Authors: Izabella St. James
The carpet in the upstairs hallway also had not been changed in who knows how long. Everything was just old and stale. Archie the house dog would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains, adding the scent of urine to the general scent of decay. At the beginning, I ignored all of these things because I was having too much fun to notice. But as time went on, the glamour and excitement of living at this famous address was replaced with disdain for all of the dirty, smelly things. I am glad to see that having a television show has encouraged Hef to replace the hallway carpets and update some things in the house; it is looking much better than it used to. Nevertheless, the Mansion is still not the highly glamorous place many people imagine it to be. In a sense, I wish Hef had kept the cameras out of the Mansion, and maintained that aura of mystique and fantasy that the Mansion had before.
6: The Blonde Boob Brigade
.
“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb... and I also know that I’m not blonde.”
—Dolly Parton
I
n 1998, after ten years of marriage, Hef and “Playmate for a Lifetime” Kimberly Conrad separated, but Mr. Playboy was not lonely for long. With the help of his friends, Hef re-entered the L.A. nightclub scene. Like Austin Powers, Hef was hermetically unsealed and came out ready to swing once again. As he repeatedly mentions in interviews, “I discovered a whole new generation that was waiting for me to come out and play!” It certainly helped that he had his own troupe of Playmates to take out, and a magazine that many young women longed to pose for. Hef has learned that going out with beautiful women attracts even more beautiful women. It is not a coincidence that Hef always goes out with large groups of blondes and at one time had seven Girlfriends; the publicity is priceless.
The original party posse was composed of the “Foursome”: Brande, Sandy, Mandy, and Jessica. Hef met Brande Roderick at a nightclub in 1998, and then met Sandy and Mandy Bentley, the twins, a couple of months later at Garden of Eden, another Hollywood nightclub. The twins wanted their friend Jessica to move into the Mansion with them. Although not attracted to Jessica specifically, Hef agreed because she was part of the package. Hef and the girls were seen out on town, and Hef was getting back in the limelight. He realized that four Girlfriends were better than one and that all of this attention was good for business. Things changed in the middle of 2000, when his beloved Brande, after becoming a Playmate and Playmate of the Year, moved to Hawaii to join the cast of
Baywatch Hawaii
. Her departure changed the group dynamic. I’d heard that by August, the twins and Jessica were asked to leave the Mansion. The Mansion regulars cite many outrageous reasons for why the twins were finally ousted. Whatever the cause, Hef had enough, and it did not end pretty. Although I have been around them many times, I do not know them personally. All I know is what I have heard from the butlers when I lived there, that they were high maintenance, that they used to sleep with some of the staff, and that they had many other things going on outside of the Mansion. They knew how to play Hef, and it worked for a long time. I believe it was these girls that ruined it for the rest of us; Hef spoiled them and then ended up being disappointed and hurt. He would never be that generous and trusting later on.
After the “Foursome” fell apart, Hef needed new girls. Enter Tina Jordan. He also met her at a nightclub, and Tina became his main Girlfriend and helped him recruit a new group of girls. This is when the concept of the party posse was born. The original seven Girlfriends were seen on the videotaped Playboy special
Inside the Playboy Mansion
and composed of Tina Jordan, Regina Lauren, Cathi O’Malley, Buffy Tyler, Katie Lohman, Stephanie Heinrich, and Tammy. This was the era of Girlfriends becoming Playmates. One after another almost identical blonde appeared in the pages of
Playboy
. Becoming Hef’s Girlfriend was synonymous with becoming a Playmate. Hef must have been happy to realize that the monthly need for new centerfolds also meant that he would have a steady supply of Girlfriends. But the scheme fell apart on both the personal and business levels. First, the readers supposedly became tired of seeing Hef’s Girlfriends in the magazine, not necessarily because they were Girlfriends, but because they all looked the same: platinum blondes with fake-looking breasts. Secondly, making the Girlfriends Playmates seemed to backfire because as soon as they got their title and a new car, they left. Some of them wanted a quick fix: they got the $25,000 that the Playmate title paid directly, and the upper tier of modeling or acting jobs it could lead to, or the prestige one could trade on. For Hef, it was another tough lesson learned, one that again affected our lives when we moved into the Mansion. The ghosts of ex-Girlfriends came back to haunt us.
That group fell apart too, quicker it seemed than the previous one. These were young girls who just wanted to have fun. From what I heard, after getting a new Escalade, Buffy drove it to see her boyfriend in Texas; Hef found out, and she was kicked out. Regina apparently was asked to leave for trying to sell Hef’s smoking jacket, among other things. Cathi and Katie left for reasons unknown to me. When Katie, Buffy, and Cathi left, Dalene Curtis, Kim Stanfield, and Michelle joined the group. When Regina left, Christi Shake joined. And a new girl, Holly Madison, had just moved in; I remember how excited she was to finally be living at the Mansion. I first met Holly weeks before she moved in. She was one of those girls who came to the parties and Fun in the Sun. It looked to me like she was always trying very hard to get Hef to notice her by hanging around his Girlfriends. I guess Holly’s efforts paid off. Tammy asked Hef to allow her to move in, and he agreed. From what I heard about Holly, she had moved to Los Angeles from Oregon and worked at Hooters as a waitress. She couldn’t afford a place to live; she was sleeping on someone’s couch, and begged Tammy to help her. Holly was invited to stay in bedroom three which had three beds in it and was used by girls who were visiting. As soon as Holly moved in, she began an intense sexual relationship with Hef. She was the only one who had sex with him regularly and replaced his main Girlfriend, Tina, in all of the bedroom duties. My guess is that she knew what she had to do to stand out and she did it. I remember a couple of weeks after I started going out with Hef, some of them said they didn’t mind the fact that Holly was becoming intimate with Hef and spending so much time with him because it freed them up. She didn’t seem to have any friends, and I always made a point of being nice to her and sitting beside her since no one else did, until a girl named Bridget came along.
Within the three months it took for me to finish my last semester in law school, the group had dwindled to Tina, Tammy, Holly, and Michelle. Dalene left after Hef made her a Playmate and helped her get a new car. I don’t know why Kim Stanfield left, but I heard that Christi Shake got caught with a boyfriend in Maryland and had to leave as well. Holly was ecstatic because she didn’t like sharing a room with Christi, and now that the other girls were gone, she had her own room. Besides the fact the group was now reduced to only four, the girls knew that Tina Jordan was planning her exit as soon as everything with her centerfold was settled. When Tina left, Michelle planned to leave as well. She already had a place in a beachside town, and would get up early and drive there to get her apartment prepared for move in. Tina’s layout was initially rejected and she had to reshoot it. There was talk about how she was too old and didn’t have the fresh girl-next-door look and the editors were tired of making compromises to get Hef’s Girlfriends into the magazine. But Tina had devoted a lot of her time to Hef and did not want to leave without making her dream of becoming a Playmate come true, and she was certain that it was bound to happen very soon. On our trip back from New York, she confided in me that on a trip to Las Vegas with Hef, she and the girls snuck downstairs to gamble and she had met a man who became her boyfriend. In fact, he was from New York and she snuck out to see him when we were there. We heard rumors that she was caught seeing him by Hef’s security, but Hef never let on that he knew anything.
Because Tina was preparing to leave, she tolerated Holly’s aggressively possessive behavior toward Hef; it made her feel better knowing that a potential replacement was waiting in the wings. I didn’t think Holly would ever become the main Girlfriend: it seemed to me that she didn’t have that certain
je ne sais quoi
that previous main Girlfriends had. She was reserved and aloof and didn’t have the charisma that Brande and Tina possessed. When Tina finally left in February 2002, Holly moved in immediately. I truly believe Hef was not ready for anyone to move in so quickly, but I think he knew there were no other options and Holly was the only one asking for the job. From then on, Holly devoted herself to becoming Hef’s first lady. This effort, which appeared premeditated to me, involved her physical transformation, mannerisms, adapting his interests and habits, and carefully examining what traits and characteristics he liked in other women and trying to adopt those as her own.
When Tina left, the group had to be restructured; Hef was left with only two girls, Tammy and Holly. At the beginning of 2002, when I became his steady Girlfriend, there were so many girls wanting to become Girlfriends that it was normal for Hef to go out with as many as fifteen girls. We didn’t mind the extra girls because they entertained Hef and we wouldn’t have to. But there was a group of favorites that included Emma and Lea, a fellow Canadian rocker girl. Roxy, a single mom, established a secure place in Hef’s troupe through her friendship with Tina. There was another girl that was always around named Stacy Burke; she seemed much older than everyone else and was a fetish model. I didn’t know how she got into the group. For two months, Holly and Tammy were the only girls living at the Mansion with Hef, and they wanted to keep it that way for as long as they could because they were getting more money and more of everything, but then Hef asked Emma and me to move in.
Of course a couple of the other girls became unhappy about that and decided to take matters into their own hands. Roxy moved her stuff into one of the rooms in the guesthouse. I believe she wanted to plant some roots to feel more secure about her place in the group now that her friend Tina was gone. Roxy also had a daughter, and it seemed to me that she used that fact to remain in the group as long as she did; she always told us that Hef would not kick her daughter out on the street, and she was right. Initially her daughter stayed at the Mansion only on the weekends, but soon began spending most of her time there, staying in her mom’s room. I felt for the 12-year-old girl; she was a very sweet, polite young girl, and I did not want her to become a victim of all of the Mansion drama. Hef told us several times that he was not fond of Roxy and that he felt there was no attraction there, but he did not know how to end the relationship. We thought it was silly that this powerful businessman did not know how to break up with a girl, but I was glad to see his soft side.
In the meantime, Lea moved in. She is a model who didn’t want to give up her friends and her independence, but the lure of the allowance and her need for a new car, coupled with our efforts to get her to move in, finally swayed her to do it. But she was focused and determined and left within months. She saved every penny and got a nose job and a new car, then she split. I admired her for her discipline. I didn’t want her to leave because I really liked her and had fun with her; plus, I knew that someone less likeable was bound to take her place.
Stacy also made herself comfortable in a guestroom; she even moved her cats in. Hef actually liked Stacy’s personality—she watched movies with him and didn’t cause any trouble; plus, she was a willing bedroom participant, so Hef was glad to let her stick around. One day Emma called me to come over to Lea’s room. They wanted to show me something on the computer—still shots of Stacy in a very graphic adult film. We also called Tammy to show her what they found. We couldn’t believe it; we knew she had done fetish stuff but not a full-on porno. None of the Girlfriends really wanted Stacy in the group. I thought she was an embarrassment. At the Grammys, she wore some latex get-up; at the Midsummer Night’s Dream party, she dressed up as a horse with a gag in her mouth and Hef had to have a talk with her about it. She was a nice, unthreatening girl, so she stuck around, but the porno was just too much; we didn’t want that kind of association. Tammy said we should show Hef; we all agreed, and I was the one sent to get him. “Honey, Lea and Emma found something on the Internet, and we want you to see it,” I said. Holly, who was also in the room with Hef, followed him. The girls showed him what they found, and we unanimously told him it was not cool with us to have Stacy in the group. It was the one and only time that we as a group had “voted” someone off. Hef knew what had to be done and did it. Although Stacy was allowed to come to the Mansion for movie nights and was welcome to attend the parties, she would no longer be part of the group or go out with us. Some months later, I heard that she thought it was me who got her kicked out, but that was not the case. Lea and Emma were the ones who had found the dirt on her. Stacy continued to faithfully come to the Mansion every weekend (although she lived in Long Beach), and had confided in others that she was waiting for us—me and Emma—to leave because once we were gone, no one would object to her rejoining the group. Poor girl, I never told her that I always thought she was a nice person and that it was the whole group who voted to get rid of her. That is why almost two years after Emma and I moved out, she is still not back in the group and never will be if Holly has anything to say about it.
When Stacy was ousted, her space was quickly taken by Emma’s friend Susan. She worked at Neiman Marcus, was sleeping on a friend’s couch, and was looking for a break. Emma introduced her to Hef at Barfly, and she immediately asked him if he had any vacancies at the Mansion. A few days later she moved in. Susan was Canadian like me (I am a Canadian citizen, consider myself Polish-Canadian, and hope to be American as well), and I thought she was sweet. She had lost her mom to cancer, did not have a father, and longed for a sense of family. She was recently divorced, and from what she told us, she was a trophy wife who had been emotionally abused by her husband. It appeared to me that she had some work done, though she never wanted to admit it to us. I once asked her who did her veneers, and she screamed that her teeth were perfect and real. When a couple of months later one of her veneers cracked, and Hef announced in the limo that her insurance didn’t cover the replacement veneers, I thought she was going to die of embarrassment. She seemed to me to be a helpless girl, with no skills in life other than modeling—Susan wanted Hef to buy her a computer, but didn’t know how to turn one on. I think she relied on her looks and on men to take care of her. We became friends mostly because Emma was our mutual friend, and because I felt sorry for her; I felt like she needed us. Susan reminded Hef of his wife Kimberly’s blue-eyed cool blonde look, and he liked that. He was always very gentlemanly and romantic with her; it drove Holly crazy.