KEY POINTS:
It is like watching the Queen in an erotica shop. There's Christie Hefner, the essence of elegance with her immaculate blonde bob, US-size 2 (New Zealand size 6) ivory shift and coat ensemble, delicately stepping around the racks of gilded cutaway swimsuits, shiny, sexy, strapless dresses, men's boxers,
G-strings, slips and camis - all emblazoned with that magic word: Playboy.
Occasionally she fingers fabric and compliments her designers on a garment, while the assistants at the Playboy Concepts Store at Sylvia Park teeter, speechless with excitement, in their stilettos.
As CEO and chairwoman of Playboy Enterprises Inc, Hefner, 55, travels with an entourage of 14 and presides over the third-most-recognised brand in the world (after Red Cross and Coke).
She is also the brain who steered Playboy out of the doldrums of the 1990s and into a multimedia entertainment company doing close to US$1 billion ($1.3 billion) retail a year (excluding DVDs), selling sexy clothes to teenagers in the malls.
And it wasn't just a case of the privileged daughter of a sensationally rich man getting an easy ride: Hefner is personally ranked by Forbes as the 85th most powerful woman in the world. (Helen Clark is 38th.)
How does her business profile square with the ever-so-slightly tacky Playboy merchandise, not to mention an 81-year-old, Viagra-fuelled father cavorting with three girlfriends in the Playboy Mansion?
"A problem?" Hefner smiles at the very idea. "No. He's been cavorting around with younger women all my life. So I've grown up used to it."
Although she is not a fan of reality TV, she is also happy with Hef's show, The Girls of the Playboy Mansion, which screens in prime time on the E! channel. "It's actually very ... [she searches for the right word] ... sweet," she says. "As somebody said to me - it's one of the very few [reality programmes] where nobody's cruel. So many of them are predicated on somebody being humiliated or fired or being a failure."
She's right. For all the focus on sex, both the show and the Playboy empire are remarkably wholesome. Back in the 1960s, Playboy magazine and Playboy Clubs were into titillation and teasing, rather than straight sex. Playboy bunnies were trained how to do a "bunny bob" that ensured they showed not a centimetre more flesh than their costumes allowed. They were chaperoned and looked after by bunny mothers.
Club members were forbidden to touch - let alone bonk - them. As Hefner says, "Women were on a pedestal. They were treated as though they were part of a theatrical presentation in terms of the costume, and the accolades they received - not to mention the pay they earned."
Meanwhile, she and her younger brother were sheltered from it all: "It wasn't a grand plan, it was just how things evolved. I was very young when my parents separated and divorced so I never grew up living with my father. And I was also still pretty young, about 7, when my mother remarried and my brother and I took our stepfather's last name.
"So all the time we were growing up, I wasn't Christie Hefner."
Her closest friends knew who her Dad was, though. "I had my Sweet 16 party at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago so all the girls went over and we went swimming and bowling and had lunch. But I didn't have the experience [of growing up in Hef's shadow], which I think is difficult, frankly, for children of any well-known person. You meet people and you don't know whether they're responding to you or using you to get close to your parent."
She didn't reclaim her birth name until her mother and stepfather (with whom she was never close) divorced. "I was elected Phi Beta Kappa [one of the highest honours for an American undergraduate] in my junior year. This was an important piece of paper, and I thought, 'You know, I'd like to have my real name on it'. So I went to court and had my stepfather's name dropped."
As she sees it, "I had the best of both worlds in a funny kind of way. I saw my father all the time. My mother was incredible about keeping my brother and me close to him and always telling us that the fact the marriage hadn't worked didn't mean our father didn't love us and want to be in our lives. She's a marvellous woman. However well I turned out, she gets the credit."
Hefner started her Playboy career when she was at college and became an assistant bunny mother to help pay off her boyfriend's first car. After graduating, she again took a temporary job, this time in the management side of the business. And she loved it: "The people; the variety of the businesses; the mix of creative and analytical; the values of the company; how people were treated - that all seduced me into staying."
The English major took business courses at Wharton, Harvard and the University of Southern California "and honestly learned most by walking around the company, working in different parts of the business, then building a network of really smart people". Naturally she had the freedom: "That's the big difference in a family business. I could sit in on any meeting and learn about everything."
But in a family business this big, this brassy and this stalled, you also have to be good. Hefner's great talent is strategy: "What's come from me is seeing the opportunity for the company to grow in two parallel ways: One, through expansion of Playboy-style content and taking the brand into high-tech multimedia. Playboy TV celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, the only magazine company that's done that," she explains. "It was the first magazine to go on the web in 1994, and [we've been] licensing content for mobile cellphones for over five years."
The other half of the plan is a "bringing the brand to life, high-touch strategy" which is where the concept stores come in. They open three each year, with a total of nine including the 370sq m shop in Oxford St, London. "And that's hugely successful, as is the Auckland store."
It is all about control, keeping the brand where it needs to be - sexy as hell without slipping down to sleaze.
"The next step is more of what we did in Las Vegas and what we're doing in Macau [to open at the end of next year]." She's talking about Playboy entertainment destinations that combine retail with a club, casino, live entertainment and dining. And yes, you're served by bunnies in the classic bunny costume, plus others in a new Roberto Cavalli version.
Hefner's one extravagance is travel. This trip included Macau, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Melbourne and the Australian Open. Now she and her husband, former Illinois state senator Billy Marovitz, are exploring the Bay of Islands, our wine country and Milford Sound.
The couple, who married around 12 years ago, wanted to get a sense of New Zealand's variety. "Billy likes to drive."
This is her first marriage and although she says she has had "wonderful men in her life", you have to wonder if she had much faith in marriage. Certainly she kept her sex life out of the spotlight so loved by her father, and did not marry until her early 40s. "It took meeting Billy at that point in time. He was ready too."
And no, she does not look overly concerned that it was all too late for children. "We married late so we don't."
What does worry her is politics and changing America back to the country she grew up in. Despite supporting Hillary Clinton in her senate races, she is backing her hometown Illinois candidate Barack Obama: "I feel America is at really critical point in time: its role in the world, domestic politics. That means one of two things: either we do things differently and hope to solve the problems of the world and our own domestic problems or we keep doing things the same.
"And as much as I admired President Clinton and voted for him and consider him a friend, I think going back to the same politics we had during the Bush and Clinton years is hyper-partisan and tends to isolate America in a way that is harmful to both Americans and the world.
"This is a moment in time for someone who can inspire people. And Barack has that ability. He's bringing people into the political process, particularly younger people who've been apathetic before."
As for the third man in her life - her Dad, who's threatening to marry Holly, his favourite playmate - Hefner is glad he is so happy and healthy. Gracious, elegant, a lady to the last, she smiles again: "I sure love the three girls that live at the house. Holly is his principal girlfriend and I like her very much. She's smart and funny and she adores him."
Meanwhile, his daughter is concerned with sterner stuff. This week she was guest of honour at a party thrown for her by socialite Gilda Fitzpatrick and her older husband James. She'd asked for it to be stacked with interesting people: politicians, businesspeople, maybe the odd journalist.
But this is Auckland, not America. And despite Hefner's millions, despite her huge reputation, Helen Clark and John Banks didn't make it. Don Brash did.
