Dionte Smith used to ride the bus to the Playboy Mansion. From there, it was only about a 10-minute walk up the hill from Wilshire Boulevard, which lines the lower portion of the high-end Los Angeles neighborhood of Holmby Hills. Along the way, Smith — an aspiring soap opera writer — could marvel at the wealth and grandeur of nearby properties, each one imbued with a sense of Hollywood history. “It was cool to, like, go by Aaron Spelling’s house,” Smith tells SFGATE, referring to the longtime mega-producer behind hits like “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place.” Sometimes, Smith says, he’d spot music producer (and founder of Interscope Records) Jimmy Iovine riding a go-kart on his property. “The walks were always memorable,” he says.

Eventually, Smith would reach the gates of the sprawling Gothic-Tudor Playboy Mansion. He’d run his hands over his outfit to loosen wrinkles or remove any small flecks of dirt that had kicked up during his walk. Then he’d step inside and clock in, ready for another day as one of the last butlers at the most hedonistic house in America.

“It’s like being at the White House,” Smith says with a laugh, perhaps speaking both to the property’s interior design choices and to its stature in the American consciousness. Built in 1927, the ornate 20,000-square-foot home was first envisioned as a suburban getaway for the Letts family, a prominent brood that had parlayed department store money into real estate development. It was the Letts who first bought up and remade what is today Westwood, around UCLA. They built their mansion alongside the LA Country Club as a status symbol, a place to flaunt their genteel Westside prominence. In 1971, Playboy Enterprises — maker of what was then the most famous men’s magazine on the planet — purchased the home, and founder Hugh Hefner moved in, swagger and all.

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FILE: An aerial view of the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, Calif.

By the time Smith was hired, the house had cycled through just about every possible iteration. It was the demure and historic Los Angeles estate that had been turned into a pleasure-seeking party palace. It had reached the absolute height of pop culture relevancy and been reduced to a backdrop for early-aughts reality television. It was an ethereal place in the mind of millions who would never see the inside or touch the waters of its mysterious grotto. It was also, at its most stripped down, the somewhat cluttered home of Hefner, yet another wealthy octogenarian living out his last days in sunny Southern California.

And in those waning hours, there was Smith, dutifully waiting among the drapes.

Originally hired out of college as a filing clerk for Playboy Enterprises, Smith says that he was approached in 2015 by a manager one day with a proposition: How about working a large event up at the mansion? Though the property’s more........

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