Ellen Gray: At 85, original playboy Hugh Hefner is a real Energizer bunny

I'M NOT QUITE ready to declare Hugh Hefner the new Betty White, but for an 85-year-old guy who spends most of the day in his PJs, he's having an interesting year:

* In January, the Playboy founder took his struggling company private, decades after giving up financial control of the empire that now includes a nearly 60-year-old magazine, Playboy TV and other adult entertainment properties and a licensing division responsible for seeing that Playboy gets paid every time its iconic bunny logo gets slapped on another T-shirt or tchotchke.

* In May, NBC announced that its fall lineup would include "The Playboy Club," a drama set in the 1960s inside the Chicago nightclub that launched a worldwide chain - one Hefner's now attempting to revive, with new Playboy clubs having recently opened in Las Vegas and London. Hefner narrates the first episode and will be represented in the series, which premieres Sept. 19, by an actor shown only from the back.

* In July, Hefner's sex life - or what might or might not remain of it - made headlines everywhere from TMZ.com to the Times of India, after his six-decades-younger bride-to-be, Crystal Harris, who'd jilted him a few days before their much-hyped wedding, told Howard Stern's radio listeners that sex between her and Hef lasted "like two seconds," happened only once and that she'd never seen the Playboy mogul naked.

Later, she'd apologize, saying Stern had rattled her, and the former couple's brief war of words on Twitter grabbed still more headlines.

* Hefner, for whom E!'s "reality" show "The Girls Next Door" has acted like Viagra on his public image, also helped Lifetime turn its planned program on his wedding into "Hef's Runaway Bride," a July 19 special in which he got to appear both wistful and philosophical inside the mansion while Harris - whose interview about what went wrong appears to have been conducted on the grounds of the same house she'd so recently fled - came off as the heavy.

Which, if you think about it too long, is only going to make your head hurt.

Ten days after that bit of theater aired, I found myself strolling the Playboy Mansion grounds in Los Angeles' Holmby Hills - talk about words I never expected to write - trying to figure out why so many have been intrigued for so long by a place that looks like a cross between a children's zoo and the setting for a slightly upscale miniature golf course.