HEFNER'S MANIFESTO; MOVIES, BLONDES, PJS, VIAGRA LOOM LARGE FOR PLAYBOY FOUNDER.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

Another sign it's the end of the millennium: discussing the joys and tribulations of single fatherhood with Hugh Hefner, the Big Bunnyman himself.

Turns out Mr. Playboy himself is making the most of it now that he's thoroughly disensconced from holy matrimony, reviving his uber-bachelordom and still making time on family night for cartoons with his boys.

``It's like having fought the wars and being around for the parade,'' Hefner said. ``What's happening now is the celebration after fighting the wars.''

Being Daddy, it turns out, is pretty great the second time around for Hef. And being a single daddy about town the second time around is even better.

``It's been a revelation,'' said Hefner, in black silk PJs and red silk bathrobe, over a large coffee table with built-in backgammon boards in the small, wood-paneled library at one end of the Playboy Mansion West in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles. ``There were so many young people waiting for me to come out and play.''

Play he has in recent months, usually with pretty blondes in tow. It's an image, replicated in endless celebrity shots of him out on the town, that seems to play well with many younger people.

``I just got through doing an interview with a 24-year-old guy from Details (magazine) who assures me I'm their idol and hero,'' he says. ``They feel to some extent as if they missed that (swinging '60s and '70s) era.''

Hef says he can identify with that youthful angst after growing up in the Depression era.

``Looking at the (Roaring) '20s, I felt like I had missed out on the party,'' Hefner said. ``It was like arriving at the party on Sunday morning. I think the kids today relate in some way to that. They feel they missed the party that to some extent I, personally, and the Playboy Mansion represent.''

Speaking of parties, Playboy has just issued ``Playmate Pajama Party.'' The video is part gamboling hotties, part history lesson, part Robin Leach-esque look - for the first time ever - at some of Hef's more notorious inner sancta at the Mansion, including his bedroom.

Hef's not totally enthralled with the video: ``I had relatively little creative input other than directions I gave (the director) at the start.''

Those directions: Take your standard naked-Playboy-models-running-around video, let 'em explore the mansion so you can show off the place to a curious universe, and sprinkle in some vintage video to give the big house some sort of historical context.

It's part of a more general Hef history binge, excavating his and his creation's past in the video and a series of foot-crushing coffee-table tomes.

``I think I am at a point in life and at an age where one holds on to what one has,'' Hefner said. ``Now we're at the end of the century, and everyone is looking back.''

Verdict on the video: Hef's got a messy bedroom.

``You can see that bedroom is lived in,'' he cracks. Indeed.

Perhaps it's not surprising for a man whose fashion sense can be summed up as pajamas and bathrobes 24/7. But aside from the accumulated geegaws, gimcracks and knickknacks of 40-some years of very public private life strewn over nearly every horizontal surface, there are the movies.

Literally thousands of them, recorded with near-curatorial zeal on professional-grade -3/4-inch videotape, of the dozens of classic films broadcast on satellite and cable channels hour after hour after hour every day.

``I don't want to miss them,'' he says. ``Being raised in a typical Midwestern Methodist home, I escaped into fantasies'' being spun by Hollywood, Hefner said, citing Busby Berkeley musicals and Frank Capra confections.

``They are the films that created the image of America,'' he says. ``It also defines who people want to be when they grow up.''

But ``Pajama Party'' doesn't do his collection justice.

``What you don't see in the video is the carefully color-coded, keyworded, cataloged library of films upstairs,'' Hefner says. ``All those tapes in the bedroom are waiting to see if they make the cut.''

Next observation: He's got some cutting to do.

Hef devotes Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights to movie viewing - complete with his preshow commentaries for the group of invited friends who crowd his large movie viewing room in the mansion's north end.

His all-time fave: ``Casablanca.''

He still shows the Bogey and Bergman classic annually, most recently because ``the girls I'm seeing now had never seen it. To see it with someone you care about is really wonderful.''

Um, yes, but Hef, what do you mean ``girls''?

Turns out Hefner is dating three women at once, including a pair of ``nice, Catholic'' twins from back in Chicago who are moving here in coming weeks.

``If you're going to come out, come out with a vengeance,'' Hefner says with more than a hint of self-satisfaction in his still-toothy grin. ``I'm a guy who always believed in knocking down the stereotypes of more conservatively bound members of the community.''

OK. Three simultaneous girlfriends brings up another question. Viagra?

``Oh, sure,'' Hefner gushes. ``I think I was the first kid on the block to get Viagra.''

Speaking of procreative urges, a statistical oddity: Hef's 73rd birthday is Friday, the optimal day to conceive a child to be born on Jan. 1, 2000. Does Hef love this? He loves this.

It's all a long way from last decade, which nearly took the hop out of his rabbit permanently.

``The '80s and early '90s were very repressive, with Reagan and Bush, the Moral Majority, the Meese Commission (on Pornography),'' Hefner said. It literally almost killed him.

The Playboy empire was teetering financially, while the era's moralists condemned Hef's out-of-step values. Even worse, director Peter Bogdanovich wrote a scathing book about the murder of former girlfriend and Playmate Dorothy Stratten that heavily criticized Hefner's role in her rise and tragic fall.

He blames that array of attacks for causing a 1985 stroke. His marriage to former ``Playmate for a Lifetime'' Kimberley Conrad four years later was, as he said, a search for a ``safe harbor.''

But it also meant, ironically, marrying ``into a situation not unlike my parents' marriage,'' he said. ``I put all of my hopes and dreams into a more traditional lifestyle. The children were very much a part of it. What was missing was the romantic part. We kind of drifted apart.''

Hefner and Conrad split about a year ago, at her suggestion. She now lives in the next estate over and has the couple's two boys with her most of the time, though he said he sees them ``nearly every day.''

Hef's term for his renewed bachelorhood: ``The unexpected epilogue. I not only survived, but prevailed. It's never been better than it is now.''

And now Hef is trying other things.

``Coming out of the marriage, one couldn't simply return to what they had done before, which is simply throwing parties,'' Hef said. He had to venture out into the world a bit from his Holmby Hills cloister. And venture he has.

``Prince said to party like it's 1999. Well, it is, and that's what we're doing,'' Hefner said.

There's the Valentine's Day party, the recent ``Boogie Nights'' party, the Midsummer Night's Dream party, and on and on.

And the list of invitees these days is exclusive, with not just old-school Hollywood stars, literati and jazzboes, but also 20-something slacker bands like Foo Fighters and younger glitterati such as Charlize Theron, Tori Spelling and Geoffrey Rush.

Now that society is busily evaluating the century's ups and downs, Hef wants to be counted as a definite up.

``I'm living the life that dreams are made of,'' Hefner said. ``People ask me, `Is it as good as it looks?' It's better. There's so much love in it, so much fun in it.''

Hey, if someone made a movie about your life, Hef, what would it be? ``One with a happy ending, an unbelievably happy ending.''

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Photo: ``I'm living the life that dreams are made of. People ask me, ``Is it as good as it looks?'' It's better. There's so much love in it, so much fun in it.''

Hugh Hefner