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Engaged to be married again, Hugh Hefner faced complaints from an ex-girlfriend. He talks to Lloyd Grove about his Viagra habits, his aversion to condoms-and his love for his bride-to-be.

"Self-serving semi-fiction!" Hugh Hefner tells me.

Related story on The Daily Beast: Vargas' Classic Pin-Up Girls

He's talking about a former girlfriend's tawdry memoir of life in the Playboy Mansion, splashed this past weekend in London's Daily Mail just as Hef, 84, was happily announcing plans to marry his current flame, a nubile 24-year-old named Crystal Harris.

Izabella St. James' Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion portrays the founder of Playboy, the once-dominant men's magazine in which naked ladies were strange bedfellows with serious journalism, as a jealous cheapskate who kept his blond harem on a tight leash even as he permitted his dogs to soil the carpets and drapes; who wolfed down Viagra and waited impatiently...

Us screenwriter whose life was often wilder than his own scripts

William Norton, who has died aged 85, was a screenwriter whose pre- and post-Hollywood adventures surpassed anything he imagined for the screen. The exploits of the virile stars Burt Lancaster, Burt Reynolds, John Wayne and Gene Hackman, tracking down villains in his screenplays, pale in comparison to Norton's time as a gunrunner in Latin America and Ireland.

Norton was born in Ogden, Utah, where his parents (Irish Catholics) were ranchers who lost their land in the Depression. They moved to California, where Norton excelled at high school, until he was expelled because he had a child by a fellow student, Betty Conklin. The 18-year-olds married, just before he joined the army, serving in France and Germany during the second world war.

On his return from the war, Norton worked as a builder, writing short stories in his spare time. His...

The titular gang of Rape Squad is not a squad of rapists but rather a group of rape victims who band together to get revenge on their attacker. Released in 1974, Rape Squad is a bad taste bonanza that wants to have it both ways in terms of mixing sexploitation and feminism and the result is a queasy film that’s politically incorrect in a way only possible in the mid 1970’s. Though written by a woman (Betty Conklin), the film’s blatant misogyny is poorly concealed with the most shallow of feminist themes. Sure, the women who comprise the Rape Squad talk the talk about women’s empowerment, but the filmmakers make sure they do so while topless in the hot tub! It’s an interesting look at the sexual politics of its time but Rape Squad is so wrong on so many levels. It’s not an easy film...