Though willowy and beautiful, Bobbie Arnstein was one woman who had made it on brains in the sexist hierarchy of Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire. From a receptionist's job, which she took in 1960 shortly after leaving high school, she rose to become Hefner's executive secretary for eleven years. As his alter ego and chief of staff, she saw to a diverse range of the head Playboy's needs, from matters of substance and budget right down to scheduling his private jet and arranging overtime for the butlers in the baronial 100-room Playboy mansion on Chicago's Gold Coast. But Arnstein's world came apart when she was arrested by federal narcotics agents last March and charged with conspiring to transport cocaine from Miami to Chicago. Stoutly denying her guilt, even after conviction last November, she was still engaged in the process of appeal when she was found dead last week, at 34, in a 17th-floor room of a hotel on Chicago's North Side. Coroners, who found lethal doses of a tranquilizer, a sleep-inducing drug, and a barbiturate in her body, ruled her death an apparent suicide.
The news sent shock waves through a Playboy regime already besieged by rumor, innuendo and investigation. Arnstein's death compounded the mystery of alleged hard-drug use among Playboy employees, and among the unceasing flow of celebrity guests through the Chicago mansion and Hefner's newest Xanadu, the 30-room Playboy Mansion West on a 5½-acre estate in Los Angeles. Stories that both pleasure domes have been the scenes of parties mixing occasional kinky sex with drugs inevitably have attracted federal and state narcotic investigators; Hefner, 48, is almost too tempting a target to ignore, so publicized is his fantasy-fulfilling life. Arnstein, the first Playboy employee ever convicted in a drug case, had been dealt an unusually harsh penalty—a 15-year conditional sentence. Hefner's defenders suspect that one reason the prosecutors asked for the tough sentence was so that Arnstein, hoping to get it reduced, would provide them with evidence that Hefner himself trafficked in —and perhaps used—hard drugs.
Twice Before. A grieving and angered Hefner flew from Los Angeles to Chicago on learning of Arnstein's suicide. At an emotional, defensive press conference at the mansion, Hefner denied rumors of rampant drug use in his domain and charged that the dead woman had been "driven beyond endurance" by federal investigators. "This is not a legitimate investigation at all, but a politically motivated one," said Hefner, a "conspiracy to get me and Playboy." Describing Arnstein as "one of the best, brightest, most worthwhile women I've ever known," Hefner also insisted on his own total innocence of drug involvement: "I have never used cocaine or any hard drug or narcotic, and I am willing to swear to that under oath."