"So, Tuesday night, the Playboy Mansion. Do you want seven o'clock or eight?"
Over the years in show business I've found that the best response is often to take the phone away from your head and stare at it for a few seconds. So that's what I did.
The Playboy Mansion? Why would... Ah, but it was too late. The memories were already drawing me back, back, back... The Mansion, Hef, the grotto, the peacocks --
Before I let Proust's Madeleines take me through seven novellas again, let me explain. First things first, though, and I did what I always do on calls like this: returned the receiver to my head, leaned forward slightly and said:
"Wh-- what?"
Naturally it was Hansen, a very cagey and successful Hollywood operative despite having blond hair and blue eyes and being from Minnesota. (I keep insisting he has brown eyes and is from Bay Ridge, but he defies me and plays dumb.)
The Playboy Mansion. I'd been there once before, in 1988, and not again since. (I go every twenty years, like clockwork.) I was a comic living here and doing comic stuff, and someone -- I honestly can't remember, but it wasn't Hansen, who was in fourth grade at the time -- called and said there was a benefit for something at the Playboy Mansion, and they had asked me to perform, and there was no money, but did I want to go?
I was single then and straight (as opposed to married now and straight, or straight now and married), and I didn't need to hear more than the p and the l and the a of the word "Playboy" before saying/screaming, "YEAHOKAYSURE."
All men are a little stupid when it comes to women, in case you hadn't noticed, and I felt this would be an extraordinary opportunity to, well, cherchez la femme, which is French for, "Do you like comics?" I had a green Volvo at the time, or perhaps that was just my face, and I pulled up to the sprawling house-thing in a hilly area surrounded by the kind of other houses that, chances are, had seen their share of busty women inside them, too.
From the start, just getting out of the car and looking around, right through to getting back in and driving off two hours later, the only thought I had in my head (and it played over and over on a loop) was, "Oh, what in the world am I doing here?"
Like Shakespeare and haiku, it just wasn't my métier. The guys there were the ripped and rippled, Cashmere blazer-ed, designer jean-ed, Egyptian cotton open collar-ed, thin buttery-leather loafer-ed, white teeth-ed type, and the women were -- well, you know.
And you know what? I'm glad for both of them. I really am. I'm glad the women want men like that, and the men want women like that, and, let's be honest, the Playboy Mansion is exact the right place for them to meet. It's sort of the eHarmony for -- well, for men and women like that who want to meet. Good luck to them all and I'll dance at their weddings.
The show went fine, and I stood around for a few minutes afterwards -- rooted, actually -- and a nice young woman with a smile larger than what she was wearing came up and said something nice, and I said something nice, and then she wandered off. I didn't follow, of course, since, as I mentioned, I was rooted.
I never saw "Hef", who was probably off flying "Bunny One" around Italy, or any peacocks, or any underground grottos. I didn't see couples strolling hand in hand or locked in furious copulation (thought I might, but no). I looked up the stairs in the main hall once but didn't go up. I glanced over the property (or at least as much as I could see from my spot); then I got back into the car and drove home to my apartment. And what a relief, too: I never knew I could hold my breath that long.
But I just didn't think I could go back again on Tuesday, and that's what I told Hansen. "Look," I said, "Tell them thanks, but... I can't."
I can hear the double-takes all over America right now. "What? Not go to the Playboy Mansion? Are you crazy? Everyone wants to go to the Playboy Mansion. Who doesn't want to go to the Playboy Mansion? Even Naomi Wolf and Larry Craig would go to the Playboy Mansion. Why don't you? You're kind of in their perfect target group, too, aren't you? Straight, bald, no threat to the girls (married), disposable cash? Bald?" (Oh, we said that one.)
Look, I'm not a prude or have anything against young, sexy women showing it off. In fact, it's just the opposite. Like federally subsidized liquor, and a serious change in the Ten Commandments, I'm for it.
It was something else.
You see, when Hansen called I was just in the middle of an article in the Times about Mohammed. Mohammed El Baradei, that is, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (aka, "Don't Make any Sudden Moves," for short.) Not a very important article, obviously, since it was back on one of those pages where the plastic surgery ads had already started.
He was speaking at a Big Meeting in Europe with lots of other guys who go to Big Meetings in Europe.
Mr. El Baradei, as you may know, is one of those reassuring types who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 and is always saying everything's fine, and let's just reengage and talk it out, and get these folks down from the brink one at a time. The guy can't be thrown and never loses his cool. Until now.
Unless you feel that a "singularly bleak vision of a world in disarray" is just optimism with a different hat. As reporter Kim Murphy says, he warned that "the most imminent threat is not a new nation joining the nuclear club, but deadly material falling into the hands of extremists."
These groups are, according to El Baradei, nurtured on "anger, humiliation and desperation," which for a second I thought was just a description of the waiting room at any audition. "For an extremist group, there is no concept of deterrence. If they have it, they will use it."
Sweet. To put it in perspective, I think this fairly dramatic change in outlook is the equivalent of someone running into a board meeting at General Motors and saying, "Uh, guys, just so you know, it's getting, like, really hot out there."
But the whole thing was just the cherry on top of the lead Times editorial that day which reported -- seriously -- two Down Syndrome women who had suicide belts strapped to them and were sent into a crowded Baghdad market, and "may not have understood what they were about to do." Don't your shoulders slump when you hear that? The editorial later said, "Neither the Islamic nor the Western worlds have come to grips with acts of such evil," and asked, "What does this moral numbness mean?"
What does it mean? It means that... It clearly means...
Well, I guess it means it's time to go back to the Playboy Mansion.
And that's when Hansen called. We Americans are the world champions at going from one thing to another without blinking. It happens every night on the news: (SAD FACE) "All the children were lost in the fiery explosion, which is still burning at ten miles an hour and impossible to control." (HAPPY FACE) "When we come back? A tour of the Happy Days exhibit at the Smithsonian!"
Of course I'm going to the Playboy Mansion. Adam Carolla's a friend and he's doing something there, and I have a movie coming out on the 22nd, Bagboy, and, oh, you know. I was just thrown for a second by a wafer thin caul of two-ply bleakness.
Hansen's coming with me this time. (He's not married and has one of those blazers.) I'll let you know what happens. See if I can find that spot where I stood the last time. Maybe there're two parched, size-eleven footprints where no grass has grown since.
Maybe meet Hef this time. I never understood all the different types of women, but I found someone right for me anyway, so what harm? I guess I go more for the type that...
Well, for one thing, the type who just might know what Proust's Madeleines were.