Millionaire Playboy publisher, film buff and party-thrower extraordinaire, Hugh Hefner turned 73 last month.

It's official: Hugh Hefner has left the harbour. No more bunny flag fluttering over that massive yacht. No more Playmates tripping down the gangplank on shopping forays into town. Gone, as if they had never been. Except for the vast yacht itself - exact weekly rental undisclosed, but generally reckoned to be the price of a three-bedroom terrace in Stoke Newington - and the nice young man in the naval uniform from Wanganui, New Zealand, who comes with it.

For our interview, Hefner himself was being as indiscreet as he wished to be; no more, no less.

And as is customary, a man from the Playboy organisation video taped every second of our meeting. Either it's for the Playboy archive or, more likely, to make sure we don't misquote him. So, relax, Hugh: every word on this page is verbatim. And I'd guess not a lot of it is new...

Long time no see

For the record, Hef was back in Cannes after a 40-year absence; he was last here in 1959, along with Kim Novak, Cary Grant, Brigitte Bardot and some bunnies. "We threw a party," he says, rather unnecessarily; Hef's reaction to almost anything seems to be to throw a party. "Playboy was celebrating its fifth anniversary," he recalls. "It was a time frame in which my whole life changed; the magazine was really on a roll. It had just reached a million circulation and, when I came back from Cannes, within the space of just four or five months, all kinds of things happened to my life. The first Playboy Mansion, the first Playboy Club. I started hosting a television show called Playboy Penthouse. We held the first Playboy Jazz Festival... My whole life changed within the space of a year, and it all began with this trip to Cannes."

Hefner loves Cannes, especially those nice gendarmes who provided security at his party last night. "One wishes the whole world could be like Cannes," he says, which certainly does count as a new thought.

He turned 73 last month, so the twinkle in his eye is slightly dimmed, but the chin still juts with only a hint of help, and, in other respects too, it's business as usual - even if he has of late become a voluble champion of Viagra.

But he also has a passion for film, screening classics and new movies once a week in the Playboy Mansion. "I'm a movie buff," he says. "I've been a movie buff since I was a small boy. It's the stuff that my dreams come from, literally. I was raised in a very typically American midwestern puritan home, and the movies spoke to me in a magic kind of way, as they have to many generations. In a very repressive home, the world reflected in the films represented another possibility. And I think that I pursued those dreams. I think that, to some extent, my whole perception of love comes out of the romantic dreams in movies."

Happy days are here again

That perception took a bit of a knock during the 1980s, what with Hef's marriage (to Kimberley Conrad, Playmate of the Year 1989, now over), Aids and a more conservative atmosphere in the air. But hedonism is making a big comeback, reckons the chief playboy. "I think it has something to do with the fact that we're at the end of the century, so there's a certain nostalgia," he says. "Everybody's making lists, everybody's looking back over the century and doing documentaries. People are ready to live with a little style again. And party again.

"For people of a certain younger age, it represents a world that they maybe missed and they want to recapture somehow," he says. "I understand that very much, because I grew up during the Depression, and I looked back continually at what I perceived as a much freer or more swinging time in the roaring 1920s. I think young people today are doing exactly the same thing, looking back at the 1960s and 1970s. They feel as if that was a party they missed."

Party party party

Hefner seems incapable of going more than half-a-dozen sentences without saying the word "party", which is presumably a fair reflection of his life. There are the weekly parties at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, which are now back on the agenda. "They calmed down for a long time because I got married and was kind of off the scene for the better part of a decade," he says. "When the marriage ended early last year, it was really like coming back out to play again. And whole generations of young people were very anxious to have me do that."

Maybe some of the latter were at the previous night's party, but the CD rack suggests a different demographic: Celine Dion, Michael Bolton and Rod Stewart occupy pride of place.

Later that night, I ran into Hef again at the Austin Powers party, flanked by statuesque Playmates all at least six inches taller than him, and all wearing those dresses where the front part and the back part are held together by an elaborate system of laces.

And, of course, partying is what Hef will be doing as you read this. It is, he explains, his new girlfriend's 21st birthday. "We'll be in both Paris and London, so I don't know quite what we'll be doing, but we'll be sure making love and celebrating," he says.

And his girlfriend's name? "Sandy and Mandy Bentley," says Hef. Verbatim.