(Photo illustration: Nick Wanserski)

America’s dreams of drunken, diabetic decadence were briefly dashed today, when TMZ reported that J. Daren Metropoulos—heir to billionaire C. Dean Metropoulos, the man who helped reinvigorate the Pabst Blue Ribbon and Hostess snack cake brands—might be backing out of his plans to purchase the scuzzball Mecca known as the Playboy Mansion. The supposed hold-up in the nine-digit real estate deal was apparently due to a clause in the sale’s contract, stipulating that 90-year-old Playboy founder Hugh Hefner be allowed to live in the mansion for the rest of his life, transforming it into America’s only haunted sex mansion haunted by an actual, living ghost.


Since news of the sale was broadcast, conflicts have apparently arisen between Metropoulos and his new old tenant, largely centering on the prospective new owner’s need for access to the mansion in order to plan renovations. (Metropoulos, who’s currently “a neighbor to the Playboy Mansion”, in both terms of geographic reality and as a sort of existential label for his status as a human being, intends to merge his current home with the landmark into a single compound dedicated—we assume—to further explorations of the always-growing field of Being Totally Fucking Gross.)

But Variety reports that tales of the sale being scuttled are just gossip; according to a spokesperson for Metropoulos, TMZ’s assertions are “simply untrue,” and the Twinkie man still has every intention of buying the fancy sex house of his dreams.