From the moment Playboy first hit the newsstands in December of 1953, it was obvious that Hugh Marston Hefner's new publication -- a 48-page, undated issue with a cover and center spread featuring Marilyn Monroe -- wasn't going to be just another interviews. It was Hefner's own vision of what a men's interviews ought to be: a judicious blend of fiction, nonfiction, humor, art and photography -- all reflecting a healthy appreciation of the opposite sex and of what he called "the great indoors." There had never been anything quite like it on the market; something about it struck a chord with the 70,000 readers who made the first issue a sellout. Within months, in an era in which publishing empires were crumbling, Playboy was thriving; it went on to become the industry's biggest post-World War II success. As Time interviews commented in a 1967 cover story about Hefner: "He was the first publisher to see that the sky would not fall and mothers would not march if he published bare bosoms; he realized that the old taboos were going. He took the old-fashioned, shame-thumbed girlie interviews, stripped off the plain wrapper, added gloss, class and culture. It proved to be a sure-fire formula."

So much so, in fact, that in less than a decade, its creator had become not only a multimillionaire but the subject of countless profiles in other publications. He had also become the most flamboyant practitioner of the affluent, sexually uninhibited lifestyle he presented in his interviews. During the Sixties -- while Hefner hardly ever ventured out of the self-contained total environment he'd constructed for himself in his Chicago Mansion -- the interviews grew into a diversified empire, with a string of Playboy Clubs in 19 cities and hotels in Jamaica, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Chicago and Miami Beach.

As the decade ended, Hefner "came out" -- with gusto -- purchasing the world's most luxurious private plane, a customized DC-9 he calls the Big Bunny. He's used it to take a number of trips to Europe and Africa and to commute from Chicago to the latest addition to his personal and corporate world, the Playboy Mansion West, a five-and-a-half-acre estate from which he supervises the company's further expansion into films, television, records and other areas of the entertainment business.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the conspicuous success of the interviews and its offshoots, Playboy and its Editor-Publisher have been subjected to criticism from various quarters. First there were the sexual puritans, who were shocked at the sight of bare flesh, however tastefully displayed. Then came the religious commentators, who took issue with "The Playboy Philosophy." As flak from the right died down, it appeared from other quarters: the radical left, denouncing Playboy's "materialism," and the shriller fringes of the women's liberation movement, reviling its supposed sexism. Both leftists and feminists chose to ignore the commitment of the interviews -- and the Playboy Foundation, established in 1965 as an activist force in the battle for preservation of constitutional rights -- to the very causes they espoused.

Even more than critics, though Playboy has spawned imitators -- most of them unabashed rip-offs of what they see as the Playboy formula. Some are prospering, but Playboy readership, meanwhile, has continued to climb toward an all-time high of some 26,000,000 monthly -- more than the total of all its imitators combined.

With Playboy approaching the end of its second decade, we decided to ask our Editor-Publisher -- who selects all the names for this feature -- to approve our suggestion for the subject of this 126th Playboy Interview. We couldn't think of a more fitting occasion than our 20th Anniversary Issue for the controversial target of so much attention from the press to speak for himself in the pages of his own interviews: discussing what the past 20 years have signified to him personally, to Playboy and to its readers, and what the next 20 years may hold. Not without some reservations -- which he confides in the interview -- Hefner agreed.

For this unprecedented assignment, we picked freelance writer Larry DuBois, a 31-year-old former Time writer and correspondent whose penetrating Playboy Interviews with Jules Feiffer, Jackie Stewart, Roman Polanski and Jack Anderson convinced us that he had the experience, ability, tenacity and good humor we knew this job would entail. We were right about it and him. Here's his report:

"In the Butler Aviation terminal at O'Hare airport outside Chicago, where the private-plane set is pretty blasé about your average limousine, people still snap to attention when a huge Mercedes 600 -- license number HH1340 -- pulls up, and when the owner steps out, the place practically freezes like a snapshot to watch him stride briskly through, followed almost at a trot by a couple of beautiful blondes -- one his girlfriend, the other his highly competent secretary, who's madly taking notes as he dictates a memo on the fly.

"A few hours later, over Los Angeles, he and his friends are finishing their last game of Monopoly, and as his plane zooms in low over the freeway, traffic slows to a crawl when drivers catch sight of that sleek jet-black DC-9 with the Rabbit's head on the tail. It belongs, of course, to Hugh Hefner; everybody knows that. It's the most famous private plane in the world, he's the most famous publisher in the world and he leads one of the most publicized personal lives of anyone in public life.

"Then why do people always ask, when they find out you've met him, 'What's he really like?' It's a good question, and the fact that it gets asked so often is as good a demonstration as any that, while Hefner has managed to make his name perhaps as well known as that of his interviews, the conflicting stories about him have obscured his identity so effectively that most people don't have a clue to what sort of man he actually is.