'Lingerie or Less." If the "strict dress code" on Hugh Hefner's Midsummer Night's Dream Party invitation wasn't enough to strike terror into any woman's heart, the warning in small print beneath - "Filming crews will be present" - surely would have been. But this was one of LA's biggest annual bashes, an infamous bacchanalian ritual held at the Playboy Mansion on the first Saturday of every August, I would get to meet the legendary Hef, and there was no way my boyfriend (now husband) Piers Morgan was about to pass up the opportunity to live out the ultimate male fantasy.
Indeed, when he told David Hasselhoff - his co-host on America's Got Talent back in 2007 - that he was bringing me along, the Knight Rider star sighed, shook his head and said: "Man, you don't bring sand to the beach."
Body paint and not much else
I could have been outraged, but Hasselhoff had a point. As we pulled up outside the Gothic Tudor-style mansion that was home to the Playboy founder for 46 years until his death this week, aged 91, it was sand as far as the eye could see. These women were nipped, tucked and plucked, in mesh, peephole and latex lingerie, and lining up to have their outfits inspected (no "overdressing" allowed) by a hatchet-faced woman at the door.Inside we were greeted by a sight that would have made Caligula blush: naked women in iridescent body paint were handing out vodka jelly shots, an Agent Provocateur-clad Paris Hilton was helping herself to oysters from the seafood buffet, and wizened octogenarians - roaming about the place looking like they were about to fall into the sexual equivalent of a diabetic coma - were being held upright by the pneumatic breasts on either side of them.
Getting the distinct impression my other half would rather I were anywhere but by his side, I headed off in search of The Hef, eventually finding him in a Bedouin tent near the grotto in which he liked to frolic with as many as 16 girls at a time - always the last place you look. He was regal in purple velour, flanked by his favourite playmates, Kendra, Holly and Bridget, and smoking strawberry-scented tobacco from a hookah pipe.
We are not amused
"Could I possibly meet Mr Hefner?" I asked one of his gatekeepers, and a minute later I was in, chatting to the man himself about Brits and Britain, which he said he loved, as one frail arm wound itself around my waist. "If you could have one famous woman in the world as your next playmate," I asked, thinking this would be my first and last chance to ask Hugh Hefner anything, "who would it be?" "Your Queen Elizabeth," he flung back, quick as a flash. "Wouldn't she look cute in bunny ears?"
Four years passed before I met Hefner again - four years the Chicago-born media magnate had spent trying to inject new life into the ailing brand he'd started in 1953, when his mother gave him $1000 to launch Playboy magazine.
Despite having expanded to include television, film, resorts, nightclubs, products and charities over the years, Playboy Enterprises could never recapture its '70s heyday, when the magazine was selling seven million copies a month. At this point it was down to under a million and fading fast - unlike Hefner, who was in fine fettle and about to marry his third wife, the 24-year-old former playmate Crystal Harris.
The 60-year age gap wasn't a problem, he assured me - looking, as always, like the tom-cat who just keeps getting the cream. "Surrounding myself by young people helps keep me younger," he went on, "and plus, you do reach a point where you think 'maybe it's time to settle down'."
When I asked whether he'd be having a stag night, however, Hefner snorted incredulously: "I've been having a stag night for the past 50 years."
To have and to hold
He was mischievous and funny, a man-child who refused to accept that adulthood was a place where dreams go to die, and as with our first meeting I found it hard to muster any real sense of outrage. He was neither the Citizen Kane nor the Jay Gatsby he was so often compared to, although he was perhaps as nostalgic and romantic as Fitzgerald's hero. And when he spoke of old screen stars like Marilyn Monroe, Gina Harlow and Dorothy Lamour, or the love songs he adored, his voice wavered with emotion...