Hugh Hefner and a Flying Ape....by Bob Sanders

Hugh Hefner, at 83, is still going strong and so am I.  I had the rare and thoroughly fascinating experience of working for him while furthering the Playboy mystique.  Let’s call this my Hefner Period Blog since my current plan is to devote 10 consecutive postings to the man and what I came to refer to as his “Playboy Empire.”  The cast of characters will include such delightfully disparate people as Amanda Blake, Hugh O’Brian, “Abbie” Hoffman, Playmate Paige Young, “Mr. Midnight” Benny Dunn, Liza Minnelli, Jack Jones, Sheila MacRae, Peter Hurkos, Arnold Morton, George Foreman, Bruce Vilanch, Roger Ebert,  Jean Shepherd, Elliot Roosevelt (he called me “Old Sport”), Larry King, Bunnies, Bunnies, Bunnies and, of course, Hef.      

 

While I suspected going to work in Chicago for Hugh Hefner in January, 1968 would have its unusual moments, such anticipation could not possibly prepare me for the unique adventures ahead.

The move was from Los Angeles, the last of eight stops for TV Guide for whom I had toiled 13 years.  As it turned out, I had traded the Dutch uncle of the television industry for something voluptuous and, at times, incomprehensible.  Playboy Enterprises, whose major interests then were a highly titillating magazine plus clubs and hotels, was run mostly by in-your-face types whose egos sometimes exceeded talents.

Seemingly endemic was a kind of charming lunacy initiated by some of, otherwise, serious bent who failed to understand what I discovered to be the captivating capriciousness of it all.  The corporate culture of Playboy certainly encouraged sometimes unusual approaches to problem solving and that may have prompted involvement with Baltimore Jack and Phoenix Hazel.  The two met on the blindest of dates arranged by the Phoenix Zoological Society with the formidable assistance of Playboy.  Jack and Hazel were a couple of great apes thought by the Phoenix Zoo to be a likely match made in simian heaven.

I was in St. Louis one 1970 mid-summer day tending to a public relations problem as press information manager of the Bunny Empire when I got a call from my boss, Nelson Futch, vice-president of promotions.  Futch, worth noting, was not of the in-your-face hierarchy but that didn’t stop him from occasional fantasy.

“What do you think about flying an ape from Baltimore to Phoenix so that he could meet a lady ape who recently lost her mate?” was Futch’s initial sally.

“Well, first we should head up to New York and buzz the Empire State Building for old time’s sake,” was my, admittedly, flippant answer.

“Let’s get serious, Bob.  This is an important story and I can see it in Time’s Medical section.  I’m pretty sure an ape has never flown before,” said Futch.  This was dialogue right out of TV’s  “Get Smart.”  Lunacy often has serious origins.

Playboy was not the first choice of the powers intent upon creating primate cohabitation.  Such aviation worthies as TWA, United and American turned down entreaties largely because seats would have to be removed to accommodate an airborne anthropoid roughly the size of an NFL linebacker.  Somehow, the airlines did not regard flying a gorilla cross-country a medical breakthrough.  Hefner’s Big Bunny, a DC-9 with a round bed in the plane’s tail, could and would provide air travel for Baltimore Jack.  Sound the trumpets.

As an aside worth mention, my first media contact in bringing attention to the Big Bunny was Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times.  Ebert, newly arrived from the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette where he wrote sports beginning at age 15, and I were introduced by Dick Rosenzweig, Hugh Hefner’s right hand guy.  Then a second string movie critic, Ebert’s film plate became so full that he never wrote about the plane.  A few years after our meeting, he teamed up with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel to create thumbs-up history.

The financially-strapped Phoenix Zoo was unable to pay any ape flight expenses and Hefner assumed all costs.  CBS had made an offer to do it for $3,500 just before Playboy was approached.    

The plane, painted a Hefnerian midnight black with the company’s white logo on the tail, was loaded with all manner of electronic gadgetry and attended by Jet Bunnies.  Attired in shiny black fake leather consumes designed by Chicagoan Walter Holmes, the Jet Bunnies wore white scarves about the length of the one dancer Isadora Duncan was wearing when she got too close to an automobile wheel and met an unusual death.  I suspect that Holmes, with Hefner’s input, was inspired by a James Bond nemesis: Pussy Galore and Her Flying Circus.  Ah, fantasy.

On July 22, 1970, I was waiting at the Phoenix airport along with 100 members of the press plus enthralled gapers motivated by my publicity efforts.  As the Tempe Daily News reported, the crowd was larger than a recent stopover by President Richard Nixon.  Of course, we not only had Baltimore Jack winging his way to meet Phoenix Hazel, but we had the Playboy airplane, the Jet Bunnies and an ambulance complete with a sign that read: APE AMBULANCE.  Further, we had a surprise attraction known to the locals as the Zebra Ladies led by the estimable Amanda Blake--“Miss Kitty” on TV’s huge hit, Gunsmoke.  Blake, or someone, had decreed the women be attired alike on state occasions with zebra dresses invoked.  A loyal company guy, I decided to keep the Jet Bunnies away from the Zebra Ladies whose presence for pictures would confuse and dilute Playboy’s involvement.  As a cogent observation to would-be PR types, don’t mess around with co-promotions.  There’s a good chance you’ll be had for lunch with Disney back then the champ at that sort of thing.

The Big Bunny came into view, landed and the scene was, for those of sufficient memory, pure Buck Rogers.  I felt like I was in some ridiculous time warp.  Where were Buck Rogers, Dr. Hugo, Ardella, Killer Kane and those other Saturday matinee serial folks?

Taxiing to a position a hundred feet from the Ape Ambulance, the Big Bunny was about to deliver the heavily-sedated Baltimore Jack, his comatose state courtesy of Johns Hopkins Hospital.  A .45 caliber gun-clutching doctor, loaned by the hospital presumably after drawing a short straw, accompanied the big fellow.  He later told me over an understandably large number of drinks that Baltimore Jack “moved five or six times” during the flight.

The Big Bunny had two exits, one for lesser mortals and one for the leader of the World of Playboy, another of those excessive terms of flackery I was finding so easy to produce.  While Hefner’s heightened interest in sex is well-documented, it is an exceedingly safe bet that neither before nor since has that piece of furniture received such an impressive workout.  I can also report that Baltimore Jack was something less than toilet-trained, a fact easily discernible during my quick check of his quarters.

One of my publicity ideas was to give an exclusive Baltimore Jack photo opportunity to Associated Press whose Phoenix photographer was waiting at the zoo for a shot of Jack in his new surroundings.  After telling all but two of the Jet Bunnies to stay in the plane because of the dreaded Zebra Ladies Factor, I hustled a couple of particularly photogenic Bunnies to the Phoenix Playboy Club’s PR guy with orders that he take them to the zoo for a picture with the comatose simian.  Futch, presumably still dreaming of the airborne ape’s appearance in Time’s Medical section, was waiting at the zoo.  My fellow flack, a local, got lost in his hometown, couldn’t find the zoo entrance, and dropped the Bunnies off at the outer reaches of the place.  They had to hike through desert terrain and 115 degrees to find a sleeping Baltimore Jack and the AP photographer.

One of the Bunnies agreed to enter Jack’s cage and the brave woman posed with one foot atop his chest.  As they used to say, we got a lot of ink.

Much happened to the principals in nearly 40 years.  Baltimore Jack and Phoenix Hazel were incompatible, they never conceived offspring, he died in 1972 of valley fever and she passed on to the great heavenly banana forest 26 years later.  Amanda Blake made the big goodbye in 1989 when she died of AIDS, Futch is no longer with us, the Big Bunny was sold to a Venezuelan firm and I sometimes have a difficult time believing the events actually happened.  Hefner turned over most of the running of his corporation to daughter Christie who recently announced she was stepping down.  Hefner continues to appear on TV in “The Girls Next Door” and occasionally lauds the virtues of Viagra which, apparently, is useful as he continues his romp among women. Hefner and I, born five weeks apart, became octogenarians in the spring of 2006.

There’s a footnote to the ape story.  In the spring of 1997, I was guest of author Ruth Beebe Hill (Hanta Yo) at the American Academy of Achievement which met that year in Baltimore.  Introduced to a man identified as head of Johns Hopkins Hospital, I told my story about Baltimore Jack mentioning the doctor who accompanied the great ape and with whom I got pretty sloshed at a party put together by Miss Kitty to celebrate Jack’s arrival.

“I am well-acquainted with the story you’ve told with total accuracy,” he said.  “Sad to say, the doctor who flew with the ape and who reported to me turned into a drunk.”  He added, “I had to fire him.” 

And so it went, a serious ending to an otherwise solid piece of what many might believe to be corporate psychosis.  Certainly, the use of an ape to bring further attention to Playboy Enterprises was unusual, perhaps beyond the pale.   Let’s go back to the start of my experiences that began in the fall of 1967.

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Next Week: “Mr. Midnight” Benny Dunn 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

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