Authors: Izabella St. James
If you pay attention, you’ll notice that he always says the very same things at interviews. I am surprised that his PR people have not caught on and pointed it out to him. He always says he is having the best time ever, and with every group of girls, he says this is the best group ever. Every Christmas was the best ever, every birthday or party was the best one ever. I think he doesn’t want to let the truth in to protect himself from the pain it would bring, and it would shatter the sense of harmony he needs to feel. He lives in a bubble of his own creation—literally, Hefworld. People joke that when we get old we revert back to that childlike stage; maybe it’s true. Why else would an eighty-year-old accomplished businessman get excited over his Girlfriends collecting Barbies and stuffed animals? Hef is Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. He built a playground, and everyone came to play with him. He created his own world. Not just a magazine, not just a lifestyle, but truly a world of his own. He acknowledges that which he wants and ignores the rest.
I think the reason he believes all these lies is because of his ego, which will not allow him to believe that he, the original Playboy, is the one being played. Oh, but he was and he still is. The thing that got me was his arrogance : he still thinks he needs to say only, “Hi, my name is Hugh Hefner,” and women will swoon. He actually thinks that women long to sleep with him, but he is fooling himself to a degree. Hef is not the irresistible Casanova he portrays himself as. Maybe that worked in previous decades, but it doesn’t work anymore. In the months before I moved out, whenever he met a good-looking girl, she immediately wanted to know if he could make her a Playmate, and if not, how much money he would pay her to live with him? Women in Hollywood will not date a much older man just because he has lived an interesting life. So many of the older men in Hollywood believe that they are irresistible, but take away their money, and the girls would disappear. And it’s okay as long as they realize it and don’t pretend that the relationship is real. I often wondered why Hef bothered with the young girls. Why not get together with an elegant older lady? Because then Hef and Playboy would not get the attention and publicity that seven young blondes bring. The Girlfriends are there to feed other people’s fantasies. Hef doesn’t want a real relationship. Hef is giving people what they want and expect from him. I think his happiness is not derived from the relationships, but from the attention and publicity the relationships bring him.
I think Hef values women because they made his magazine and brought him the money and fame. He values them for the pleasure they can bring him. But he doesn’t really value a woman for all that she is, all that she can be or is trying to become. He is not interested in strength or independence. He just wants girls to look pretty, sit beside him, and smile. He says
Playboy
brought sexual liberation for women because it told the world that nice girls like to have sex too. Hef likes to talk about how
Playboy
gave women freedom, freed them to be sexual. I think he means that it made it easier for guys to get laid.
Hef is a complex individual. There is the businessman, the creative genius, the man who is an icon and has been voted one of the most influential people of the century. There is the hopeless romantic, who is very charming and witty and still knows how to woo a girl; an eccentric hermit who is stuck in his ways; and a Peter Pan who refuses to grow up. But the bottom line is that I do, and always will, care about Hef. I think he makes a lot of mistakes as far as the girls are concerned, but he is a good person. I got to see things that he didn’t, or maybe that he doesn’t want to see. But the time I spent living with him was a one-of-a-kind experience. I wish him all the best in life; most importantly, I wish him real love.
10: Desperate Housemates
.
“People do not always argue because they misunderstand each other; they argue because they hold different goals.”
—William H. Whyte
T
he two years I spent at the Playboy Mansion were full of adventure, partying, scandal, deceit, emptiness, betrayal, and yes, bone-rattling, brainbending fun. We, the girls, created most of this intrigue. What can you expect when you put seven girls from completely different walks of life under one roof? The answer can be found in just three words: Drama. Drama.
Drama!
Everyone wanted to know if we got along. “Yes,” and, “It’s like a sorority,” were the answers we gave
MTV Cribs
. Emma and I are jumping up and down on the bed, like at some ongoing slumber party. We lied. What were we supposed to say? “The group is totally divided, and the range of feeling goes from tolerance to pure hate?” No, we couldn’t say that, it would shatter Hef’s naïve quest for “harmony” in the group. It pains me to watch that segment to this day. “We are a family,” Hef used to say. As my insides turned at the comment, I would mutter under my breath, “I have no trailer trash in my family.” The relationship among all the girls was the worst thing about living at the Playboy Mansion. It was a place where everyone avoided the truth. The Mansion created an atmosphere of distrust and insecurity. It was what eventually drove us out.
When screenwriter Scott Silver (
8 Mile
) came out to interview us for Hef’s biopic, I’m sure we sounded like the women in
The Stepford Wives
. We couldn’t answer his questions truthfully; we couldn’t tell him how we felt, what really went on at the Mansion. We thought that even if he didn’t tell Hef what we said, someone might overhear us and, either way, Hef would find out and we would be in trouble. I remember feeling bad for Scott; he was going to write a screenplay based on what we wanted him to think and not the truth. I see Holly, Bridget, and Kendra on television promoting their new show,
The Girls Next Door
, and saying they all get along so well, but I don’t believe it.
At the heart of my bunny life at the Playboy Mansion lay the complex network of relationships among the girls, which is key to understanding the whole experience. The tone was set right at the beginning of the new era, in early 2002, when Holly replaced Tina Jordan as Hef’s main Girlfriend. Holly got that position because no one else wanted the job. It meant sharing a room with Hef and having a regular sexual relationship with him; it meant more than what one considers standard sex. Apparently that was the requirement. Most of us were there for a
good
time, not a long time and not to be Hef’s chambermaid. We wanted to have fun, party, shop, flirt with boys, and have the least amount of supervision from Hef—we didn’t have grand delusions about being put in Hef’s will. But Holly eagerly wanted the position. To me, Hef did not appear to be excited about Holly moving into his room when Tina’s essence was still in the air, but since no one else was interested and Holly was so devoted, he let her move in and eventually grew comfortable with the arrangement.
When Tina was the main Girlfriend, she was the mother hen of the group, and with the possible exception of Holly, we were all sad to see her leave. Perhaps because she was a mother to a beautiful little girl in real life, Tina was a caretaker. She always had good advice for us girls when she was there. She explained many things to us about how the relationship with Hef works, when we were still new and confused; she gave us good advice on how to talk to Hef and how to ask him for things. She encouraged us to get whatever we needed and was always optimistic. I don’t know if she was like that with the other girls before us, or if she was just being nice because she was leaving and had nothing to lose. In any case, we really missed her when she left. With Holly in Tina’s place, things changed drastically. Tina enjoyed sharing Hef, but I believe Holly wanted him all to herself. Tina stood up for the group, but I never saw Holly do that; she was hoping we would all leave the Mansion faster. On Sundays when we watched movies with Hef, Tina would sit on the end of the couch so that another girl could be on the other side of Hef. After Holly became the main Girlfriend, she made him sit on the end so that she was the only sitting next to him. When we would come into Hef’s room to watch a movie with him, she rolled her eyes and made us feel awkward. It seemed like everyone was in Holly’s way, and she created a situation that was uncomfortable for everyone.
Things were so bad we had to call an emergency meeting once. The goal was to get things out in the open, eradicate distrust, and get along better. We were all placed in this unique situation because of our connection to Hef; why not make the most of it? We went out of our way to assure Holly that we respected her desire to be with Hef and her position as his main Girlfriend. We told her none of us was after her position; none of us wanted to do what she does and couldn’t even if we wanted to. We thought that if she knew that, she would stop trying to eliminate the other girls. After everyone left, Emma confided to me that she had recorded the whole conversation; she did it to have evidence of us trying to make peace with Holly and also of any confessions anyone might let slip. I thought it was a bit strange, but I wasn’t going to say anything about it to Holly. We undermined our own relationships with Hef to make her comfortable. We stopped hanging out in his room as much, we stopped watching movies and TV with him, we sometimes even avoided saying good night to him just to stay out of her wrath. The issue for me was that Hef kept coming to us and complaining that we were becoming detached and didn’t spend enough time with him. He sometimes asked us why we weren’t as devoted as Holly. What a laugh that was, because we were the sacrificial lambs of Holly’s devotion. The sad thing was that when we distanced ourselves from Hef to make her more comfortable, she would point out to him how we did not care for him. No matter what we said to reassure Holly, things went back to awkward and unpleasant in no time. I think it stemmed from Holly’s own insecurities, and there was nothing we could do to make this girl happy.
One of the most ridiculous things about her behavior was that Holly celebrated their anniversary. Every year in August she made us all celebrate their “anniversary.” We would go to Hef’s favorite restaurant, Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills, and Holly or Bridget would have gone in before to decorate the table. Some girls would get them presents; Stacy Burke, who was forever trying to get into the group, named a star after them. But Emma, Susan, and I just laughed. As if we were going to get
our
boyfriend an anniversary present for him and another one of his seven girls. What about our anniversaries? We could have celebrated them too, but my guess is Holly would have flipped out. She constantly tried to do things to make herself the number one girl, to distinguish herself in whatever way she could.
Just like Hugh Hefner created his Playboy Hef persona, Holly worked hard to create a new image for herself. Like a chameleon, she adapts to suit the preferences of whomever she is trying to impress. Holly set about her own transformation into Hef’s ideal companion by mirroring his tastes and habits, and I think Hef, a narcissist, is flattered by her efforts. First she got her nose done. She knew Hef loved Barbi Benton’s nose, and that is what she asked the plastic surgeon for. The very day she got her cast off her nose she went to Jose Eber, where she dyed her hair as white as it could get, and got a haircut à la Marilyn Monroe, because Hef has a major Marilyn Monroe obsession (she was the first
Playboy
centerfold, and twenty years ago he bought the burial crypt right next to hers for $75,000). She had a makeup artist do her make-up like Marilyn, black liner and red lips, and had her nails done in ‘50s fashion. I saw her at the salon, and I thought she looked really pretty. But Holly’s efforts backfired. When she got home, Hef asked if she was wearing a wig and told her to take off the red lipstick because it made her look like a harlot. It was a lesson for us all; Hef did not take to change very well. If he liked the way you looked, he did not want you to change. In time he got used to Holly’s hair, but he always preferred long locks. She had the short hairstyle for a very long time, and people always commented that she looked the most mature, but Holly was in fact the youngest. She has very nice skin, so I think it was just the matronly hairdo that made her look older; it led Emma to coin the nickname “Helmet Head” for Holly because her hair was short, puffy, and did not move.
It seemed to me that Holly must have studied all of the ex-Girlfriends and tried to adopt the things Hef liked about them to become his perfect girl. She tried to get Barbi’s nose, Buffy’s breasts. She copied all of the party outfits that the former Girlfriends used to wear: the Viagra nurse like the Bentley twins, the cheerleader like Stephanie Heinrich. She also started getting dresses from Baracci like the Twins used to, even though Hef was in a lawsuit with Baracci and we weren’t allowed to shop there. I think her obsession must have been so intense that she talked him into letting go of the conflict. She and Bridget immediately started getting their dresses there and they all looked alike.
Holly was very jealous of his previous relationships, particularly the women he was especially close to like Brande Roderick, Tina Jordan, and Barbi Benton. She usually put on a smile when they came up to greet Hef, but we could see her rolling her eyes and twirling her hair. She reminded me of Cathy Ames in John Steinbeck’s
East of Eden,
the empty, cold look in her eyes. And she usually had something negative to say when they were gone. I think she has some deep-rooted insecurities, maybe because it took a while to get Hef to notice her. It looked to me like she constantly tried to measure up to ex-Girlfriends by looking more like them and trying to get what they got for her to feel legitimate. She admitted as much on
The Girls Next Door
, when she said that being featured in the magazine finally made her feel legitimate because Hef’s previous Girlfriends had been in it.