Playboy is pure fantasy. But IRL? Not so much. Like getting cozy in old, dirty sheets?
Or being secretly videotaped? And…is that "old man smell"? Grab a quaalude from the
candy dish — welcome to the mansion!
With its constantly-rotating collections of guests and enormous parties,
the Mansion probably needed to be cleaned more often than it was.
And according to the playmates who lived there, it was begging for a hosing-down.
That’s because even its canine occupants ran free — and did their business all over the house.
In her book "Bunny Tales," former playmate Izabella St. James had a
bone to pick with resident dog, Archie. She recalled,
"Archie, the house dog, would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains,
adding a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay around the place."
"I think the dogs get the good life here and they tend to come here and get lazy and fat."
She also revealed that fellow playmate Holly Madison's dogs were not even
close to being house-trained, and would constantly poop in Hef's bedroom. So then
everyone was forced to watch out for minefields on the carpet. Reportedly,
St. James and some of the other girls finally convinced Hef to recarpet their own bedrooms.
But he insisted on the worst color scheme for the house. She remembered,
"The white carpet looked great at first, but with two dogs and butlers delivering food in dirty
shoes and occasionally spilling things, the carpet was gray and stained in a matter of three months."
"OK the carpet is gross in here."
"Yeah. The carpet's so bad." The Playboy Mansion was popularly
branded as the icon of elevated living. And it appeared to be exactly like anyone would assume
living the luxury dream would be. At least, from the outside. So, of course you'd expect
to be ensconced in 1,000-thread-count sheets with exotic feather-stuffed pillows. But
the truth was something altogether different. And way more depressing.
Izabella St. James noted the bedding situation in her book,
using the words "worn," "stained," and “disgusting" to describe the setup.
She also claimed her bed sheets had been visibly worn when she first arrived. Not
exactly the best first impression for a mansion that would eventually sell for $100 million.
After the girls begged and pleaded, Hef eventually replaced the bedding. Of course,
this scenario was still better than the other options in the house. According to NPR, there were
so-called "napping" mattresses that were clearly intended for anything but catching a few winks.
And a room where the entire floor was nothing but Sealys and Sertas. …Y'know. For group naps!
Anyone who's ever seen a horror movie knows an old mansion is just screaming for tortured
souls. And this mansion certainly fits the bill. The L.A. Times reported that it was
originally built in 1927, making it nearly 50 years old when Hef bought it in 1971.
So it should come as no surprise that several former playmates have described the place
as definitely, absolutely, totally haunted. Nylon reported that playmate Bridget Marquardt
witnessed plenty of supernatural happenings, including TVs randomly switching channels. She
also straight-up saw a ghost, describing a phantom woman standing in her closet. She told the outlet,
"She had long, black stringy hair,
very pale, very thin. She was wearing a white T-shirt that was too big on her and black
acid wash-y jeans. She was more modern day and I feel like I recognized who she was."
[Scream]
"Sorry I scared you."
According to E!, Holly Madison also described an encounter in the mansion gym when a woman
walked from the bathroom to a stairway — and then simply vanished. She also claims
the toilets often flushed themselves. Well, that's enough evidence for us! That mansion
is fully haunted. Moving on…
You might think that a millionaire
publishing mogul would be at the forefront of cutting-edge interior decorating when it
came to his dream house. But! You would be wrong. When Hef bought the place in 1971,
fashion and design trends were straddling the line between a trippy '60s aesthetic and the bold looks
of the '70s. Hef fully embraced the spirit of the times — and then never changed a thing.
According to the playmates who lived there, the look was outrageously dated. Even worse,
Hef resisted any suggestion that he redecorate anything into the modern era.
Izabella St. James described the furniture in her room as being
"old and damaged." And as former playmate Carla Howe once explained to The Sun,
"[Hugh Hefner] refuses to change anything in the mansion and the
whole place feels like it's stuck in the 1980s."
Fast forward to 2016 when the property was listed for sale. At the time, according
to The Wall Street Journal, a broker stated flat-out that the house would need remodeling
because the look was indeed "dated." Hef crafted an image for the Playboy brand
that evoked opulence, leisure, and sex appeal all at once. And an ever rotating
roster of bouncy Playmates were a key part of the lifestyle. They appeared to be beautiful
women who posed provocatively for the cameras and were all about jet-setting, parties, and fun.
"People assume that we are all s—ts."
[Laughing]
But the reality wasn't bulling over with thrills. As Holly Madison wrote in her
book "Down the Rabbit Hole," she felt like the mansion's iron security gate wasn't meant to keep
people out — but was instead there to lock her in. According to US Weekly, Carla Howe blamed the
restrictive vibe on the early curfew of 9 P.M., saying it all felt like prison. And as Izabella
St. James noted, the girls all felt "trapped" and often suffered from "boredom and fatigue."
When St. James described the Mansion by saying it was, quote, "sexually liberating" and that
"the air smells like sex" — that's probably what we were all imagining. After all, it was
ground zero for Hef's media empire. And that depiction seemed pretty spot on for the brand.
But St. James says that after she lived there for a while, she realized the air actually
smelled like dog urine — not anything friskier. And according to Radar Online,
Carla Howe described the whole mansion as smelling damp. When former Girl Next Door,
Kendra Wilkinson, appeared on the Hollywood Raw podcast, she bluntly claimed,
"Dog s— smell definitely stuck to the wall."
This was confirmed when a Vice writer hit up the house in 2013 for a screening, recalling,
"The mansion was really, really sad. And it smelled like old man."
You might think that one of the perks of having your own kitchen staff and 24/7 butler service
would be the food. After all, Hef could certainly afford to pay people to bring him the best of
everything — any time he wanted it. And it turns out, it was the same situation for the girls.
St. James noted that the 24-hour kitchen at the Mansion was indeed a big plus. And
also a minus because the playmates sometimes gained weight. But she loved the ability to
order nachos or cheeseburgers after a late night out partying. She also
explained that the kitchen was responsible for all of the catering for Mansion events.
According to Fortune, at one point Hef was spending $46,000 a month on food, alone.
"Do any of you cook?"
"No. The cooks don't let us back there. I decorate cookies. That's as far as I've gone."
But St. James's opinion of Playboy's culinary offerings wasn't universal. Carla Howe recalled
the meal options, telling Radar that they were akin to what you'd get at the hospital. Well,
it all might come down to the personal diet of the guy footing the bill. According to US Weekly,
Hef drank 35 to 40 Pepsi's a day — to wash down his roughly three daily pounds of M&Ms.
The Playboy corporation presented life at the Mansion as an erotically-charged fantasy come
to life. Something vaguely like…beautiful, scantily-clad Bunnies having pillow fights,
spontaneous orgies, and other fun in eternally wet t-shirts. After all,
the Playmates represented the epitome of what you can do with a little fame and fortune.
But according to some of those girls, the atmosphere inside the mansion was no fun at all.
And it was so not-fun, Holly Madison called it "toxic." Reportedly, playmates regularly
engaged in drug binges, had secret boyfriends, and violated their curfews. And the girls
resented Madison's rule-following, leading her to claim they wouldn't even be sad if she died.
"Holly is so cunning and so manipulative."
Izabella St. James confirmed the soul-sucking atmosphere, noting that Hef would also pass out
drugs to the playmates, who would then combine them with lots of alcohol.
"This, of course, is the infamous grotto." There's a reason why everyone has heard
about the Playboy Mansion grotto. It's the perfect place for a secret rendezvous. But
not everything was on the up-and-up when it came to what went down behind the waterfall.
According to The New York Times, parties could easily cross the line from fun to dangerous — as
drugs and alcohol drove people to make the worst decisions. And all of it was caught on tape.
"People you wouldn't even think were doing it, were doing it."
Several playmates have noted that there's no such thing as privacy at the mansion — thanks
to state-of-the-art surveillance. Former playmate Jill Ann Spaulding told The Daily Mail that hidden
cameras were installed in the mansion by Hef to protect him against lawsuits. And when she
arrived at the mansion in 2001, the girls warned her that there were cameras in most of the rooms.
Even worse, according to Newsweek, a source alleged that Hef would use the
secret footage to blackmail mansion guests, whenever he needed to.
To the outside world, landing Playmate status might seem like a pretty sweet gig.
You become a well-known model, you're the face of a global brand,
and you get the chance to live in a mansion just outside Beverly Hills. And get paid for it!
But according to Holly Madison,
it was more like being a member of a cult. As she explained to Insider,
"We were all kind of gaslit and expected to think of Hef as, like, this really good guy."
Before the facade began to crumble,
Madison had been fully committed to becoming Hef's perfect girlfriend.
"You started to feel like, 'Oh, he's not what they say in the media. He's just a nice man.'"
Then there was the fact that the girls were isolated from the outside world
and their families. And contact with friends was discouraged. The playmates weren't even
supposed to leave the grounds unless they were going to an official Playboy event.
Madison also described her situation with Hef as feeling like she was suffering from
Stockholm Syndrome, instead of enjoying a loving relationship. And according to US Weekly, former
playmate Sondra Theodore once compared the Playboy mogul to Charles Manson. Playmate Miki Garcia even
once alleged that the girls were brainwashed to believe they were actually Hef's family,
when he really regarded them as his property.
Hef built an empire capitalizing on the most
basic desires of a typical American guy. And however wild things got at the mansion parties,
most people assumed everything was consensual between like-minded adults.
But according to Sondra Theodore, that wasn't the case. As she claimed on A&E's
series "Secrets of Playboy," Hef was covertly recording many of the women.
And during a few of her bedroom encounters with Hef, Sondra found the cameras rolling.
"Sometimes things happen in the bedroom."
Holly Madison also alleged that Hef liked to take
photographs of the girls when they didn't know it, revealing to A&E,
"When you would go out with Hef, he's taking all kinds of naked pictures of
these women when we're wasted out of our minds. And he would print out like eight
copies for him and all the women, you pass them around. It was just gross."
Madison reportedly feared that if she ever tried to leave, Hef would release
the explicit photos he had taken of her.
When Playboy branched out into reality TV with
"The Girls Next Door," several of the playmates — along with series regulars Holly Madison,
Kendra Wilkinson, and Bridget Marquardt — became legitimately famous.
But instead of being surrounded by friends, life in the Mansion was crushingly lonely. Carla Howe
called it prison, and Holly Madison claimed she wasn't allowed to invite friends over.
But it appears that much of the isolation stemmed from the 9 P.M. curfew.
As Crystal Harris Hefner — who eventually became Hef's third and final wife — explained to Radar,
"It was a little bit lonely in the Mansion. I couldn't go anywhere."
"I was such a part of Hef's world for ten years and, y'know, at the mansion most of the time."
In her book, "Sliding into Home," Kendra Wilkinson described returning to the
mansion to meet the curfew, as her friends continued to party the night away. She wrote,
"I used to strip until two in the morning. I was clearly a night person;
I couldn't go to sleep at nine P.M. But that was the rule. Hef didn't
want his girls out on the town, getting into trouble and ruining 'Playboy's' reputation."
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