Posted on 6th January 2009 03:00PM
Hugh Hefner learned about love from the movies.
The 82-year-old Playboy founder - who is now dating 19-year-old twins Karissa and Kristina Shannon since his split from Playmates Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson - had a loveless childhood and resorted to visiting the cinema in his quest to find out more about his emotions.
He said: "Everything I learned about love, I learned from the movies. The reality is because I was not shown affection, I escaped into an alternate universe, and it came right out of the movies. Love for me is defined almost exclusively in terms of romantic love as defined by the films of my childhood.
"The movies, other than family, were the major influence of my childhood. I was in a very typical Midwestern, Methodist home with a lot of repression and not much demonstrative expression of emotion. My escape was the darkened theatre."
The ageing lothario also claims his childhood passion for movies heavily influenced his taste in women.
He explained: "I think my fascination with blondes is directly connected to the impact the platinum blondes had in the movies of the 1930s. Jean Harlow, Alice Faye, all of those Busby Berkeley showgirls. You can't go wrong. Well, you probably could, but what fun."
Hugh - who will give Kendra away when she marries Hank Baskett later this year - also revealed one of the things he is most proud of is staying friends with his exes.
The twice-divorced media mogul added to the Los Angeles Times newspaper: "Brian Grazer, who is working on a movie about me, made a comment that I was the only man who had made love to over a thousand women and they all still liked him.
"And I do take some pride, in fact, that I remain friends with the majority of former wives and girlfriends. I am a romantic."
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