected with her.
After learning the essence of the story, Hurkos arrived the next day in Lake Geneva where he was conducted at his request to a room in the hotel where employee records were kept. Passing his hands in rather dramatic fashion over a collection of files, Hurkos intoned: “The answer is in this file.”
The suggestion that the job was an inside one produced the name of a suspect not employed by the hotel. He was, however, the townie boyfriend of an employee so Hurkos was on the right track. Both the boyfriend, who had a criminal record, and the employee were put under surveillance.
Five days later late in the afternoon, the boyfriend came into the Playmate Bar clutching a Time magazine. Within minutes, he became involved in a heated discussion with a private detective hired to watch him and, as it turned out, provoke him. To make a point, the boyfriend slammed the magazine on the bar causing a one-way plane ticket to London to drop to the floor. A local cop, also watching the boyfriend, picked up the ticket and proceeded to question him. The coat and jewels were found where the guy was living.
This version of Hurkos in Lake Geneva differs slightly from the one told by author and Chicago Tribune columnist Norma Lee Browning in her 1970 book, The Psychic World of Peter Hurkos. Because of deadline problems, Browning’s book (written while she was authoring her syndicated column out of Hollywood) did not include a solution to the robbery.
# # # #
Next Week: Boxing, Anyone?
