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The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 167

Location:
San Francisco, California
Issue Date:
Page:
167
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

COLOR. JIIIIIWIIIIHIUHimimiHtllWmilMHMIIHIIIIIIIIimUllllllllllllllllllllllllilllllU! iiimiinHitiMiiifiHiiiiMiiiinttriUMHfmiirrnmnttMtnmfnwritttrnmHmmmiiMiHnmimnrjf HERB WE US SCENE MEW I iin A rr I IV These Foolish Things WELL, TOURISMOS and touristas, confused by San Francisco's sometimes drizmal weather? So was most of my life, till Michael Castleman produced a new vocabulary appropriate to the city's range of precipitation. "Meteorologists can't do it," he says, "and they're always wrong anyway. Therefore I Chronicle Publishing Co. AUGUST 24, 1980 Ji.

Hefner's Dirty Little Secrets By Bob Greene SOMETIMES YOU'VE got to wonder about the government. With all the evil that's going on, it often seems that the feds are unable to do anything to stop wrongdoing. And when they do decide to become supersleuths well, it's enough to make you wonder if they've been living in the same world the rest of us have. What brings this to mind is the announcement of the conclusion of a top-level government investigation the other day. The Securities and Exchange Commission declared, with a great deal of pride, that it had found Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine guilty of keeping certain things secret from the public.

Here are the secrets the SEC said that Hefner was hiding: That he has a 54-room mansion in Chicago; that he has a 30-room mansion in Los Angeles; that he gets free meals in the mansions; that be has a staff of butlers to serve those meals; that he invites girlfriends and other guests to stay overnight for free; that he rides in limousines; that he has expensive videotape equipment; that he used a DC-9 aircraft called the "Big Bunny" before he sold it several years ago. The SEC, with a straight face, charged that Hefner and Playboy failed to report those benefits and that since Playboy became a publicly held company in 1971, failure to report the benefits was a violation of the law. A propose the following lexicon in ascendmg order of IZZLE Light form of precipitation. It seems to come from nowhere, often on relatively sunny days. You can hardly feel it; you can't see it.

But it's THERE. MIZZLE Izzle from visible fog or mist. You feel wetness without the sensation of real droplets. FIZZLE You FEEL droplets, but can't see them. VIZZLE The droplets become visible.

DRIZZLE Standard definition. DRAIN More than drizzle, less than rain. RAIN Standard definition. RAINING DOG POOP A substitution for "raining cats and dogs," which is anachronistic. Cats die under the wheels of unrushing cars, dog poop is ever where.

4- WHAT EVERY San Franciscan wants: A stop sign at his corner. Two uniformed cops patroling his block 24 hours a day. A guaranteed parking space in front of his house. A North view and a South garden. Right around the corner: good school, good park, good little restaurant, drugstore, cleaner, shoe repair, grocery.

Not a swimming pool or tennis court, but friends who have them. The pleasure of a sailboat without the trouble and expense of owning one. All the benefits and services of a big city without paving the taxes for them. If- 3 "1 'M Raise the Titanic I OUR NATIVE WITZ: "Have vou noticed." tt 1 (Hjronidr Editorial Comment Richard T. Thwriat, Cditw and ublithcr Charta Young Thiariet, Publhhar 1955-77 Garg T.

Camwen, Publihf 1925-55 ttutnAmA 1At liw CknrlA nnrl Am Yauna GREAT. For more than 25 years, every issue of Playboy magazine has been proclaiming in vivid prose and color photographs that Hefner lives like a medieval king in his mansions being served by his butlers, sleeping in his round bed with his girlfriends, riding in his limousines, flying in his airplane, playing with his video equipment. No American male has been able to escape the legend of Hefner. Even if you aren't a Playboy reader, you haven't been able to get away from the story of Hefner's way of life. Every major publication has reported on it in exhaustive detail.

Books have been written about it. Television specials have been produced about it. And now, in 1980, the SEC tells us it has discovered it. Polish Strikers SOMETIMES THE COMMUNIST high priests and law-givers manage to make themselves look unusually inept and ridiculous (as well as menacing and bloody-minded) in running their countries. The struggles of the Polish Communist leadership last week to catch up with the Polish strikers offer a current demonstration of that.

About 100,000 workers the faithful masses whom the Communist leaders invariably pretend to love, cherish and loyally serve walked out of 174 work places in the Baltic industrial region of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot. Their strike action brought socialist labor to a grinding halt in the old Danzig corridor, notably in a Gdansk shipyard named for the highest of Communist high priests, Vladimir I. Lenin. In their ritualistic denunciations of this huge mass of workers for expressing the simple, human aspirations of an oppressed proletariat, the Polish leaders relied on such moth-eaten, sloganistic labels as "foes of People's Poland" whose ideas, they said, are "far removed from the striving of the working class." That was the best cliche that Prime Minister Edward Babiuch could muster. His boss, Edward Gierek, the Communist Party leader, hurrying home from the Crimea, went on television to climb to the heights of prim, ideological morality with a warning that Poland's "socialist system" could not be ONE OF the secrets the SEC reported was that the number of girlfriends and overnight guests who slept in Hefner's mansions between 1971 and 1979 was 6020.

Well, I can't claim to be one of Hefner's girfriends, but I do admit to being one of the 6020 overnight guests. I have stayed at both the Chicago and Los Angeles mansions several times during the period in question, and I am able to provide the SEC with even more secrets for its Hefner dossier: Hefner has his initials stamped in gold on his blue velvet bedroom slippers. The most popular drink at the California mansion is orange juice, because of the high pulp content with which it is made. Hefner's best friend, John Dante, who lives in the California mansion, has a plate of cookies brought to his room by the butlers almost every night. If a guest at the Los Angeles mansion scores a higher mark than Hefner's record on one of the pinball machines, a security guard must be summoned to verify that score, or Hefner will not accept it as true.

Hefner has a small television set built into the wall facing the toilet in his private bathroom. When Hefner plays Monopoly, his marker is a tiny statue carved to look just like him. But don't tell the SEC. changed; there were limits, he said, that must not be overstepped by anyone because and here came the phrase that revealed the real and growing fear which possesses the Polish leadership "only a socialist Poland can be a free and independent state with unviolable frontiers." These "unviolable" frontiers Gierek speaks of are all too greatly in danger of violation. They are the Soviet border to the east and the East German border to the west, where two divisions of Red Army troops-lurk in their barracks, ready to pour into Warsaw if need be to put down uprisings, as, they poured into Prague just 12 years ago this month to strangle the Czech freedom movement.

The apprehension of Soviet intervention in force in Poland is no doubt the most paralyzing of Gierek's fears, for 100,000 strikers are quite a troublesome crowd to shush, and he may not last. Especially worrisome to the Polish party hierarchy must be the strikers' demands, which are poignantly democratic in their character, such as: Guarantees of the right to strike, of freedom of expression in word and print, and of freedom from censorship. Release of all political prisoners and abolition of privileges for security services by the liquidation of special shops open only to police and party officials. Respect for the International Labor Organization conventions, including the right to establish free trade unions. These would be called "non-economic demands" in this country, but in Communist Poland they constitute a heretical challenge to the party's authority.

(Lenin and Stalin would turn over in their graves at all this.) The saddening question is whether any of the extraordinarily bold young shipworkers who have been willing to put their necks on the line for such demands as these will have to go to their graves for their show of courage. muses Rik Thompson, "that Amy hasn't grown at all during four years in the White House? And shame on those who would say, neither has her father" "I was sorry to hear about the Jo Jo Starbuck-Terry Bradshaw split," sympathizes Dan Bunker. "When they were together, and Terry was wearing his woven hairpiece, they seemed the epitome of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Beautiful and Darned' Herb Rosen's name for the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall: Jaws III (or, The Pregnant Oyster) Judy ver Mehr, after gulping down a glass of ice water at the Kirin restaurant: "Migawd, this hot Chinese food can actually Szechwan fire!" (hoots, hollers, general alarums) Poster on the Gay Caucus bulletin board in the Unitarian Fellowship on Franklin, caught by Juanita Reynolds: "You Don't Have To Be Straight To Be a Good To which someone has appended: "But it helps if you're not crooked." A CHILD'S garden of neuroses: The guide for Great America amusement park, notes Liz Weissman, contains this sociological observation on the new ride called "LiP "Children can relieve their aggressions aboard these pint-sized bumper cars." Uh okay if they have a little fun, too? TIP TO TOURISTS: Pretzels without cheese (at those streetcorner stands) cost half as much and are twice as good as those with cheese Hey! Rice-a-Roni is no longer "The San Francisco The latest issue of the gay newspaper, the Advocate, carries an ad for ready? "Eat MeBeat Me Licorice Whips, San Francisco's Treat." I suppose it was just a matter of time That's an exciting notice stapled to the elegant menu of the London' Oyster in Los Gatos.

It reads: "We are trying to curb inflation please pay 10 percent only of the prices quoted." Then you open the menu to find "Prawn Cocktail $49.50," "Dinner Salad $25," "Scampi Bordelaise $142.50" and so yawn Give us each day a new bumper sticker, today's being Vern Chatfield's "Caution: I Break For Coffee" Arid Dick Amyx observes that the misanthropes' bumperstrip has now been amended to read "Nuke Draft-Dodging Gay Iranian Whales." OUR FARFLUNG correspondents: In Missoula, Montana, Cyra McFadden espied a redneck pickup truck with two stickers Help Fight Crime. Buy A Gun" and "Drive Christian" (aw, go lay a chicken-fried steak) And over in Colstrip, Montana, rich in minerals, Larry Miller was charmed to find an Old King Coal Preschool Page one headline in the Billings Gazette last "Refugees Poach, Eat Golden Gate Park Animals," which demonstrates a little taste. I think you gourmets out there will agree that poaching is preferable to frying Andrew Early, touring Taiwan, forwards a brochure from the Buckingham Hotel which includes "Elizabeth Room western meals accompanied by intoxicated piano" And Sally Wilmington was entranced to hear a Yosemite ranger say in the course of a conservation speech: "If we don't make wise decisions now, pur nation's parks will no longer cease to exist." That's bad! No, I mean that's good! Isn't it? BARRELS'S BOTTOM: Andrew Largo applauds the sign over Bob's Used Books in the 700 block on Geary, which offers "Books For the Price of a Politician," whereas Kathy Duncan is oddly pleased to find the Halsted Funeral Home and Botta's Body Shop cheek-by-jowl in the 1100 block of Sutter Attenzione namephreakos! Susan Skaggs tips us that the ace repair man for Archie's Typewriters on Columbus is How Wong, as in How Wong Can He Be? And if this is a racial slur, I apologize Perhaps I shouldn't even mention Jeremy Nichols discovery that Se Hewlett-Packard sales rep for Nikon, the per Japanese camera, is Rick Shaw, eh? The Semantics Of Computers THAT WE ARE becoming engulfed by the technological gabble that pervades the world of super-machines was demonstrated with disheartening clarity at a recent hearing that dealt with the rash of Oakland air traffic computer breakdowns. Some of these breakdowns were caused, a congressional committee was told, by failure of "hardware" (the multimillion-dollar computer), some by "software" (the programs inserted into the machinery), and some by "skinware." This revelation asked one bemused congressman to ask: "Just what is 'skinware?" "Skinware," it turns out, is computer-talk for the human animal. In other words, these particular breakdowns were caused by errors made by people.

The machines would seem to be getting the upper hand when the living, pulsating creatures with creative and fallible intelligences that run them are reduced to the sadly diminished THE SERIOUSNESS of the Gdansk crisis in Poland will probably not be accurately measurable for days, or even weeks, to come. But its potential for real trouble is seen in the care the United States government is taking to avoid giving the Soviet Union a pretext for military intervention a la Prague in 1968. vAny challenge to Communist authority in Eastern Europe raises that risk, and Secretary of State Muskie, himself a Pole, has been quick to recognize it and steer clear of provocations. If he succeeds in inducing that other prominent administration Pole, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to also steer clear, that will be a good thing too. For the present situation around the mouth of the Vistula could develop dangers for a lot more people than the hundred thousand strikers and the 35 million Poles.

Art's Gallery Now open your mouth ond say "AhK!" Ercxraocncrjc epithet of skinware. -CGLQR i-.

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Pages Available:
3,027,448
Years Available:
1865-2024