There wouldn’t be time to focus on such things moving forward. Our lives were about to change and the three of us would be further united on a brand-new project—like it or not.
CHAPTER 8
“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Would you say that Kendra is ‘growing up’ at the mansion?” posed Jerica, the young, freckle-faced field producer sitting across from me. It was 2005 and we were in the mansion’s game house filming my first set of one-on-one interviews for a new unscripted E! series spotlighting Hef, his three girlfriends, and our lives inside the mansion. The question completely caught me off guard. Don’t get me wrong, I was excited at the prospect of doing a television show—day-to-day life was so monotonous that I welcomed any sort of change, opportunity, or even that chance at fame I had once hoped for—but at the time reality TV still had a pretty negative stigma. My time at the mansion hadn’t been all that rosy, so I was anxious about what the show would entail. Naturally, this particular question set off a siren in my head.
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” I said, a bit more defensively than intended. “It sounds gross and inappropriate. Besides, she’s 20 years old; she’s grown up already.”
It’s not like we really had a choice when it came to doing the show, so all that anxiety was really for naught. Once Hef approved the idea, it was full steam ahead. No one even bothered to ask our opinions about filming the show, even if it was just a courtesy. “Trophy girlfriends” are better seen and not heard. But what did I really expect? At the mansion, it was always Hef’s way or the highway.
We weren’t given a choice in the nudity aspect of the show, either. When the first season started filming, we weren’t shy about being in front of the camera in various stages of undress—we knew everything would have to be blurred out in order to air on television and the cameramen shot us from creative angles to avoid landing any nudity on the show. Halfway through the first season, though, someone must have realized that nudity could be shown in foreign television markets and on DVDs, so getting as much nudity as possible on camera became a priority. No one ever consulted the three stars of the show when it came to this issue, and I wasn’t aware of the change until after it had been put into effect.
As intelligent as he is calculating, Hef saw the series as an opportunity to capitalize on the new genre of television that was sprouting up and once again reinvent the brand while bringing in a fresh audience to Playboy. And the needs of “the brand” always trumped those of “the girlfriends.” It was understood that if we chose to continue living at the mansion, we had to agree to be featured on the series. I’ve always been a private person despite my public life, so I was wary about the repercussions. Would Hef feel the need to bring in more girlfriends for ratings? Would the spotlight bring out our worst? Would producers try to stir up drama among the three of us?
Jerica waited patiently for me to fill the silence, probably hoping I would break.
“After all, she is an adult,” I said, rounding out my thought. I had shown up for the interview intending to look as wholesome as possible, wearing a pastel print button-up dress shirt, my hair pulled back into a ponytail with newly cut bangs, and very light, fresh-faced makeup. Despite my years of acting classes, I’d never watched myself on camera being “myself.” When we finally screened the first episode months later, I was absolutely horrified by my appearance. I looked so dour on camera, realizing that the corners of my mouth naturally turned down when I spoke. I looked washed out. Moving forward, I would take to caking on makeup like a beauty pageant contestant and grinning ear to ear for every interview.
“Well, I just meant that she’s young and sort of like the kid sister,” Jerica continued calmly. The suggestive remark struck a chord with me for a few reasons. First off, I was only 26 years old myself at the time. Given the relationship I was in, I didn’t really feel like age should matter. We were adults and free to date whomever we chose. Let’s be honest, our dramatic age difference wasn’t an uncommon question, but Jerica asked it in a way that made me feel like there were ulterior motives at play—like she was using some sneaky back-door approach to get me to say something I didn’t intend to.
“If I say that, it makes it seem like he’s a pedophile, and that’s just gross,” I said, point-blank. No sense beating around the bush.
Second of all, I hadn’t seen an episode pieced together yet and was still pretty untrusting of the process. Were they going to paint Hef as this villainous, predatory man? Part of me was still protective of him. Hindsight offers many luxuries, but in that moment my view was still clouded by the fantasy that Hef was my boyfriend.
“The idea that one of his girlfriends is still ‘growing up’ feels wrong,” I explained, more politely than before—aware of all the eyes currently on me.
“Okay, fair enough,” said Jerica. She continued to the next question, lobbing me a softball. “What do you see life like five years from now?” Mechanically, I jumped into my spiel.
“In five years, I would love for it to be just me and Hef,” I said, smiling and trailing off into my standard response. I was a part of Hugh Hefner’s publicity machine and made sure that everything I said publicly was what I thought he would want me to say. Part of me wanted to please him, but mostly I was terrified of being reprimanded or losing favor by simply saying something he felt was off-color or didn’t paint him in the godliest of lights. This was hardly my first dalliance with press interviews, so I had most of the answers down pat.
I think the “growing up” question struck a nerve even deeper than I cared to admit. Frankly speaking, I’ve always been pretty uncomfortable by Hef’s fascination with extremely young women. He was obsessed with women looking as young as humanly possible. Everything—absolutely everything—about that skeeved me out. Jerica’s needling pushed some button to cause all this subconscious crap to surface, but luckily I was still tucked safely into my corner of denial and quickly repressed the thoughts.
“How do you feel about the nine o’clock curfew?” Jerica asked, resting her chin in her hand. People were always fascinated by the curfew. As I’ve said, I was a homebody anyway—and little did outsiders know that the curfew was hardly the worst thing about mansion life. Like a robot, I happily went back to my Hef and Playboy-friendly responses, the hard questions dodged for the day.
Though The Girls Next Door marked a sudden change in Bridget’s, Kendra’s, and my lives, the series wasn’t created overnight. Throughout 2004 and early 2005, different entities had expressed interest in developing a Playboy Mansion reality show. At first I paid no attention to the rumblings, thinking it would have nothing to do with me. The ideas that were being thrown around didn’t center on the girlfriends. Ideas surfaced like, “Growing Up Hefner: What Life Is Like as Hugh Hefner’s Son” or “Upstairs, Downstairs: The Butlers of the Playboy Mansion.”
We were sat down for test interviews, along with the butlers. There is no doubt in my mind everyone on the other side of the cameras thought that Hugh Hefner’s three girlfriends would be the most demanding, unreasonable bitches of all time, making the staff’s life hell at any given moment. None of these people, not even the executive producer (a close friend of Hef’s), had ever gotten to know Bridget, Kendra, or me.
My test interview, for the most part, was relatively uneventful. I was asked all the usual questions about what life at the mansion was like: How is it having a nine o’clock curfew? What do you order from the kitchen? Where do you shop? Do you mind sharing your boyfriend? And I, like the drone I had become, answered all the questions with the same rote, dry answers I gave everyone else. The three repressive years I had spent at the mansion had drained all the personality out of me anyway, so I’m sure I sounded like a robot.
Then I was asked a question t
hat threw me for a loop: “When did you first realize you were beautiful?” I started a bit, taken out of my hypnosis by an out-of-the-ordinary question.
“I never did discover I was beautiful,” I snapped. “I made myself beautiful.”
One of the head producers would later say to me that this answer led him to believe that they had something with the girls and maybe there was more of a story here than just “how do butlers deal with demanding, spoiled bitches while naked Playmates are running around them all the time?”
The answer I gave was the one honest, spontaneous thing I had said all day, and it alluded to so many things:
1. That I had been conditioned to believe that I was not beautiful.
2. That I was possibly entirely composed of plastic surgery (I wasn’t; I stopped after the nose job).
3. That there was a little more going on in my head than most people would assume: that I was in on the joke.
It was finally Lisa Berger, then president of programming at E!, who suggested she would like to see what life at the mansion was like through the eyes of the girls: a Dorothy in Oz kind of take on the Playboy world.
I was torn on whether or not to be excited about this project.
I had come to L.A. wanting to be an actress. My newfound lack of self-esteem had made me crave fame for fame’s sake. I had started taking hosting classes, hoping to make it in any way I could: acting, hosting, modeling, whatever. The one thing I hadn’t considered was reality TV. Despite my hunger to be in the spotlight professionally, I have always been a very private person. Even before I moved into the mansion, I changed my last name, in part to protect my family’s privacy should I become known. Even the small amount of notoriety I had already gained from being one of Hef’s girlfriends made me extremely uncomfortable—being a part of a bimbo harem was not what I wanted to be famous for.
On the one hand, exposure on reality television could lead to many opportunities. Perhaps even something that could give me some pride, some financial security, and maybe even enough confidence to leave one day.
On the other hand, the drama demanded by a reality show could turn the mansion back into the snake pit it used to be during the Mean Girls days (on and off camera). The prospect made me anxious and depressed.
I was also scared of being lumped into a “blond bimbo” stereotype. After all, I remembered how I had felt recently when we had filmed an episode of Entourage at the mansion.
We were each given one simple line to say on camera, surrounded by the show’s cast, crew, and hundreds of extras. The scene had to be shot over and over and over again to the point of lunacy . . . because Kendra couldn’t get her one line right.
I was beyond mortified and prayed that the floor would just swallow me up. I was certain everyone on set was assuming that all three of us were equally ditsy. The thought of having to be compared like that, on a weekly basis, gave me crazy anxiety.
There were days I woke up, sat at the desk I had added to the vanity area, and just felt like falling to the floor because I felt so depressed. Though it is completely obvious to me now why I felt so dark, believe it or not, back then I was stumped.
Don’t I have everything I want? I asked myself. The Mean Girls were gone and life at the mansion was easier. I was slowly saving up a little money, and I was living in the lap of luxury.
Of course, to keep myself from really losing it, I was completely ignoring the fact that anyone who was part of an old man’s harem and treated like a brainless idiot would be depressed.
Feeling like I was at a breaking point, I had told Hef that I needed to see a psychiatrist during one of my sob sessions, but my confession fell on deaf ears. He refused to let me see a therapist because, as he put it, a therapist would just tell me to leave the mansion. He told me to talk to Mary about my problems instead.
In spite of his objections, I did end up seeing a therapist in order to get some prescription medication. The therapist diagnosed me with depression brought on by my anxiety over filming the reality show and how it would affect my life. He prescribed me Effexor, a drug prescribed to those with serious depression (one I weaned myself off of a few years later). It made me feel a little better for the time being and helped buoy me through the mansion for a few more years.
THE FIRST EPISODE OF The Girls Next Door introduced the E! audience to Hugh Hefner’s three blond girlfriends. Through interviews and “candid” moments, the series established the lay of the land at the Playboy mansion: the girls, the grounds, the pets, the curfew, the 24-hour kitchen, and other mansion oddities. The episode wrapped up with Hef, his girlfriends, and a handful of Playmates waiting for Kendra before heading to Hollywood for the AFI Awards red carpet honoring Star Wars creator George Lucas. The footage showed a jovial Hef hobnobbing with celebrities, goofing around with press, and routinely holding, hugging, or kissing one of his many dates.
“We get respect,” Kendra said in a voice-over while the camera panned to showcase our backsides sauntering into the theater. I remember wondering, Does she really think people respect us? She seemed clueless to the fact that most people probably didn’t respect us for how we were living our lives and that the cheers and accolades she was witnessing were simply due to Hef’s strange novelty as a pop culture oddity. I, on the other hand, was probably too aware of the negative ways in which we were perceived. And this awareness made me paranoid. In fact, I let it get to me so much that I became even quieter and more withdrawn than I had been before.
“We’ve decided on your characters for the show!” Hef told me one day when he ran across me in one of the secretaries’ offices, going through Polaroids.
“Really?” I asked, curious as to what he meant.
“Kendra is the one who wants to have fun, Bridget is the one who wants a career, and you’re the one who cares about me.”
His delivery made it clear that the decision had been firmly made and that there was no room for argument. While caring about someone is certainly a positive thing, I was troubled by the limitations of our “characters.” Couldn’t we actually be who we are? Multidimensional people who have different interests, passions, and goals? Sure, Bridget wanted a career, but what about me? I couldn’t want one, too? Apparently not.
I was too distracted to ask any more about it. I had been going through photos looking for potential Fun in the Sun guests while we were talking. Hef had long ago lost interest in trolling for new conquests, so much so that the pool party guest list had dwindled substantially.
Somehow I had found an old Polaroid from the year 2000 buried deep in the pile.
I blinked a few times to make sure I was seeing this properly: it was me! I was wearing a black Frederick’s of Hollywood corset with a kimono robe and sporting strawberry-blond hair, but the real surprise was the “grade” I had received from Hef: A.
All these years at the mansion being made to feel ugly and less than—and he had marked me as an A all along!
Hef had already shuffled back down the hall.
“I can’t believe I got an A!” I said to Jenny, Hef’s social secretary, genuinely in shock. Hef always treated me like such a scrub, like I was barely lucky enough to be in residence at the mansion.
“Well, of course you did,” Jenny said, matter-of-factly. “What did you think you would have gotten?”
WHILE I KNEW THAT people were curious about the world inside the Playboy gates, I found it hard to imagine how we would fill an entire season. Relative to scripted shows, reality television is inexpensive to make (which is the reason so many of them litter the airwaves). I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but in order to get the most for their time and money, producers typically map out episodes in advance based on schedules and then determine what could make for potential plotlines. While our crew initially filmed us at all hours hoping for some of that legendary Playboy spontaneity, they eventually learned that mansion life didn’t quite live up to the hype after countless hours (and probably thousands of wasted crew dollars) were spent fil
ming the most mundane moments of our lives.
Finding interesting things for us to do proved more difficult than anticipated. Contrary to popular belief, I couldn’t just tote a film crew with me around town. Producers had to get permission from every store, restaurant, beach, and salon in Los Angeles we wanted to film at. Everything requires some sort of preapproval.
And what the hell would this season even be about?
Soon I realized Hef had a plan.
The second episode focused on two prospective Playmates that were staying in the mansion’s guesthouse. After having dinner out at Geisha House in Hollywood (where Hef had his own fried chicken meal brought in and prepared by the mansion staff, as usual), Hef called Bridget, Kendra, and me into his room to “talk to us.”
“I can’t promise it, but you’re going to shoot a cover and I’m going to put you in the magazine,” Hef said. It was in many ways a defining moment in my life. After four years living there, I was finally going to fulfill my long-held dream of being in Playboy magazine. And he just said it. The words fell off his tongue like the most ordinary of small talk while standing crunched into the corner of his bedroom entry surrounded by a handful of crew members.
It was so unceremonious a delivery that we needed a moment to process the news. We were utterly blown away. Kendra’s mouth dropped to the floor and she appeared catatonic for a good 60 seconds. I screamed so loudly I was certain the dog I was holding had gone deaf, and Bridget looked as though she was going to burst into tears. This man—who had conditioned us to believe we were good enough for his bed but not his magazine—just made our dreams come true. It was well within his power all along, but he was finally saying we were worthy. It was validating and exciting all at the same time.
Still, we were extremely skeptical—particularly Bridget and me. We had been at the mansion for years and had been browbeaten to believe we just weren’t Playboy material.
Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny Page 16