Turns out Hef loves Bix. I should have figured; why else would Playboy have chosen to distribute the artsy & relatively obscure 1981 documentary Bix by the French-Canadian filmmaker Brigitte Berman? (It’s quite a good film, by the way.) Anyway, with the Playboy Jazz Festival in full swing this weekend, Hefner namedrops the early jazz star to the Los Angeles Times, which reports:
A traditionalist at heart—[Hefner] frequently refers to his affection for legendary ’20s cornetist Bix Beiderbecke—he looks forward to this year’s New Orleans tribute, with the cross-generational presence of native sons Branford Marsalis, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and 22-year-old trumpeter Christian Scott.
Hefner has mentioned Bix to other reporters, too. In a 2004 article about Hefner’s religious proclivities, the Chicago Sun-Times found room for Bix’s name just below the subhead “Worship, bunny style”:
When [Hefner] thinks about how he might worship his creator God, the Playboy founder also talks about music—jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, the Midwestern cornet player who drank himself to an early grave at age 28 in particular—and his backyard.
Christ. This is not exactly journalistic writing at its best; still, I like how we get Hugh Hefner, God, Bix, and a sweet backyard all in the same thought. Unfortunately, the yard ends up getting all the attention (5.7 acres, 50 coastal redwoods, hot tubs, a zoo with squirrel monkeys).
It’s also interesting how the article connects Bix and Hef as fellow Midwesterners (the former from Davenport, Iowa, the latter a Chicago native). There are deeper connection perhaps. Hefner’s father, reports the Sun-Times, “was an accountant with whom he says he spent little time as a child.” Bix’s father was a successful businessman with whom he had a notoriously strained relationship.
“Our family was Prohibitionist, Puritan in a very real sense,” Hefner, who was raised a Methodist, said. “Never smoked, swore, drank, danced. All the good stuff. Or hugged. Oh, no. There was absolutely no hugging or kissing in my family.”
The story about Bix—by which I mean the story about Bix, not necessarily the truth, which is more elusive—suggests that his family, all of them respectable, church-going Presbyterians, were similarly repressed. In fact, their repression is seen more or less as a product of Davenport’s repression, which is itself a distinctively Midwestern thing. (See Sarah Vowell.) For Bix, such an uptight upbringing is said to have resulted in a) a predilection for young girls and/or men; b) an interest in jazz, a music that, in 1919, the year Bix turned 16, “inspired feelings of terror among local Baptists [in South Carolina] such as what might have been aroused by a personal appearance of Yahweh”; and c) an unusual thirst for bathtub gin.
Sex, drugs, and hot music. Hefner has famously eschewed the drugs, but not the other two. And of course it’s all because of no hugs.
“There was a point in time when my mother, later in life, apologized to me for not being able to show affection,” he told the Chicago paper. “That was, of course, the way she was raised. I said to her, ‘Mom, you couldn’t have done it any better. And because of the things you weren’t able to do, it set me on a course that changed my life and the world.’”
I’m sure that made her feel tons better.
PREVIOUSLY: Bix & erotic spanking (“Oh golly gosh!” she protested half-heartedly, “you’re surely not going to spank me again, are you?”); Bix the Lewd, Bix the Lascivious; the Bix Beiderbecke story for gay men
[June 17, 2006]