But Hefner's real present has come from the Playboy Club at the Palms. There is a reason he picked Vegas to party. I suspect licensing the Playboy brand name to the Palms has proven a life-saving move for the magazine titan. But the Playboy Club is not where Playboy magazine comes alive. Since opening, it has become clear that only part of what made Playboy magazine great has come to Vegas.

The place is very much a Vegas offering for 2008.

The classic Playboy magazine appeal was to Mick Jagger's Lucifer, the heterosexual man of wealth and taste. So, Playboy magazine always offered culture with the pics of naked chicks: jazz, literary fiction and serious journalism. The Playboy experience had an intellectual component lacking in its adult-magazine competitors ("Dear Penthouse, I never thought this could happen to me...").

In Vegas, the Palms' Playboy Club entirely jettisons all the print magazine's high-end pretensions. Taste is out. Only wealth remains. No Norman Mailer memorial or bop combos playing Bird.

The Palms' take on bringing Playboy to life makes no play for your mind; rather, the experience is all about appealing to elitism and exclusivity that comes only from financial cachet, not cultural. Most casinos offer incentives to get you in the door to gamble. But the Playboy Club charges admission, making it the only cover charge in Vegas that I know of just to get inside a casino to gamble.

On their website you can learn about the Playboy dealers, where they are asked centerfold-style questions. Marilyn Monroe, the original centerfold who married playwright Arthur Miller, would be sad.

Dealer Ashley's favorite book, she said, is "The Seagull by Jonathan Livingston" (sic). Whereas dealer Elicia, asked her favorite, offers: "Books? I'm confused." Harry Potter is another favorite. Guilty pleasures are no more than high-calorie food, and most answers are only a few words. The minds of these women are not being marketed, nor are their thoughts solicited about the games they deal. They are presented as blandly as possible, only to generate some male interest. The picture is the most important part of each biography. If you want to know the dealers, you will have to sit at a table and gamble a lot of money, hoping to chat them up. The bunny cocktail servers (Debbie Harry of Blondie was one back in the old days) do not appear on the website. It is only the dealers, whose work time can be very expensive, who are offered as enticements.

In fact, everything about how Playboy's name is used in Vegas is about cold, hard cash: from the luxury suites (the Hefner suite has a pool) to the high-limit gambling, including even the exclusive lounge environment with a priceless view below. The message: You are at the top.

Back in the day, you could claim to read Playboy magazine for the articles, but Playboy at the Palms is where you go to leer at scantily clad female dealers while drinking overpriced booze and spending lots of money being pampered: decadence for sale without any redeeming social value beyond costly fun.

Not that there is anything wrong with any of this. But it is a formula for success in Vegas that means the more cultural aspects of Playboy simply don't fit here -- or maybe Vegas proves the highfalutin pretensions of Playboy magazine were simply a veneer all along.