No Nude Naked Adult Lindsay Lohan

You're the suggestible type: yes, you are, so when anyone tells you they're holding anything at the Playboy Mansion—the Dogcatcher's Ball, or a benefit for breast cancer soon to be an annual event—you're all over it like a cheap suit. Which, incidentally, is what you wear. To the Playboy Mansion. Dude, you're going to the Playboy Mansion. Hasn't been a place like this in Orange County since Rodman stopped landing helicopters on the beach.

The week before you go is like a rerun of when cell phones first came out and you were everyone's friend for six months: when people you'd never met would buy you beers for the chance to call home from the Long Beach Grand Prix on something resembling a portable fire safe. The fact that you're going you-know-where (to, it's assumed, do you-know-what with you-know-whom: in this case, the gals from Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, Lindsay Lohan, Val Kilmer and the new INXS guy) works its way into every conversation, from hemlines to gear ratios.

And, coming from an asshole like you, the news is well-received. Sure, people still hate you, but everyone wants you to have a great time at the Playboy Mansion—the way they would, given half a chance, the way Hugh Hefner and Owen Wilson do every night, the old bastards. And somewhere about Wednesday, you realize you have to go, now you gave it the big buildup—and oh, yeah, what are you going to wear?

You settle on pants and a leather jacket; I did, anyway, and drove myself up to the W Hotel (formerly the Westwood Marquis) to catch the shuttle to the Playboy Mansion. Valeting the Honda would be $28, but I was okay with that. And the shuttle was a shuttle—not one of the limousines that shuttled the VIPs, the PR people and the members of the Karma Foundation up the hill to their inaugural gala for the Los Angeles affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. And it was an hour late—security snafu—so I stood on the hotel steps until I met a woman from the Los Angeles Business Journal, her friend from CNBC visiting from New York and a guy from the Forbes magazine outpost in Santa Monica. Then we stood on the steps. But that was okay too.

It was, duh, the Playboy Mansion, and as the shuttle scraped up Hef's narrow, high-walled, tree-lined driveway, a certain sense of entitlement descended on us like Hef's six girlfriends, whom we never saw. There were naked women, though, right after a five-minute press conference in a huge plastic, carpeted tent on the lawn; after Karma Foundation founder James Pratt said things like “We've always said, good people have good friends, and it's all about karma.” Then it was time for Pratt, resplendent in a vest, and co-founder Eric Stotz, in a cream pinstriped suit, to pose on the bandstand with a half-dozen Playmates in body paint. Their role, they said, was to help the Komen Foundation and others like it raise money—which could not be raised without them? It felt, the woman from CNBC said, like a wedding, so after pictures, we wandered outside.

The tent was pitched opposite a huge stone bar—everything free; tipping was just a city in China, albeit one with no Maker's Mark. Outside the tent, I pushed past the swells onto a narrow, flagstone-paved court with more edibles (spinach dip, hors d'oeuvres) and a silent auction of guitars and presidential gewgaws. A box of Clinton's presidential cigars was getting trounced in the bidding by an autographed picture of Reagan and I didn't understand, until an old guy in a velvet suit jacket like the one Michael Des Barres was wearing let me in on the joke. “Who knows where those have been?” he said, with a wink and a nudge. Who knew where I'd been? Oh, that's right: everyone. I ordered another Jack on the rocks, at the other bar, at the other end of the silent auction next to the Grotto, and joined my fellow journalists in mid-kvetch—all of us struck at the 3D-ness of Playmates at 9 o'clock, striding at you in body paint.

Yeah, it was only about 9 o'clock, maybe 9:30, but it felt like 12. People were still standing around lamely as the 16-piece jazz band the bartender said they'd flown in from New York—soul singers on backup, and a front man who looked like one of the Commodores—vamped through a short set of covers: from McFadden and Whitehead's “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now” to “Jump Jive An' Wail” (Louis Prima rolling over in Brian Setzer's grave), closing with that new Outcast joint, “Hey Ya!”

People kinda suck, and not just the rich, who hadn't come out in droves and weren't falling over themselves to bid on Fender guitars signed by somebody famous. Once they heard we couldn't go inside, no one wanted just a tour of the grounds: the Hefner zoo—rescued bunnies, hairy toucans and spider monkeys basking under the heat lamp—the guesthouse, the Grotto where Vanity Fair photographed Jennifer Aniston wearing hair products. So I took the tour: me, three PR people and a former Bunny/Playmate leading us away from the chattering crowd where Hefner, Val Kilmer, Lindsay Lohan and the Laguna Beach girls never showed, to a place where the Mansion sat mute and silent in the cold light of the moon. Its grass was greener than mine, but the front lawn where they filmed the Weezer video looked impossibly narrow in the moonlight.

The Centipede arcade game, one of several in the guesthouse/game room, was out of order, and the bedrooms were teeny: double beds with duvets in solid colors and rotary phones inset in oaken consoles. And in every one, a box of Kleenex. Made me think: I don't have Kleenex in my bedroom. And that was it; the Playmate in the spangly dress led us back, into the Grotto briefly (it was empty; my glasses fogged up) and out to the drive where we'd come in. The kid who plays the gay son on Desperate Housewives was drooling over Hef girlfriend Holly Madison's zonker yellow Saleen, backed into its reserved parking spot.

And where were Holly Madison and Hef's other live-in lovelies? And where was Hefner? Someone said they saw him through a window as we walked around, playing with his girlfriends. Playing dominos. After 50 years of parties, maybe this was just another Saturday night. He's done everything else; maybe dominos is what sets his teeth on edge now. Maybe that's why this party broke up very quietly sometime after 11, when the shuttle and a couple of limousines whisked us back down Sunset to the W, and I paid a guy $33 ($5 tip) to give me back my car. Even a playboy has to sleep sometime.

td******@oc******.com

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