How was it…  the party at Hefner’s?  I saw him descend the stairs, the throng awaiting, 45-50 girls in all, bodies glistening from ever more elaborate paint-to-body adornment.  Totally nude, of course, suntanned all over.  My date was enthralled.  It was his first time.  I told him to just stand there, take it in.
 I knew the protocol.
    Things were tough for Hef.  He’d sold the house next door, for $18,000,000.  People weren’t buying newspapers, magazines and he had spent richly.  Rumor had it that he sold entrance to the parties.  We all knew that, but now it would be selling the whole party.  “Is this the last party?” I said to the hat check girl.  She gushed objection to the idea, “Oh heavens, Miss Newmar… (something, something) …many more.”  We were being descended upon by another busload of stacked lovelies and their dates, the dates dressed in what gratuitously could be described as bathroom attire.  They were all eager, just having been welcomed with trays of “shooters” in the baronial hall.
    Hef’s posture was a little bent this year, with less hair.  I asked those in the know how he was doing, what with the recession and possibly selling the $100,000,000 mansion, the largest property in Holmby Hills.  “Oh no, he’s very happy, just fine… waking up in his bed… with several blondes.”  “I’m Hugh Hefner,”  they said, he said. Oh boy!
    I had arrived in a limousine filled with movie stars, vixens of the fifties, including Jane Russell whose injured foot had a special seat of its own.  I scoutched up, relieving her of any implied stress toward her preeminence.  She had driven down from Santa Rosa to be with her friend Terry Moore.  They discussed ex-husbands and what it was like to live with a football hero for 20 years.
    The party was a bash, a Tokyo traffic jam in the nude, about eight girls to one bath robed gent.  Bodies in highest heels, tripping this way, tottering that way.  I was bored, what can I say, staring endlessly at the parade.  Conversations were going unheard, all of us shouting from mouth to ear, in uncomfortable quick sentences, momentary and meaningless.
    Hef’s seraglio, the gilded cage he sits in, was bigger, grander than ever.  I didn’t venture there, reconciled to being a witness to his courtiers scrambling about like birds or beasts in a television nature show.  I sank down at the nearest table, struck dumb by the further din of a woman saying I had to stay right where I was until her husband from South Dakota got back.  I did, he didn’t.  I felt dismayed, but tried to look good in my dainty white organza dress with no underwear which took a determined tummy tucking posture.  Meanwhile I was sitting through the whole repartee of this woman describing her husband’s slavish adoration for everything Batman… the Batmobile, Batcave, etc. and on and on.
    “Where’s Chuck McCann?” I demanded, wanting rescue from the fact that celebrities are the loneliest people. Well, not really, but I did want to be anywhere else at that moment.
    “You look like a bride” came a meaningful compliment. As I stood, the leafy set design became entangled to the top of my 5'11" frame, leaving me festooned to the scenery.
    My mood softened when a lovely lady managed to tell me through the rap rock bedlam that she had doubled me in an underwater scene in the movie McKennas Gold.  “Gregory [Peck] was a dear,” she said. 
    “Wasn’t he!” I remarked, knowing how close his French wife Veronique stayed to answer his needs.
    “Why aren’t there more men at this party?” I complained, wondering for the eleventh time why I’d come.  The noise drowned out her answer.  We picked a few morsels from the cheese table.  As good as the food is at Hefner’s parties, I wasn’t hungry. 
    She walked me up through the castle to the circular driveway.  There stood the fifties movie queens I’d arrived with. On the way home France Nuyen told me about the decimation of the Screen Actor’s Guild union. “No more residuals ever, from the Internet,” she blurted out, “our future.”  She named the “criminals,” Tom Hanks, George Clooney and another.  I threw my long shanks down on the seat long ways in the stretch limousine.  Things aren’t what they seem.