Towards the end of the season, in the summer of 2008, we shot our fourth Playboy cover, slated for February 2009 (this one would end up being our last). After much lobbying, Hef agreed to a three-split run, which meant we each had our own cover. It felt like a gigantic milestone! Fans loved watching our shoots on the series (which is most likely why we ended up getting four covers) and since three separate shoots would mean more footage for the show, production kindly coughed up the budget: $10,000 per shoot. I was so grateful that production was doing this for us—I definitely felt like they went more out of the way for us, and enjoyed our triumphs more than Hef did. While Hef scoffed at the initial idea (to him, we still couldn’t stand on our own), even he couldn’t refuse a free $30,000.
Hef approved my idea for the cover: I posed each of us in front of the mansion in such a way that if you line up the covers it created one panoramic shot. Another first for the magazine! I loved being a part of these little “firsts.”
To make our three pictorials look as varied as possible, I talked to the girls about each of us using a different photographer. Bridget worked with Arny on an elaborate circus design, I suggested Kendra pair with Stephen to shoot her for a Sports Illustrated–inspired beach shoot, and I decided on up-and-coming photographer W. B. Fontenot for a glamorous (yet dark) old Hollywood shoot at the historic Los Angeles Theater. Unfortunately, I discovered at the last minute that the decadent old theater’s fee to allow production to film there was out of our budget. Only the still shoot was affordable. Since I wanted my third of the pictorial to be done my way, I decided to cover the cost of the photo shoot out of my own pocket and provide a different scenario for GND to film. Additionally, this would give me rights to the photos and the ability to grant Playboy the license to print only the photos I approved.
In order to provide content for the TV show, I decided to do something a little experimental and “out of the box” for a Playboy shoot. Since the magazine would be using my theater photos, what I shot for the show could be done with television in mind and not the magazine. Back then, there wasn’t much room to move when it came to Playboy photo shoots. Hef had very particular tastes, so if you didn’t want to waste everyone’s time and money, you didn’t stray far from the formula.
One of the recent activities we had filmed for GND was scuba diving. I fell in love with it! We had filmed our training in the mansion pool—I was astounded by how beautiful all the natural rock looked underwater. Inspired by that day, Barry and I did my shoot in the mansion pool, setting up several surreal underwater scenes: a tea party, a chained escape artist, a mermaid, etc. It felt amazing to do something so different! The underwater photos were used as “bonus” photos in the Playboy Cyber Club, as most Playboy pictorials set aside a few bonus extras from each published pictorial for their membership site. Hef, never missing a chance to paint me as ugly, would later publicly announce that my underwater photos were never published because they “weren’t flattering,” when in fact they were never meant for the magazine in the first place.
THE RECENT DOMESTIC BLISS at the mansion was too good to last. While the television show had bolstered Hef’s mood for quite some time, he was eventually brought back down to earth by the sad financial state of Playboy Enterprises. It’s no secret that the company hadn’t been profitable in years. I remember seeing a TV news magazine story on the subject even before I moved into the mansion, but what I didn’t know was that things had gone from bad to worse. It was 2008 and the economy was teetering. Coincidentally or not, Hef was turning into a monster around this time. Bridget, Kendra, and I had each other’s backs; it was next to impossible to create conflict between us. Without the drama and infighting he so craved, lashing out at me became his new way of letting off steam. Because I was the “main” girlfriend (and meekest one in the bunch), Hef always felt safest picking on me. Sure, he lashed out at the other girls from time to time, but he was more cautious about it with them. He recognized that any of the other girlfriends would be way more likely to pack up and leave if they’d had enough, so I was usually the one he took his frustrations out on.
In years past, when Hef and I had problems, I always blamed the other girlfriends for the drama. Without any Mean Girl scapegoats left, I was slowly beginning to realize that Hef being mean was just . . . Hef being mean.
“Count it cumulatively!” Hef yelled so loudly that someone clear across the street could have heard him. As Hef’s two sons Marston and Cooper got older, “Game Night” with the girlfriends eventually replaced Tuesday’s “Family Night.” These Game Nights became a mind-numbing ritual—at best.
Bridget, Kendra, and I would gather around the dining room table with Hef (and whatever girls were visiting the mansion that week) and play games. I loved Monopoly and Clue, but he quickly lost interest in those games. Hef was introduced to a very simple domino game called Mexican Train and became instantly addicted. Ever the creature of habit, Hef had us up playing Mexican Train every Tuesday, for hours at a time. I loved it the first few times we played, but the game was so mind-numbingly easy, I quickly became bored.
One night Hef was particularly uptight and kept anxiously checking the score pad over my shoulder. When he realized that I was keeping track of the scores per game (as I usually did) instead of cumulatively (we played many rounds of the game in a row), he blew a gasket.
“Do you even know what ‘cumulative’ means?!?!” he screamed in my face so ferociously that it made my blood boil. I wanted to give him my cumulative SAT scores and stomp out of the room, but I restrained myself. Clearly he was looking for a fight and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
I took a deep breath and looked him square in the eye.
“Yes,” I said, firmly and evenly.
Everyone else was silent. Kendra and Bridget had been on the receiving end of such temper tantrums and unnecessary cruelty themselves, so I knew they were cringing for me as they looked down at their dominoes.
It wasn’t just the verbal disrespect that was wearing on my nerves. The limitations of mansion life were starting to get old. After seven years living under Hef’s strict rules, I thought I could have earned enough respect to be allowed to bend the rules every now and then. Even prisoners get points for good behavior!
But unless cameras were following me, I still wasn’t permitted to spend a night away from the mansion. Looking back now, I get frustrated with myself for being so blind. I was complaining because my boyfriend wouldn’t allow me to spend the night away from his home, because he wouldn’t allow me to stay out without him past 9 P.M. As a 28-year-old woman I still had a curfew!
I had never even asked to spend an off-camera night away from the mansion until a worthy occasion presented itself. Playmate Tiffany Fallon invited us to her wedding in Mexico to Rascal Flatts guitarist Joe Don Rooney. A charming Southern girl, Tiffany was one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the pages of Playboy and truly a joy to be around. Bridget and I were ecstatic when we received the invitation, which included gorgeous luggage tags with our name and addresses printed on them.
“I’ve never been to Cabo before,” I exclaimed to Bridget, glowing with anticipation.
Bridget and I looked into flights from Los Angeles into Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to see if we could fly in and out the same day. Despite being only a two-and-a-half-hour flight, none were direct, and international travel is always a bit more time consuming. A day-trip just didn’t seem feasible (or like any fun). Since Hef thought the world of Tiffany, I figured we might actually have a shot at attending. But it all depended on what kind of mood I caught him in. After talking it over ad nauseam with Mary, I got up the courage to ask Hef if Bridget and I could have a night away (Kendra was invited as well, but since she didn’t want to pay for her own travel, she opted out).
“He says we can go!” I exclaimed excitedly into the ancient, crusty, cream-colored phone in my dressing room. I heard Bridget squeal on the other end of the line. Much to my surprise, Hef had given me a favorab
le response and told me to work out the details and let him know how long we’d be gone. I felt like Cinderella finally getting to go the ball! I couldn’t believe our good luck! I was so excited to have my first girls’ night out in over six years!
“We’ll have to make travel plans right away: flights, hotels, transportation,” I rattled into the receiver. “If we leave in the morning, we’ll get there with plenty of time to get ready for the wedding and the party.”
“Party?” Like a record player screeching to a halt, I heard my plans instantly evaporate. Hef repeated himself, “You’re going to a party?”
It was as if he appeared out of nowhere, having changed into his blue flannel pajamas, clearly oblivious to the fact that it was still daylight outside.
“Well, yeah,” I began fumbling. “I meant the wedding reception. It’s like I told you, we can’t get a flight back late enough to be able to attend the ceremony and reception. We’d be spending more time traveling to Mexico than actually in Mexico.”
I prayed he would see this logic, but Hef let out a stifled, sarcastic chuckle, as if to mock me. He wasn’t even actually listening to me.
“You’re not going to any parties,” he said firmly before shuffling his feet across the hardwood back into the bedroom. “The trip to Mexico is off.”
Without uttering a word to Bridget (who I was certain overheard the whole ordeal), I gently put down the receiver as tears welled up in my eyes. I realized in that moment that nothing was ever going to change. My years of dedication earned me nothing. All I had to show for it was an increasingly bitter boyfriend and no hope for a future.
“I’m so depressed, I don’t know what to do. I’m not happy here anymore,” I told Bridget as we commiserated over not being allowed to attend our friend’s wedding.
Truth be told, I had never been happy at the mansion, but I had always been able to put on a facade leading others to believe that I was. After all, Hef couldn’t be seen having unhappy girlfriends, could he? I had been fooling someone else all these years as well: myself. While I had come into the mansion looking for a temporary safe harbor and a possible stepping-stone to a Hollywood career, I had fallen down a rabbit hole of nasty girls, a degrading love life, eroded self-esteem, and total fear of judgment from the outside world. I felt like a failure on my mission to make something out of myself. I had tried to rationalize my choices by convincing myself that I had fallen in love with Hef and just wanted to settle down and have a family.
I know how absolutely insane it sounds to want to have kids with someone in their 70s. You are basically robbing a child of his or her father before it is even born. Now that I am a mom myself, the idea seems even more unpalatable. But I suppose I thought of it as a ticket out—in more ways than one. The last time the mansion had been multiple-girlfriend free was when Hef was married and had two children, so (considering the mind-set I was in) that seemed like an ideal scenario for me. I had convinced myself that the multiple girlfriends were the problem, because I just couldn’t admit to myself that I had made a terrible choice moving into the mansion in the first place. It was cognitive dissonance at its finest.
There was also the part of me that was grateful for the things Hef had afforded me: food and shelter when I needed it, the allowance put towards paying off the debts I had from college, and the opportunities to be on a television show. Though there was plenty to complain about in the way I was treated, I was grateful for the good things and couldn’t stand to be just like so many of the girls who had come before me, taking and running with no shame. Attempting the marriage and kids game, knowing deep down that it was a dead end, was perhaps my subconscious attempt to end the relationship in the “nicest” way I could think of.
I then confessed something to Bridget that had up to that point been top-secret, known only to me, Hef, Mary, and a few doctors. A step towards settling down had been made.
Hef had submitted semen samples to a fertility doctor only to find what the doctor had predicted all along—that nothing from this 70-something-year-old man was viable. I’m sure Hef knew this, too, and that was the only reason he decided to humor me and submit anything. I had made it clear to him several times that I wasn’t going to be happy settling down at the mansion without a family and this was his way of trying to “save the relationship,” though I’m sure he was quite relieved to dodge having another child. This was concrete proof slapping me in the face that there was no future for me at the mansion and it was either sit there and rot or take the plunge and face the world. I couldn’t even admit wanting to leave to Bridget—I just told her how heartbroken I was over the outcome of the tests and that I didn’t know what to do with my life.
Bridget was a little surprised but not as shocked to hear the secret scoop as one might think. She knew I was miserable and that I had been for a while. She knew I wanted a family in my life someday and that that wasn’t compatible with life at the mansion. She also knew of my other fear: after being one of Hef’s seven concubines, would anyone even want me now? Had I ruined myself forever by making this choice?
She was a consoling friend and a great listener, but she didn’t really know what to say. She had her own set of frustrations with mansion life and didn’t have the answers.
There was something else happening that was distancing me from Hef, and maybe he felt it—I was starting to realize that perhaps spending the rest of my (or, perhaps more accurately, the rest of Hef’s) life at the mansion was not what I truly desired. It had been years since Hef had chased after any other girls. It was becoming increasingly clear that Bridget and Kendra were restless and thinking about leaving and that Hef was fine with that, too. When I wasn’t burying my head in my work, I was starting to panic inside. Was this really what I wanted? As becoming Hef’s one and only came closer and closer to becoming a reality, the truth was clear to me. I didn’t want someone who wanted to settle down with me because he was getting too old and tired to continue his playboy lifestyle. I didn’t want someone who wanted to settle down with me because I was convenient and docile, the “perfect” girlfriend. I had always wanted to find a soul mate who was creative, ambitious, adventurous . . . and yes, Hef might have been the epitome of all three of those things at some point in his life, but that point was long gone, probably before I was even born. What was left was an old man running like crazy on the treadmill that was “life at the mansion,” desperate to live up to his image.
I felt horribly conflicted. I couldn’t quite admit it to myself yet, but I needed to find a way out.
In the spring of 2008, Playboy searched for the 55th Anniversary Playmate to be featured in the January 2009 issue. Back in its heyday, when Playboy was still in the home of every red-blooded American male, the magazine would host a highly publicized nationwide search—à la the “Millennium Playmate”—to find the perfect girl for the anniversary issue, inspired by movie producer David O. Selznick’s search for the actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. When Ukrainian model Dasha Astafieva happened across Mary’s desk in the pages of the Eastern European country’s edition of Playboy, I knew she was perfect! The black-haired beauty with ice blue eyes was the clear front-runner, but GND producers and I wanted to create a two-episode America’s Next Top Model–esque storyline following five candidates as they competed for the title. In addition to Dasha, I chose four girls Hef would consider for the coveted spot: Hope Dworaczyk (a brunette standout from the Dallas casting call), Jessica Burciaga (a petite Jennifer Lopez look-alike whom I found on Myspace), Crystal McCahill (a curvy Chicago girl whose mother had been a Playmate in the ’60s—a connection Hef loved!), and Karissa and Kristina Shannon (blond twins that I thought would make perfect TV drama).
After spotting the Shannon twins’ photos in a stack of Playmate test shots, I decided to research them a bit further. It still amazes me what some people are willing to put up online. Both Karissa and Kristina’s Myspace pages were riddled with the funniest posts imaginable. It’s hard to explain withou
t a visual aid, but just imagine two 18-year-old girls posting the most over-the-top, wild, impressively illiterate entries. It was like something off The Maury Povich Show or Jerry Springer. I couldn’t tell if they were serious or not, but either way, they seemed like they might be the right kind of people to stir the pot.
“If they are anything like their posts,” I said, laughing with Angel, who was standing over my shoulder as we were looking at their profile page, “they’ll make for great TV.”
The candidates were brought to Los Angeles that summer for their test shoots and invited to stay at the Bunny House. Our Girls Next Door production schedule was tight, so we had a quick turnaround and needed the girls nearby and available at a moment’s notice.
The shoots were going along right on schedule, until I received word from Dasha that Jessica had left the Bunny House the night before her scheduled centerfold shoot at the studio.
If she were MIA, we’d lose an entire day of shooting and waste thousands of dollars. No one had any idea where my runaway Playmate had gone.
“We really need you to finish your pictorial,” I reasoned with Jessica when I finally got her on the phone. “We’re on a tight schedule and every day costs money.”
It turned out that the runaway bunny went hopping back to Orange County. According to some of the crew and other girls staying at the house, Jessica had been tormented for days by the twins, along with Playboy’s resident wild child Laura Croft. While Karissa and Kristina were surprisingly professional on set, they were apparently quite a handful after hours. Supposedly the three girls tormented Jessica: calling her names, smearing shaving cream on her bedroom door, and relentlessly accusing her of sleeping with a GND crew member. While these antics would have made for great TV, they were an example of the “negativity” Hef never wanted included in the final cut, so my efforts to include some spice in the mix, by inviting the Shannon twins, were wasted.
Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny Page 21