EIGHT: Up All Night in Chicago's Playboy Mansion

The Stones accept Hugh Hefner's offer to stay at his palatial pleasure dome, delighting some members of the STP squad and offending others. It's a counter-culture clash between two generations of social rebels, as the two camps try to find common ground amid differing views of drug use and misogyny. The invitation forces the band to confront the fact that they aren't young punks anymore, but drifting ever closer to the middle-of-the-road — and middle age. Naturally the Stones take full advantage of the excess on offer — until Keith parties a little too hard and nearly burns the house to the ground. Fun and sex is had by all, but they all agree that there's something a little creepy about it all. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Stone's Touring Party is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome to Chicago. It's June nineteen seventy two. A convoy
of limos and cabs come to a stop outside in
the Dress on a tony residential street. Even in the dark,
the building stands out amid the Brownstones, surrounded by an
imposing wrought iron fence lined with black suited security heavies

(00:29):
with walkie talkies in their hands and pistols under their shoulders.
It looks more like an embassy. Good Lord, did the
Stones call on a favor with the ambassador? Do they
have embassies in Chicago? I'm in Chicago, right? Did I
take too many kayludes on the ride here? No matter.
It's midway through the tour now and easy to forget
where you are. The days are starting to blur, or

(00:52):
maybe that's just the quayludes. But climbing the wide, sweeping
stairs you'll get a major clue where you are. On
the door is a brass bearing the inscription see known
osilas noni tintinare. Students of Latin will know what this means.
If you don't swing, don't ring, you can only be

(01:12):
one place. The Playboy mansion. The scene is a party
in the great room while the Palace Museum, as it's
come to be known on the Rolling Stones Tour. It's
so straight that it almost seems sarcastic, with medieval suits
of armor flanking the stairs and hardwood paneling that makes
it look like a tidillating Titanic. Such is the taste

(01:34):
of the Lord of the manor one Hugh Hefner. But
don't let it fool you. There's nothing straight about this place.
It's well after midnight and people are careening from room
to room, from the bar to the living room and
down to the pool. Some pop in and out of
secret passageways. A James Bond esque detail inspired by Hefner's

(01:55):
dear friend, the late Double seven creator Ian Fleming, Champagne
Quovassier flow over the bar like water. Keith Richards is
lying flat on his back in a deep plush sofa.
His slender frame is sporting brass studded jeans, leopard skin boots,
tinted hair, and red sunglasses. He smiles at you over

(02:15):
his tequila sunrise, or at least he's smiling at something.
The game room is down a curving stairway past the
pool in the sun and sauna room and through the
beaded curtains. There's a pool table in the middle and
a collection of neon flashing pinball machines, a computer quiz table,
football test your skilled driving games, and electro dartboards. And

(02:37):
it's all for free, no dime needed. The sound system
has been captured and plugged into a portable tape recorder.
Smokey Robinson competes with his Flesh and Blood Motown mate
Stevie Wonder, the stp opening act, who's playing some seriously
funky piano on hefner steinlight. He's interrupted by a loud

(02:57):
crash as somebody spills an entire drink tray on the floor.
Even the unflappable waiters are starting to lose it. An
impossibly beautiful woman named Mercy stands nearby. She peers through
a cascade of platinum blonde hair. She's in town for
Playboy to take her picture, but her trip was made
even more exciting during a brief, yet passionate encounter with

(03:20):
one of the Stones, or at least someone in their orbit.
And tomorrow's my birthday too, She says, I feel just
like Cinderella that description comes courtesy of Robert Greenfield, the
legendary rock journalist who is Rolling Stone Magazines Dedicated Stones correspondent.
As a twenty something in the early seventies, he was

(03:43):
there during those long nights at the mansion, raising eyebrows
with the ladies of the house for furtively taking notes
for his articles and stubbornly refusing to go completely off
the rails. More than the partying, which crossed the line
from leasurable to punishing, for most concerned, it was a
fascinating encounter between two very different generations of counterculture leaders

(04:05):
who were more alike than they were different. By gaining
entry into the Playboy Mansion, the Stones also gained entry
to a certain level of social respectability, as much as
they'd try to deny it, and as much as their
behavior there suggests that otherwise. They'd spent the sixties offending
the old timers. Now they're being welcomed into their midst

(04:27):
What did that mean? In addition to Robert Greenfield and
has never before heard tapes of the Stones and their
exile on Main Street era, Glory will also be joined
by his friend and fellow SDP tour mate, Gary Stromberg,
a PR soprimo. Who's represented a whole jukebox of music's
greatest artists. My name's Jordan Runtogg, and welcome to Stone's

(04:50):
touring party. Everyone knows that artists on tour arrive in
each city preceded by the legend of their own publicity,
but it cuts the other way as well. For rock

(05:12):
bands on the road, cities come pre hyped with a
legend of their own. In Chicago's legend was a mixed bag. Sure,
it was the central blues hub north of the Mason
Dixon line and home to Chess Records, a seminole R
and B label that brought the world Chuck Berry, bo
Didley and Muddy Waters. But the Stones arrived on June eighteenth,

(05:33):
nineteen seventy two, a hot, windy, smoggy, stinking, bristly hog
of a day, with something other than a sense of
joy in their hearts. The band bredue to play three
dates at the International Amphitheater, a great barn of a
place that builds itself as the world's largest building in
terms of total area. Even if it isn't, it's certainly

(05:55):
the world's ugliest. It had recently played host to a
livestock show, just prior to the Stone's arrival and the thick,
rich aroma of bnor still Lingers. The Stones had played
there in sixty nine, and Keith doesn't remember it fondly.
Here he is talking to Robert Greenfield, courtesy of our
friends at the Northwestern University Archives.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
Chicago had a strange town.

Speaker 4 (06:21):
It isn't it a good place to play? It didn't
seem to. I think the only good one is too
small and something like that. I mean, all I know
is that every time you play your god, the fucking
bown of stinks.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Making matters worse is the smell from the nearby stockyards,
where fresh meat was hung upside down and drained of
blood before being ground into pieces, pressed into patties, and
broiled into burgers that fed America. Chicago had a reputation
for blood in the street. He was here less than

(06:57):
four years earlier. The cops beat the flesh of young
protesters at the Democratic National Convention, cracking skulls with their
nightsticks as network news cameras broadcast the carnage into living
rooms across the nation. All amid chance of the whole
world is watching the convention stage where politicians hurled accusations

(07:18):
and slurs at one another is the very same one
where the Stones will perform. Chicago cops, not looking for
a repeat of the sixty eight riots, have the city
locked up tight like an occupying army, a particularly savage
one at that. The day after the Stones arrive, the
Chicago Tribune reports that the FBI is hard at work

(07:39):
on determining the identities of five Chicago cops moonlighting as assassins.
They're allegedly responsible for the six dead black men found
decomposing in the Chicago River. The rise in violence quotion
of a major city like Chicago is like a whiff
of strong smelling salts or good cocaine. It clears the

(07:59):
head kickstarts the blood, and generates all kinds of razor
sharp thinking, including the stp squads planned to protect the Stones.
Even the band's formidable bodyguard, Big Leroy Leonard, is on
high alert. Man, this is the kind of town you
can get yourself mugged right on the street broad daylight,
he tells Robert Greenfield. Mugged if you're lucky. Adding to

(08:27):
the logistical headaches is the fact that Chicago's playing host
to a McDonald's convention at that very moment, and all
the desirable and defensible hotels are congested with eight hundred
Burger executives, all trying to figure out how to make
the Big Mac safe for America. Several other trade shows
were occurring simultaneously, meeting rooms were in short supply. Plus,

(08:49):
let's be honest, most of the finer establishments in town
weren't exactly thrilled at the prospect of hosting rock stars,
but thinking went, if the bands themselves didn't destroy the place,
than their fans Shirley would. So the STP tax squad
labor defined a location for the Stones that was both
secure and geographically convenient. The answer was a rather an

(09:13):
orthodox one. The Playboy Mansion, you know, the house that
hef built, the poor An Emporium, the Bunny Abbey, the
American dream House, or a towering monument of sexual exploitation
and misogyny, depending on your point of view. So, while
the rest of the SCP family are holed up at
a Hyatt by the airport some thirty miles away from

(09:36):
the action, half graciously agrees to host the Stones and
their inner codery.

Speaker 5 (09:48):
They worked in Chicago.

Speaker 6 (09:49):
They stayed in the mansion the whole Separate Book movie
documentary Gary.

Speaker 5 (09:55):
They were there.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
Three three nights, three nights.

Speaker 6 (09:57):
Yeah, I mean, this is the insanity of this tour.
I was inconvenient. They were not near anybody else, no support. Yeah, fine,
Jagger must have said okay on this one.

Speaker 7 (10:07):
He had to.

Speaker 8 (10:07):
It was very nice men to adviias. I mean, you know,
because it was the nicest place we could stay in Chicago,
and we didn't know him.

Speaker 7 (10:14):
It was very spitable. You have to just speak him
at all.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
Sure, Yeah, he's a very nice dude, you know, he's nice.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Located on a leafy street in Chicago's moneyed Gold Coast district,
it was certainly big enough. In fact, heff would later
lease it to the Art Institute of Chicago to be
used as a dorm, and the high gates out front
made it reasonably impenetrable to those wishing the stones harm.
Hugh Hefner, the man responsible for it all, had recently

(10:45):
hosted a TV show called Playboy After Dark, where bands
like The Grateful Dead and Deep Purple performed in his
living room, but this was merely a sound stage replica,
and the Bonome was similarly faked for the television cameras.
You know, hef wasn't exactly in the habit of inviting
Stone out rockers into his home, but when the STP

(11:05):
tax squad called and explained their predicament, he said, sure,
come on in. He's not really much of a fan,
but he's cross paths with Mike at LA parties once
or twice, and he very much liked his appearance and
the Nick Rogue Arthouse film performance. As Heffner told Robert
Greenfield in nineteen seventy two, the main purpose of the
Playboy mansion was the foster a salon culture of social

(11:27):
figures and celebrities alike. So why not have the stones?

Speaker 9 (11:32):
The mansions are kind of a curious combination. Kater's first
and foremost went home, but it's a very special home,
so that nobody stays there.

Speaker 8 (11:40):
I don't want them to stay there.

Speaker 9 (11:41):
And the people who stay there are either people who
I know personally working close n or someone who I
may not yet know but whose work I admire, who he left.
But with the stones, even in that context, having the
stones there was something rather special or bold tay to.

Speaker 10 (11:56):
Think Hefner was the one who wanted them to stay
theres not the other way around. Everybody wanted a piece
of the Stones, and the Stones were very selective in
who they would allow in, and they allowed Hefner to
let them stay at his place. You know, you would
not have thought that that was the case. They were
the stars, not Hefner, and.

Speaker 6 (12:14):
The playmates had nothing to do with that decision.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
No, despite the novelty of having playmates for housemates, the
Stones are feeling low when they show up at the
Playboy mansion just before midnight. They've come directly from Minneapolis,
where that night's concert was marred by Overzella's cops with
canisters of tear gas, and the smell remains a faint

(12:37):
tickle in their nostrils, more like jumping gas flash tonight,
Mick joked warily as their whisked the board their private plane. Afterwards.
Their mood hadn't improved by the time they arrived at
the mansion, where the vibes were decidedly bad. An attempt
had been made on Hefner's life shortly before the Stones visit,

(12:57):
and the failings of armed guards made the place looked
like the state home of some Eastern European dictator. They're
so strict that Charlie Watts, arguably the most nondescript Stone
and certainly the most low key, was mistakenly barred from
entering at first. Once that gets straightened out, they enter
to find the couches in the great front hall awash

(13:19):
with beautiful but bored looking women watching a screening of
a dull X rated movie called Is Their Sex After Death?
It all felt simultaneously stuffy and tawdry. If they weren't
so wiped, they would have turned around and left then
and there. Charlie Watts actually did, referring to stay somewhere
else down the street, but for the rest of the band,

(13:45):
their fatigue got weighed their distaste. Guitarist Mick Taylor explains.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
I suppose I could have gone very critical about it.
I was just exhaustive and I got there, or I
was descended. I was sort of resting because it was
a midway through a ray strenuous.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
To The energy just wasn't meshing, and the Stones wanted out.
But then their bodyguard, big Leroy Leonard takes them aside,
Hey have you guys actually taken a good look around
this place? The Stones had not toured the seventy room
thirty thousand square foot residents. And this was a crucial error.

Speaker 7 (14:23):
You see.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
This meant that they hadn't seen the oval shaped indoor
swimming pool and underwater tiki bar, also accessible by trapdoor
from the wood paneled living room. They hadn't seen the
steam rooms or sun rooms or gymnasium, nor the bowling alley,
or child's fantasy of a game room with flashing pinball
machines with free replays at a full sized pool table,

(14:45):
and state of the art video games primitive by today's standards,
but mind melting to a stoned out member of the
stp entourage. And they hadn't seen the chef permanently on
call twenty four hours a day at a cook you
whatever you desire in the possibly well stocked kitchen. Yes,
the Stones bodyguard gets them to open their minds and

(15:05):
consider the possibilities, which were fairly limitless after the Soso
hotels they've been sequestered in. The mansion is a place
to let go. It's like Disneyland for sense freaks, an
epicurean island where your every wish comes true. To better
understand exactly how stunning this was to the Stones, who'd

(15:28):
already been world famous for the better part of a decade.
It's important to know where they came from. Bassist Bill Lyman,
for example, was the son of a bricklayer. His upbringing
was practically Dickensian compared to this.

Speaker 11 (15:42):
We had guest lights in our home until five years
before I got married, So fifteen years, sixteen, seventeen, seventeen
years ago the guest lights. We had no hot water,
We had no bell too, and the toilet was outside.
And I never had a bathroom until I've been married
two years and I moved into a flat that was

(16:02):
past sixty five.

Speaker 12 (16:03):
Never had a bathroom in the house or retire. Yeah,
hot water in the house.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
Running Mick had a more middle class childhood, but he
and Keith spent the band's early years sharing a legendarily
squalid apartment with founding Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

Speaker 6 (16:22):
They lived together communally in this awful flat in Chelsea,
Edith Grove. Okay, nobody cleaned anything. They lived like animals.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
The kitchen was the worst of it. Dishes would pile
up until the food scraps congealed. The substances that didn't
seem of this earth. Keith would describe the greasy, discarded
pans as junked pyramids of foulness that no one could
bear to touch. A fourth roommate, who shall remain nameless,
would welcome the trio home from gigs late at night

(16:53):
by standing at the top of the stairs and showering
them with his own fresh urine. Mick and Keith's mothers
would sometimes come by and make a valiant effort to
straighten up, but it would never last. Lights were switched
off immediately whenever dates were brought back to prevent the
lady from getting a glimpse of the place and fleeing
in terror. Bill Wyman, a frequent guest, remembered it well too.

Speaker 12 (17:17):
Well, those were really amazing times.

Speaker 11 (17:20):
You can never get it across the people, how difficult,
how weird those times were. You know, Brian and Keith
were starving in the winter of sixty two sixty three,
and they were starving and their money they're know, eating
in their flat, no food. I don't know what they
were doing, but they were existing. Knows about it. If
Charlie ever came and they would bound a few bob

(17:40):
off him to ganghas and pies and all I ever saw.

Speaker 12 (17:42):
I mean it was like apple tarts. You could buy
it for seven monce or something.

Speaker 11 (17:46):
It was really soon and the place stank, and the
manager was broken and had this great collection of empty
milkpoles with various forms of and.

Speaker 12 (17:58):
Ages of mold.

Speaker 11 (18:00):
They had like faulty of them in the kitchen, all
in lines grow yeah great, yeah.

Speaker 12 (18:06):
Never forget that.

Speaker 11 (18:07):
And they used to write with the candle on the
ceiling with the black of the candle. You know, you
used to get candle lighted and used to write all
these things on the ceiling in this black smoke. There's
all this writing all over the ceilings in black. It's amazing.
You never find anywhere to sit. Standing was quite.

Speaker 12 (18:24):
Hard because there's rubbish and everywhere. It's terrible. And now
it really was bad.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
They'd come a long way in the intervening decade, but
you never truly shake poverty. Once it's hit your system,
it stays with you forever, becoming the point against which
all their life experiences are measured. For Bill Wyman, contrasting
the Playboy Mansion with Edith Grove, or the unending string
of subpar SDP hotels for that matter, was dis orienting,

(18:53):
to say the least.

Speaker 11 (18:55):
It wasn't like hotel. It was a different to It
wasn't even a house, I think it was. It was
kind of your own.

Speaker 12 (19:02):
You had your own room. You have been a really
nice room there and when you went in the room,
you had everything you wanted in that room.

Speaker 13 (19:07):
You know.

Speaker 12 (19:07):
It wasn't I anywhere else. It wasn't eleven night home.
You had a hair dryer.

Speaker 11 (19:12):
You had a woman's hair you know, the thing that
got over the head, every one of those.

Speaker 12 (19:16):
You had a razors there.

Speaker 11 (19:18):
You had a whole cabinet solid full with cosmetics and
after shave and the soaps, and I mean it was everything.

Speaker 12 (19:27):
You had hair dryers, you had put makeup mirrors.

Speaker 3 (19:30):
Yeah, you had stereo system.

Speaker 7 (19:33):
You had to wake up radio for the.

Speaker 12 (19:34):
Clock, you know there.

Speaker 11 (19:36):
You had a sport table recorder all done it and
stereo with radio and record player.

Speaker 12 (19:42):
And you had books there.

Speaker 11 (19:43):
And I mean you could just go to your room
and stay there for two years if you wanted to.
I'm sure people do that there, you know, and just
phone out if you wanted anything, whatever it might be,
you could get it.

Speaker 12 (19:53):
It was fantastically organized, super American.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, after taking it all in, the Stones decided what
the heck Let's stay at the Playboy Mansion. But if
a good night's sleep was what they were looking for,
they wouldn't find it here. A pair of snakeskin boots

(20:28):
rest on a polished hardwood table. The table belongs to
Hugh Hefner. The boots belong to Keith Richards. His scrawnee
scarecrow frame is sprawled across the couch in a wooden
paneled hall the size of a football field. He takes
in the increasingly surreal scene before him. The biggest British

(20:51):
rock band in the world is currently at play in
the Temple of the American Dream, Chicago's Playboy Mansion. Despite
the slightly awkward arrival, the Stones have made themselves at home.
Keith openly muses about painting his room black, you know,
a little something for have to remember them by. No

(21:11):
one sure if he's joking. As far as Keith is concerned.
The man of the house must have known what he
was getting himself into.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
There's a few possibilities as far as he's concerned. You know,
we just complete the young koothlous.

Speaker 12 (21:28):
That would have sort of.

Speaker 4 (21:30):
Tried to destroy the place, in which case he would
have thrown it out, or we'd been very boring musicians
that sitting around in their bedrooms working out a new
song as all the time, which case that wouldn't bother him,
or we're living it up.

Speaker 7 (21:44):
Eh.

Speaker 4 (21:44):
We happen to be at that point in the two
where we were able to do that.

Speaker 7 (21:48):
You know.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
Hugh Hefner, for one, is delighted that the ice has
been broken.

Speaker 9 (21:54):
Although I had met MC a couple of times before,
neither one of us moved you know or another that well,
obviously I had good vibes about it in general, or
would not have said yes in the first place, but
neither of us now exactly what to respect. So indeed
is you know the first eating there was a kind
of period of adjustment, and I think it really at
turned into a ball.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
The music signaled the changeover, like a gorilla army coming
out of the mountains to seize the local radio station.
The Stones convinced hef to get a hold of his
personal electrician, who links up Keith's cassette player with the
house stereo. Soon the big band crooners are gone, as Aretha,
Jerry Lee and the Coasters comes spilling out of the speakers.

(22:37):
The baggage man and the Stones bodyguards start dancing with
one another, and the chaos starts to spread. It's turning
into a rock and roll sockhop as stp people arrive
in droves. Robert Greenfield and Gary Stromberg are among them.

Speaker 6 (22:54):
It was astonishing to be in the mansion. The mansion
was this stately brownstone in Zana. Do the pleasure dome decree.
They were all these arcade games, like a pinball machines. Yeah,
and you know, food was shirt twenty four hour a
day kitchen.

Speaker 10 (23:10):
You can order whatever you wanted. They would prepare it
for you. Yeah, there was no menu. If they just
order what you want, we'll get it.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Should you ask the butler what's for dinner? You're getting amused?
Anything you like? Well, nothing special? What do you got?
We have everything? What do you prefer? How about some
fish baked, broiled, fried, cold, lobster tails, perhaps with lopster
tail suffice. He's only too happy to bring it to you.

(23:42):
Bassist Bill Wyman spent most of his time in the
game room trying to break the high score.

Speaker 11 (23:47):
Games room was fantastic downstairs in the polls, I mean
you could.

Speaker 12 (23:52):
It was set up that places set up to do
anything you wanted to, any time of the day or night,
wherever you want.

Speaker 11 (23:58):
You could play table tennis, you coulday village, you could
play There was thirty different games he's got.

Speaker 12 (24:04):
On the top of these bimball machines.

Speaker 7 (24:05):
But you've got record scores, you.

Speaker 11 (24:07):
Know, the top ten records scores are on that. They're
fantastic score. I mean one hundred and thirty hours and.

Speaker 12 (24:13):
You know one I got a good score one day
and the next day I found my name about fifth
position on one.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
Of these boat Bill would strike up a kinship with
Heaf based on a shared passion for backgammon. They spend
hours sitting in a long wooden table like Barren's, playing
contest after contest, but now HEF's deepened conversation with Mick Jagger,
blackbriar pipe in one hand and pepsi cola in the other.
He holds court beneath a huge Picasso canvas of a

(24:41):
reclining female nude. Naturally, Keith Richards stifles a laugh as
he looks on from the couch Hef and Mick. On
the surface, it's such an incongresous pairing. The quintessential fifties Hepcat,
self styled sophisticate and the captain of the Roving High
It Nation of seventies rock together at last, look at Hafner,

(25:05):
Keith says, chuckling into his tequila sunrise making conversation, bridging
the generation gap. He's my father's dream. But the gap
isn't as wide as he might expect, making half are
two very different kinds of outlaws, but outlaws just the same,
presenting two distinctly different alternative lifestyles for two distinctly different times.

(25:28):
According to Hefner, the common ground wasn't hard to find you,
there were some paps.

Speaker 14 (25:34):
Some of the basis for the contact or the communication
between you and the rowing them, Mick, was the fact
that both of you had essentially rejected prescribed code of
behavior and in different ways of term formulating Yes, I
think's really I.

Speaker 9 (25:44):
Think I think a part of it was Playboy makes
you to represent the establishment a pin that's just a
result of having been around for you know, eighteen or
twenty years and having been terribly successful in you know,
the actual fact of the matter is that Playboy as
a concept and Playboy as a success was a form
of counter culture or an alternate lifestyle. That's really at
the heart of what Playboy was all about.

Speaker 8 (26:06):
I mean, that really is what Playboy is all about,
what I'm all about.

Speaker 9 (26:08):
I was raised in a very pure and orthodox Methodist home,
and Playboy really came out of my own deep prebellion
to the.

Speaker 8 (26:18):
Stones, came out of city, it came out of England,
you know, gray establishment England.

Speaker 9 (26:22):
And you know, it's almost because the counterculture of the
moment is it is much more reflected in the rock
music and aggressive, destructive, anti establishment kind of thing. To talk
about anything like that is so materialistically oriented and leisure
time and fun oriented as Playboy as a counterculture thing
doesn't ring true unless you think about.

Speaker 8 (26:41):
It a little bit.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
To Keith and the rest of the Stones, Hefner's attempt
to liken himself to them and their scene just seemed laughable,
the attempt of an aging man desperate to prove his potency.
But young rebels so often forget that those in charge
the dreaded establishment were once the new kids too, filled
with vim and vigor and out to change the world.

(27:04):
Most fail and disappear without a trace, but succeeding can
be a crueler fate. Hafner's been around long enough to
see that through acceptance, all revolutions, from social movements to
fashions to rock bands, gradually drift towards the middle of
the road.

Speaker 9 (27:21):
First of all, it's very special and belongs to a
little group alone. Then it's fresh. I mean, you certainly
saw that with the Bells, where it was like a
kid thinking. Then it was the heads of state. And
then when it reaches that level, the need for their
own special thing for the young must essentially then move
on and discover something else that can be their own.
I mean, otherwise, each generation has a need to not

(27:45):
simply be a carbon copy of their parents. It may
not be rebellion in each generation, as we've seen it
in the last one or two, you know, a real
rejection of so many of the basic values of the
previous generation, but a variation on that theme is always
just and has to exist to some degree. That's the
way you would established in some countries that you're independence.

Speaker 8 (28:04):
You say, I'm me. I'm not just my father or
my mother. I'm me.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
The stones don't want to know that this piteous dinosaur
will one day be them sooner or later. And the
way things are going probably sooner. Displayed on the polished
leather couch being served trays of sweet, creamy chocolate, Declaire
is by a butler. It's becoming hard for Keith to
deny the band's own drift towards the middle. His presence

(28:31):
in this very room proves that they've gained the kind
of social respectability that no other group could lay claim to.
Just a few short years ago, Keith wouldn't have been
allowed anywhere near the place. Some member of the black
suited walkie talkie presidential caliber security operatives manning the front
door would have taken him aside and told them to
get a haircut, a job, and a new attitude, and

(28:53):
then try coming around. And yet now here he is.
He was still surprised when talking about with Robert Greenfield
a short time later. Here he is, courtesy of our
friends at the Northwestern University Archives.

Speaker 7 (29:11):
Do you find it weird that you were there at all?

Speaker 4 (29:13):
Yeah? Yeah, I thought it was sweet.

Speaker 7 (29:18):
I mean, you think you would have been let in
there in sixty nine or you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
I don't know the reasons for I mean, I don't
know when he reached a point when he would have
accepted the Rolling Stones staying as much, you know. I mean,
it's very difficult to say if you'd have let us
in there in sixty nine, it's probably not you know, I.

Speaker 7 (29:35):
Mean, would you want it to go on sixty ten?

Speaker 4 (29:40):
I wouldn't have felt any different about it at sixty
nine and never mored in seventy six. It's a comfortable bed,
you know, and a few distractions.

Speaker 12 (29:48):
It makes a change from a hotel anywhere, you know,
just stayed anywhere. That gives an office a break from
a straight hotel.

Speaker 7 (29:57):
Still, I mean, I thought that a lot of it
was a joke. I mean, for your it got I
mean because it was.

Speaker 4 (30:02):
It was funny, you know, pre a chance to be
lighthearted for a few He was a very ambiguous sort
of respectability, you know. I mean, my mother a dormustry
for a one hundred and something funnies and at the same.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Time the house of this very liberal.

Speaker 4 (30:19):
Gentleman, you know who. I can't really put him all together,
you know, I don't know. He just borrows a little
bit from everywhere, you know, this sticks it all together.

Speaker 6 (30:32):
I mean, Hefner was really interesting. He was so white,
you know, so from another era, fifties broken. All these
sexual and cultural taboos changed America very substantively. And it
sounds like a joke, but had really good writing and Playboy.
Really good people wrote for Playboy, really good journalists, really

(30:54):
good novelists. He paid top dollar and so he could
get the writing. I don't know if anybody read the articles,
but that's neither here nor there. It's Gary's point all
over again. Half wanted to get his hip ticket punched,
and he could only do it by having the Stones
stay with him.

Speaker 5 (31:10):
And they were up. It's like Gary said, yeah, we'll
do this.

Speaker 10 (31:14):
And they weren't deferential to him at all, not at all.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
No, No, you observe.

Speaker 10 (31:20):
This, and you think that this was Hefner like was
worked his way into the being near the stones, rather
than the stones working their way into the mansion.

Speaker 5 (31:29):
They were so unimpressed, yea, so unimpressed. They weren't particularly
nasty or no.

Speaker 10 (31:33):
No, no, it just didn't mean anything to them. They
were the Stones and they could go anywhere they want,
to do anything they wanted, and everybody would count out
to them, including Efner.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
Bill Wyman was certainly skeptical at first, but he was
won over by HEF's charm and patience while teaching him backgammon.

Speaker 11 (31:50):
I was kind of ridicule the playworth and I still
doing the work. Was the compass ego searching guy that
didn't really look real, you know, and wasn't very strong
or anything. Where I met him. I still thought it
for the first half an hour because I never really
sat and talked to him, but I saw him that
he was in our presence, and during those few days

(32:13):
I found him to be a very nice person, very friendly,
and nothing was too much trouble.

Speaker 12 (32:18):
But he's a very good host. Absolutely he always felt
oh I did. I always felt that he did.

Speaker 11 (32:24):
He liked you.

Speaker 12 (32:25):
There was no kind of keeping.

Speaker 11 (32:26):
Away or scenes going on, bad scenes, I mean any
bad vives. And he would spend an hour or so
teaching someone to player a game.

Speaker 12 (32:36):
No hang up, then too busy. There was none of
that scene.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Half meanwhile, apparently never learned Bill's name. He was a
little shaky with the non Glimmer twin Stones.

Speaker 9 (32:47):
One of the guys was learning back and I happened
be really good at the game.

Speaker 8 (32:52):
Was part of one good evening, you know, just draw
on some of them. Did he speak of Charlie laugh,
you know?

Speaker 7 (32:57):
The dummer was any recollect.

Speaker 8 (33:00):
I'm not sure who was it they're playing. I'm not sure.
I'm not positive.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Guitarist Mick Taylor, the new guy in the band, never
got any FaceTime with helf and he was kind of
okay with that.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
I didn't even meet Hugh Hefner, you see, he didn't
meet him once. I saw him playing backgammon with girls,
but I didn't meet him or speak to him. I
think people's tend to get put off because of what
it stands for, you know, the whole playboy philosophy.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Ah, yes, the philosophy without which the intellectual elite might
confuse hef for a petty smut peddler. For all of
Hugh Hefner's intellectualism and high flute manifestos heralding a bold
new era of personal freedom, few would forget or forgive
that this freedom only extended to men, and his empire

(33:54):
was built on flesh. To some, especially those in the
burgeoning National Organization of Women, the mansion might as well
have been the stinking stockyards on Chicago's South Side. But
you'd have to ask the bunnies and playmates about that,
and you easily can, because they're everywhere. The mansion contains

(34:15):
a two floor dormitory which houses upwards of two dozen
young professional women, all in possession of what toothpaste ads
would describe as a winning smile. They're soldiers in the
Playboy Army. The playmates outrank the bunnies by virtue of
having appeared with a staple across their middrift and the
center spread of the magazine, thus providing a momentary distraction

(34:37):
for those hungry for the latest Knobakov short story or
an expose on rising divorce rates. It costs bunnies fifty
dollars a month to live in the mansion are about
four hundred and twenty and today's dollars plus food. Of course,
they're forbidden from having male visitors or consuming alcohol unless
Heff himself offers. They're even subject to memos, including this one,

(34:59):
that are during the Stone Stay June twentieth, nineteen seventy two.
Dear Bunnies, when was the last time you took a
really good look at yourselves and your job? Have you
considered how important you are to us? You, each and
every one, make Playboy different and exciting. The bunny concept
has been responsible for the founding of an empire. The

(35:20):
memo then rambles on for seven paragraphs about the rules
of Bunny punctuality before concluding, get your acts together, ladies,
we're running a business here. Keep in mind that no
one else would take the time or make the effort
we do. You'd be out the door. In other words,
watch it or go back from whence you can. Hugh

(35:44):
Hefner views it all a little more altruistically. He sees
the mansion as a safe haven, offering women with limited
options a lucrative alternative to bad life situations.

Speaker 9 (35:55):
What the Bunny really are our cross section of young
physically attracted girl who were drawn to the job for
a variety of reasons, among which are that it is
an ideal job for a girl without any other kinds
of experience, to get away from home, to get out
of allows.

Speaker 8 (36:13):
Your marriage, etc.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
They're worse in the real stories, to be sure. Certainly
some did escape trouble in their past, only to become
figures of renown in multiple senses, crazing the walls of
army barracks and auto body shops. Indeed, certain members of
the STP crew, including Robert Greenfield, found themselves starstruck in
their presence.

Speaker 6 (36:36):
What was going on at the mansion was it was
you know, hot and cold playmates running in and out
and running out.

Speaker 5 (36:43):
They were dressed.

Speaker 6 (36:44):
I'm not going there, but I mean, if you were
I always refer to myself as a kid, if you
were living in America back then, you knew them. It's like,
oh my god, January nineteen sixty eight. You know, you
know if you were that, if you were that, Oh
my god. I saw her when I was in high school.
They were all around and they were keeping score of

(37:04):
which one of them had slept with more rolling stones
than the other.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
The ladies of the Playboy Mansion were aggressive. Some of
the braver ones walk straight up to the stp had
haunchos and say, Joy tells me, you're a bitch, dominate me.
It was chauvinism of the first order, coming from all sides.
Hef had some thoughts on this.

Speaker 9 (37:25):
The starfucker phenomenon is something that is older than I am,
and that is just a coarse term for something that
we're talking.

Speaker 8 (37:34):
About that is a way.

Speaker 9 (37:36):
That a person lives out a part of their fantasy life. Absolutely,
I mean these are wrong. Matter of fact, the Sinatra
becomes a much better application in terms of, you know,
a previous generation, because it's exactly what's going on. In
other words, it is a variation on that. Then you
have to go beyond that in terms of implications in
terms of lifestyle, etc. But of course also that's a

(37:57):
part of what invariation goes on there.

Speaker 8 (38:00):
Other times too, because they are living up to a
variation on the theme related to later on, you know,
there is a.

Speaker 9 (38:07):
Lot of sex at the house, and we have twenty
five girls living in the house.

Speaker 8 (38:10):
In the dormitory.

Speaker 9 (38:11):
There is, however, and this is often a disappointment with
other people who arrived, no kind of organized sort of
you go with him, you know nothing. There is not
even the vague pseudo prostitutional element anywhere in the play
with thing, just because for me that is just a
person that you know, it maybe is one and a
half morality and one half personal turn off.

Speaker 8 (38:34):
It's all individual initiative. As matter Factloria Steinham did a
thing like that when she did a so called interview
with me that wound up.

Speaker 9 (38:40):
Being ninety nine percent her fantasis and one percent or whatever,
you know, the actual interview. When she started out with
a story about a guy arriving at the house, and
as soon as he arrived the Playboard exactly ask him
a people like a bunny and sending him a bunny
to his room, and half.

Speaker 8 (38:57):
An hour later on the phone, well, how it was it?

Speaker 2 (38:59):
Well that's put In his twenty ten memoir Life, Keith
Richards observes that the rolling Stones quote worked with the
lowest pimps to the highest, the highest being Hefner a pimp. Nonetheless,
his opinion was only slightly more generous when speaking of
Robert Greenfield back in nineteen seventy two, arguably more wounding

(39:21):
to their host. Keith was certain that the Stones visit
was the funkiest the Playboy Mansion had ever been, and
that they were the ones who brought the debauchery, looseness
and fun.

Speaker 4 (39:32):
I mean, you could just tell it the day he
walked in, and that place isn't very rarely like that,
just from the way people were acting. And I should
think that an ordinary evening in the mansion is Hefner
sitting under the spotlight, playing back and with Frank Sinatra
on the stereo computer Hi Fi volume number one.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Yeah, hef took offense to the notion that he didn't
set the tempo for swinging in his home. Greenfield offered
him a chance for rebuttal, and the forty six year
old fought manfully to regain his reputation as a sex
god amidst younger and more virile men who outnumbered him
five to one.

Speaker 9 (40:11):
They weren't aware of what the grounds are like when
they weren't there. Free and open sex's comin place.

Speaker 14 (40:18):
In terms of fucking, there was a lot of fucking
you are on on, I mean a lot of people
getting it on in all.

Speaker 7 (40:22):
Kinds of places. And the house is that usual or unusual.
I've only been there with film, so I don't know.

Speaker 8 (40:28):
It's neither usual nor unusual.

Speaker 9 (40:30):
It is usual, and there's a lot of fucking going
on around the house, but not in the kind of intense,
hyper kind of got to get it on kind of
thing that was going on during those three nits.

Speaker 8 (40:38):
But I don't think they really believe. I don't think
Keith really believes that it just was their show while
over there, you see, you don't say that if you
believe it.

Speaker 9 (40:47):
You say it when you're kind of overwhelmed and what's
happening when it's essentially kind of more than news.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
Yeah, Hefner was similar to Mick Jagger and that he
possessed unusual levels of self awareness. Both understood that they
lived lives that existed chiefly in daydreams. As such, each
constantly tried to calculate how they were being perceived from
the public at large, down to the person across the table.
Half developed a theory that the Playboy mystique distorted his

(41:16):
own image, creating a pair of distinct but inaccurate personas.

Speaker 9 (41:21):
That's another curious thing related to the fantasies that have
to do with me and Playboy.

Speaker 8 (41:26):
They're actually they take two distinct forms. One is that
we must.

Speaker 15 (41:30):
Be into and that I personally must be into something
related to say that was personally invented. I mean, there's
a direct parallel with the US, aren't right. Whether it's
doing some kind of special actics that have been.

Speaker 8 (41:40):
Done before, then there is a reaction to that.

Speaker 9 (41:43):
Did also very computer, which which is a very understaining
where I'm getting a part of the population cannot stand
that slot and therefore if there was a rejection of it,
that takes the form of well it's really all pepticola
and popcorn, or it's really just a big business or
each queer, and those are all very understandable because that's
the kind of thing of nobody can have it as

(42:04):
good as that seems to be, So I'm going to
find something that makes it possible for me to survive.

Speaker 7 (42:08):
The twuth is closer to.

Speaker 8 (42:09):
The former than the latter.

Speaker 9 (42:10):
One of the reasons for the existence of Playboy is
the magazine and the lifestyle described there, which obviously has
a significant elements of fantasy, and it are my fantasies,
my adolescent fantasy when I grew up. And what I
didn't imagine work occur when I began publishing.

Speaker 8 (42:24):
The damn thing is.

Speaker 9 (42:26):
That it became so posterously successful, and the fantasy became
for me in reality my world and the house there
and hearing is filled with some of those beautiful, physically beautiful.

Speaker 8 (42:36):
Ladies in the world.

Speaker 9 (42:37):
And then we go from there and say, but nonetheless,
even in that prior frame of reference, those three or
four days were something a little more intense ongoing out
in the open than as usual.

Speaker 8 (42:50):
We do have our scenes from.

Speaker 9 (42:51):
Time to time, and you know, they may be in
the Roman bath or wherever.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
The Roman baths, or's private pool sized jacuzzi has been
an object of intrigue for the STP crowd since they arrived.
It represents the ultimate inner circle, a massive holy grail
of social acceptance, capable of fitting twenty five people. If
riding in a limo with even just one of the
Stones was a gas, imagine being naked and Hugh Hefner's

(43:21):
personal tub with the band and a bunch of models.
Once the ideas floated, it becomes hard for anyone to
think of anything else. Some of the ladies giggle and
lean over to hef asking if it's okay if they could,
and he says yes. What else is U Heffner going
to say?

Speaker 6 (43:42):
And there was some scene where the Stones and Hefner
were smoking dope I'm sure, with playmates naked and the jacuzzi,
and they were all eyeing one another waiting for the
orgy to start.

Speaker 5 (43:51):
But nothing happened.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
I seen the jacuzzi.

Speaker 5 (43:54):
I got my way into the with the Stones in half.

Speaker 10 (43:57):
One of the stones, and I don't remember who, maybe
it was, I don't remember that, but I got my.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
Way into the jacuzzi.

Speaker 10 (44:02):
That was my goal while I was there.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
Once it becomes clear that there will be no orgy
in his tub. Hef retires to his private quarters with
a lady on each arm. They settle in the watch
some videotapes in his enormous circular bed, which rotates and
vibrates and has more knobs and buttons than a Boeing
seven forty seven cockpit. With hef in the middle smoking
his pipe. It looks like some absurd parody of suburban domesticity.

(44:33):
Leave it to Beaver on DMT. It might be noon,
but HEF's ready to say good night. The madness had

(45:06):
been going full tilt inside the mansion for several days.
It intensifies after midnight, when Hefner's up and about. But
what is midnight anyway? Day and night have long since
lost their meaning. This is partially due to the absence
of sunlight. Look at casino. The shades are permanently drawn,
casting the interiors into permanently party ready darkness. And the

(45:29):
drugs certainly don't help either. The Stones tour doctor, who
was never exactly stingy with his prescriptions, is dangerously close
to what we might now term a sex addict. He's
frequently indisposed, and in these delicate moments, the stp Coterie
take great pleasure in rifling through his bag and helping
themselves to his pharmacological goodies and helf good host that

(45:52):
he is has a plentiful stash as well. So take
a pill to relax, maybe a little coke to make
everything a little sharper up, some grass to take the
edge off the cove, and then a little tequila to
give the whole buzz some depth. Now, after several days
of this, it's easy to see why the whole scene
is starting to feel kind of space out. When Robert

(46:19):
Greenfield asks Mick Jagger for his memories from the mansion
a short time later, the singer comes up short.

Speaker 7 (46:26):
What did you think of the mess?

Speaker 8 (46:27):
I can't feel I can't remember the mansions? Okay, it
was a bit of loaded. That was a bit sort
of memory playing.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Whether he's serious or just doesn't want to say anything
incriminating on tape remains to be seen. Mick Taylor, on
the other hand, was a little more forthcoming.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
It was just good fun, you know it was. I mean,
I put it this way, if every hotel that we
would have stayed in in America, and that too, and
they were the same as that, we would have absolutely exhausted.
He wouldn't have any strength to down a rock and
roll to but it was a nice sort of halfway house.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
They get evangelical about the craziness. One of the waiters,
a young kid trying to earn his stripes with the
visiting rock stars, keeps telling everyone how much he likes
to get high. Someone in the stp contingent, clearly smelling ps,
decides to give him something else to smell. The next
time the waiter enters carrying a full tray of tequila Sunrises.

(47:33):
They dash over and crack an able nitrate capsule under
his nose. The waiter smiles the show he's hip before
the rush hits his frontal cortex like a tornado. Then
he's off wheeling and staggering, sending the tray crashing to
the floor in stoned super slow mo Keith richards Hey,

(47:54):
the gentleman, crouches to the floor and gives him a
hand with the mess. As soon as he stops laughing.
Heff is ready to fire the poor guy before the
stones intervene on mass in his behalf. He wasn't the
only member of Hefner's staff to indulge the ladies in
residents seem to be exploiting a loophole in helf'sno drinking

(48:17):
policy by openly soliciting every other substance in the physician's
desk reference, Got any beans? Want to ask Robert Greenfield? Beans?

Speaker 9 (48:27):
You know?

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Quayludes. They're my second favorite drug. The first is made
obvious by the tiny silver spoon that hangs from a
chain around her neck. The bunnies like to get high
in pretty much every way imaginable, but mostly through the
use of these hypnotics, which Respectable America is just swinging
into in the summer of seventy two. For the uninitiated,

(48:48):
quayludes insert a warm and fuzzy feeling into that portion
of the brain that usually inhibits action. They're great for
falling down, sleeping with people you might not otherwise speak to,
and forgetting your own name. There's a strong case to
be made that coeludes the drug of the year for
nineteen seventy two, much as nineteen sixty seven was a
good year for LSD and nineteen sixty nine was the

(49:11):
year the coke took off. During the Stone Stay, the
women of Playboy Mansion will have all the best to smoke, sniff,
and pop. This all surprises Robert Greenfield. In the Twilight
of the sixties, such behavior was the purview of freaks

(49:34):
and fringe dwellers. Using drugs, or at least the right
kind of drugs, was the sign of a free spirited seeker.
Getting high might as well been short for getting on
a higher plane of consciousness. Drugs made you enlightened, at
least that's what longtime heads stole themselves. By breaking the

(49:56):
law and ingesting this pseudo sacred sacrament, you were opting
out of the world as it was and embarking on
a voyage of self discovery, one that would benefit yourself
and ultimately humanity. Greenfield couldn't be sure, but this didn't
seem to be the goal of the women in the
rabbit attire before him. He found himself confronting two potentially

(50:17):
harmful biases simultaneously. One maybe the bunnies were more switched on,
adventurous and intelligent, or at least weird than he had
originally assumed. Or maybe drugs didn't make you a superior being.
Perhaps it was a bit of both. Stone's guitarist Mick
Taylor was having the same internal debate.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
I'd never seen people.

Speaker 12 (50:45):
Be so stone and talk so straight.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
And because they weren't, I mean the things they talked about.

Speaker 12 (50:51):
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
The level of conversation was so trivial.

Speaker 12 (50:54):
You know.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
I mean they weren't particularly bright or intelligent. I mean,
there was a raisist Drugs had made no change.

Speaker 7 (51:01):
In their lives. They were They were hairdressers.

Speaker 8 (51:03):
And toronail polish drugs.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
I mean, that's one of the myths that have been exploded,
isn't it. I Mean, drugs.

Speaker 8 (51:10):
Don't really do that much for you.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
They only sort of went on, so it's already there,
you know. But in the beginnings they can make people completely.

Speaker 12 (51:18):
Mindless, you know.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Greenfield discussed this trend in drug use with the Stones
resident expert on the subject, Keith Richards. Here they are
courtesy of our friends at the Northwestern University Archives.

Speaker 14 (51:32):
For me, it was like some kind of really insight
into what the changes between sixty nine and seventy two.

Speaker 12 (51:37):
Sixt hundred people will get high in America were three.

Speaker 7 (51:40):
They were crazy.

Speaker 4 (51:41):
Now everybody, Yeah, it's it's spreading. Maybe doing that drives
them to it kind of yeah, doing that kind of
gig drives them too. They look upon the actuals of
hours that they're working as a fucking drag ball, you
know that they do it for the advantages of having
somewhere and pulled a swim.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Keith was arguably the most enthusiastic participant in the hedonism
of the Playboy Mansion. He was rivaled only by Bobby Keys,
the sax player, and the Stones touring horn section. Together,
they became a sort of alternate universe evil Glimmer twins.
Their bonds seemed almost faded. They were born just minutes
apart in February nineteen forty three. It was a match

(52:30):
made in well, never mind, where they first became inseparable
after an incident that went down during the Stones nineteen
seventy tour of Europe. Some guy in Sweden kept harassing
Keys at lunch, so Keith hit him across the head
with a bottle and then persuaded the police to arrest
the guy while he was still semi conscious. Keys repaid

(52:50):
the favor a few stops later by asking a hotel
manager if he could stop the drilling noise on the
street outside so the Keith's baby son could get some sleep.
When the hotel manager informed Keys that street noise was
in his department, Keys headed to the hotel kitchen, where
he began dropping valuable pieces of crockery on the stone
floor one by one until the noise outside of Baden.

(53:13):
Ever since, the pair have been gleeful co conspirators on
the road, spurring each other to dizzying new lows of debauchery.

Speaker 6 (53:24):
Bobby pushed the envelope always further than anybody.

Speaker 7 (53:28):
I mean.

Speaker 6 (53:29):
In the south of France, Bobby was seeing Natalie de Lan,
to the former wife of a great French actor named
Alain de Lan, and I don't know what house they
were in. Jagger walked in and Bobby and Natalie de
Lan were in a bathtub together, naked, filled with champagne.
The bathtub, not the two of them naked, although I'm
sure a lot of it was good. And Jagger said

(53:51):
to Bobby, you know, even I don't live like this.
Bobby ran through money, spent every dime he ever had.
He was an explosion wherever he went, and he was uncontrollable. Yes,
and he was Keith Sky keep gasoline and a match Keith.
Because he and Keith could run together, he could keep
up with Keith. And so it's interesting, right, So within

(54:13):
this really tiny world there are sub groups. I mean,
Mick wouldn't have gone out at night.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Never would have hung with Bobby.

Speaker 5 (54:20):
You know anything, you can wind up in jail.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Gasoline in a match is an apt description considering Keith
and Bobby very nearly burnt down the mansion. It happened
one night or morning or whatever, when the duo were
holed up in the bathroom, the preferred refuge for high
profile drug users when the setting becomes a little too public.
They're sitting on the floor, just relaxing alongside the toilet,

(54:45):
as one does. Then it all starts to get a
bit smoky. With considerable effort, they swivel their next to
the floor in search of an errand cigarette ash. Seeing none,
they resume their position, but haye starts to thicken. Suddenly
everything is blank and gray. Where's Keith? Where's Bobby? There

(55:08):
are bangs on the door and beeps on the ceiling. Hey, hey,
anyone in there? The place is on fire. What's he
talking about? Man? The door bursts open, and serious looking
men in black suits toss buckets of water on the
heavy drapery, which is fully ablaze directly behind them. Instead
of feeling gratitude. Keith is enraged at the intrusion we

(55:30):
could have done that ourselves, He spits, the pupils pinned,
how dare you burst in on our private affair? Once again,
no one was sure if he was joking or not,
But soon everybody cooled out and it became just another
chapter in the saga of Keith and Bobby on the road.
Keith claimed to have forgotten all about it when asked

(55:50):
by Robert Greenfield, did you get.

Speaker 7 (55:54):
Destroyed in the blighting of the masses?

Speaker 4 (55:58):
Nothing but damage as far as I knew?

Speaker 12 (56:00):
Because the untired you.

Speaker 7 (56:04):
He's telling me about a fire.

Speaker 4 (56:06):
Oh yeah, yeah, one of those Uh yeah, one of
those towne the light fire, addressing down to smotors for fews,
but there was no damage to the extra fishings in
the dead call.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
Half also downplayed the incident when questioned about it by
Robert Greenfield.

Speaker 8 (56:30):
I mean what you're.

Speaker 9 (56:30):
Asking is, did I have any fear before the fact
or during the fact, that they might leave the place
in some level of physical shambles?

Speaker 8 (56:40):
Excellent?

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Uh.

Speaker 9 (56:42):
I suppose the thought might have crossed one's mind, since
that would be part of the concern about having a
really far out rock group, and then my reaction would
actually occurred. Of course, was just the opposite, because there
wasn't any of that.

Speaker 8 (56:54):
There were physical damage. No, I'm not aware of it.
I'm sure what we're gonna wear them.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
HEF's private notebook tells a different story, offering a comprehensive
list of the destruction left in the stones.

Speaker 7 (57:06):
Wake.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
White rug in the red and blue bathroom was burnt
needed to be replaced. The toilet's seat was also burnt
and had to be replaced. Two bath mats and four
towels were also burnt. Redroom chair and catch a stained,
possibly to the point of needing reupholstering. Redroom bedspreads also
badly stained. Sometimes it's best not to ask. Though Keith

(57:27):
could never be accused of openly giving a damn, he
would admit in his memoir to feeling a sense of
embarrassment and even shame over his antics. You don't say, okay,
we're going to have a party tonight. It just happened.
It was a search for oblivion, I suppose, though not intentionally.
Being in a band, you're cooped up a lot, and
the more famous you get, the more of a prison

(57:49):
you find yourself in. It's the convolutions you go through
just to not be you for a few hours. The
only person who didn't sanction Keith's buffoonery or the general
absurdity of the play my Mansion was Stone's drummer, Charlie Watts.
Unlike the others, he never came around on the place.
The guards almost didn't let him in the night they arrived,

(58:09):
and once they did, he turned right around and left,
preferring to stay at supposedly lesser accommodations down the street.
He wrote in his diary that night, at this point
in the proceedings, I cannot fault the luxury, but I
also cannot stand it. Sure he'd swing by the mansion
at nights to hang with the others, but fundamentally he
felt that Keith had the right idea when he almost

(58:30):
burnt it down. Everything about the mansion just offends him,
especially the excess. While forty plus members of the stp
Horde are content to gorge themselves on champagne and lobster
tails and quayludes as if they've been born into such situations,
Charlie makes a point of paying for everything he takes. Moreover,

(58:50):
he's a married man, and unlike Mick, he meant it.
According to his bandmate Bill Wyman, this made life among
the bunnies uncomfortable.

Speaker 11 (59:00):
I think the most offensive thing to Charlie was there
were so many girls are.

Speaker 12 (59:03):
Even trying to pick you up.

Speaker 14 (59:06):
Well, I mean I was offensive to me and I
said that my sounds ridiculous, but it was very chauvinistic
both sides to do.

Speaker 11 (59:12):
I mean, you only have to be You had to
walk to a farm for ten minutes, and the three chicks.

Speaker 16 (59:16):
Came around doing Everybody was token, you know, and they
knew that I was with my girlfriend, you.

Speaker 12 (59:21):
Know, they knew Charlie. Well, they soon found out that
Charlie didn't want to know about it.

Speaker 11 (59:28):
But then you'd still have to get You still have
to go through that position with the fifty or whatever
it was before everybody cutting down too.

Speaker 12 (59:36):
You were or you weren't interested in whatever the case was.

Speaker 2 (59:40):
Charlie instantly sized up that the whole playboy mansion thing
was a celebrity situation and that just wasn't for him.
Let Mick do with that stuff. It made him feel
like a piece of meat out of all the stones.
Charlie is still very much the person that he was
before it all began. He doesn't buy the notion that
to be a stone oh and automatically meant to be

(01:00:01):
a star.

Speaker 6 (01:00:02):
So I very much want to talk about Charlie for
all the obvious reasons. And he was so different on
the tour. He was always so different on every tour.
And my initial memory of Charlie is on the English
tour after the first show, which was in Newcastle, and
Mick was in the lobby of the hotel where we stayed,

(01:00:24):
being interviewed by BBC Television, probably the local They had
lights and the perfect BBC guy, you know to see
it in the accent, interviewing me, is this your last
tour then, you know? And Mick was, you know, a
circle of people circled by watching this in the lobby
man whoa, And I'm saying, they're watching them, watching him, watching,

(01:00:45):
you know, And all of a sudden, Charlie appears and
he's kind of bent over and he's creeping around the
outside of the circle and say, who is that? Is
that someone we should know?

Speaker 5 (01:00:59):
Is he famous? Miss and Jagger?

Speaker 6 (01:01:03):
He hears this and he's maintaining the Jagger face in
the camera. Meanwhile, Charlie's taking the piss. He's like, you know, God,
I'm laughing my hands off because here's Charlie saying, oh,
you know, like mocking the persona okay. So on the
American tour, Charlie was just he's to me, he was
the great sweetheart in the band, and I think beyond

(01:01:27):
all else, he was the adult in the room.

Speaker 5 (01:01:30):
At all times.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
He always felt a little different. As he told Greenfield,
I was never a teenager man. I'd be off in
the corner talking about Kirka guard. I always took myself seriously.
That streak continued for him. The STP tour was serious business.

Speaker 13 (01:01:48):
The anything is and I think that the two America
was drugs and six as it might have been the
sun too.

Speaker 7 (01:01:54):
Wasn't me, man, this thing it was a lot of things.
I think it was as places all right, but then
dying in the what was it about? I mean, was
it wasn't a great way.

Speaker 13 (01:02:03):
Of saying, fucking of this big, less than this and
nice and fucking why you can undonea world?

Speaker 12 (01:02:08):
Well that's really what it was about.

Speaker 8 (01:02:10):
To me.

Speaker 7 (01:02:10):
Well, it was more than just working.

Speaker 13 (01:02:11):
I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of
bullshit which other people bulls in me.

Speaker 7 (01:02:16):
There's a lot. There's a lot of happiness too.

Speaker 13 (01:02:18):
I mean, oh, sure, you know the happiness is zebvious.

Speaker 8 (01:02:21):
That wouldn't be doing it a lot of mad things.

Speaker 12 (01:02:23):
I mean, oh, that's happiness.

Speaker 10 (01:02:26):
He also didn't get carried away with all either stuff
going on around us. That just didn't seem to affect
him at all. He was in his own head. You
could have a conversation about jazz with him at any point,
but none of that other stuff around him really affected
him very.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
He didn't care.

Speaker 5 (01:02:41):
He couldn't be bothered.

Speaker 6 (01:02:42):
Yeah, I just wanted to play and the greatness and
I didn't see it that much in uh, the American tour,
but on the English tour.

Speaker 5 (01:02:50):
Keith would charge towards the.

Speaker 6 (01:02:54):
Drum kit when he wanted Charlie to pick it up,
and I could hear because I'd be standing by the
pian I know, you know it's called Charlie pick it up, man,
you know, And Charlie was everybody knows this, like you know,
they're great drummers. I have to put Charlie up there.
Nobody played like him. He did not. He was not

(01:03:15):
a rock drummer, and he would have been the first
person to say that they recruited Charlie because he was
so well known in London. They wanted him as their drummer,
and Bill Wyman got in because he had the amps.

Speaker 5 (01:03:27):
It's true.

Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
One by one the rest of the band started to
see it Charlie's way. They began to feel trapped in
the pleasure dome and suffocated by it all.

Speaker 12 (01:03:37):
Well found the worst thing about that place where she
couldn't look.

Speaker 16 (01:03:40):
Out the windustry. It was a dark ball, I should think,
so nobody could look in and would think that was
the reason, but no, it was kind of very dark.

Speaker 11 (01:03:53):
The whole price of it was very difficult to Actually,
you couldn't stick it out when you and.

Speaker 12 (01:03:59):
Fresh air sort of the winter out on the sundrim
in it.

Speaker 8 (01:04:01):
Wasn't kind of like that.

Speaker 12 (01:04:03):
You never thought that that was possible, and it wasn't hardly.

Speaker 7 (01:04:06):
You know, this guves me an empty somewhere.

Speaker 12 (01:04:11):
I think there's no lab in it.

Speaker 7 (01:04:12):
I felt it.

Speaker 12 (01:04:14):
Yeah, there was no personal feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
There john sort of great things that there was hospitality
without a host.

Speaker 12 (01:04:20):
Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 7 (01:04:21):
It was.

Speaker 12 (01:04:22):
There wasn't any love.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
The dark vibe that he greeted their arrival starts to
re emerge and curdle into paranoia. A pervasive rumor circulates
through the STP squad that hef neres hidden cameras and
all the bedrooms, secretly videotaping the ongoing sexual Olympics for
his own private consumption. The theory's got legs. Mick Jagger,

(01:04:45):
the world's number one sex fantasy object and half the
ultimate voyeur. It's too perfect. Hef gets testy when Greenfield
asks him about it. For just a moment, the mask
of the genial Midwestern media mogul begins the slip.

Speaker 14 (01:05:01):
A lot of people I've spoken to who were in
the house, again, it's the story that I've been told
several times for several people felt that felt the surveillance
in the house. And also several of them are certain
that some of their more outstanding sexual performances.

Speaker 8 (01:05:15):
Are on filmore tape. So it's really true, It's really true.

Speaker 9 (01:05:20):
The Stones are as guilty of accepting the fantasies of
the playboy.

Speaker 8 (01:05:26):
Fantasy as John Q public.

Speaker 7 (01:05:28):
Well, I haven't got distance stuns themselves, but I know
they were aware of them. They thought, well, they.

Speaker 9 (01:05:33):
Were complete bullshit, but complete bullshit that has existed, particularly
with the house's concerns, and so almost the moment that
I first moved into it, over and over again. I
used to have it's replaced out, but before I had
the round better, I used to have a bet up against
the wall, and there.

Speaker 8 (01:05:48):
Was a recess in the ceiling leading.

Speaker 9 (01:05:51):
Life, and the ladies would and would be absolutely certain
that there was nothing to it whatsoever.

Speaker 7 (01:05:57):
I mean, you know, the complete fantasy that I mean.

Speaker 9 (01:05:58):
You haven't then for what, well, well, let me say
I do have videotape equip I mean videotape is for
moving pictures what the polaroid is for steel pictures in
terms of, you know, shoot your own movie, shoot your
own thing in the realest sense of the word. Certainly
I use them for that purpose from time to time,

(01:06:19):
but certainly also there's a great boy. Your fantasy related
to me is completely non acestor I enjoy visual sex
in the sense of, you know, it's an Eurotic film
or something in a context of if I'm groogling with
a lady or something, but as a replacement for because
my other things, I guess it's because I really don't
live through other people's lives.

Speaker 8 (01:06:40):
I wouldn't replace that's one of them for myself. The
great pleasures.

Speaker 9 (01:06:45):
Of whatever, you know, the like my own life and
the success of it, which is that it was the
filment of my own fantasy beyond anything I could have imagined.
My fantasy isn't to be Mick or that is so
far removed from well.

Speaker 14 (01:06:59):
That is a fantasy, so that you would, I mean
Nick being everybody sets out of the fantasy that you
would of course have videotapes with nxbus did.

Speaker 8 (01:07:05):
She on.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
There would be a high price for the excess quailudes.
The Playboy Mansion's party pill of choice was used by
predators to sexually assault an untold number of women within
those walls. Just a year after the Stones visit, twenty
three year old Bunny Adrian Pollock fatly overdosed on the drug,
sparking an investigation by Chicago law enforcement officials. They'd find

(01:07:37):
bowlfuls of cocaine and pills. The legal ramifications were big,
but as usual, Hefner had the women in his service
to the dirty work.

Speaker 6 (01:07:49):
Tragically, the woman who had gotten us in to a
great degree, and who loved what I had written in
rolling Stone. God love her.

Speaker 5 (01:07:59):
Who was that Bobby Arnstein?

Speaker 6 (01:08:01):
Oh yeah, And they were trying to make a case
against Hefner for cocaine possession, and Bobby would have been
the connection. They were trying to get her to flip
and Hefner had given her her career. She loved him,
and she killed herself rather than you know, turned state
to get off herself. Her choice was go to prison

(01:08:21):
testify against Hefner. She killed herself a.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
Fittingly. She took an overdose of queludes. Showtime comes as
a relief. Hefner doesn't come since the Manson murders. He
does his best to avoid large gatherings outside the confines

(01:08:48):
of his mansions, or at least that's his excuse. His
absence isn't exactly more and does The Stones pull up
to the International Amphitheater, just down wind from the stinking
south Side Stockyards. Cynthia's managed to see nearly every show
on the Stones North American tour, despite having no transportation,
no money, and perhaps most impressively, no tickets. She hitchhikes

(01:09:13):
with a rolled up sleeping bag and keeps her clothes
in a bulging knapsack. She sleeps in the cars that
pick her up and washes up, and rest stops or
college dormitories. She'd planned the odyssey for months prior to
hitching from New York to Vancouver for the first concert.
From there, she headed to Seattle and then on down
the coast. Her roots look like a Jackson Pollock painting,

(01:09:35):
and often she barely makes it to the venue on time.
But once there she waits. She knows how to wait perfectly.
If she waits long enough, she'll always get in. Someone
will give her an extra ticket, or a guard will
turn his head and let her walk by. It was
during one of these waiting sessions that she first caught
the attention of Robert Greenfield.

Speaker 6 (01:09:57):
I am responsible for discovering Cynthia Sagittarius because I was
outside the hall and I saw her, and then I
would see her and she'd be at the next show,
and I started to talk to her. And obviously her
name was not Cynthia Sagittarius, but hippies renamed themselves in
that era. She had some nightmare experiences where a guy
pulled a gun and held it to her head, stopped

(01:10:19):
the car, and she hitchhiked from one gig to another.
She had no money that I could tell. And she
was so authentic and so real and so in love
with the Stones. Didn't want to meet them, didn't want
to go backstage. This is the purity of some fandom
and it's to be respected. Okay, loved the music. She

(01:10:42):
looked to be about twenty seven, twenty eight. She wasn't
a child, you know, sweet, just a wholesome person. I
don't even think she got high. But the concept of
hitch hiking.

Speaker 10 (01:10:52):
Yeah, I was just going to say, in America and
the distances she'd had to go, we weren't talking about
just next door. This is hitchhiking big distances from day to.

Speaker 5 (01:11:01):
Day and getting dare in time for the show.

Speaker 12 (01:11:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
Cynthia lives in the gaps that exist in the network
of the straight world. She refuses offers a food, money,
and even a backstage meet and greet. She just wants
to hear the Stones play. Their music makes her feel good.
She's a welcome Danta Doe to the free for all
back at the Playboy Match and where everyone's angling for

(01:11:27):
more food, more drink, more drugs, or more influence. Cynthia
has nothing and wants nothing other than a space to stand.
While the Stones are wrong, she survives with her faith.
It's her implicit, pure trust and the goodness of people
that allows her to carry out her quest. As she says,
Krishna provides, or in this case, Robert Greenfield.

Speaker 6 (01:11:52):
I said, hey, you know what, there's this person. And
then from that point on and God loved them. They
left a ticket or her at the box office, and
I think I still remember because again they never left
the building. They weren't out. Then last place they want
to be was outside before the show. But it was

(01:12:12):
small world, and she was easy to find, you know.
Once I knew her and I said, there, hey, Cynthia, listen,
they want you to see every show. That it was
like it was Christmas, and it's like, I mean, I
might be the kindest thing I've ever done for anybody
in my entire life. She did the whole tour kind
of like dead Heads.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
But by herself herself.

Speaker 5 (01:12:36):
Again we're talking about.

Speaker 7 (01:12:38):
And an innocent, so innocent.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
That's what I remember most about her. I was how
innocent she appeared.

Speaker 5 (01:12:43):
Right if she was, no, she was a pure human being.

Speaker 6 (01:12:47):
And we're back to what happens when the Stones come
to America. They extract the best, the worst, and everything
in between.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
None of the band are especially sad when it's time
to leave the Playboy Mansion. Charlie have been good to
go from the start, and now Mick Taylor agreed.

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
I personally had a good time there. You know, a
kind of place I'd like to live, and.

Speaker 2 (01:13:16):
So did Bill Wyman.

Speaker 7 (01:13:17):
That was great.

Speaker 12 (01:13:18):
I would live there. I wouldn't live there.

Speaker 7 (01:13:21):
Good a nice place to but enough is enough.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Even half that swinging sense of the erotic arts was
ready for a break.

Speaker 9 (01:13:32):
To have four days or three or four days like
that as an ongoing lifestyle.

Speaker 8 (01:13:39):
Would be a pani.

Speaker 9 (01:13:40):
I mean, there are other things that you want to
do too, you know, there are quiet romantic relationships that
are roles that are very very important to me.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
Nominally as a journalist, Hefner knew a good story when
he saw one, and the Stones nineteen seventy two tour
was one for the books.

Speaker 9 (01:14:00):
It received a surprising amount of precedent, and the reason
for that, I think is not to be found.

Speaker 8 (01:14:08):
In the qualities of their musicianship.

Speaker 9 (01:14:10):
A primary reason for that is that there is somehow
an awareness of the fact that what they represent is
now especially unique because they've said coming to an end,
and the only thing was kind of left and some
enalgy is that.

Speaker 8 (01:14:26):
And that was added to also by what happened to
the Beatles. The Beatles disintegration makes the mortality of a
group much.

Speaker 9 (01:14:34):
More real also, so it does become more of a
unique event in my lifetime.

Speaker 2 (01:14:47):
It's the morning of June twenty second, nineteen seventy two.
The stp forces gathered themselves together and stagger into the
street to begin their retreat from the Playboy mansion. Behind them,
the party is in its death throes. In front, the
first gray light of dawn rises over the Chicago roofs.

(01:15:07):
The bloodshot sun is the nerve to announce another day.
Everyone reeks of dried sweat, whiskey, and stale cigarette smoke.
Passers by on the street are freshly showered and cologned,
hurrying to catch that early bus on the way to
their offices. It seems incredible outside the mansion, people still
have to get up and go to work. Life actually

(01:15:30):
goes on day to day.

Speaker 1 (01:15:32):
Imagine Stone's Touring Party is written and hosted by Jordan

(01:16:04):
Runtalk Co Executive produced by Noel Brown and Jordan runtalk
edited and sound designed by Noel Brown and Michael Alder June.
Original music composed and performed by Michael Alder June and
Noel Brown, with additional instruments performed by Chris Suarez, Nick
Johns Cooper, and Josh Thane. Vintage Rolling Stones audio courtesy
of the Robert Greenfield Archive at the Charles Deering McCormick

(01:16:25):
Library of Special Collections in Northwestern University Libraries. Stone's Touring
Party is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

(01:16:47):
your favorite shows.