Looking remarkably fresh for a person who has been bombed and strafed by the media for the last 18 months, Jessica Hahn swept into an office in the Playboy Building last week, flashing $12,000 worth of personal reconstructive surgery.
What had hurt the most? an interviewer asked. ”My nose,” she said.
”I also had my teeth and breasts done,” she explained, settling her deeply unzipped black dress onto a beige sofa and shaking an immense amount of hair, ”but the nose was really annoying. All the bandages. Not being able to breathe.
”But now I am so grateful. It`s made a difference.”
A difference? ”I`m really happy for a change,” she said, speaking not only of physical changes but mental growth that has included the chance to tell her side of a messy story. ”I`m not angry,” she began. ”I feel better. Don`t use this-it sounds like a cliche-but I`m not afraid anymore. I`m grateful.
”This was my therapy. I am, you know, free now. I`m not afraid of people anymore. That was my biggest problem. I felt if I disappointed somebody, they were going to just cast me away. I needed to be wanted, and that`s how you get yourself in trouble.
”People say, `Jessica, aren`t you craving attention?` Well, I think everybody in this world would die without attention. It`s like water to a plant,” she said, pointing to a fern in the corner of the room.
”Don`t you mean affection?” the interviewer asked. Hahn paused, appeared confused, then started to argue. ”Affection? Attention?” she said. ”It`s the same thing, isn`t it? You want to be noticed.”
Hahn certainly has been noticed in the eight years since, as a secretary for the Full Gospel Pentecostal Church in the working-class town of Massapequa in Long Island, N.Y., she accepted an invitation on Dec. 4, 1980, from faith healer John Wesley Fletcher to fly down to Tampa to meet his friend-her idol- evangelist Jim Bakker.
Running through her story once again, Hahn said she drank a glass of drugged wine in a motel room in nearby Clearwater. She wound up in bed with Bakker and later with Fletcher, who pulled all the blankets onto his side of the bed after they made love, fell asleep and left her freezing.
It was an ungentlemanly oversight for Fletcher and a very expensive one for Bakker. His television ministry, known as PTL, foundered after Hahn made their affair public in March, 1987. Three months later, PTL filed for bankruptcy reorganization with $130 million in debts.
”You mean,” the interviewer asked, ”that, at the end of all you went through, if John Wesley Fletcher had given you one blanket, none of this would have happened? The PTL empire would still be going? Jim and Tammy Bakker would still be in control?”
Hahn paused.
”Yes,” she said. ”If they`d done just one little thing to show I was human, I probably would have kept quiet.”
As historians note, remembering England`s King Richard III, empires have fallen over details, such as the lack of a horse at a crucial moment in war. Hahn`s decision to enter into battle began five years ago. In 1983, she confided the details of the encounter to her pastor, Rev. Gene Profeta. He called in a friend, Paul Roper, a self-styled Christian vigilante from Anaheim, Calif., to help Hahn defend herself against worried PTL staffers who were pressing her to sign a document denying that any incident took place.
Roper was no stranger to theological frays. Several months before he met Hahn, he had taken on Rev. Ralph Wilkerson, colorful founder of Anaheim`s 10,000-member Melodyland Christian Center, accusing him of misspending church funds for personal purposes. Roper took control of Melodyland`s finances himself, dumped Wilkerson, sold off the church`s two planes, slashed salaries, dismantled its television ministry and, in the words of one admirer, ”turned the place around in six months.”
”I never could figure out what Paul Roper did,” Hahn said. ”He told me at various times that he was an accountant, a minister and a lawyer.” He also knew how to operate a tape recorder. After taping Hahn in a 1983 session in which she described her motel encounter with the two evangelists, he negotiated a hush-money settlement two years later with PTL for $265,000, gave Hahn $20,000 of the first payment of $115,000 and kept $95,000. When the story eventually broke in 1987, he released a transcript to newspapers. (Roper, through a representative in his Anaheim office, declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Though many people, in similar situations, might have gone to a therapist, worked through their emotions in private and tried to rebuild their lives, Hahn, now 29, is happy she went public. ”I was quiet for seven years,” she said. ”It was either, `Jessica, say nothing` and let other people tell `The Jessica Hahn Story,` or tell it myself.”
That she has done in hundreds of interviews. She has been the subject of three articles in Playboy, which included a second set of nude pictures in the September issue. She has described her sexual encounters in details that could only interest a dry cleaner. Last week, during her swing through Chicago, she also appeared at the Limelight nightclub, at 632 N. Dearborn St., where she signed autographs for three hours.
”It`s basically very simple,” she said. ”One thing happened, that I decided to go ahead and tell my story. After that, I took any opportunity that came up. The one that felt right was Playboy. It`s just the way my life has happened, but what a cast. You`ve got Hugh Hefner, Jim Bakker and all the rest of them. You couldn`t plan this with the best PR people in the world.”
Does Hahn feel, well, dull when she is not center stage? ”Yeah,” she said. ”I feel very uncomfortable.” She clearly has come a long way from a broken home on Long Island, where her father, she has said, ”treated us in a real bad way.” When Jessica was 2, he abandoned his wife and three children. Nor was he close to the family before that. ”My mother told me that, on the day I was born, he refused to hold me,” she said. The result, some say, is a young woman obsessed with older men of authority. Or, as Hahn herself has put it, ”Whoever was in charge, I wanted to be closest to him.”
Looking like a million dollars after taxes, the sum many claim she has earned thus far from Playboy, she said she plans to ”invest my money, get a job, perhaps go back to school.” She has bought a condominium in West Hollywood, after spending a year in the Playboy mansion in Holmby Hills, where she had a minor role in another drama, a $35 million palimony suit filed by Los Angeles matrimonial lawyer Marvin Mitchelson on behalf of Carrie Leigh, a former live-in lover of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, Hahn`s current employer. During events leading to that imbroglio, Leigh asked Hahn to hide away, for Leigh`s possible use in legal battles, a videotape Hefner and many friends made at freewheeling parties featuring a sexual game called ”the pile.” Hahn instead returned the tape to Hefner. Stung, after giving Leigh what he called ”the best years of her life,” Hefner later ordered up a Playboy story on his ”grief,” which staffers urged him not to run because it was ”silly”
and described himself as a ”hopeless romantic who has always fallen in love the way Pete Rose slid into second base-head first.”
The suit later was dropped, but Playboy staffers still are nervous that Leigh might offer evidence to competing magazines that would put Playboy`s founder in an embarrassing position. Perhaps as a preemptive strike, Hefner recently announced plans to marry Kimberley Conrad, a linkage, a Playboy staffer said last week, that ”may take place sometime next year.”
Meanwhile, moving in speedy company, Hahn has picked up considerable street smarts on how to hold center stage. ”Some background,” she pouted about the simple office surroundings while posing for a photographer during a break in her Tribune interview. ”Couldn`t we at least put a plant here?”
”Do you like being photographed?” she was asked.
”Not really. I`m real tired. Am I going to look tired? Where are we shooting from? The waist up? Promise?”
Hahn is sensitive. She is lumpy around the waist. Her thighs are fat. She also has a peculiar, wistful sadness.
”That guy who`s with you,” she whispered to the photographer, during a moment when the interviewer was out of the room, ”he`s real sweet. Like my grandfather. Not that he`s old or anything. He`s not. But his eyes are kind. I loved my grandfather.”
