On the topmost floor of the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, Hugh Hefner keeps leather-bound scrapbooks on rows of glassed-in bookshelves that not only fill his attic-like archive room but also run up and down the narrow surrounding hallways. He has been filling these scrapbooks since he was in high school, and they now run to nearly 2,500 volumes, or roughly 2,489 more volumes than Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization. Hefner is currently compiling new ones—with the aid of an archivist, but he does much of the work himself—at the rate of up to 11 a month. Like many people’s scrapbooks, Hefner’s contain photos, newspaper and magazine clippings, and other two-dimensional memorabilia. Unlike many people’s, they also contain captions written in the third person, by Hefner, often in a grand but stilted tone that seems drawn from vintage newsreels.

Volume 115, from November of 1965, covers the launch of the San Francisco Playboy Club. On one page is a photo of Hefner on opening night—he was 39 years old—looking gaunt and tense with a furrowed brow, drumming his fingers on a table while sitting on a big banquette that looks as if it could hold eight or nine people. But Hefner is alone. Behind him, decorating the walls, are illuminated photos of half-naked centerfolds. The caption reads: “A contemplative moment for Hefner at the end of the evening—seated alone in Playmate bar—considering the phenomenon he has wrought.” Perhaps it was the burden of creation that left him looking so morose and spent. Maybe Zeus looked glum after pulling Athena from his head.

In truth, Hefner could claim to have wrought many phenomena: Playboy magazine, which he founded in 1953 and, at 85, still serves as editor in chief; Playmate calendars; rabbit-logo air fresheners for cars; even the cable porn that now provides the magazine’s parent company with its greatest source of revenue. (Though perhaps not enough: Playboy Enterprises, Inc., has lost money in five of the last six years. With the company’s stock price languishing for most of the past decade, Hefner, the controlling shareholder, recently took it private, paying $6.15 a share for outstanding stock that had been trading for around $4 last summer, when he made his first offer.) Despite all that, Hefner’s singular melding of worldview and lifestyle may have found its most spectacular expression in the Playboy Clubs. In a realm of enterprise where life spans are usually measured in a handful of years, if not months, the Playboy Clubs managed to endure for more than a quarter-century in America, from the early 1960s to the mid-80s, and a bit longer overseas—an impressive if not always graceful feat. (Studio 54, to cite another headline-making nightspot, hung on for only a dozen years.) The clubs’ central attractions were the famous Playboy Bunnies, the glorified waitresses who braved skimpy, pinching, corset-like costumes to serve and titillate patrons of Playboy Clubs throughout the world, and who, in their idealized form, rank among the most iconic of 20th-century American sex objects, eclipsed only by Marilyn Monroe. En masse, they helped shape the fantasies of several generations of adolescent and post-adolescent men, when they weren’t clearing tables or trying to remember the proper garnish for a Cuba Libre.

In much the same way that Walt Disney conceived of Disneyland as an extension of his films, Hefner designed the Playboy Clubs to embody the lifestyle portrayed in his magazine. An informational packet sent to members of the New York club during its 1960s heyday spelled out the fantasy in explicit terms: “Step into the Playroom”—one of the multi-leveled club’s different areas—“and the wonderful world of Playboy is yours! Against a background of brilliant, illuminated covers from Playboy, the joie de vivre depicted within the world-famous magazine’s pages comes to life.” And on some nights this was even true. The crowd that helped open the London Playboy Club, in 1966, was as glittering, attractive, and eclectic as a publicist could hope for: Julie Christie, Ursula Andress, Roman Polanski, Michelangelo Antonioni, Sidney Poitier, Laurence Harvey, Peter Sellers, David Frost, Peter Cook, Kenneth Tynan, Rudolf Nureyev, Woody Allen, Lee Radziwill. This may have been Playboy’s apotheosis of cool. But even on normal nights, celebrities were not immune to being seen in the clubs. Bunnies who worked in New York and London remember serving various Beatles. Tony Bennett was a regular in New York, as was Johnny Carson, who then became a “rabitué” of the Los Angeles club, as Playboy would style it, after The Tonight Show moved west in 1972. If club members in outposts such as Denver or Phoenix or St. Louis or Baltimore were less assured of rubbing elbows with pop stars and television hosts, they could always count on being served a drink by a pretty girl with long legs, bare shoulders, and a cantilevered bosom.