Playboy Mansion Butler From The 70's | Sexual Freedom | Endless Partying | Era of Dorothy Stratton | Jim Belushi | Dan Aykroyd | Chevy Chase and MORE!

In this engaging conversation, Leland Zaitz shares his unique experiences as a butler at the Playboy Mansion during the 70s and 80s. He reflects on the era's cultural significance, the glamorous yet challenging life of working with celebrities, and the dynamics of relationships within the mansion. Leland also discusses his transition into writing for Playboy, revealing insights into the entertainment industry and the evolution of Playboy's culture over the years. In this engaging conversation, Leland shares his unique experiences as a butler and writer within the Playboy Mansion, reflecting on the creative freedom he enjoyed, the camaraderie among playmates, and the impact of notable figures like Hugh Hefner and Dorothy Stratton. The discussion delves into the complexities of relationships, the challenges of navigating fame, and the lessons learned from a life intertwined with celebrity culture.

Takeaways

Leland Zaitz began his journey with Playboy after discovering a magazine as a child.
The 70s and 80s were marked by sexual freedom and a vibrant party culture.
Working at the Playboy Mansion was both glamorous and challenging.
Leland's role as a butler allowed him to interact with numerous celebrities.
The Playboy Mansion was a private and exclusive environment before the rise of social media.
Cocaine became rampant in the mansion, changing the party dynamics.
Leland had close relationships with iconic playmates and witnessed their struggles.
The shift in Playboy's culture was evident as it transitioned into a corporate entity.
Leland's writing career began with erotic content for Playboy, leading to feature films.
The perception of Playboy as a corporate entity often conflicted with its public image. Leland Zaiz reflects on the creative freedom experienced while working at Playboy.
The transition from butler to writer opened new opportunities for Leland.
The camaraderie among playmates created a unique community at Playboy.
Life lessons learned from the experiences at the Playboy Mansion are invaluable.
Navigating fame and identity was a significant challenge for Leland.
The Playboy lifestyle had its downsides, impacting personal and professional growth.
Memorable encounters with celebrities shaped Leland's perspective on fame.
The tragic story of Dorothy Stratton remains a poignant part of Playboy's history.
Hefner's legacy is complex, blending empowerment with controversy.
Relationships in the Playboy world often faced challenges due to jealousy and possessiveness.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Playboy Era
• 2:53 Leland's Journey to the Playboy Mansion
• 6:57 Life as a Butler at the Mansion
• 10:18 The Changing Dynamics of Playboy
• 14:40 Reflections on Fame and Film
• 19:02 The Legacy of Playboy and Its Impact
• 19:14 The Corporate Side of Playboy
• 24:09 Relationships and Dynamics at the Mansion
• 29:59 First Impressions of Hef and the Butler Experience
• 34:02 Transitioning to Writing for Playboy
• 37:09 The Glamorous Yet Challenging World of Screenwriting
• 37:53 Transitioning from Film to Playboy TV
• 38:44 Experiences at the Playboy Mansion
• 41:01 Reflections on Personal Growth and Identity
• 44:01 The Complexities of Service and Dismissiveness
• 46:10 Memories of John Belushi and Hollywood's Dark Side
• 52:42 The Tragic Story of Dorothy Stratton
• 57:34 Navigating Jealousy and Relationships
• 59:34 Coping with Grief and Identity
• 1:00:55 Hef's Connection to Hollywood
• 1:03:38 The Legacy of Dorothy Stratton
• 1:05:16 Understanding Domestic Violence
• 1:07:28 Reflections on Love and Relationships
• 1:09:44 Hefner's Complex Legacy
• 1:13:54 Final Thoughts and Farewells

Transcript

Echo Johnson (00:38)
welcome back to the show

I'm so happy that you're here. To our audience, thank you so much for your support.

If you are not subscribed to our YouTube channel, please do so. It's Bunny Chronicles podcast. All of our socials are also Bunny Chronicles podcast. Make sure you subscribe, like, and tune in because all of the audio format interviews also long format videos and they're awesome.

Also, if you want unedited videos with no commercials or breaks, you can also support the show at patreon.com/thebunnychronicles Welcome to the show Leland. We are going back into the 70s and early 80s y'all and I am so excited because I certainly know that

For me thinking about Playboy that's kind of always the era I would go to what was it like in the 70s? because two things and Corinna and I agree on this that some of the most epic beautiful playmates came out of that era, but it was also the 70s it was the era of freedom and sexual promiscuity and party party party it was a fun time so it's gonna be interesting to take a deep dive in to

this era and time. So let me introduce you to our guest, Leland is joining us and he had a long career with Playboy that started in 1978 he was a Playboy mansion.

Butler on the night shift. until 1982.

Leland worked with Playboy up until the 2000s, around the Girls Next Door era.

wrote a lot of movies for Playboy, so we're going to get into that as well. it was the heyday, and this is a quote from Leland, and I think it really kind of sums up what we're going be talking to. It was the era before AIDS, right? 1978 to 82, sexual freedom and promiscuity, and the era before cocaine began shattering lives. And that's a very big,

true statement.

was very close with iconic playmates of that era and decade, Monique St. Pierre, who was Playmate of the Year 1979. We love Monique. Heidi Sorensen, who was Miss July 1981. Lorraine Michaels and more. And Leland was also there during the time of some pretty prolific relationships that HEF had early on before he ever got married, with Shannon Tweed.

Carrie Leigh, Sondra Theodore, and it was also the time of Dorothy Stratton's death. Star 80, we're definitely gonna talk about that. That was a pivotal time in the history

of Playboy and at some point I do want to do a show that's dedicated to Dorothy I'm happy that we're going to be able to talk about that today. In the early 90s, Leland started working as a contributing writer for Playboy Entertainment writing Skinimax style movies. we'll get into that as well.

welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here and let's get into the conversation.

Leland Zaiz (03:31)
Thank you.

Okay, where would you like to begin?

Echo Johnson (03:36)
Yeah

Corinna Harney-Jones (03:37)
Well, I want to I want to begin at the beginning with you and how you Let's go way back to when you first heard the word playboy and saw a playboy magazine and and found out about the mansion and your whole journey of how you

Echo Johnson (03:48)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (03:56)
Yeah,

I, my first memory of Playboy was finding a Playboy magazine that somebody had left behind a gas station or something. And I, I was, I was six or seven, something like that, or 10 maybe. I brought it home and I hid it under the fort out in the backyard. And, and I would go out there every so often and sneak out there and look at this pages and dive into that world. And I remember, I don't remember her name, but everyone remembers her first playmate, the first

Echo Johnson (04:07)
cool.

Leland Zaiz (04:23)
the first glimpse of an adult human naked female. I, you know, that sort of started it for me. When I was a young man, in college age, like most young men at that time, I was fascinated with Playboy. It was the mid 80s and most young men went through a Playboy phase.

And as soon as I was old enough, I got a subscription. And that made me feel like a man more than maybe smoking cigarettes or even getting laid, what have. And in January 1975, this issue, yeah, in this issue, they had an article, a pictorial about the Playboy Mansion. You can see that.

Echo Johnson (04:53)
cool. I love that cover. That's one of my favorites.

Corinna Harney-Jones (04:55)
Yeah, beautiful.

mansion grounds.

Leland Zaiz (05:04)
one,

yeah, a very detailed article describing the mansion and all these pictures of movie stars and celebrities and Hepner himself and the castle-like structure of the house and the zoo and the grotto and the forest. And there were staged pictures of naked girls running all over the place. And I bought into the mythology of it. I became fascinated by it.

I was living in Oregon and I moved to LA to try to get into the film business. And when I moved to LA, I went looking for the Playboy Mansion based on clues in the article. I knew it was two blocks off of Sunset. I knew it bordered the LA Country Club. So I'd drive up to Holmby Hills and drive around trying to find the place. And I eventually found what I was pretty sure was the mansion. They had high walls, but over the walls and past the trees, you could see the crenellated walls of what I was sure was the mansion.

And it became part of my personal legend, kind of. told everyone, and I used to bring friends. I can show you where the Playboy Mansion is. It before the internet, so most people didn't have a way to learn things like where the mansion was. And I was working at a gas station at the time down in Torrance. I was trying, I was writing screenplays. I'd bring my typewriter to work every day and sit in the gas station office typing scripts, you know, between customers.

And one day I was showing somebody the Playboy Mansion and a kid about my age walked up to the back gate, waved at the security camera and said, hey, Dave Butler. And the gates opened up and he walked up the driveway and my jaw hit the ground because I hadn't been clever enough to imagine there was such a thing as working at the Playboy Mansion. And I thought, how the hell do you get that job? Is it like a national lottery, know, a worldwide search for the cool guys, you know, who gets that job?

Echo Johnson (06:29)
Bye.

Corinna Harney-Jones (06:35)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (06:37)
And

by the strangest stroke, not long after that, one of the other guys who works in the gas station came in one day and said, hey, my girlfriend, a regular at our restaurant is a bartender at the Playboy Mansion. I said, you've got to get me a number. I just finished bartending school because I was turning 21 and I wanted to do something other than pump gas. And I got the name of the house manager, John Maldonado, and I called and I told him all these lies about how I had all kinds of experience as a bartender.

And he brought me up for an interview and I drove up there and actually got to walk through the back gate and go to the house office and talk to him. And my memory about, and I remember the smell of the, and you remember back then the spec was beautifully groomed. It was like Disneyland, it's just another world. But one of my memories of that meeting is going into his little house office, which looks like a restaurant manager's office, and there was a broken lamp on his desk.

Echo Johnson (07:11)
Yes, the smell always.

Corinna Harney-Jones (07:13)
yeah.

Leland Zaiz (07:24)
For some reason, it made it seem more real and accessible to me. thought lamps can break at the Playboy Mansion. There's something about that that made it like, okay, this isn't a complete fantasy. So next time they needed extra help for a big party, they called me and it was a fundraiser for Jerry Brown, I think. And I went up there that afternoon and I worked behind the bar out in the backyard.

Echo Johnson (07:29)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (07:30)
I'm gonna go.

Now when you say

Leland Zaiz (07:45)
So I saw a couple of celebrities and one or two playmates, Debbie Bustrom actually, and she said hi to me at the bar and my life was complete. know, playmate said hi to me. And at the end of the, I couldn't go explore anywhere. I was dying. I wanted to go see the grotto. I wanted to go to the forest. I wanted to go to the zoo. wanted to go inside the house. I couldn't do any of that. But at the end of my shift, they asked if I wanted to work again. And I said, sure. And they needed somebody to work.

Corinna Harney-Jones (07:54)
haha

Leland Zaiz (08:09)
think Friday and Saturday nights. And so I was quickly put on working two nights a week. For a while, I pumped gas all week and then Friday night I'd run up to the mansion and work there all weekend and then come back and pump gas. That only lasted for a few weeks until they needed somebody to work full time on the night shift. So

in short order, I found myself working full time on the night

as a

Corinna Harney-Jones (08:30)
I wanted to ask you what kind of scripts were you writing and is that what you wanted to do was

Leland Zaiz (08:36)
I was 12 years old.

was writing like romantic

mysteries and stuff, know,

just the stupid stuff that people do when they're first when they are first writing.

Corinna Harney-Jones (08:44)
But did you ever get any of those

films made and did Playboy, were you thinking, hey, getting into the Playboy mansion, can, this might help

it's the classic Hollywood story with, you know, you're writing scripts, you want to be a, they're all bartenders. Every actor and screenwriter in Hollywood is a bartender. It's like your whole beginning is so, so fun. It's just on point,

Leland Zaiz (08:52)
and no.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well,

Echo Johnson (09:06)
point.

Leland Zaiz (09:08)
I got to

meet people like Peter Bogdanovich and Buck Henry and Richard Brooks

Robert Towne. And

was too kind of

too much of a nerd and didn't have enough confidence to approach any of these people. And I didn't have confidence in my writing because I was just starting out. So I didn't really see it necessarily as a path or I wasn't clever enough to promote myself as a

Although

I have a script that I was writing at the time that has on

autograph by James Cann Leland best wishes with this James Cann

Echo Johnson (09:34)
I just have to say because you just reminded me that was my first celebrity I met at the

I was 18 when I went up there it was right after misery came out and he was talking to me at the bar and I was like my

Corinna Harney-Jones (09:41)
Yeah, he was a fixture.

I don't think a lot of people realize how spectacular and special it is to have this kind of, you know, even brushing shoulders with and being part of.

the underbelly in a sense of Playboy. So thank you, Leland

Leland Zaiz (09:58)
Well, one night my

job was, Peter Bogdanovich brought up some young woman and wanted to show her a bunch of movies. So we had to put the 60 millimeter projectors on the grand piano in the living room and roll down the screen. And as butlers, we had to learn how to change out the projectors and show movies. And he showed this young woman four or five movies. So I sat there and I watched Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil and I forget, like five movies. And all I had to do was just sit there and watch movies.

I watched Peter Bogdanovich sitting down in front of me trying to tell this young woman how great these movies were. And I don't think she had the slightest interest in, you know, classic cinema or But I remember thinking, yeah, I wish I could, I wanted to move

Corinna Harney-Jones (10:33)
she, meanwhile she's getting a master class in film. But

Leland Zaiz (10:38)
sit next to him and talk to him about Well, my thought at the time was, wow, I'm getting paid to just sit here and watch movies. And because I couldn't get leave, I would call the Butler's pantry and have the other Butler bring me dinner when it was dinner time, you know, for five hours.

Corinna Harney-Jones (10:39)
were, you were getting a you were getting a master.

Yeah.

Echo Johnson (10:52)
Would you really Leland? That's awesome!

Leland Zaiz (10:52)
this thing called.

But the most valuable thing was that I got to meet Robert Town who was a legendary screenwriter and then well regarded as the best screenwriter

and my personal hero. And he was a regular at the mansion so I kind of got to know him. And when I left the mansion I went to work for him as

his personal assistant for a while.

that was kind of

But anyway.

Corinna Harney-Jones (11:15)
you

Leland Zaiz (11:16)
I worked up there for five years. So for the next five years, my life was going to the Playboy Mansion. In a lot of ways,

was detrimental to my career because I wasn't trying so hard anymore. It was easy to feel like I'd already arrived because I got to go to the Playboy Mansion every night and hang out with all these famous people and live a pretty good lifestyle. So if I hadn't have done that, I probably would have worked a little bit harder on my

But hey, what are you going to do? You're here at the Playboy Mansion. You're having

Corinna Harney-Jones (11:42)
film. I mean, from beginning to end, from your dirty fingers, pumping gas, piping on the, I see it all. So I hope you wrote this and I hope that it's gonna be made into a feature film and that I get a role in it.

Echo Johnson (11:46)
Typing out.

Leland Zaiz (11:55)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (11:56)
film

is Corinna's arena, Leland, so she's always excited when we can talk about, she's an actress, comedian, she's

Corinna Harney-Jones (11:57)
I love film.

well, so I love that and I love that about you and that you got to be around some real legends, you know, it's incredible. Yay! Okay, yes, please, please.

Leland Zaiz (12:10)
Yeah, well I just finished a script about that experience, so stay tuned for that. I'm gonna show you guys some pictures, okay? I think I might have sent

Echo Johnson (12:17)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (12:19)
some of these to you. That's me serving heath, there's Sondra.

Echo Johnson (12:23)
Yeah, I got that one, yeah.

Leland Zaiz (12:25)
And that's me in the pantry. And after I was there for a while, I would come into the pantry and I'd turn off the overhead of fluorescence and put on this nice, soft, indirect rose-colored lighting to create a nice, moody little clubhouse.

Echo Johnson (12:37)
Yeah, I was wondering

Corinna Harney-Jones (12:38)
Woo!

Echo Johnson (12:38)
about that, Leela, and I was like, I don't remember it being like that in the pantry. Okay, so you'd set it up. Yeah, he's like, it was for me.

Leland Zaiz (12:42)
It was for me, yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (12:42)
We missed the good stuff.

We would have gotten in trouble with Leland. I have my butler. We all have our butler stories.

Leland Zaiz (12:49)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (12:49)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (12:52)
Well,

yeah, the mansion became a very popular hangout. It wasn't supposed to be, but girls,

a lot of the guests would come hang out with us, but especially a lot of the girls, because we were the young cool butlers. We weren't laughing at these older crony guys. Yeah. Well, I have a memo here. I have a memo here. It says,

Corinna Harney-Jones (13:02)
And you are not supposed to fraternize with the guests. You're not supposed to fraternize.

Echo Johnson (13:10)
you do, you have to send that and it's from HEF?

Corinna Harney-Jones (13:12)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (13:13)
no, it's from the house office. It says, recent events have brought to light the fact that the situation of guests

hanging out in the pantry area and fraternizing with the butlers has gotten totally out of control. And then new rules for how that's

Echo Johnson (13:25)
You

are not the first one to say that.

yes, okay.

It's Monique.

Corinna Harney-Jones (13:30)
I

Leland Zaiz (13:31)
That's money.

Corinna Harney-Jones (13:31)
love her. love Monique. Monique was my kind of mentor.

when I was a baby, we were all babies. But I remember she really walked me through so much because she was doing makeup. When I met

Leland Zaiz (13:36)
Yeah, shut up.

Yeah, well she's a very,

very sharp cookie and very sexually evolved. I was in awe of her because she slept around a lot and wasn't, was totally unabashed about it. And it made it seem very cool to be a woman who had sex with a lot of people. And I just thought, wow, she's, yeah, she's living in the future or something. Yeah, she was very cool.

Corinna Harney-Jones (13:59)
I didn't even know that about her.

Yeah.

Echo Johnson (14:05)
She's

living in the Who is that in the picture with you?

Leland Zaiz (14:09)
That's Victoria Cook and Kim Mellon.

Echo Johnson (14:11)
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Leland Zaiz (14:12)
Out

in the guest house.

Echo Johnson (14:14)
Victoria Cook, she lives in Santa Fe. She's a client of my dad's. And I love that picture of you and Belushi. We have to talk about that because I remember when we talked to, when we interviewed Mark Hopkins, another butler and he, yeah, exactly. And that's what he talked to you that you guys, we're super tight, but he brought up and we did the interview with Cathy St. George And he brought up that.

Corinna Harney-Jones (14:17)
Yes.

Leland Zaiz (14:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, he was my buddy. Mark and I are best friends. I had dinner with him the other night.

Echo Johnson (14:36)
I don't know if you were there, I assume that you were, but that Belushi and Aykroyd would just show up to the mansion and even if Hef was like upstairs asleep or doing whatever, they would come in and hang out. and Mark's like, I'm literally watching them firsthand, like perform for me, smoking a joint. I'm like, no way.

Leland Zaiz (14:46)
Yeah,

Yeah, well, they felt more comfortable with us than with Heth and his buddies. They came up, Belushi brought up the members of the punk band Fear one night. So Leigh Ving and DIRF Scratch were up there. Completely out of their element, you know? And sort of like kids, even though they were these tough punk musicians, they were like kids in a candy store, like, you know, afraid to touch anything and, you know, shy around the playmates and stuff. was pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Echo Johnson (14:57)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (15:16)
I love it. I was a punk

or playmate so I get it.

Leland Zaiz (15:20)
Robin Williams, we had a good time. We got to watch Robin

Echo Johnson (15:22)
Yes!

Leland Zaiz (15:23)
Williams

do his impromptu performances.

Corinna Harney-Jones (15:25)
Yes,

that's one that I because I was just listening to some podcast that you were interviewed. And that was one of the stories that really tickled me. I'm like, my gosh, you've got your own private show from Robin Williams.

Leland Zaiz (15:40)
Yeah, Mark and I were locked

in the library bathroom,

Robin Williams as he did a, I don't know if you've been in the library bathroom, it's not much bigger than the phone booth. So the three of us were in there for HEF an hour laughing our asses off as Robin Williams basically did a routine for the two of us. It was pretty, really nice.

Echo Johnson (15:48)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (15:49)
yeah.

And you can

use it cocaine.

Leland Zaiz (15:59)
Well yeah, I think there was cocaine

Corinna Harney-Jones (16:01)
That's crazy! I am going to ask you this. So just having been part of that for what, the four years that you were there and it was five, sorry, five, five, which is a long time of the grand years of butlers and butlers debauchery and cocaine. But...

Leland Zaiz (16:02)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (16:02)
That

is wild.

And to do the night shift.

Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (16:27)
I think that it was a pivotal, there were a lot of pivotal things that you saw that really switched a whole dynamic at the mansion because it was almost like the party was over because, you know, of course you found out the effects of certain things and it's all fun and games till, you know, sadly So, yeah.

Leland Zaiz (16:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, Playboy

started going downhill and losing a bunch of money. They lost their casinos. that was happening. Playboy TV started happening and that was a pretty big failure at first blush. know, cocaine became more rampant. You'd go to a big party. There'd be 200 guys and 300 girls and you know that at least 180 of those guys had a vial in their pocket. You know, that was just the way life was conducted back then.

Corinna Harney-Jones (16:51)
Yes, because.

So that's why Hep was so

against cocaine and all those things. It became so shunned, especially when I became a playmate. when I went to the mansion, he was married to Kimberly. It was a family house. I'm sure it would have been fun to be a fly on the wall then, but it's fun to hear it because it changed. It definitely changed.

Leland Zaiz (17:29)
Oh yeah,

Corinna Harney-Jones (17:29)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (17:30)
I know, definitely. Years later when I came up to do the Playmate Luncheons, Playmate of the Year luncheons, it was very, very different. The house by then had gotten pretty long in the tooth and was pretty ragged. They were shooting the Girls Next Door show, so it was set up almost as a permanent studio. were lights permanently clamped to the balconies in the great hall and cables running around, and it had nowhere near the same intimacy and exclusivity that it did in my era.

Echo Johnson (17:56)
Mm.

Leland Zaiz (17:56)
Part of the thing about being there in the 70s and the 80s, that people didn't have cell phones. so nobody had cameras on them. There aren't a lot of photographs. So you could go up there and be assured of your privacy. There wasn't anyone taking pictures, no selfies, know. And there wasn't a TMZ or any kind of salacious gossip mill dedicated to exposing those secrets. It was a really...

Echo Johnson (18:02)
Right.

Corinna Harney-Jones (18:03)
private.

Leland Zaiz (18:22)
It really felt exclusive. It felt like you're part of an extremely exclusive club being able to come to the Playboy Museum. And as you guys know, being, you know, Playboy feels like a family for a lot of different reasons. But as a butler too, and as a later as a writer, I always felt that feeling of we're a family in a way because so many people had a provincial view of Playboy. They thought it was, you when I was writing those movies,

Echo Johnson (18:35)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (18:48)
My friends and acquaintances would joke, you still writing that porn? And it wasn't porn. It was very, very soft core. was SAG actors. was movies that appeared on cinemax and stuff. But I often said that Playboy was like the Disney of porn, if you could call it that. It was the most high class, respectable version of female nudity that existed on the planet. So.

Echo Johnson (19:03)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (19:09)
So I think because so many people had the wrong view of it, those of us who really knew how corporate it was for one thing, how nice most of the people were, the fact that there weren't orgies and tureens of cocaine on the tables of the mansion and stuff, you couldn't really convince people of that stuff, but you knew. So you were in the know and that sort of.

Corinna Harney-Jones (19:26)
No.

get into

that argument with people all the time, not all the time, but now especially doing the funny chronicles. I have a friend of mine, we go back and forth about him calling calling Playboy porn. He's like, no, it's pornography. I'm like, I don't think.

Leland Zaiz (19:31)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (19:37)
What is that?

Leland Zaiz (19:41)
Yeah, yeah. That's just some

Echo Johnson (19:43)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (19:44)
monopoly money there.

Echo Johnson (19:45)
That's cool. there was a Playboy Monopoly game.

Leland Zaiz (19:49)
Yeah, it's got the Chicago mansion and the playway, LA mansion. No, this is money that was specially made for Hefner's Monopoly. He played Monopoly three nights a week and they played with money that they printed for it. I'd have mentioned that.

Echo Johnson (20:01)
That's so cool. That's so

neat. You know, I wanted to touch on that, Leland, what you just said about it being a big corporate entity. And it was actually one of the more conservative environments that you would work in because I just had an interview with Eric Mittleman and Farrell Hirsch who were Playboy TV, Playboy Radio, and your name came up. Eric he spoke to that and particularly, it's a very funny story.

to our audience listen to the show with Playboy Radio. So there was a, it was like a holiday party. And of course they have HR department and they were

any sort of like sexual advances like that didn't fly within the corporate entity, it just didn't, right? So they were having a Christmas party and Hef came and as we all know, Hef always would do open mouth kiss. That's just what he did to everybody, right? And so he comes in to the party.

Leland Zaiz (20:50)
Not to me.

Echo Johnson (20:53)
And Eric Mittleman is standing there with the HR lady there was a group of strippers that were from the Playboy Radio Night Calls that were there and they all wanted to meet Hef and of course Hef was gonna go give him a smooch and whatever. And then Eric was like, looked over to the HR and was like, are we gonna have a problem with this? And the lady at the HR, she goes, nah, I just think we need to look the other way on this one. And I was like, oh, that's so funny. It's Hef.

Leland Zaiz (21:17)
There was a great deal of looking the other way at the Playboy Mansion. There's a Playboy Mansion matchbook.

Echo Johnson (21:21)
right at the mansion.

I love, you have so much memorabilia because of the Facebook page as well, huh, that you run.

Leland Zaiz (21:28)
Look

at that, that's a genuine Playboy bunny tail.

Corinna Harney-Jones (21:31)
I bet you have a story with that.

Echo Johnson (21:32)
No way! that's so cool.

Leland Zaiz (21:35)
The reason I

have this is that one year the Playboy bunnies from the LA club were playing the LA Rams cheerleaders in a charity softball game in Century City. And they enlisted me and several of the other butlers to be cheerleaders for them. So we wore little shorts and Playboy shirts and we had bunny tails and we stood up near the dugout. We were so stoned. I don't think we ever did any kind of cheers or anything, but we were there to be the sex object.

Echo Johnson (22:00)
You know,

that's so funny. Corinna even said, looking at your old picture, she was like, he was one of the cuties, one of the cute butlers. Because there was like, there was like the butlers in security that had like game, right? Like they were our buddies. And I was like, yeah, him and Mark Hopkins were like, yeah, they were having a ball.

Leland Zaiz (22:18)
Well, yeah, yes and no. Mark did very well for himself and he was kind of a ladies man. I grew up kind of a nerd and that's who you think you are inside is just who you think you are. I was not a player. So I did date a couple of playmates, but I wasn't trying to get laid. I'm not that kind of guy anyway. like sex that has some emotion and meaning to it.

Corinna Harney-Jones (22:41)
I find that part of Playboy something that I think is special because I never felt like it was creepy. People would say like, and I think the people that have had around him or hired that was one of the things that was made most of them special anyway that because I think that's really that makes you have character that you weren't a sleaze that just wanted.

Leland Zaiz (23:03)
Well, it

got me close with a lot of girls because they knew I wasn't on the prowl and I'm still close with a lot of them. I probably turned down a lot just because I was convinced that they were kidding if any girls came on to me. thought, they're just teasing. I didn't think I was cute or playmate worthy necessarily. But I always found it curious that HEF

Corinna Harney-Jones (23:07)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (23:25)
had a staff of young men on the Butler staff. I always thought that was weird. It was almost like he was impish about it. Well, let's put these guys here and see what happens, you know, because we were ostensibly not supposed to fraternize with the girls. But of course, especially at late night, that's fucking all we did, you know. That's what there was to do. And like, as I said,

Corinna Harney-Jones (23:39)
Yeah, I remember.

Echo Johnson (23:39)
Yeah. Yeah.

For decades

and decades, that's what all the butlers did at night. Like we'd go hang out with them.

Leland Zaiz (23:46)
Yeah.

a lot of the butlers were gay, not for any reason other than one guy gets a job and he gets his friend a job and they get their friend a job. The first gay people I ever knew were Playboy butlers. And growing up in a small town in Oregon, I thought gays were weirdos and freaks, but that was one of the coming of age aspects of it for me is getting to know gay guys and realizing actually they're pretty cool and fun.

Echo Johnson (24:09)
Yeah.

was that

Corinna Harney-Jones (24:09)
the

Echo Johnson (24:10)
Hefs' pipe? No way. my gosh, that's so neat Leland.

Leland Zaiz (24:13)
Yeah, it's one of Hefs' pipes.

Corinna Harney-Jones (24:17)
Did Hef give that to you?

Leland Zaiz (24:18)
No.

I don't know HEF ever gave me anything except maybe a warning. No.

Corinna Harney-Jones (24:23)
Yes!

Echo Johnson (24:24)
except maybe a warning that's so good how how old were you Leland when you started working up

Leland Zaiz (24:29)
I just turned 21 when I started,

Echo Johnson (24:31)
Okay, So I want to back up and go into the relationships with Shannon Tweed, Carrie Leigh, and Sondra Theodore, because these were epic periods in Hefs' life. They were really profound relationships. And these women all meant a lot to him. And it was very sad then to see Sondra Theodore come on the Dark Secrets of Playboy and change her whole, tune

But how many years, it was Shannon Tweed first and then Carrie Leigh and then Sondra, right?

Leland Zaiz (24:56)
No, when I started there, was Sondra. Sondra came aboard, I don't know, like 75, 76, something like that. She was only 19 at the time, but she was fun. I really enjoyed Sondra. She was a real buddy of the butlers. And I was close to all those girls because Hefner's girlfriend, DeJure, needed a confidant at the back stairs, you know? So I would do secret things for them or keep secrets for them and deliver things that they didn't want Hef to know about. But Sondra was very un...

Echo Johnson (25:04)
Okay.

Leland Zaiz (25:25)
full of herself and very friendly and garrulous and I enjoyed her. I felt very close to her. I don't recognize the Sondra that we see now. Anyway, so it was strange watching Hef juggle Sondra and Heather wait because Sondra would be sent off the property down the back gate just as Heather was coming up.

the front gate. I'm still close with Heather, by the way. But I always thought it was remarkable that Hefner was able to have two girlfriends at a time and the girls were at least initially okay with it. But then he started because of Heather, Sondra got her own apartment in Westwood and she was spending more more time

Echo Johnson (26:01)
when she

was living with Cathy St. George, they actually lived together.

Cathy and Sondra had an apartment together. And so Cathy brought up, she goes, there's no way that any of that went down because I know where Sondra got her drugs from because we lived together. And I was like,

Leland Zaiz (26:07)
okay, okay, yeah.

Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (26:17)
But

I'm going to ask you what your takeaway was, because I think a lot of the things, you know, that maybe HEF had any regrets. But I think maybe that was sort of one of the things that was, if you could ever even say he had a demise, but was jilted women, because that's kind of a hard game to play. And he was so lovable and such an incredible human

being really aside from you know there's so many women that loved him and wanted just him they wanted that monogamy and he just wasn't going to be he was a playboy I mean he was very you know open about that but I know that hurt a lot maybe that was the jiltedness of Sondra why she went kind of nuts you know

Leland Zaiz (26:54)
Yeah, I think.

I don't know, because for years afterward, know, Sondra still came up to the mansion after she left and she got married there, I believe, and she had her bachelor party there and she borrowed money from HEF on several occasions.

became a friend of the family. I don't know, I don't want to speak to Sondra because she's going through whatever she needs to go through. She was a...

Corinna Harney-Jones (27:12)
of it.

No.

Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (27:21)
know,

Sunday school teacher before she came to the mansion. So she may have some, know, vestigial primal senses of guilt about it all. But when, but she eventually got edged out. I don't know exactly remember exactly how they broke up, but they, they would get into fights and then Shannon showed up. And when she started coming up, she was saying Shannon was a very alpha kind of female. And she, I think she saw the lay of the land and said,

Corinna Harney-Jones (27:31)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Leland Zaiz (27:49)
I'm gonna take this in a way, you know. She was able to kind of engineer her way in there. She had a very strong personality. She was beautiful and statuesque. I liked Sondra lot. I liked Shannon a lot too. But she quickly took over as Hef's girlfriend and she quickly put a kibosh on the sexual shenanigans. She wasn't interested in doing threesomes where Sandro is completely game for all of that stuff.

Corinna Harney-Jones (27:51)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (27:58)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (27:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (28:13)
and it was a party every night practically. So in a way.

Echo Johnson (28:16)
That's

actually an interesting point because I never really considered that because after him and Kimberly broke up and then the multiple girlfriends and I had always heard that he had relationships and so I thought that they were monogamous but it makes sense that even back in the 70s he was like

Leland Zaiz (28:33)
they would fight, saw Shannon and Hef, because Shannon was a strong girl, and she started working on Playboy TV, and I think on some other show, and she was gone a lot, and Hef didn't really like her having her own life,

Echo Johnson (28:48)
Interesting. Okay.

yeah

Leland Zaiz (28:51)
I'll show you something

else here. This here, this is the pantry log book. It's set by the phone in the pantry and every day there's a list of who's in what bedroom and then who comes on and off the property. Like, know, Ray Manzella comes on at noon and Max Watt goes off at 1130, whatever.

Echo Johnson (28:53)
Yeah.

wow!

Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (29:12)
John Dante wants some more of this particular kind of wine or HEF is leaving at three and we need the limo or, you know, Lou Enfronol will be arriving and going and guesthouse for. So I found that in the basement years after this is 1978, 79. And I thought, well, that's a good, that's a good, good thing to have. I sort of, was a whole lot, whole library of these. I just, because the reason I took this one is I,

Echo Johnson (29:27)
That's awesome.

Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (29:33)
Yes! Wow!

Leland Zaiz (29:39)
Every night we would have to write, Hef would pre-order his dinner. He'd call and say what he wanted for dinner, and then later he would call and say bring dinner up. And it was my job to write down his order. And I got, started getting really fancy about it. Like there's me writing, writing his order, and let's see some other examples. There's, that's me putting his order up on a movie marquee.

Echo Johnson (29:54)
wow, how cool is that?

Corinna Harney-Jones (29:56)
out.

Echo Johnson (30:04)
That is so cool. You know, that's actually, that's a good point that, okay, as our audience should know at this point, that HEF was an avid scrapbooker and kept everything you can possibly imagine. And so they had all the logs of the books. mean, and I always wondered about that. Like, how did they know we were coming on? Like, da, da, da, da. So everything was always then conveyed to you guys in the log books, who to expect, what room they were in.

Corinna Harney-Jones (30:05)
Wow.

Leland Zaiz (30:07)
Yeah, I was kind of like...

Corinna Harney-Jones (30:17)
Mm-hmm.

Leland Zaiz (30:17)
Yes, yes.

Yeah, yeah, you kind of had to have control of all that kind of stuff. And like when someone came on the property, the pantry would get a call, know, so and so is on the property and we'd write it in the log book. And when they left security and call and say so and so is off the property, we'd write it down in the log book.

Corinna Harney-Jones (30:49)
Are you?

Echo Johnson (30:49)
What was

your first impression of Hef? Like when you met him, were you nervous? Were you in awe? Tell us about that.

Corinna Harney-Jones (30:57)
Yes, your very first meeting.

Echo Johnson (30:59)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (31:00)
Well, I wish I could tell you, it was at the, saw him at a distance at the first charity luncheon that I worked at. And he just seemed like a larger than life character over there across the lawn. And so I never really developed much of an impression of him except that, I mean, I observed him and he was very smart guy, obviously.

very generous with his friends and fun and funny and very friendly. And just probably be a very good guy to know. But in the five years I worked for him, he never called me by my name once. At some point, think, yeah, at some point he must have figured it's not cool to get to know your servants or maybe because there's so many of them or there was know, pernil right now. Well, that's what I was. And I mean, I served him dinner and bed every night.

Echo Johnson (31:31)
You're not the first to say that, Leland.

Your servants.

Leland Zaiz (31:45)
And all his girlfriends knew me very well. And Sondra would come down in the morning to see the latest drawing that I did in the book. And she told me she showed HEF and, you know, HEF feigned disinterest in it. Years later...

Corinna Harney-Jones (31:57)
How dare the peasants, how dare the peasants have art? How dare I? I'm kidding.

Leland Zaiz (32:01)
Years later,

Echo Johnson (32:02)
You're fraternizing, I said.

Leland Zaiz (32:06)
I was writing movies for Playboy, they would have the company parties at the Playboy Mansion. So I actually got to go up to the mansion basically as a guest. And on one of those parties, I went up to HEF and said, HEF, Mr. Heffner, I'm Leland. I was one of your butlers for many years, and now I'm writing for Playboy. And he said, huh.

Corinna Harney-Jones (32:25)
He did not help facilitate that you Just now how did that happen? I thought he had noticed, you know, you've got a conversation and he opened that door I didn't realize you open that Okay

Leland Zaiz (32:31)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (32:34)
Yeah, same.

Leland Zaiz (32:36)
No, not at all. Not at all. was

again, just a complete kind of coincidence. Years later after the mansion, I was trying to get a job in the business and MTV was prevalent at the time was coming up and there was a lot of companies springing up to make music videos. And I saw that as a ground floor opportunity when there was all these new young companies that I thought would be easier to get into than trying to get into one of the studios or one of the big production companies.

I found a list of companies that made music videos and sent a bullshit resume to them, you know. And I got a as a PA on a couple of video shoots. And after just doing a couple of those, one company that I was a PA for, the head of the company learned that I was a writer and read some of the stuff I wrote and I quickly went from being a PA to writing stuff for them, which I did for a while.

The company got big and moved to Nashville because they were starting to get big in country music videos. I didn't want to do that. So I kind of lost that connection. they were hired to make a home video for Playboy, erotic workout for lovers. And they shot it. then they came to me. They asked me to write the voiceover for it, which I did. And then the company went away.

Corinna Harney-Jones (33:46)
wanna know what a voiceover for lovers is all about. Wait, you gotta, he just spits this stuff out. oh my gosh.

Leland Zaiz (33:52)
It was stupid. It's like couples yoga or something. I don't

remember now, but it was like couples yoga. Here, hold your lever by the back as they bend over and scratch and wobble. But years later, somebody at Playboy contacted me and said, we saw your name on this thing and we need someone to write some stuff. So I ended up writing a bunch of self help videos that Playboy was marketing through Sharper Image.

Corinna Harney-Jones (34:04)
this is really... I wanna see...

Leland Zaiz (34:17)
How to Make Love with the Same Person Forever, Secrets of Rheotic Visage, Dr. Root's 10 Secrets for Greater Sexual Pleasure. So I wrote a whole string of those. And this was before the internet. so I'd get tasked to write one of these. I have to go have to go out to the bookstore and just sit on the floor of the stack of books about sexual pleasure, whatever, and figure out all this stuff and then write this stuff. So that's how I got into writing for Playboy. And I did that for a while. And then they started making movies. And I really wanted to make movies. So I

Corinna Harney-Jones (34:17)
Okay.

Leland Zaiz (34:45)
able to get into the movie division and started writing movies for them. And I ended up being their kind of number one writer. I wrote or did page one rewrites of other scripts. I worked on 25 feature films for them over the years. So, that was fun.

Echo Johnson (34:56)
You know, so

this would have been the early 90s, right? Because we also just had an interview with Andy Schreiber, who started as a temp and went on to be vice president of Playboy home video department. And he was talking about when they were just starting this division. And I was like, well, you got access to the archives. must have been so much stuff. And he was like, no, because all that they were doing was the Playmate videos, really.

so 12 a year, and he was able to put together, like they had some old movies and whatever, and was able to put together enough of a catalog to then go distribute it into the foreign markets, because it was at that point that different markets were opening up for the first time, like in Asia and Germany and whatnot. So early 90s, yeah.

Leland Zaiz (35:38)
Yeah.

I guess so. I'm not that good at dates, but yeah, I know Germany was one of our big markets. We actually, it started out as Indigo films and then became Mystique films. And we had a studio in Marina Del Rey or Playa del Rey, Playa Vista. And we had our own soundstage and offices and we would make 10 or 12 movies a year. So it was like a little mini studio just cranking out these movies. And it was fun because...

Echo Johnson (35:44)
Okay.

Right.

Leland Zaiz (36:02)
They were, I mean, they were sag actors. it was, you they weren't, they weren't porn. And, and we did mysteries and dramas and comedies and romantic comedies and stuff.

Echo Johnson (36:11)
you have that budget to be able to go do something like that. And that's what was touched on as well. And also this was interesting too. And I wonder if you found this or had the same experience as well. And again, going back to Eric and Farrell that they were talking about the Playboy Entertainment Department and how there was a good like chunk of people there that were like.

this is like so demeaning and like the end of the road to be working at Playboy as a writer or producing this type of content. And then they went to talk to like, they had to build a wall between the Playboy radio and Playboy Entertainment because Farrell didn't want the negativity spilling over onto his team. So.

Leland Zaiz (36:42)
Yeah, well, I

Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (36:52)
us.

Leland Zaiz (36:53)
I heard that podcast and I don't have any experience of that. I worked with Richard Rossetti, Saul Weisel. Dick Rossetti was the president of Playboy Entertainment Group. we, was as everything else, it was very corporate and we had a lot of fun and very mature and adult and very professional. And I suppose myself included, we all wish we were working at MGM or.

Echo Johnson (36:58)
Okay.

Leland Zaiz (37:19)
know, Paramount or something. in fact, at the time I kept thinking, I don't want to keep writing these fucking Playboy movies, especially because my friends would say, you still writing that porn? And the actors weren't good. The actors that were willing to do this amount of nudity and simulated sex, weren't getting the Timothy Shamalei's, Calamitas. So I would write these.

Corinna Harney-Jones (37:25)
Thank

actors.

Leland Zaiz (37:39)
what I thought were pretty good scripts, I really put a lot of effort into writing good screenplays. And then I'd go to the set. I always went to the set because free food and naked women. Just being involved in production is just undeniably glamorous anyway. But I would go to the set and watch these actors say my words and it would just come out and just fall dead. It was never really fun to watch them become good movies. But the fun part of it is that

Corinna Harney-Jones (37:49)
Hahaha

Thank

That hurt

Leland Zaiz (38:06)
We'd do 10 or 12 movies a year and you'd do a movie, you'd make the movie, you'd cast it, we'd have story meetings and then build sets and cast it and shoot it. And then we never had to worry about either reviews or box office, know? They came out and we went on to the next thing. So it wasn't until after it was all over we sort of looked back and realized, yeah, pretty good little thing going

Corinna Harney-Jones (38:19)
No pressure.

Did you move on to do anything else with, you know, writing and...

Leland Zaiz (38:29)
Well, they

eventually quit making movies and I did some other stuff for Playboy TV and I ended up doing those Playmate of the Year luncheons several years running for a producer named Steve Silas. And that was kind of fun because it would start out by going to the Playboy Studios on Broadway, I think in Santa Monica, where the Playmate of the Year would get made up for the luncheon. And we'd go there and I would interview her.

in the make-up chair as she was getting made up. And then we would, and getting dressed. And then we would ride with her in the limo to the Playboy Mansion. I'd sit in the back of the limo next to the camera and interview her on the way to the Playboy Mansion. And we'd get to the mansion. And as a butler, I was used to going out the back gate. So now I was arriving in a limo, coming up the front gate. And it was kind of fun to come up to the mansion that way. And at the Playboy luncheon, do...

Echo Johnson (39:07)
Very cool.

Corinna Harney-Jones (39:13)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (39:18)
There was invariably a lot of playmates from the past there, so I'd see all these playmates that I knew from back when I was a Butler. Now I was a writer, producer guy, so it was kind of interesting.

Echo Johnson (39:23)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (39:23)
The Union. Wow.

Echo Johnson (39:28)
Leland, was that

an idea that you had or did Playboy approach you about documenting the PMOY luncheon?

Corinna Harney-Jones (39:34)
Why?

Leland Zaiz (39:34)
No,

Corinna Harney-Jones (39:34)
Because that's...

Leland Zaiz (39:35)
the Playboy TV was doing it. I don't know if it was Trachilis or who, but they were being done. And if you get a reputation for being able to write well and write quick and be a good guy, you sort of get recommended. And that's kind of what happens. Like, we're looking for a writer. Hey, talk to Leland. so that's how that happened.

Echo Johnson (39:53)
That's interesting.

Corinna, you remember, I guess you would have known, but in 1993, do you remember them documenting your whole playmate of the year luncheon? No, okay.

Corinna Harney-Jones (40:02)
No, they did before

Echo Johnson (40:04)
it's 2025. We're like, we're going back to 1978 here, y'all. Like, we've got a lot of dates to remember.

Corinna Harney-Jones (40:08)
I swore

I would never even go back to my Playboy days. It was something in the past, but it is such a fascinating world. know, it's echo that I always say drug me into this kicking and screaming and here I am representing. It's been so fun. It's like people like you that I just find it. really are part.

I hate for it to sound cultish because it isn't, but we are part of a very special family. it's, there's nothing like Playboy. There just isn't. And I was never ashamed of it, but I am a Christian, and I had started studying the Bible after the fact, you know, and I, because I had seen a lot of things that I think helped shape me to want to know.

Leland Zaiz (40:35)
without question.

Corinna Harney-Jones (40:53)
You know, even discovering like

deep into the scriptures and things. know that sounds funny after having been at Playboy, but I like to ask this question, how you think it shaped you or some of the life lessons you may have learned from being around Playboy. And we really do, we all have a camaraderie. I feel like some of the most fascinating people I've ever met, some of the most influential people I've ever met from all sides of the gamut, you know, it's a very interesting

Yeah, very robust, very eclectic, very, you know, you could go on and on. I mean, I've met other Christians that have been part of the Playboy world, if you will, you know, and it's just interesting.

Echo Johnson (41:23)
Robust, yeah, yeah.

Leland Zaiz (41:36)
Well,

I don't know that it shaped me at all, really. I think, I mean, everything shapes me as a writer and as a thinking person. I'm always on the lookout for meaning and seeking patterns and trying to understand life and understand people. When I came to the mansion, I was a callow young boy and I was uncool. And my main drive at the time was trying to figure out how to be cool. I saw all these people and they seemed really cool and I thought,

what is cool and I thought, it's cool to be really diffident and act like you don't care about it. And then I'd see someone that exuded a lot of enthusiasm. thought, well that's cool to be really enthusiastic or dress like this or speak like that or do these drugs.

Corinna Harney-Jones (42:03)
you

Echo Johnson (42:11)
Bye.

Corinna Harney-Jones (42:14)
that's when you were like

21 so you were all you know we're really all babies in our early 20s

Leland Zaiz (42:19)
It was, yeah, was very formative time

and I was really trying to, you know, it was coming of age. I was trying to figure out how to be. At the same time, I saw a lot of misbehavior kind of, not in terms of harassment, although I saw very little of that. I didn't see a great deal of it. Almost everybody I know who was there at the time, all of the girls, I don't know of almost anybody other than Sondra who looks back with anything other.

Echo Johnson (42:31)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (42:44)
with anything other than fondness on the whole experience. But one of the things is, I was a writer and I was putting my writing on hold and I started, I became obsessed with the division I felt between me and the guests. They were the guests and they were the people that were cool enough to get invited to the Playboy Mansion and they drove their Mercedes and they made movies and I was the butler. And it got more,

Echo Johnson (42:47)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (42:48)
Nya!

Leland Zaiz (43:11)
upsetting, kind of aggravating as I got to become closer friends with these people. I got to be really good sort of pals with James Kahn and John Belushi and you know, people like that and all the playmates. And I'd sit around, when HEF wasn't around, I'd sit around with these people smoking a joint or shooting a shit or having fun talking to them. And then, you know, there'd be a bunch of us just sort of hanging out and then, we need some drinks. Leland, you go get the drinks. And I remember, yeah, I'm the servant, you know.

Corinna Harney-Jones (43:36)
Oh yeah.

hard because you as an artist, as a creative and as a writer, you really should be among your colleagues.

Leland Zaiz (43:47)
I eventually grew, you the bloom went off of it. Mark got fired, so I didn't have my buddy to work with anymore. And I got stuck with a series of other butlers on the night shift who were gay or just boring or whatever, interested in the same things, interested in being a rascal the way I was. And it became a lot less fun. It became...

I'd done everything and seen everything after three or four years. It's like just more of the same. There was, and I realized that my career wasn't going anywhere. So I realized I couldn't stay there forever, but it was a golden nest that I needed to be kicked out of. wasn't gonna, I couldn't conceive of voluntarily leaving a place like that. I I got to go to the Playboy Mansion every night. So I got sloppier and sloppier in my work and in my transgressions kind of in a self-sabotage way.

Corinna Harney-Jones (44:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (44:34)
And I mean, I was always buddies with the security guards, most of them. They would turn their backs, you know, they'd wander through the house and me and Mark would be sitting in the dining room smoking a joint with a couple of playmates and they'd come in and quickly turn, like, I see nothing, you know, because they like this. But then we got, there was a couple of security guards I didn't have much respect for. And I'd go at night, I'd go down to the wall and tweak the motion sensor wires just to fuck with them, know, do things like that, just to mess with them and.

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:00)
how funny.

Leland Zaiz (45:02)
So they started

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:02)
god.

Leland Zaiz (45:03)
sort of put a target on my back and then they eventually busted me for something. Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:05)
Yeah, well

Echo Johnson (45:07)
That's funny, Leland.

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:08)
we want to hear your story about Belushi, your Belushi legendary

Leland Zaiz (45:12)
Well,

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:16)
And are those

things that when you say bad behavior, it's just, it's a personal idea of what you think is bad behavior, not that you would ever judge or anything, because that's how I am. I don't judge, but you make an observation and you say, okay, that's unhealthy. That's something that I just don't want to make those choices. Is it more like that? Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (45:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, not just people being assholes, you know. People being assholes,

Echo Johnson (45:37)
Right.

Leland Zaiz (45:38)
being arrogant largely, being dismissive of me because I was a butler. People, yeah. And also to each other,

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:40)
Yeah.

Give me a drink, servant. Get me a drink, sir.

Echo Johnson (45:48)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:50)
Service, I think, is a beautiful thing. There's

Leland Zaiz (45:53)
You got to serve somebody.

Corinna Harney-Jones (45:55)
you're more thoughtful, but I get what you're saying, how frustrating that must have been that you're sitting there having a good time and you're one of the, you you feel like you're all on the same page.

Echo Johnson (46:02)
Yeah.

Just the dismissive

part. can't stand that when people are dismissive.

Corinna Harney-Jones (46:09)
Yeah, get me a drink. You're

laughing. Go get me a drink.

Leland Zaiz (46:15)
Yeah,

Echo Johnson (46:15)
Yeah, right.

Leland Zaiz (46:16)
yeah. there wasn't a great deal of that, to be honest. And most of the people, know, especially like, like, Jimmy Cann was great. He was like a really big guy, Tony Curtis,

Echo Johnson (46:23)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (46:25)
you know, there's some people that were

Corinna Harney-Jones (46:26)
He's

that I don't think got enough recognition. I love Tony and I feel so privileged to have met him. And yeah, he's one of the legendary. I don't think he ever got enough credit as an actor. I mean, some like it hot. He takes it back to me. He's totally being Katharine Hepburn when he's playing that character. He's so good. Oh, he's, oh, oh yeah.

Leland Zaiz (46:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, the sweet smell of success, he's brilliant in that, he's getting the defiant ones.

Corinna Harney-Jones (46:52)
and the dark stuff that he did. What's that movie that he played that? Yes! my

Leland Zaiz (46:55)
Yeah, Lebke.

Echo Johnson (46:58)
Ha

Leland Zaiz (46:59)
couple of things. Oh, Belushi, just to put a bow on that. One night he asked, he needed a ride to a recording studio in Santa Monica for whatever reason. He asked me to steal him a bottle of Chivas Regal. And I thought, if you asked HEF, HEF would probably give it to you. But I had to sneak a bottle out to the car for him.

Corinna Harney-Jones (47:01)
Sorry about that.

Leland Zaiz (47:17)
gave him a ride to the studio and we had a couple of house cars like these beat up old Chevy Vegas or something, Novus. And so we went down the back gate and started driving and he was in a unhappy mood and he was sad complaining that he was having trouble with his wife Judy. She was upset because he was sleeping around and out in Hollywood. And he said, I know these girls are only sleeping with me because I'm famous. I know I'm ugly. And I was trying to be, I said, no John, you're a cute guy.

trying to make him feel better about himself. And we went down Comstock to Wilshire and turned right and then the corner of Wilshire and Comstock, there's a hotel there now that used to be condos. And that's where the comedian Freddie Prinze committed suicide. And John Belushi pointed me out, he said, that's where Freddie Prinze killed himself. And I also remember him telling me about Doug Kenny. Doug Kenny was

one of the editors of National Lampoon and one of the writers on National Lampoon's Animal House.

he had died by either falling or jumping off a cliff in Hawaii. No one ever learned which one it was. And Belushi said, I told Doug not to move to LA, man. I said, don't move to LA, it'll kill you. Which is ironic, because just a month or two later, Belushi was dead. But yeah, so we had a, you know.

Echo Johnson (48:21)
you

Whoa, famous last words. That's insane,

Corinna Harney-Jones (48:23)
my

Leland Zaiz (48:27)
But we had a really heartfelt talk on the drive, know, and Belushi was very egalitarian. If you could be the garbage man or the butler or the president, you know, it's the same to him. You're just another human being. And it was very personable in that way. so we had a great talk. And I allowed myself to think, hey, we're really hitting off. We're really close here. It wasn't the first time I met him by any measure. But so we were just talking about

women and the success and various things on the way to the studio. We got to the studio and I pulled up to the curb and said, well, good night. He said, no, not good night. Come on, come with me. And I thought, OK, well, I could get fired. I got to go back to the mansion. But this may be worth getting fired for. Famously, you go out with Belushi, you end up back home three days from now. Well, we'll see what it's like. And so I parked and we went into the studio. And I remember walking down the hall and seeing the gold

Corinna Harney-Jones (49:10)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Echo Johnson (49:10)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (49:16)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (49:21)
records on the wall and stuff. It was kind of neat. We went back to the studio where there were a bunch of guys waiting for him to say, hey John, how you doing? And I stood there waiting to be introduced and wondering, know, when are we going to start doing drugs? What's going on? And, and I, but I quickly realized that he, his attention was on the next shiny thing. And, and I was just stood there like, okay. I just turned around and left. thought, okay, he's on to something else. So that was the last time I saw him. Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (49:32)
you

Echo Johnson (49:45)
Interesting.

I remember Cathy St. George also shared, she actually opened up the door one night when him and Aykroyd had showed up at the mansion and let them in and she's like, Hefs' asleep so they came in and hung out. And she said that was the last time that she saw him. And then a couple of months later, he had passed. So he was definitely battling his addiction at that point, big time. And then what you just said with the background that his wife was mad at him and he was like sleeping around and stuff.

Yeah, certainly that the era of the time, right?

Leland Zaiz (50:15)
I remember Chevy Chase came up one night and I was a big Chevy Chase fan. was before we knew he was an asshole, more or

when I was a kid, I wanted to be a stuntman. So my brothers and I would practice jumping off the garage roof and slamming in the walls and hitting each other with chairs and stuff. And at the mansion, when I got comfortable at the mansion,

Echo Johnson (50:27)
Cool.

Leland Zaiz (50:33)
I would amuse people by tripping and falling and doing pratfalls. And I could tumble down the complete set of front hall steps and land with the splat on the marble floor to the point where people would say, bring up their date and say, hey, Leland, do your fall for Dorothy. Yeah, so I kind of got known for that. So when Chevy Chase was there, he was out in the game house shooting pool with a friend of his and me and another one of the audio video guys went out there offered him a joint.

Echo Johnson (50:37)
funny.

Corinna Harney-Jones (50:50)
in.

Leland Zaiz (50:59)
smoked and then he dumped a bunch of cocaine on the table and said I made a mess here you guys might want to clean that up. So we did some blow and then I told him that I liked his prat Falls you know because he would open the Saturday Night Live show by doing a fall and so we started showing each other falls and you know comparing falls and showing each other tricks and stuff so here I am with Chevy Chase you know showing each other falls so that was that was kind of a high point.

Echo Johnson (51:04)
wow.

my

God, that's so epic because I mean, that's like, one of the things that Chevy Chase is known for physical comedy,

Corinna Harney-Jones (51:25)
Bye.

Leland Zaiz (51:30)
comedy.

Corinna Harney-Jones (51:32)
I worked with Peter Pitofsky. We were in a show together. Jay Leno loved him, but that was one of the things that he did was those pratfalls. But I'm telling you, you have injuries forever. I don't care how good you are at that. Your back is never right. I mean, it looks insane. It looks painful.

Leland Zaiz (51:32)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (51:32)
Yeah,

Leland Zaiz (51:44)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (51:47)
Hahaha!

Corinna Harney-Jones (51:50)
That's it.

Leland Zaiz (51:51)
Yeah, it was fine. I didn't like it when

people said, hey, Leland, do the fall because it was much better if they didn't expect it and they didn't know you were doing it. You know, if someone is walking through the hall and I tumble down, they go be horrified and they'd pop up. Yeah.

Echo Johnson (51:57)
Bye.

Corinna Harney-Jones (51:58)
Exactly!

Yeah, yeah, that's when it's the most fun.

my

I want to, this is horrible. I always swear I hate gossip, but I'm like, why was Chevy chase an asshole for you?

Leland Zaiz (52:13)
Well, he wasn't. I said that's

before we knew he wasn't an asshole. mean, the general public, you know, it's been kind of known. He wasn't an asshole.

Corinna Harney-Jones (52:18)
I'm like, what happened?

Leland Zaiz (52:20)
He was totally cool to me.

Echo Johnson (52:21)
That's awesome. My God, what a cool,

like, a cool era and decade to be around and like just to see that caliber of talent and celebrity. like, I mean, that's, I'm sorry, that would have never happened as you know, that would have never happened for any of us had we not ever been at the mansion and met all these incredible people.

Leland Zaiz (52:30)
Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (52:35)
And.

Echo Johnson (52:41)
definitely want to touch on,

on

Dorothy Stratton. So unbeknownst to me, and thank you for telling me the playmates that you were close with. So Heidi Sorensen wrote a book called The Breast Chronicles. And Heidi, also a fellow Vancouvernite is what they call themselves from Vancouver, such as Kimberly Hefner Pamela Anderson.

and Dorothy Stratton. Heidi Sorensen had published a book called The Breast Chronicles and in this book, I'm gonna read a quick little excerpt.

for our listening audience, Dorothy Stratten, one of the most revered and I would say probably well-known playmates and unfortunately because she was murdered by her estranged husband at the time, Paul Schneider, and he was the one who ultimately got her into Playboy but it was falling apart at that point. She was with Peter Bogdanovich?

Corinna Harney-Jones (53:33)
They have

Echo Johnson (53:34)
And so it was 1980. Heidi published this book recently and there's a chapter devoted to the memories of the day that Dorothy died. And it's a very important time and horrific tragedy that happened in the scope of Playboy history. So.

In this book it says it was a very powerful and grim remembrance that takes the reader to the unbelievably tragic night one of horror and loss of the day Playboy received the news of Dorothy Stratton's murder. In the book Heidi recalls Dorothy and her innocence she was a pure spirit in every sense so completely naive to the harshness of the world and the cruelties of others she was down to earth and real her eyes never beheld

pretty jealousies. She was encapsulated in a bubble of love, truly. She had eyes full of wonder and excitement in regards to her future. And then the night that she died, Heidi was sitting in the dining room with Sondra Theodore and some of the other singing playmates, which I've never even heard of. So that's something that we have to touch on, Corinna, at a later time. And a butler entered the room in a hushed voice told...

the playmates what had happened. In the state of disbelief, Sondra and Heidi walked the stone path to the game room to tell Hef when the words finally came out, Hef's eyes clouded over in a fog,

Hef loved Dorothy not in a romantic way, but in the way that one soulmate might love another when they recognize their goodness. It was the end of something beautiful and the beginning of Dorothy's journey on another level. Was that you? Were you the butler that went in and told the news?

Leland Zaiz (55:07)
Yeah, it's interesting. know, Cis Rundle has a story that she took the phone call, but the way it happened was that night, a call came into the mansion and I answered. It's the butler's answer to the phone at night. And it was, I forget his name, but it's the private eye that Paul Snyder had hired to follow Dorothy. He called and said, I need to talk to have Dorothy got shot. And I didn't know the guy and didn't know who he was. So I called bullshit and I said, yeah, okay. And I hung up on him.

And he called back just a minute or so later said, no, honestly, you can call the LAPD if you don't believe me. Dorthy just got shot and she's dead and I need to talk to HEF

Echo Johnson (55:36)
Whoa.

Corinna Harney-Jones (55:40)
And you already

knew that he was a weirdo. Like you had already. Yeah. Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (55:44)
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Echo Johnson (55:45)
Pretty everybody knows.

Leland Zaiz (55:46)
Nobody who ever met Paul didn't come away with a bad impression of the guy. He was just snakey. But so I called out to the game house. Hef was out at the game house at the time. And I put the call through, I think, to Cis Rundell or whoever it was, social secretary that night.

So I didn't see HEFS reaction or anything, but my memory of it is that all the girls, there were a bunch of girls out there. Heidi reminded me that it was the singing playmates, but they came from the game house, came into the dining room and were in tears, they were shattered, and asked for champagne. Now they were shattered because it hit so close to home, because just about every playmate had some guy.

maybe not a creep like Paul, but had some boyfriend back home that they had left for Playboy that was now, you know, some producer that was chasing them around saying, no, I'm going to make your life everything you want it to be. the, the, the, the phone and the, the, the PBX phone in the pantry was often festooned with posts notes saying things like, if Joe calls for Cindy, she's not here. Or if Peter calls for Lisa, she's off the property, you know?

We were like the gatekeepers and the Playboy Mansion was a place where you could avoid reality. So I think all these girls understood every one of them. You look at Playboy, Playmate profiles and in turn offs, it's a very common thing to see jealous people because most beautiful women are exposed to jealous people. They get a boyfriend or someone like someone that person, that guy thinks everyone else is going to be after their girlfriend because she's fucking beautiful.

So I think that's a common thing. And I think most of those girls had the experience with some guy that was a little too clingy or a little too jealous or don't leave me or, know. So that's why it hit, that's why, partly why I think it hit them particularly hard. In addition to which everybody loved Dorothy. She was a very sweet person. She was only 20. She was very just untrammeled by anything, you know. Just, frankly, to be honest, I thought she was an airhead. She wasn't, but I...

Corinna Harney-Jones (57:17)
Mm-hmm.

Leland Zaiz (57:37)
That was the impression she gave, just because she was so naive and sweet.

Corinna Harney-Jones (57:37)
But she was that sweet. Yeah.

Well, I

can tell you, I know it was a game changer for everyone because I was that way when I came into Playboy. I was a baby, and I had never even heard of Dorothy Stratton. I didn't know about Star 80. And one of the things that HEF I had a very jealous boyfriend when I came in and I was Miss August. She was a Miss August and I had someone say, you remind me and it wasn't a compliment in the sense that no, I'm telling you.

Leland Zaiz (57:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Echo Johnson (58:04)
Wow.

Corinna Harney-Jones (58:06)
obviously it was devastating. And I had someone take me aside, including HEF because I wanted to use the last name of my boyfriend instead of my name, because I loved the ring of it, Corinna D'Angelo, you know, I thought I want that. But he was very jealous and they saw it before I did because of Dorothy. And they told me, no, no, no, no, you don't want to use his name. He's the one that got me into Playboy.

So I remember getting a lecture and them saying you have to be so careful and I know you don't understand this and I didn't I was so naive It might have been Mary or somebody told me you really remind us of Dorothy and it wasn't what I look like It was my person they said you really remind us of Dorothy and I didn't know who she was and I said what he okay They said but we just want you to know

Echo Johnson (58:45)
you

Corinna Harney-Jones (58:55)
you've got to be very, very careful. And you may think your boyfriend, but he was very possessive. But because of that, now looking back and hearing your story, I want to hear the rest of your story, I realize the magnitude of that and how scary and how dangerous and jealousy is such an evil thing.

jealousy like that you don't think you can you know someone's gonna murder someone

Leland Zaiz (59:21)
became interesting because I served them champagne and they kept drinking champagne for hours into the early hours of the evening and they all got quite drunk. And by the end of the night or the early hours, they were laughing it up because they were so drunk. And also just not in a callous way, they were just trying to forget and they were kind of medicating themselves. what was...

Echo Johnson (59:39)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (59:43)
really interesting to me is that they asked for a Polaroid camera and they started taking pictures of each other. We didn't do selfies back then, but we had a Polaroid camera in the house. And they started taking pictures of each other, flashing each other. And I thought that just struck me as really interesting because somehow their identity was still kind of tied up in the fact that, you know, I will show you my breasts and that's, you know, what gives me some value or that's fun or whatever it is, you know. I thought...

It struck me as a really strange thing to do on the heels of the news they just got. I mean, they were all drunk. And they left the Polaroids there that night. And I cleaned them up. And I thought, well, this would be a good souvenir to have. Then I decided not to. I laid them all out. And I took a Polaroid of all the Polaroids.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:00:11)
Someone's dead.

Can you pass them?

Leland Zaiz (1:00:24)
I decided in the end that wasn't cool to take them. So I put them in Sondra Theodore's box. But yeah. So that was the experience. It went from tears to drunken laughter and flashing their boobs.

Echo Johnson (1:00:29)
they always knew.

Let me ask you, could you visually see the impact that it had on HEF? Because it's something that he spoke about the rest of his life.

Leland Zaiz (1:00:46)
I don't have much memory of that. He was with his friends like Mark Saginor and Harry Weems and John Dante and stuff out in the game house. And I'm sure they were huddled around the phone trying to get details all night. But I didn't really see, I don't remember any moment where he seemed shattered or shaken or things changed or anything really changed. It's.

very likely that things did change for him and he did express some emotion about it, but I wasn't privy to any of that. I never saw it, but I can recall.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:01:16)
your observation was interesting to me that your initial impression was that she was a bit of an airhead but looking back it wasn't even that she was just so probably also yeah

Echo Johnson (1:01:24)
with us in this time.

Leland Zaiz (1:01:25)
There she yeah, she, I mean, she's certainly shown with a special light and you watch her

in, you watch her. I mean, I, sometimes I used to think of maybe people were just, you know, Monday morning, Corey backing when everyone said there was something special about her, but you watch the movie, they all laughed. She just shines in that. She has such a pleasant. Yeah, I think so.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:01:44)
Yeah, they say that she could have been a spectacular, really

an incredible actress and

Leland Zaiz (1:01:51)
And I think that in a

way that kind of hurt Hef too because Hef likes it when his playmates got in the movies because it made him feel like he was part of Hollywood, which he really wasn't. And he got, I mean, that's probably his one regret is he didn't get to be a Hollywood producer. He tried and he said when he got his star on the walk of fame, that meant more to him than anything else because was Hollywood like was embracing him. So I think he felt invited into the tent finally.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:02:10)
Well, one thing is... Yeah...

he was such a master because he understood film. really was.

Leland Zaiz (1:02:20)
yeah,

were enormously important to him, you know?

he created a life that was

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:02:24)
well, had told

I wanted him to invest in my first feature film and he also understood the brand. So he understood that he had a whole brand to maintain and he had to keep it separate because he was gonna invest in a film that I was doing and he said, Corinna, you wanna go, he put me in touch with someone at Hallmark because it was a very heartwarming love story and there was bits and pieces of Playboy in

Leland Zaiz (1:02:32)
Thank

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:02:51)
because my character was loosely based on me, my friend that wrote it who now works at Paramount, but he told me, Corinna, no, you don't want anyone, I don't want to put my name anywhere near this because he really thought it was that worthy when he read the script, which I thought was so interesting, you know? So he kind of understood that even though it probably hurt, you know? He understood that Playboy was separate from

Leland Zaiz (1:03:09)
No.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:03:17)
from

the movie industry, because he even kept the privacy of so many people that were heads of studios even

Echo Johnson (1:03:24)
Corinna, that makes even so much more sense right now just from what Leland said about, and as we know, HEFS love affair with cinema and that's really, what the Playboy centerfold was based on, were the starlets of that era. But we just had an interview with the USC professor that was the chair of the censorship in cinema last week, Leland, and he spoke about how important it was to HEF

that at the end of each semester that they held the class, Hef would go in for a Q &A and he never missed it over 20 years. He even gave up going to London to receive a award. Mary had called Professor Rick Jewell and told him how important it was for him to attend his Q &A sessions at this course, because he just, he loved cinema and he was able to then, you know, give back in that capacity with a Q &A with students. So that's interesting.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:04:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yep, he was one of the three profe- they called him one of the three.

Echo Johnson (1:04:17)
the third professor. Yeah.

Wow. I'm so grateful for you to speak on on that bit of history and and

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:04:24)
I know it's

so dark we kind of went it's like

Echo Johnson (1:04:27)
Yeah, but it's important to

talk about I remember watching that film when I was like 10. I knew it was a very important story and it impacted me when I saw it. And then when I was discovered for Playboy, I was like, oh my God, Dorothy Stratton. And I remembered that.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:04:31)
Oh no, I finally saw it! I

Echo Johnson (1:04:45)
So it's definitely as dark and horrific as it is. It's a part of Playboy history and one that needs to be spoken about and really just purely to honor Dorothy. But then it also just goes back to the problem of domestic violence. And I think that Luanne is working on a script right now that kind of surrounds that is the epidemic of domestic violence. And actually looking at at

Leland Zaiz (1:05:04)
Yeah, she wrote a script about it,

Echo Johnson (1:05:08)
that whole situation and what happened to Dorothy through that lens, that it was domestic violence at the end of the day. She was murdered by her husband. She was called over, he set it up, and murder, suicide is what it was. So, yeah. So thank you.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:05:14)
yeah. yeah.

Yeah, when it's

something, it's...

You know, you can, you want people to continue to be aware because, you know, we all age and get older and then there's a whole new young flock of girls that are unsuspecting. But we're so aware now of all of these things. You know, you can look, you can take classes on YouTube on what these predators are and psychopathic narcissists and, you know, all of these.

Leland Zaiz (1:05:45)
Guys are dicks.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:05:46)
with yeah they're real buttholes

Echo Johnson (1:05:51)
But you know, it's, but especially Leland, that was a good point that you brought up because it's something that each and every one of us has had to contend with. And that is when you become a playmate, you know, I had a high school boyfriend at the time and it was in a matter of a year no longer. I mean, think about it from the male's perspective of like, I love this woman. And I'm not speaking to, to Dorothy Stratton's husband because he was a piece of shit.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:06:15)
I'm sorry.

Echo Johnson (1:06:15)
obviously,

but it's a big thing for a man to contend with that, you know, this is a woman I love. There's certainly playmates that went in that were married at the time that would end up getting divorced. Your whole life is...

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:06:24)
There's healthy, you know, everybody

were human but it's yeah out of control when someone wants to possess

Echo Johnson (1:06:31)
Yeah, so...

Leland Zaiz (1:06:35)
a difficult time when women would walk away from him. know, Barbie Benton broke his heart. I think he was unhappy that Sondra eventually moved out. He was unhappy that Shannon moved out. think he was of the mind like, you can walk away from me. I'm Hugh Hefner. But you know, male egos are just fragile that way. think, you know, I mean, the biggest, toughest guy is still crumbled to pieces when a girl breaks thier heart. know, what is it with you chicks?

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:06:48)
Mm-hmm. Well...

Echo Johnson (1:06:48)
Interesting. Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:06:59)
Yeah. Are you

Echo Johnson (1:07:00)
You chicks!

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:07:05)
married?

Leland Zaiz (1:07:06)
managed to avoid that ensnarement. to these men.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:07:08)
Do you think that that do

Are you you dating? I want to know all of it all of it.

Leland Zaiz (1:07:14)
I was dating Luanne

Fernald up until recently.

Echo Johnson (1:07:17)
Yeah, I do remember you saying that.

Leland Zaiz (1:07:18)
I knew Luanne briefly at the mansion. She came through there very briefly. She had a boyfriend at the time. And she says that she immediately recognized the sort of predatory atmosphere of the place. So just didn't really dive into it. So I remember her as being kind of stuck up in a loop. over the last many years, they've had Playboy Mansion reunion parties at Holmby Park, just down the hill from the mansion.

Echo Johnson (1:07:38)
Yeah,

I've gone the last couple years, yeah.

Leland Zaiz (1:07:41)
I met Luanne there and we started dating.

Echo Johnson (1:07:43)
Oh, that's so cool!

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:07:45)
That's really neat.

Leland Zaiz (1:07:45)
Yeah. Yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:07:47)
is a camaraderie that, you know, it just is.

Leland Zaiz (1:07:51)
She's a very sweet person and still quite beautiful.

So,

Echo Johnson (1:07:54)
Yeah, definitely.

Leland Zaiz (1:07:56)
I've always spent most of my life being a struggling writer or sometimes a successful And that always sort of took precedence. I didn't want to drag a girl along on my struggles, you know? So I've had some long relationships. I've been engaged a few times.

But at the end of the day, just kind of a, I think my chief value is freedom and I'm kind of a loner and women get tired of that after a while. You know, like my attitude has always been, do you love me? Okay, good, I'll see you later. And that's, that's not very sexy.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:08:24)
You're like... Wow.

Echo Johnson (1:08:25)
Hey, at least you know when

you're honest about it, Leland. There's something to Something to be said for that. Well, so tell us the name of your Facebook page so we can obviously share that with our audience. It's a great, great page because just the history and the photographs and everything you have on there, I'm obsessed with it.

Leland Zaiz (1:08:29)
No.

Yeah,

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:08:44)
wow.

Leland Zaiz (1:08:45)
Facebook has gotten to be real ass holes lately. They keep flagging stuff and taking stuff down. There's no nudity on it, you know. Yeah, I see other pages that have far more salacious material, but I keep getting flagged and threatened. It's funny because Playboll sent me a note saying, your page is in jeopardy. If you posting stuff like this, you're in danger of losing your page. And the same day, I'll get a note from Facebook saying,

Echo Johnson (1:08:50)
I know, anything about Playboy, they do that.

Leland Zaiz (1:09:11)
Hey, congratulations, you got 300 views. Here's how to boost post it's all bots, but it's a bit irritating. Anyway, the page is Playboy Mansion West 1980s.

Echo Johnson (1:09:22)
Playboy Mansion

to our audience, definitely go follow that page and it's a deep dive just into the whole history of Playboy,

Leland Zaiz (1:09:23)
think, or maybe just Kato means from 1980s.

I post a lot of pictures of playmates from that era, but also every picture I can find of the mansion from that era and contemporary pictures that I find as they're renovating the mansion. I've combed the web for images of the construction and progress. But yeah, there's thousands of posts on there. If anyone's interested, can just go on that page and just do an archive search. And there's tons of what I think pretty interesting stuff.

Echo Johnson (1:09:46)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (1:09:56)
Playmates are on there too. I mean, they would like post or comment on it. So I know a lot of, there are a lot of playmates who visit the page regularly. So I'm keeping the torch alive.

Echo Johnson (1:10:04)
Awesome.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:10:05)
Well, I

I know you're a script writer, you need to write a book.

Leland Zaiz (1:10:09)
Okay, I'll write a book.

Well, I

have that under, that's an ongoing project of mine too. So watch this space.

Echo Johnson (1:10:15)
Nice.

Nice. I love it. So we like to end the show always with two questions and we love to hear what people say. So the first question is three words that define Hugh Hefner to you.

Leland Zaiz (1:10:29)
intelligent, generous, horny.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:10:31)
Yeah.

Echo Johnson (1:10:32)
That's great. Horny. He was a horn dog.

Leland Zaiz (1:10:34)
Well, if

I can just interject, I'll give you my viewpoint on that. think Hef, you know, his legacy has been tarnished in large part because of himself. The Me Too movement came along and I don't know if Hef, I don't subscribe to the fact that Hef was a predator, certainly. But you know, he liked his women and he liked to have sex with lot of women. For whatever weird reason, it became a real kind of sickness with I mean, you...

Think about people like Paul McCartney or John Lennon. They could have had any woman in the world and probably did for a couple years, but they both settled down and had legendary romances, Yoko Ono and Linda. many people, George Clooney, name anyone who rock stars have slept through a hundred women or a thousand women, they eventually get that out of their system. They settle down and fall in love with someone. Hef never did. And he got worse and worse about it, especially in reaction to...

Crystal and then who was the first one? Kim, Kimberly? Kim Conrad? You know, he got married and settled down and then when he got out of those marriages, he bounced back and he became a parody of himself with seven bleach blonde girlfriends and out all the time. And I think that just that went a long way in sort of tarnishing his relationship. And people don't look at him so much as a champion of female rights or

Echo Johnson (1:11:27)
So, yeah.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:11:28)
Yeah, Mary

Kimberly.

Leland Zaiz (1:11:47)
civil rights in general. see him as this clown in pajamas that always had a bunch of beautiful women around him, even when he was 90 years old.

Echo Johnson (1:11:54)
That's a really good point, that it was like he, to his own detriment, because of his affinity for multiple women, then that ultimately ended up hurting him at the end of the day. And of course you're gonna look at him and be like, yeah, he was this person because of that, when in fact he just had a healthy sexual appetite, and he chose to live his life on his terms, know, like it or not.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:11:55)
Will it be killed?

Leland Zaiz (1:11:59)
Yeah, he could have felt that.

I think so.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:12:17)
It's actually a whole case study. mean, if you really got involved in what sex addiction is and and I really do think you can destroy yourself. I think he

Leland Zaiz (1:12:20)
Yeah, well, yeah, no question.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:12:28)
He was such an incredible human being and had enough character, which made him so unique because most men, like you said, Leland, are predators and he wasn't. He was actually a gentleman. He actually appreciated and celebrated women. He also empowered women. So it was, it was an odd dichotomy that was very rare because everyone that knew him, I never felt like he was a creep. Never once. I never felt like.

Leland Zaiz (1:12:54)
No, I never thought it was a creep

either.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:12:56)
And that's a rare character, but Echo sometimes laughs at me because I'll make biblical analogies, but I love flawed humans. I mean, as an actress, that's what you love anyway. And some of the most incredible humans and stories are in the Bible.

Leland Zaiz (1:13:06)
Hey, that's me.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:13:09)
David had a harem

Echo Johnson (1:13:10)
hair.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:13:11)
talking about David and I'm making a comparison with Hef. There were a lot of similarities to him and David who had multiple lovers, multiple women and Solomon who it was his demise. But I'm saying this because they weren't bad men. And even David with all of his flaws was a man after the Lord's own heart. Now, whether or not Hef ever, you know, believed in Jesus or whatever, that's between him and God. But.

It's interesting to look at how...

You know, it could have been an unhappiness that, you know, is a case study and sex addiction and in, you know, too much of a good thing and not having that. I wonder, you know, it's one of the questions I would love to have asked him before he died is I think that he was such a romantic and maybe he would have thought that monogamy would have suited him better because then he had

people on the inner circle at the end of his life that you wonder You know did you trap yourself? Because like you said his legacy has been it shouldn't have been and I hope I hope that it can be rekindled but but For the man that he was and the reason I compare him to David is because he was he did so much good you know what I mean by that like

Leland Zaiz (1:14:30)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Sure.

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:14:32)
And

I hate that they lump him into, like you said, the hashtag me too. And when he wasn't a rapist, he wasn't a pedophile.

Leland Zaiz (1:14:41)
Okay Echo, so what's your second question?

Echo Johnson (1:14:43)
Second question is, had you had the opportunity to say anything to Huff or in memoriam, what would you say?

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:14:43)
Yeah.

Leland Zaiz (1:14:50)
I would say, hey, my name is Leland.

Echo Johnson (1:14:52)
That's fucking perfect, Leland. We haven't had that response either. Hey, my name is Leland. And actually, what's very funny, Leland, all the butlers say that. They're like, I don't think he ever knew my name. And I'm like, really? I find that hard to believe because you were there for 30 years. Like, surely he knew your name.

Leland Zaiz (1:15:14)
It's Leland. Learn it. Use it.

Echo Johnson (1:15:15)
It's Leland HEF!

my god, I love it.

Leland Zaiz (1:15:17)
I got your pipe. I

got your pipe. You want your pipe?

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:15:19)
You stole his

Echo Johnson (1:15:20)
Yeah!

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:15:20)
pipe! Serves you right for not getting your name!

Echo Johnson (1:15:23)
That is fabulous. Well,

what a fun interview, Leland. I'm so happy we finally got to speak with you. Thank you so,

thank you so very much to our audience for tuning in. Leland, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. And there he goes with his pipe. So for y'all listening on audio, you need to come watch the actual video because Leland threw up some really good memorabilia pieces that you definitely wanna take a peek at. right, well, with that said,

Corinna Harney-Jones (1:15:38)
you

Echo Johnson (1:15:51)
we'll see you guys next week.