She was right. Everyone else was being shot with their costars or coanchors—and I would be the only E! personality featured solo, wearing a black version of the Marilyn Monroe Seven Year Itch windblown gown and elegant opera-length gloves.
“Oh my God! It’s like, so nice to meet you,” squealed a young, skinny brunette as she swept into my dressing room, seemingly taking stock of the hair, makeup, and wardrobe paraphernalia thrown everywhere.
“We loved Girls Next Door,” her buxom companion gushed.
“Totally,” the skinnier one jumped in. “Like, when I first got an agent, I told him I want to be on the Girls Next Door,” she babbled, her head bobbing from side to side as she spoke, “and then he was like, ‘No, you need your own reality show!’ ”
“Oh, thanks! That’s sweet!” I responded as an E! executive motioned to me from the doorway, ready to whisk me off to set. “Nice to meet you! I’m sure I will see you around!”
Certain we were a safe distance from my dressing room, I turned to him and whispered: “Who were those girls?”
“Oh, they’re the Arlington sisters,” he stated matter-of-factly as if I should have heard of them.
When I gave him a blank look, he continued.
“Did you hear about those robberies in the Hollywood Hills?” he asked, his voice taking on a very Hollywood sales-pitch tone. “All the celebrity houses, like Paris Hilton’s? They are the ones that did those.”
He said that as if that were a perfectly reasonable claim to fame.
Needless to say, some of the network talent wasn’t necessarily thrilled to be sharing the spotlight with these young felons. Say what you will about how some of us became household names, none of us got there by breaking and entering. The world of “famous for being famous” was getting weirder and weirder.
HOLLY’S WORLD PREMIERED TO excellent ratings—nearly 2 million viewers!—and talk of a second season was practically immediate. Between filming the series, watching it unfold on air, and performing six nights a week, 2010 went by in a blur. My turn in Peepshow had garnered such fabulous reviews over my first 18 months that I moved from the three-month contracts the show had offered me initially to signing a full-year commitment and had even begun singing lessons so that I could take on an additional role in the production. On top of all that, I had a new gig as the Las Vegas correspondent for the entertainment news show Extra. I had little spare time, but was still managing to have a blast!
I was finally standing on my own. Ratings were so strong for Holly’s World, they were even surpassing those of Kendra’s latest season. In fact, there was only one attempt to include a Playboy-related plotline in that first season. When producers suggested the cast and I stop by Hef’s annual birthday party at the Palms, I wasn’t particularly opposed to it. While I wasn’t jumping out of my chair to go spend time with Hef and Crystal (particularly after I watched her spiteful GND character unfold), I knew that fans loved those sort of on-camera reunions.
The Holly’s World cast arrived at the Hef suite at the Palms for the ’80s-themed soiree (which I assumed was a not-so-subtle wink to Hef’s age) in costume. Hef seemed genuinely delighted to see us, as did Mary and a few of the girls I had known from my mansion days. Crystal, however, barely made her presence known. New playmate Claire Sinclair (a Barbi Benton look-alike) acted as a go-between for a pouting Crystal, who spent much of the party tucked upstairs and away from cameras, despite being swathed in a stunning Baracci gown and dolled up to the nines. Hef’s new number one girl seemed to resent having anything to do with my show—especially since “her show,” GND season six, had been canceled.
The Shannon twins had since departed the mansion. According to the rumor mill, Karissa and Kristina were wild and never really good at adhering to the rules. I can’t imagine Crystal was disappointed to see the magnetic twosome go. In their place was a new girlfriend, a gorgeous, baby-faced blonde named Anna Sophia Berglund.
Hef’s birthday party eventually moved to Moon Nightclub. When Josh and I arrived back at the Palms—after doing two performances of Peepshow—we entered the club and situated ourselves in our designated booth, just a row over from Hef’s table. Immediately, he spotted us and, with a big smile on his face, waved to us with both arms and the enthusiasm of a little kid.
“It’s like he’s signaling for help,” Josh observed. “He looks bored.”
He did look a little bored and eager for the cameras to make their way over. Crystal was supposed to have sung “Happy Birthday” for Hef at midnight (something Bridget had done at his party the previous year), but she didn’t end up performing. Knowing Hef, he clearly was waiting for his on-camera moment.
After downing a round of drinks, we made our way over to his booth.
Suddenly, one of Hef’s security stopped us.
“Sorry,” the hulking guard said. “The boss wants to leave.”
We couldn’t have been there for more than 15 minutes. What was this guy talking about? I thought.
And just then bright security flashlights whizzed past us, leading Hef’s entourage out of the club. Two Playmates—Jen and Kim—walked by us, looking truly embarrassed, and mouthed “sorry.” Next came an angry-looking Crystal, who avoided any eye contact with us, dragging a dazed and confused-looking Hef, who shuffled along behind her.
“What happened?” I asked the guard.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I just got the word they were leaving.”
It was so unlike Hef to miss even a short chance to be in front of cameras that I was actually concerned. He lived for that sort of attention. He didn’t look unwell, but I asked the Playboy publicists about it anyway. They assured me that Hef was perfectly fine and his sudden departure had nothing to do with his health.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put the pieces together: Crystal’s neurotic behavior and canceled performance combined with being forced to participate in my reality show and Hef’s overzealousness to see us . . . You do the math.
Oh well, I thought. Hef loved any chance to be on TV and he loved Girls Next Door nostalgia. To me, though, it didn’t matter whether we got the nightclub scene or not. If he didn’t want to film it, it was his loss. Unlike Hef, I didn’t enjoy living in the past. I was young and living for the present and future.
I couldn’t help but think of Hef spending the better part of five seasons pounding into Bridget’s, Kendra’s, and my heads that we were replaceable—that the show would be just as successful in our absence. With Kendra and Holly’s World pulling in solid ratings and being renewed for additional seasons and GND fading quietly into the night, it appeared we weren’t so “replaceable” after all.
CHAPTER 16
“I do hope it’s my dream and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream!”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Even the most magical fairy tale isn’t complete without a villain—and one was about to arrive in Holly’s World.
E! was thrilled with the performance of the first season of Holly’s World and promptly ordered a second season. To satiate the viewer demand, the network scheduled production to begin in fall 2010 in order to meet a January 2011 premiere date (in the television industry, fall and winter premieres are reserved for the more established shows, while summer premieres tend to be for untested programming). The shift forward was a huge move for our little-reality-show-that-could!
Unfortunately, not every E! show saw such great success. Earlier that year, Hef had delivered a pilot to E! titled The Bunny House that he hoped would be the second coming of The Girls Next Door and keep Playboy—and himself—on air.
The show followed the exploits of five Playboy Playmates as they lived in a plush pad across the street from the mansion: Claire Sinclair, Hope Dworaczyk, Crystal McCahill, Jaime Edmondson, and Jayde Nicole.
Claire (the Barbi Benton doppelgänger) and I had become friends. Not only was she beautiful and sweet, she actually had a brain in her he
ad. I had met Hope and Crystal during the Anniversary Playmate search a few years earlier, while Jaime was new to the mansion fold. She had an interesting history: she’d been everything from an NFL cheerleader to a police officer to a contestant on CBS’s The Amazing Race.
Then there was 2008’s Playmate of the Year and the show’s official mean girl, Jayde. The ex-girlfriend of reality star Brody Jenner, she had already spent some time in front of cameras during the final season of MTV’s The Hills.
In the wake of her breakup, Jayde had been trying to shop around her own pilot with no luck, but the network loved the idea of a “girl you love to hate” character, so when producers got wind of that, they placed her in The Bunny House as the resident shit stirrer.
The pilot followed a re-creation of Claire’s Playmate test shoot at Studio West—with Crystal seated purposefully in my former perch viewing the instantly uploaded images on a computer monitor and shouting words of encouragement, as I used to do when I directed the shoots—and a group trip to Las Vegas for Hope’s Playmate of the Year celebration. But between Kendra and Holly’s World, there was just too much Playboy-produced content on E! and the pilot wasn’t picked up to series.
However, there were those who remained obsessed with the idea of resurrecting Girls Next Door, so Claire and Jayde were planted on Holly’s World in hopes that their characters would gain enough popularity among viewers that E! would be forced to revisit The Bunny House concept.
I had virtually no choice in the matter, but I wasn’t particularly bothered by it at first. Producers insisted that, per E!, the show needed more drama and Jayde had signed on to the show, knowing she was going to play the “bad girl.” Honestly, that made my job much easier; I was happy to let her be the drama queen. Unlike Girls Next Door (where “negativity” was forbidden), most reality shows require some dramatic elements . . . how can you have an interesting story without conflict? Oftentimes, producers will guide the storylines, encourage talent to make provocative statements, and edit things together to increase the overall tension on the series. If producers had a predetermined villain, then we wouldn’t need to manufacture trouble between the existing cast—who at the time were my closest friends. Plus, I didn’t feel threatened. I was sure E! would never order The Bunny House.
As for Claire, she was a natural fit for Holly’s World, not because of her Playboy connection, but because she was a budding Vegas showgirl herself who had just signed on for a guest run at MGM’s Crazy Horse Paris revue.
While we took a break from filming during the holidays, Hef and Crystal had become engaged. Right on cue, the media firestorm began citing that I was reportedly “devastated” upon hearing the news. Actually, I was probably one of the few people in the world not at all surprised that Hef was getting remarried. Hef’s youngest son, Cooper, turned 18 that year, providing Hef the green light he felt he needed to divorce Kimberley (despite the fact they had already been separated for nearly 13 years), plus with Girls Next Door no longer on the air, Hef needed an incentive to once again reinvent himself and garner headlines.
I understand why people thought I would be upset. For five seasons it appeared as though I wanted nothing more than Hef to myself, a big white wedding, and the mansion hallways echoing with pitter-patter of tiny feet. In the media, our breakup played out as if I was unable to tame the ultimate bachelor only to have him propose to the next blonde that shoved her way into the mansion. The truth was: I couldn’t have cared less. The happier Hef was without me, the more quickly I could disassociate myself. It could have easily been me walking down that aisle and I was grateful to have gotten the hell out of there!
Long after I left, a friend of Hef’s confided to me that Hef kept saying that he had “no idea” why I chose to leave.
“All you had to do was stick around until Cooper turned 18,” he said with a pointed look.
“But I don’t care anymore! That’s not what I want,” I responded. So few people seemed to realize that I had woken up from the spell I had been under a long time ago.
The few years I had been out of the mansion had been the best of my life so far—if I had married Hef, I wouldn’t have had any of that. My life would have been over.
“DON’T YOU MISS THE maaaaaaansion?” a dreamy-eyed girl asked me during one of my Peepshow meet-and-greets. I would often get this question and it continued to amaze me how many women were cast under this Playboy spell. There I was headlining on the Vegas Strip, making millions of dollars a year all on my own and starring in my own television show . . . and they wondered if I missed living by an archaic set of rules with a spoiled man old enough to be my grandfather. Were they crazy?!
After hearing this over and over again, I began to realize that what viewers took away from The Girls Next Door was nothing like what life there was really like.
When it was suggested we film an episode of Holly’s World at the mansion so I could congratulate Hef on his engagement, I actually jumped at the chance! This was my opportunity to show viewers that I wasn’t at all “devastated” by Hef’s engagement; in fact, I was happy that he was moving on and wished him well! Regardless of how I felt about Crystal, I never for a moment wanted to trade places with her. I thought it was important for people to know that.
It was an eerily quiet day at the mansion when I arrived to film my “congratulations” scene with Hef. An extra-large dollhouse occupied the great hall—a gift I had commissioned for Hef shortly before I left. The piece was an exact replica of the home he had grown up in in Chicago in the early part of the last century.
When Hef arrived to shoot the scene, he spent a lot of time fussing over the dollhouse. Eventually, Crystal made her way downstairs in a cozy-looking long-sleeved shirt. I congratulated her as well. She seemed different to me that day: calm and friendly, low-key, as if there wasn’t a negative bone in her body.
Maybe she’s finally growing into herself, I thought. It was nice to see that side of Crystal. Perhaps I had judged her too harshly. Maybe they’ll actually be good for each other, after all.
I returned to Vegas that night and went back to finishing season two of Holly’s World. The second season was even more memorable than the first. The producers found a couple of private investigators to track down Josh’s birth mother (whom he had never met and knew nothing about). When Josh and Angel went to Charleston, Josh’s hometown, everyone thought we were at the start of a long quest to find his real mother. No one actually expected her to turn up right away! The investigators came through and the episode turned out to be one of the most genuinely surprising and emotional ones of the series.
I let Angel go as my assistant and gave her the role of my understudy in Peepshow. She also landed a small role in another Strip production due to an audition that was planned and filmed for the show. Laura was mostly prompted by producers to hang out with Jayde so that our resident villain had an excuse to be intertwined into our storylines.
Though the show was better than ever, I found myself growing more and more distant from my closest friends. With my crazy work schedule, Josh was really the only person from the show that I regularly saw off camera—and that was only because we were in Peepshow together. It was clear that if there was a season three, Laura wasn’t necessarily going to get invited back due to her failure to connect with the audience. I wondered if she would choose to stay in Vegas if that were the case.
Meanwhile, Angel, who was loved on the show, was growing more and more distant from me. I rarely saw her anymore and she seemed to make a point of hanging out with anyone but me, Josh, or Laura. She spent most of her time at her mom’s home, leaving her and Roman’s things in each of their rooms at my house. I began to sense something was wrong. Her attitude changed, too. She’d come a long way professionally since joining the Holly’s World cast and I thought I had helped her get so many things that she wanted, but maybe those were just things I would have wanted at her age. Obviously something was a bad fit, because she didn’t seem happy anymore. The carefre
e, fun-loving Angel who used to light up my days was gone.
While my cast was handling their newfound places in the spotlight in different ways, I kept busy with work and foolishly pushed my concern about my friends aside. We’ll deal with that when next season’s negotiations come up, I thought. The future seemed so bright that I was sure everything would just repair itself eventually.
Claire was the front-runner for 2011’s Playmate of the Year and it was suggested that since she and I had become so close, I resurrect my role as Playboy’s photo editor for the pictorial as a special contributor. Despite how desperate I was to get away from Playboy, I actually liked this idea since it put the spotlight on my professional, not personal, involvement with the magazine.
Given her very era-specific look and curves, I began planning the shoot in my head: a vintage Bettie Page–inspired feature using the plush red Crazy Horse theater as a backdrop. We couldn’t wait to get started!
As the shoot dates drew nearer, I was excitedly explaining the project to Josh when I got a call from one of the producers. With a heavy sigh, he dropped the bomb on me that we were no longer filming Claire’s pictorial.
“Why?” I asked, hoping it was just a silly mix-up that could easily be fixed.
I heard him take a deep breath and exhale. He explained that Hef had just called him and said that Crystal and I had a Twitter fight and that she was really upset about it. He said she threw a fit about it and that Hef had no choice but to take me off the pictorial.
“Ugh,” I groaned. I had heard through the grapevine that Crystal was still moping around the mansion because she had “her show taken away” and was upset that I was the one still on television. Any suggestion of my presence anywhere near Playboy sent Crystal into a frenzy. What happened to the laid-back Crystal I had seen the last time I visited the mansion?
“Are you serious? We didn’t get into a fight,” I snapped, exasperated by her immaturity. “Someone on Twitter pointed out that she copied my underwater photo shoot, and later I made a generic post about hating copycats. That’s it. I didn’t even mention her name or reply to the person who pointed it out!
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