There’s a new profile in Playboy of Hugh Hefner’s teenage sons, Marston, 18, and Cooper, 17. The boys live with their mother, 44 year-old former Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad, in a house on the grounds of the Playboy estate but separated by about 100 yards and by large hedges from the mansion. Conrad and Hefner split up in 1998 after 9 years of marriage, but are technically still married as Conrad refused to grant Hef a divorce.*

The older son, Marston, was also featured in an interview with his dad in the June, 2008 issue of GQ. Christie Hefner, Hugh’s 56 year-old daughter from a previous marriage, has announced plans to resign as CEO of Playboy Enterprises on January 31, 2009. Director Jerome Kern is going to serve as “interim non-executive chairman” as a replacement is located for Christie. Judging from all this press it’s starting to look like Hef’s sons will take over the empire once they’re old enough.

Marston comes across as a thoughtful, smart young guy. He cares about world affairs and tells GQ he reads Newsweek, Time and The New Yorker. His ideal woman is someone he can talk to as he’s been around perfect beauties all his life. As his mom explains it, “It’s like working at Krispy Kreme – you don’t eat all the doughnuts.”

Younger brother Cooper has more of his dad’s enthusiasm for women. He says he’s dated a few women at one time and his mom has had to talk to him about it:

“I’m not going to have multiple girlfriends — not at the same time,” 18-year-old Marston Hefner says in the January issue of Playboy “I can’t imagine that.”

His brother, 17-year-old Cooper Hefner, begs to differ.

“I can imagine doing that. I don’t think it’s an odd thing to do,” he says. “You date around to try to find a connection with some girl.”

Cooper admits he’s “already gotten in trouble” and had the “revolving-door conversation” with his mother, former Playmate Kimberley Conrad.

“One girl comes in the front door while the other one gets pushed out the back,” Cooper says, adding that his mother has told him, “‘We do not have a revolving door in this house!’

“She’s all about one girlfriend at a time,” he says….

So do the boys ever want to run Playboy one day?

“I definitely want to be involved with the company,” Cooper says. “If I were to take over the company or have a say in what’s going on, I’d want the girls to be presented more as they were in the pictorials back in the 1950s and 1960s -— kind of artsy, classy. I would like to bring back that retro-class feel.”‘

[From US Weekly]

Marston also has a vision for Playboy’s future that involves a change of direction for the men’s magazine. He says that it should be more multicultural and intelligent, which is much like his ideal girlfriend:

Okay, let’s say you were to take over the business one day. Have you given any thought to how you would change it?

“As far as the nudity goes, I don’t think I would change a lot, except maybe make the pictures cool and artsy instead of some really obvious setting. It’s usually, like, cowgirl. You know what I mean? I’d do something tight, like a painted body on a crazy art canvas. I’d want to make it cool again. Not like now, where it’s some cheesy saying and then a Playboy Bunny on a T-shirt.”

What about the Playboy aesthetic?

“I’d make it much more multicultural and diverse. Not so many blonds. I’d mix it up. Just how my dad has his taste, I have my taste.”

Your dad, I say, he’s a man with a specific…type. I’d say: blond. I’d say: surgically augmented. I’d say: not exuding a tremendous amount of (outward) intellectual ambition. How different are your tastes?

“The ones I find attractive are brunet, blue eyes, and that’s about it. An intelligent woman that I can have a conversation with.… That centerfold in the magazine probably wouldn’t be my girlfriend, because I wouldn’t find her attractive. I don’t care about fake boobs if the girl has a good personality, but most girls with fake boobs I don’t find attractive—because of why they got the fake boobs in the first place.”

[From GQ]

Marston told GQ writer Steven Hurst when he asked specifically about it that he’s never really sought out the mansion during parties or tried to catch people getting naughty on the grounds because “It’s my house. Just knowing people are having sex at my house is uncomfortable.”

Marston plans to go to college, he hadn’t decided where when he spoke to GQ, and Cooper is reaching the age where he’ll soon do the same. It may be a few years until we see a more artsy, classier version of Playboy.

[Much thanks to my twitter and Facebook friends who helped with this story: Busy Bee Blogger, Agent Bedhead, Kimberly, and Cherlee.]

*While Wikipedia lists their year of separation as 1999, a recent article in GQ has it as 1998. Photo credit: Playboy.com