Hugh Hefner's "Little Black Book" tells his own heroic epic and shows us the world he has wrought.
by Matt Labash
His co-writer is Bill Zehme who has, in the past, proven himself a formidable talent, this year picking up a National Magazine Award for an impressive Esquire story he wrote on disgraced columnist Bob Greene. But as a longtime celebrity chronicler, Zehme has fellated more stars than most of the denizens of Hef's bunny hutch. Thus the Hefner/Zehme collaboration is a love story of sorts: Zehme's love for Hef, Hef's love for himself.
Bill Zehme, who possesses the trait any celebrity hagiographer needs in abundance--credulity. With pen, purple, and panties, damp, Zehme depicts Hefner in an annoying argot that is half fanzine, half overripe liner-notes from some moldy bebop album. At every turn, he polishes the legacy. Hefner, we learn on the first page, is less pervy old lecher, more silly girl. Like some dreamy, unicorn-drawing teenybopper, Hefner--indiscriminate mounter of thousands of women--it turns out, is in love with being in love. It says so right on the opening page: "The one he loved first did not love him back."
But if the prose is icky, it pales next to the man it intends to service. Despite Zehme's strenuous efforts to turn Hefner into something admirable, something approximating flesh-and-blood, the latter comes off as a 24-carat eccentric, completely unable to harness his own appetites.
Hefner is a gentle lover, Zehme tells us, presumably not from personal experience, though one can't be sure with sentences like: "Feelings intensified, as they are wont to, and walls changed to portals, as his gentleness would impress each woman he ever knew." How Hefner had a chance to survey each woman, when he was pinned at the bottom of a Sealy Posturepedic dogpile, Zehme doesn't specify.
However, it is not so much the softer side of Hef we are struck by. It is the utter banality of his observations. Though the man has spent most of his existence getting an up-close look at gender relations, he offers nothing but a series of no-duh epiphanies. With his wealth of experience, one might think he'd say something insightful, even if by accident. But he doesn't, unless you weren't clued in to the following: "The female body is aroused in more than one place." Or how about, "Some relationships improve with marriage, but a lot of them don't."
