In the midst of another reinvention too is its owner, who at 78 has come out with two new books this month, Hef's Little Black Book, which is basically his guide to loving and living, and Playboy: 50 Years: The Cartoons.
On the circuitous route to an audience with Hef, I took the mansion tour, visited the grotto where Playboy bunnies have splashed since the seventies, adoring the Bunny master and any other gems of testosterone that came their way.
The Playboy mansion is a blend of crazy and manicured exotica. There are spider monkeys, peacocks, cockatoos, lovebirds, a pinball room. I look at the Playmate quarters - very brown, very Seventies, basic beds, mirrored ceilings. The Van Room, as it's called, has a spongy, squishy floor and tapestried velvet pillows in shades of Seventies brown to remind its occupants of being in a tour bus with the band.
Hef's study is a more booky place. Still the Seventies velvet, but with tan swivel chairs, it has pictures of him and the family, his two boys Marston, 14, and Cooper, 12, from his marriage to Kimberly Conrad and pictures of his daughter Christie who is in charge of his empire, as well as lots of books.
It would all seem very sedate if it weren't for the other pictures of him with his current crop of girlfriends, all big-boobed, big smiling blondes dressed in skimpy white dresses and golden tanned flesh.
Hefner arrives, of course, in a crimson silk paisley robe and black silk pyjamas. I thought that that was a myth. "Any time I can get away with it, I wear pyjamas. I started wearing them when I worked late at night in the office, which was out of a mansion in Chicago in the sixties.
"And then came a moment where I realized I could get away with it all the time and it's so comfortable."
This is one of the points of Hef, that he can get away with things that no other man could. Anyone else at 78 in pyjamas would look like an invalid. He just looks louche.
Hef's Little Black Book is funny and sophisticated in a way that you'd not expect. Overwhelmingly, it shows that he believes in love and romance and that he still can't believe his luck that now he doesn't have to bother with chat-up lines. ".'I am Hugh Hefner' usually works."
Was there a moment that you thought you could get away with things that other people couldn't?
"Obviously it began with the creation of the magazine and I started living the life. Within the space of a few months, I started hosting a television show called Playboy's Penthouse, based on a party at my pad.
"And that was in the fall of 1959. Within six months, my whole life changed."
Hef's Little Black Book explains though that this whole life of legendary sexual luxuriance evolved from a rejection of his first love.
That was where the pattern was set. He connected love with yearning and loss.
"I think the perception I was shy and withdrawn was a myth, but I was going through an awkward period in adolescence, and then my last two years of high school were the happiest times before Playboy."
After his teenage girlfriend called Betty Conklin rejected him, he reinvented himself. "I changed my wardrobe, started referring to myself as Hef, wrote record reviews and started drawing a comic strip, which was an autobiography of my life and the adventures that I wanted. What I was doing was creating my own stage in my cartoons and that was the world I created later doing Playboy."
The cartoon life has always been irresistible to Hef, and he has always loved to collect cartoons. He says of Playboy: 50 Years: The Cartoons that, "What makes this book fascinating is that it's the handsomest cartoon book ever created as it chronicles literally 50 years of the sexual revolution. Every cartoon that ever appeared in Playboy was personally chosen by me. When they are put together, you get a look at how pop culture and humour and attitudes to sex have changed."
If there's been a revolution in Hef himself, it's been an emotional revolution. He seems most ignited when he talks about love.
"I don't think Playboy evolved just from the rejection of my first love, it actually came from something else. It came from rejection and repression in my childhood. I was raised in a typically puritan home, there weren't a lot of hugs and kisses. I escaped into the dreams and fantasies of another world created by the music and movies of my childhood."
In contrast to the world on the screen, he never saw his parents hug or kiss one another and they never hugged or kissed him. He said that that gave him, "a yearning. For me, the definition of love was defined by songs."
His voice trails off, he seems to say this somewhat sadly.
Then he recovers very brightly and says, "I'm very fortunate at this point in my life in having found someone despite the disparity in age who is remarkably similar to me in terms of tastes and interests, which include a whole lot of romantic things, like a connection with movies from the past."
This woman is Holly Madison, one of the blondes beaming from the picture, the one who has her cream Porsche convertible with its Holly licence plate parked outside. She is described diplomatically by Hef's PR lady as "the girlfriend with seniority," as she is part of a harem of five or six others. They all share his bed. It's a very big bed, he assures me.
He leans forward, perhaps to hear me better. He looks good for his age - graceful, elegant. He is the exact same age as my dad, born astral twins, April 9, 1926. Aside from the fact one keeps pigeons and one keeps exotic birds and they both have daughters with similar names, I would say he is a living proof that astrology doesn't work.
He has very much lived out his dreams. Right now, he is living out a male fantasy that is beyond his wildest dreams. He's had an empire. He's pushed for personal freedom on many levels, and now every night he goes to bed with a half-dozen blondes. So tell me, how does it all work?
"Very well."
They don't get jealous, hierarchical, weird with one another and therefore with you?
"Well, surprisingly, less than one would expect. I have built this reputation for who I am and the life that I live over a period of time. The same expectations are not there.
"What is amazing to me quite frankly is one understands how attractive that this would be as a fantasy for men, but it seems that it is also a fantasy for women too. I don't fully understand it, but women want to be a part of this ongoing party posse. Part of that has to do with the unique nature of my life, and a strange thing that has happened to the very notion of celebrity in our time.
"I think it's all connected to the notion of the Playboy Mansion. The parties, and the feeling that somehow or other, if you live in a small town in the Midwest, or in the suburbs, the notion that you could somehow not be looking through the window but actually [be]at the party has tremendous appeal.
"I understand that because I had exactly those feelings when I was a kid. Growing up in the 1930s meant that I just missed the party, the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby."
So you became Gatsby?
"To some extent. I expected after World War II that there would be a similar celebration. But we got the opposite. Skirt lengths went down and it was very repressive, politically, socially, sexually, and that was the inspiration for starting Playboy, to create the party that wasn't going on."
Do you think that these days have reverted to a new kind of puritanism and that's why the party has come back in full force?
"There's a certain kind of political correctness that defies logic. But I don't think you can ever take people back to that other time.
"Technology has changed that. TV and the Internet are a kind of time machine that permit us to live in almost any kind of decade. And I think that's one of the reasons why Playboy is so hot again. Why young women are wearing the rabbit as a personal statement of freedom. They grew up in a more conservative time, the eighties and the nineties, and they missed the party."
We muse on the strangeness of the double-edged symbol of the Playboy bunny. In the early days of feminism, it was seen as a symbol of chauvinism and objectifying women, now for some it's seen as a symbol of freedom. For which, of course, Hef has always been a campaigner.
Of course, real world and Playboy world have different versions of freedom. For the several women who drift in and out of his bed, freedom could be a liberation that knows no bounds and a ticket to fame and adventure, or simply nothing left to lose. This world is very different from his first emotionally clenching, very conventional marriage, and perhaps the world he has created is in spite of it.
"It was a very conventional marriage, something I don't think should ever have happened, but she's the mother of Christie and David. I think she recognized it wasn't a great idea before I did. She had an affair before we were married."
Hef is of course an intriguing dichotomy. Vulnerable, intellectual, yearning, yet sexually basic, rampant. His book comes with a recipe for fried chicken. He loves instant gratification, of course. What is remarkable is that at 78 he is still able to get it. In the book he talks about the joy of Viagra.
"Liberating. It set men free in a very real way just as the birth-control pill did for women in the sixties. It takes away the boundaries in terms of age and also drinking. It takes away conflict and it gives you certainty in terms of performance. I got it on a birthday three months after the end of my marriage."
Conrad and their two sons, Marston and Cooper, live in the house next door.
"Kimberly and the children are next door with an open gate and we have a much better relationship when we had when we were married. ....
"The last six years of my life have been the happiest ever, without question. I came back onto the scene and it was like Elvis Presley coming back from the dead."
He smirks to himself like the cat that's about to get the cream.
"There's always speculation. Is it a publicity stunt? But it isn't."
All the girlfriends live in the house. A sixth one is joining in another week. All are blondes.
"They're not always blond. My first wife was a brunette, as was Barbi Benton. But like Picasso went into his blue period, I'm in my blonde period."
Now I've got over the idea that this man is actually living this life, I can ask him. How does it all physically work?
He smiles.
Okay. Do you do one after the other or all at the same time?
"Yes to both, it's a big bed, keeps you young."
Isn't it a little hot?
"No, we have air conditioning. I know that I am living out a lot of guys' fantasies, but they are my fantasies too. I had wonderful dreams when I was a kid, but I never imagined that my life was going to turn out like this."
One omnipresent male fantasy is apparently watching a girl-on-girl. Is that why he likes to have lots of women?
"Yes, that's part of the package. When the feminists' comments about objectifying women were expressed in the seventies, it seemed to me very naive. I think women are sexual objects. If they weren't, there wouldn't be another generation. Variations on the theme are not so difficult to understand. Women are attracted to Playboy because they want to see pictures and compare themselves. Women are sexual objects for women.
"Bisexuality in women doesn't carry any kind of taboo. It's not the same kind of taboo that male bisexuality carries. All of it is just invention, of course, it's just culture. Beyond culture, there is an important fact, that men are very visual and they respond to that kind of thing. The sexes are very different though."
With typical Hefness, just as we've gone into this very basic sexuality stuff, he turns the conversation to the idea that Holly is his soul mate.
"Not in the sense that it's fatalistic and preordained, but yes, I would describe her as a soul mate because she is totally devoted to me and she took the initiative. She asked if she could go out with us." (Yes, he uses the word us, not me.)
"She loves me in a way I don't think I've ever been loved before. ..... I wish I was younger so that I would have more time for this relationship because it's so good. That's the only downside. But in a sense at any other point in my life I wasn't ready to be loved like this."
I believe him when he says this. It might have been a cartoon-style journey, but maybe he's reached the place that we all want to be. One where he is truly loved.
On my way out, I take a detour past the enclosure with the real-life furry bunnies hopping about. The exotic birds squawk and howl. Hef says that he loved animals from childhood. "I loved them because they gave me unconditional love." And finally it explains to me why he liked his girls to be bunnies.