When Hugh Hefner’s assistant committed suicide, it threatened to bring down the Playboy empire
The feds used Bobbie Arnstein’s drug arrest and death to attack the magazine
When hotel staff broke into Bobbie Arnstein’s Los Angeles hotel room on January 19, 1975, they found the 34 year old dead and fully dressed, lying in bed. She had left a suicide note, written in her typical self-effacing style. The envelope read, “This is another one of those boring suicide notes.” As her last act, she had penned a letter taking sole responsibility for her death, and defending her employer, who she said “had been most patient and generous during my recent difficulties.” He was a “staunchly upright, rigorously moral man.” That employer was Hugh Hefner. And though she intended exactly the opposite, her suicide was the scandal that almost brought his cotton-tailed Playboy empire down. Her death revealed contradictory truths about gender, power, and the notorious magazine that had both driven her career and very well may have destroyed her.
Over the years, people would spin different theories about who was ultimately responsible for Bobbie Arnstein’s death. Hefner would cite “the harassment of government prosecutors” after she was convicted of drug charges in what many believed was an attempt to take down Playboy. Others cited a depressive episode that began 10 years earlier, when she crashed her car on a stretch of Kentucky highway, badly injuring herself and killing her fiancé. In an article in The Chicago Reader, her closest friend would lament, “Bobbie killed Bobbie.”
Arnstein grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, a bright and precocious girl who was extremely close to her twin brother. When she was slated to skip the seventh grade, she didn’t want to leave him behind. She began working for Hefner after high school. They dated casually at first, but according to Gay Talese’s book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the relationship “had ripened into a deep and special friendship,” and she quickly became indispensable.
Officially, she was his executive secretary, a role that involved everything from arranging business to, at least on one occasion, letting him know when one of his girlfriends had packed her bags and dumped him. After the death of her fiancé, Arnstein adopted Hefner’s freewheeling lifestyle, dating a slew of younger men and working punishing hours. She didn’t fit into the Playboy confines of femininity. In the pages of the magazine, Hefner had conjured a particular male fantasy of a sexy, demure, and coy female. A straight-shooter, and a strange mix of assertive and self-conscious, Arnstein just wasn’t that kind of gal.
Understandably, after many years of long hours and nebulous duties, she wanted a pay increase and a title more befitting the essential role she played. As The Chicago Reader explained in 1975, “She required a monetary pat on the head, a paper reassurance that [Hefner] needed her. She wasn’t getting either.” The Reader reported that she measured herself against the bunnies unattainable beauty standards and always felt herself coming up short. While certainly as smart, if not more so, than the men at the company, she couldn’t seem to get ahead. She began asking around about what other employees were being paid. And a man was hired for a job that seemed a more natural fit for her.
Sometime in the early 70s, Arnstein fell for Ron Scharf, a drug dealer seven years her junior. In 1974, she was arrested in front of the Playboy mansion in Chicago for conspiring to transport a half pound of cocaine from Florida to Chicago, along with Scharf and some other men.
Her name was all over the newspapers, which meant that Playboy’s was as well. Arnstein was keenly aware that it wasn’t a good time for the company, which was both in the midst of a discrimination suit brought by a black employee and being investigated by the IRS. Nixon had even put Hefner on his “enemies list.”
Arnstein’s trial lasted for eight weeks, and in November of 1974, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison — five years longer than that of the men involved, and they had masterminded the operation. But there may have been a second reason beyond straightforward sexism that she was given a harsher sentence. The FBI wanted to use her as a mole to take down Hefner. The feds had been trying to lock him up since Playboy’s inception. As Talese explained, “the investigators seemed eager to present the Arnstein conspiracy case in an atmosphere of sex and drugs, degeneracy and death.”
Arnstein found herself in an impossible place, choosing between keeping her freedom and defending the man she had essentially dedicated her life to. She refused to cooperate with police, or even speak in her own defense for fear that she would inadvertently say something that might harm Hefner.
After her conviction, she was released pending an appeal. During that time, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois summoned her to his office, informed her that someone had a “contract” for her murder, and said that she should be careful. He was trying to scare her into his protection so he could use her for his purposes.
Understandably, this made Arnstein a little paranoid, and she was not alone — everyone in the Playboy mansion was haunted by the feeling that they were being set up. Hefner had ordered the mansion be swept by a security team for wiretaps, bugs, and planted drugs. Delivery boys and employees were eyed with suspicion.
Meanwhile, Arnstein was heavy with guilt. Her drug conviction had dredged up another case from a couple years earlier, in which a bunny named Adrienne Pollack had overdosed on Quaaludes. Hefner had never met the woman, but increasingly people were seeing what law enforcement wanted them to see.
It was in this climate that Arnstein twice attempted suicide, overdosing on sleeping pills. Hefner asked her to work out of the Los Angeles office, thinking that exchanging the brutal Chicago winter for sunny California would improve her mood. She refused the move because she didn’t want to live in a car-dependent city after her accident. Around New Year’s, she did however go there on a trip with Hefner. On Saturday, January 18th, she had dinner with close friends. She seemed optimistic about her future and told them it was unlikely that she would go to prison. She had recently gotten a raise from Playboy and a new title, Assistant to the President, though her name still didn’t appear on the magazine’s masthead. After dinner, a male friend drove her to the Playboy mansion, where she picked up a fifth of liquor. “Are you taking it to a party or something, Miss Arnstein?” the butler asked. She said that she wasn’t.
After a few drinks, she headed to the Hotel Maryland, where she checked in under a false name. She hung a “do not disturb” sign on her door and took a deadly mixture of sleeping pills, barbiturates, and tranquilizers. When hotel staff found her, she had been dead for 12 hours.
Back in Chicago, an unshaven and teary-eyed Hefner made a public statement in the mansion’s living room. Arnstein “deserved better than this. She deserved — among other things — the same impartial consideration accorded any other citizen similarly accused. But because of her association with Playboy and with me, she became the central focus in a cocaine conspiracy case in which it appears she was only peripherally involved.” He blamed law enforcement’s “witch hunt” for the death of “one of the best, brightest, most worthwhile women I have ever known,” he said pausing with tears running down his face. He ended his statement on a similar note to Arnstein’s last words: exculpating himself. “For the record,” he said, “I have never used cocaine, or any other hard drug or narcotics,” adding that “puritanism remains as formidable an opponent to a truly free and democratic society as ever.”
In the following days, many journalists agreed with Hefner that the investigation had been unfairly zealous, while the Chicago Tribune claimed that Hefner was using the suicide to his own gain by attempting to “cop a plea through publicity.” Because of Hefner’s associations with drugs, Playboy lost board members and revenue and stocks plummeted.
In many ways, Arnstein’s philosophy was the same as Hefner’s. Both were radically committed to agency. But Arnstein’s agency had been trammeled on, both by the police and an industry that seemed to reward only one kind of womanhood, if it rewarded women at all. Arnstein had ended her suicide letter, “it has comforted me to know that this last decision — being of my own choosing … was the only one I’ve felt able to exercise over which I’ve had complete control.”
Playboy’s circulation would never again be as high as it was that year.
