Down the Rabbit Hole (16 page)

“I can't explain
myself
, I'm afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I'm not myself, you see.”

—
Lewis Carroll,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I
n just one year, I had gone from the newest member of Hef's Party Posse to the one with the most seniority. Tina, Vicky, April, Lisa, Candice, and Carolyn had all gone their separate ways. In their place was an entirely new cast of characters: Bridget (my sole friend), Daphne (a pretty, cunning girl who quickly became one of Hef's favorites), Dianna (Hef adored her because she had the helpless “damsel in distress” act down pat), Elizabeth (one of Daphne's sidekicks who was low on the totem pole because Hef found her shrill and demanding), Whitney (at 30, the oldest girlfriend and Hef's least favorite because he considered her “pushy”), and finally Amber (a seemingly sweet as sugar, quiet girl who defected from side to side when it came to the battle between the Mean Girls and me).

While the girls were different, some things never changed. With the exception of Bridget, I was no more successful in making friends with this group of girls than with the last. To make matters worse, since none of these new girls were being given the Playmate pictorials they so badly wanted, they therefore weren't kept busy with photo shoots, video shoots, and promotional appearances like the last batch of girls had been. With all the extra time the new girls had to spend at the mansion counting their frustrations, the claws were perpetually out.

The Wednesday and Friday nightclub outings, which had seemed so exciting to me when I first joined the group, became dreadfully monotonous, not just to me, but to all of the girls. On Wednesdays, we would go to Concord or the Standard Lounge, and on Fridays, we would go to the upscale, but not star-studded, Barfly on Sunset Boulevard. Since there were no celebrities to be seen at Barfly, the girls hated it and referred to it as “Barf Fly” behind Hef's back. Each night out would begin with a limo ride to the nightclub, with Hef passing out his “thigh opening” Quaaludes to the girls in attendance. I still refused them, but many girls didn't. The evening out would always end with the girlfriends trying to convince Hef to go home a little earlier than usual. He usually insisted on staying out until 1
A
.
M
., but on the rare occasion he agreed to leave early, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Daphne, Dianna, and Elizabeth would beg Hef to bring us to cooler night spots instead of “Barf Fly,” but he was loath to change his routine. Also, his cachet on the nightclub scene had subsided over the past year. He had been going out so often, he was no longer a novelty, and he was too high maintenance (always bringing a huge group and always demanding the best booth in the house) for the A-list clubs to be bothered with him anymore.

The dreaded “bedroom routine” still went on after each club night, but the parade of new girls joining the antics had subsided. In fact, anytime a woman the girls found to be a potential threat got too close to Hef, one of them (I was never sure who) would give her a “friendly warning” that herpes was “going around the mansion” and she would instantly back off. The rumor gained such momentum that I was witness to two instances of girls (who had slept with Hef; one was a former girlfriend, one was a weeklong fling) calling his office and asking that he pay for their herpes medication. Even though he grumbled about how he received a “full physical” every year, therefore it couldn't have been him that they got herpes from, he always ended up paying for the medication. I suppose he did it to keep them quiet and make them go away.

Daytime at the mansion was still as uneventful as ever. Looking for something to occupy our time, Bridget and I became official mansion tour guides. The job required that we familiarize ourselves with every fact about every nook and cranny of the 21,987-square-foot house and the 5.3-acre property. We hosted the frequent morning tours—mostly to servicemen and charity raffle winners—and we were even given custom Bunny costumes made specifically for us, which was a real treat considering that even Playmates weren't allowed to keep theirs. (While most people use the term “Playboy Bunny” to describe anyone associated with the magazine or Hef, the term actually refers to the waitresses who wore the Bunny costumes at the Playboy Clubs, which existed in the middle part of the last century. In the absence of these clubs, Playmates occasionally donned the costumes for photo shoots or public appearances.)

I spent a lot of time in the mansion's zoo, learning about the animals from the wonderful zoo staff. Hundreds of exotic birds and three types of monkeys called the grounds home. I made friends with a large spider monkey named Coco whom we eventually trained to be able to walk around on a leash.

One day, as a favor to Hef, I decided to take on the project of “organizing” his bedroom. Even for someone with a lot of time on her hands, it was a formidable task that ended up taking several days. From the first time I'd ever seen the inside of his bedroom to my days as his main girlfriend, Hef had managed to collect even more junk. A recent
Premiere
magazine profile of Hef had referred to his room as “the lair of the Playboy pack rat.”

One of his most prominent collections was his film library. At that time, many of the films he had collected were still languishing in stacks on his bedroom floor, in the form of ¾-inch tapes (which look like larger versions of traditional VHS tapes, all in generic gray clamshell cases). My main order of business was carrying all the tapes upstairs and filing them in one of his many video closets so they could await conversion to DVD by his “video staff” (who also operated as a human TiVo, taping every television program he circled in the
TV Guide
).

This ended up becoming quite the workout; I must have climbed up and down those stairs more than 300 times carrying heavy stacks of tapes. It was particularly unpleasant when I'd unearth a tape and realize it was coated in years-old dog urine.

As the piles diminished, ornately carved walls I had never seen (and which probably hadn't seen the light of day in a decade) appeared. While it felt good to see the room come together, I must say I found some things I would have rather not seen. Topping the list? An old reel stashed away in a drawer full of porn labeled “Girl and Dog.”

It made me wonder if Hef had ever thought about who was going to go through his things one day after he passed away. He was so fastidious about his public image and about having every moment in his life documented and recorded in a way that showed his life the way he wanted it shown.

I was disheartened to learn from one of his friends that he had plans to donate his scrapbook collection to a library or university after he passed, though he hadn't settled on which one at that point. It was such a personal and private collection, not just for him, but for anyone who'd ever been in his life.

Hef holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for largest scrapbook collection at over 2,000 volumes. He keeps them in his attic along with desks and supplies for his scrapbook staff (yes, he has a scrapbook staff) to paste everything together. Good or bad, anything written about him goes in the scrapbook. Every picture his photographers take ends up in the scrapbook. Every girl he takes out is pictured in the photos, and the insinuation that they slept together is there along with nude photos, in some cases. I'm sure many girls included in the scrapbooks wouldn't be too thrilled to learn they could be public property one day soon.

I know I wasn't. Granted, there wasn't anything scandalous about me in the scrapbooks, but it was humiliating to think that
anything
personal I had trusted him with could end up public property via their inclusion there, even if it was just something trivial like a sad note I had written to him. It was another thing that made me feel embarrassed, trapped, and forever branded.

In another attempt to occupy my time (and my brain), I began taking French lessons, acting classes, and real estate investment courses at UCLA. I needed to do something to stimulate my mind and avoid permanent bimbo status. The stammer I had developed continued to creep into my speech, and I hoped that furthering my education might somehow help. Bridget and I truly were kindred spirits. She had already received her master's degree, but felt the weight of mansion life affecting her head, too, and began taking classes as well.

The classes were the only part of my day that didn't in some way revolve around impressing Hef or conforming to his rules. He couldn't have cared less about what I was learning. To him, a woman's beauty is her most powerful asset . . . unless of course she happens to be famous.

Above all things, Hef is fascinated with fame (both his and other people's). He is obsessed with cataloguing his life as a public figure and keeps records of every press interview he's ever done. Celebrity is one of the few things that can't be bought—and Hef prides himself greatly on his 60-plus years in the spotlight.

Whenever even the most Z-list celebrity would grace him with his or her presence, Hef would drop everything to accommodate the “star.” It made me feel so incredibly insignificant, and it was embarrassing to watch him act even cheesier and more fake than he usually did. Hef never even bothered to introduce us to his guest—as if we were some lifeless mannequins unworthy of such an “honor.”

While I had always dreamed of one day becoming an actress, it wasn't until I lived at the mansion that I began craving fame strictly for fame's sake. In some corner of my mind, I thought that maybe if I became famous I would have some value. Perhaps I would earn Hef's respect after all. Maybe I could even score a pictorial in the magazine.

My life had become so backwards. I had once looked at a
Playboy
pictorial as a stepping-stone to an acting career, but over the past few years I had become so absorbed by
Playboy
that I started seeing fame as a stepping-stone to a pictorial. I was completely coming undone.

“W
E HAVE
P
INK
P
USSIES
!” a loud baby-voiced blonde shrieked, charging past security into our roped-off table at one of our regular night spots.

Hef
adored
Paris Hilton. Before she became a household name with her television show
The Simple Life,
Paris was a notorious socialite who was regularly mentioned, along with her sister Nicky, in Page Six.

With some sort of murky pink liquid (these shots were the “Pink Pussies” Paris referred to) sloshing out the tops of three shot glasses, Paris squeezed her way into our VIP section of the club. Like clockwork, Hef motioned for us to scoot down to make room next to him for Paris. According to Hef, she was a “celebrity” (even though her meteoric rise to fame was still months away).

I took it upon myself to always take note when a celebrity would make the effort to introduce him- or herself to us or even simply blanket the group with a simple “Hi, girls!” Many of them ignored us entirely and spoke to Hef as if he were the only person in the room. Since Paris took the time to introduce herself, she fell into the “nice” category.

It was the heyday of the club scene in Los Angeles, so we would see Paris around semi-regularly. She'd always make a point to come over and say hello to us—and each time Hef would just beam like a perverted grandfather. At one point, I heard, she even began discussing the possibility of doing a pictorial with
Playboy
photo editor Marilyn Grabowski.

But a few weeks later, Paris, in the lowest low-rise jeans, the skimpiest blue top, and the darkest spray tan I had ever seen, appeared tableside during one of our club nights at the Standard Lounge to speak with Hef. I noticed she seemed more subdued than usual as she leaned into his “good ear.” She appeared to be explaining something to him. When she eventually walked away, Hef turned towards me and said: “She can't pose for the magazine because her mother said she would disinherit her.” Whether that was true or if it was just an excuse she made up in order to back out of the discussions, I don't know.

Right before her new Fox reality show aired, Paris's now infamous sex tape surfaced, making her the most talked about woman on the planet.
1 Night in Paris
quickly became one of the bestselling porn videos of all time. Posing nude for
Playboy
wouldn't have been nearly as controversial as her sex tape. What nude photos did for Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s, sex tapes were now doing for 21st-century starlets.
The Simple Life
premiered to more than 13 million viewers.

I certainly wasn't planning on ever making a sex tape, but any TV appearances I could get—even it was just as “Bunny Number 2”—I jumped on. Given our roles as mansion tour guides, Bridget and I were often drafted to help play hostess when television shows came to film. During a shoot for MTV's
Doggy Fizzle Televizzle,
Bridget and I gave Snoop Dogg the official tour. When MTV returned to shoot an episode of
Viva La Bam
on the property, I was asked to be the Bunny who interacted with the cast. Desperate to swipe the spotlight away from me, Daphne came to crash the shoot, but her spot ended up on the cutting room floor. Shucks.

When MTV Cribs shot a Playboy Mansion episode, only one girlfriend could fit in the doorway alongside Hef for the opening shot—and since I was his main girlfriend, I got the part. The crew took a liking to me and asked that I lead them along on the tour. (One of the other girls in particular tried shoving her face on camera as much as she could. She was green with envy that I was getting this opportunity and rolled her eyes whenever they asked me to say something on film.)

Rarely would a request come through to shoot all the girlfriends together, but before the holidays one year, a Los Angeles news station asked to film a segment with all the girls in our pajamas in front of the mansion's Christmas tree. Hef insisted we each wear the same matching oversize flannel pajamas he kept in bulk in his closet, but I decided to wear my own slim-fitting pajamas with red Playboy Bunny heads printed on them. Hef was extremely offended and demanded that I march back upstairs and put on the de rigueur pink flannels. Was I one of his children?