Leif Ueland - Accidental Playboy: Caught in the Ultimate Male Fantasy

Copyright 2002 by Leif Ueland

All rights reserved.

Warner Books

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

First eBook Edition: November 2002

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2731-7

For Sigurd and Sissy Ueland,

My exquisite, much-beloved parents

Mom and Dad, please do not read beyond this point.

In the summer of 1998, I was invited to spend six months aboard Playboy magazines Playmate 2000 Search bus and chronicle my adventures as it trekked across America, searching for the Playmate of the Millennium. The following is my account of that trip.

With the exception of the few celebrities mentioned, the names and other identifying details of persons in this book have been obscured. For the sake of narrative cohesion, I did create one fictitious individual: Vegas, the Playboy production assistant. However, all of the events of which he was a part did occur.

As for my own role in the story, much as I may have been tempted to cast some of my misadventures in a more flattering light, I have resisted the urge. It also bears noting that what follows is not a novel, though it may at times read like one. Such was the odd and appealing nature of life on the Playboy bus, where life had a way of unfolding as it would in a book.

Leif Ueland

July 2001

You have to understand, Ive been living out the dreams of a great many men for a very long time.

Hugh Hefner

S o, she asks, do you do this in every city?

Do what? I respond, smiling through a pia colada haze.

This, she says, gesturing to the surroundings. Tell a bunch of women its your birthday and ask them to come back to your hotel room for a slumber party.

Oh, that. I nod, playing slow. No, it really is my birthday. But cue 2001: A Space Odyssey theme music, because the most adolescent region of my brain is now piping up, Hey, why didnt I think of that?

Besides, I add, we couldnt do this in every city. I'd be dead by now.

What surrounds us is little less than a circus. My two queen-size beds have been dragged to the middle of the hotel room and pushed together. A long strand of white Christmas lights has been wrapped several times around the beds, which, with the only other light in the room coming from many scattered tea candles, gives the scene a look that is part spaceship, part flying carpet.

A candidate dressed in a bright pink baby-doll negligee sits at the center of the bed in front of my computer, struggling with some software glitch so I can resume my chat with the diehard readers of my online dispatches. To the side is our Playboy photographer of the moment, Raj, kicked back on the sofa, drink in one hand, camera in the other, as one of the other candidates cavorts in front of him, opening up her pajama top and hiking up her mens boxers. Photos of her randy voguing are being instantly posted online.

Theres more. Someone ordered pizza, and not only is the delivery person female, but shes feeling yet another candidates bare breasts, unable to believe theyre fake. Meanwhile, a technician from the hotel is stringing telephone cord all over the room, trying to give us a second line so we can have two computers in on the chat, while a second hotel employee is bringing in a birthday cake. Vegas, the tour gofershirt off, puffing on a cigar, eyes the narrow slits of the blindly inebriatedis standing at an ironing board, blending up a fresh pitcher of pia coladas. Sophia, our excellent PR woman, who has been wearing a ten-minute heat mask for over an hour (and whose skin tomorrow will look amazing, incidentally), keeps shaking her head. You, she will say to me, are an evil genius.

Did I mention Im wearing jammies?

And heres the disturbing thing: This event, this Fearless Reporter Live Chat Slumber Party Birthday Extravaganza, is all my doing. Even more disturbing: Its creation wasnt prescripted. Rather, the whole spectacle came to me in a vision, the same way at a certain point Ill just know that I must lie on the bed, open my shirt, set a piece of cakewith burning candleon my chest, choreograph fork-wielding women around me, and have the picture recorded for tomorrows dispatch.

These are the sorts of things that are spontaneously arriving in my mind. No sudden epiphanies for the novel I should be writing. No moments of insight into the human condition. No, Im channeling Bacchus and the night is young.

And theres more to come. By the end of the weekend Ill refer to myself as mini-Hefner, or Hef-lite. But this isnt right. This isnt who Im supposed to be. Im no evil genius.

What the hell has happened to me?

T he call, when it comes, is nothing more than an amusing bright blip in the dark tempest of my depression. The phone rings and, as is only natural under the circumstances, Im terrified. What if its someone I owe money to? Or worse, someone with whom I have an emotional tie? Im a writer, in the midst of writing what I darkly tell everyone is a bestseller, and understandably Im averse to distraction.

Ah, the gay, romantic pleasures of the writing lifea succession of perfectly turned epigrams dashed off on Odeon cocktail napkins while some working girl whom Hemingway has sent over purrs dirty French limericks into my ear. So good, its almost clich!

The reality is, its seven at night. Im washing a sinkful of dishes, dressed only in my musty old bathrobe. The bestseller is, after nearly a full calendar year well, its not done. As far as quantity of writing, Ive long since written the length of a novel. Who knew Id keep writing the first several chapters over and over and over? I didnt.

In the last twelve months Ive earned a grand total of two hundred and fifty dollars. To pay the bills, Ive liquidated the stock portfolio I prudently built up in my youth, money I imagined going to a down payment on a house. I have, in essence, robbed a childs piggy bank to pay for the dream that seems to be slipping away. Worse than that, these were funds accumulated while suffering the ultimate humiliation: modeling kiddie underwear.

Where was I?

Right, phone ringing, me screening. Out of the squawking answering machine comes the voice of a good friend, Max, who is in a much worse place than I and thus fair game for a conversation. To make a medium-length story short, he was hit by a bus. He was hit. Not his car, his person. To him, with his one hundred thousand dollars of hospital debt and looming bankruptcy, my two hundred and fifty dollars in income looks huge. How can I not take his call?

A year ago, Max and I came up with an idea for a television show, which we pitched around town, though we had neither agent nor lawyer, and we now get a kick out of watching our ideas crop up on the shows that happen to be produced by the very same executives we pitched to. So these calls usually pick up my spirits, albeit in an embittered way.

But this call is different. Max has heard of a job. The details are sketchy, but from what hes picked up something about Playboy traveling around the country a search Miss Millennium Playboys website writing photography. Max thinks Im a natural.

Heres the cruelest aspect of the writing life: Even in a joking spirit, its difficult to listen to Max talking up this opportunity. The mere act of