For many years the Playboy Mansion stored its secrets and techniques close, with its high gates and invite-only policy contributing to its storied history as a hidden bastion of hedonism and imagined promiscuity, with events stuffed with beautiful ladies raging into the late hours of the night time. As is used to be regarded as the ultimate pleasure palace, an invite to the Playboy Mansion was once the hottest price ticket in town; the who's who of Hollywood yearned to get a glimpse of the infamous birthday celebration assets and the guy who resided there, Hugh Hefner.
But in 2005, the doors were busted huge open for all to look when The Girl's Of The Playboy Mansion debuted on Channel E! Following the day by day lives of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's three live-in girlfriends, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson, the display used to be an enormous success for the network, lasting 92 episodes over 6 seasons. And for the first time, the common public used to be invited inside the iconic Holmby Hills home. With beautifully manicured landscaping and large oak completed bedrooms, the mansion seemed to all smartly seeing eyes as a superbly kept piece of Gothic-Tudor architecture.
But after the cameras shut off and the ladies had moved out, they made no secret of how they in reality felt about the California house, and how all was no longer as glamorous as tv made it appear to be.
Originally built in 1927, the mansion was once purchased by Playboy in 1971. Playboy founder and editor-in-chief, the late Hugh Hefner, rented the mansion from his corporate, dwelling there from 1974 until his dying at Ninety one in 2017. The west wing of the mansion was used as the editorial offices for Playboy mag, with the rest of the assets used for residing and entertaining. The mansion incorporates 29 rooms together with a wine cellar and a screening room with a built-in pipe organ. The grounds comprise three zoo constructions with an aviary, basketball and tennis courts, and a waterfall and swimming pool space with a grotto, sauna, and bathhouse.
Polish actress Izabella St. James met Hefner in an LA nightclub when she used to be 25 years outdated. Two years later, Hefner invited her to move into the mansion and transform one in all his professional girlfriends. St. James stayed in the mansion till May 2004 when she ended her relationship with the famed lothario. Two years later she printed Bunny Tales, the memoirs of her time living in the famed mansion, and spilled the beans about how it isn't as glamourous as one would think.
"Everything in the mansion felt old and stale, and Archie the house dog would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains, adding a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay," she wrote. "Each bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture. It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room. The mattresses on our beds were disgusting – old, worn, and stained. The sheets were past their best, too."
British glamour fashion Carla Howe spent 3 years from 2012-2015 between the UK and California, but described her time at the Playboy Mansion as extra similar to an previous individual's home than "a place of excess with orgies and topless girls."
"[Hefner] almost by no means leaves house and refuses to modify anything else in the mansion, the whole place feels like it's stuck in the 1980s," she told the Daily Mail. "There is no velvet or gold and all the carpets are brown and curling." She went on to explain the bedrooms as damp cold and unused, and that residents had to take a seat all the way down to dinner with Hefner at 6:30 pm each and every night for red meat with parsley sauce that "tastes like hospital food."
Howe's sister Melissa stayed at the mansion too and said that there were strict rules the girls had to follow while living there. There was a Nine pm curfew, and the girls were not allowed to invite friends over to see them. Strictly no male visitors had been accredited. "If you do something wrong, you'll get an email," she said. "There's a strict code of conduct. There are even rules about Instagram and Twitter. You've got to show everything in a good light and if you're drunk in a picture you'll be in trouble."
While St. James was dwelling in the space, Hefner would present the ladies a weekly allowance of $1000, a procedure, she said, that he would use as a weapon. "We had to go to Hef's room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet – and then ask for our allowance," she wrote in her memoirs. "We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn't happy about in the relationship."
Kendra Wilkinson, who found status on The Girls of the Playboy Mansion as Hefner's third girlfriend, recounted in her ebook Sliding Into Home how the 9 pm curfew made her feel trapped. As the other Playmate fashions who lived in the adjacent house down the boulevard had been allowed to head birthday party at Hefner's expense, the live-in girlfriends didn't have as much freedom. "Nights were hard because while my Playmate friends got to go out and party, I would have to be home by 9 p.m," she said. "I'd get a text message from a girl that read, 'Having so much fun in Vegas. Wish you were here! Partying with all these football players,' and that was devastating. I felt so trapped and angry when I was missing out on something good."
Holly Madison left the mansion in 2008 after seven years residing with Hefner as his primary female friend. While to begin with proclaiming on The Girls of the Playboy Mansion that she wanted to marry and get started a family with Hefner, she later described her feelings towards him as being attributed to Stockholm Syndrome. Madison released Down The Rabbit Hole, a tell-all guide about her reviews in the mansion, in 2015, and said that regardless of pretending "everything is so great here," she used to be depressing inside of.
"There were days I woke up and just felt like falling to the floor because I felt so depressed,' she wrote. "Everyone thinks that the notorious metal gate was once intended to stay folks out. But I grew to really feel it was supposed to lock me in...I’d invested every a part of myself in the mansion and had not anything looking ahead to me out of doors the ones gates. I felt so trapped and so prone...the climate inside the mansion was toxic."
Bridget Marquardt was the third star of The Girls of the Playboy Mansion. One of Hefner's live-in girlfriends, she resided in the mansion between 2002-2009.
But her memories of the mansion are a little more unusual than most. Marquardt explained on the paranormal activity podcast Dark House that she believes the Playboy Mansion is haunted. "I noticed a woman," she said, presuming it to be the ghost of a former employee. "My sister, myself and my buddy Stacy have been all sitting on my mattress,” Marquardt recounted. “We were speaking, having a pitcher of wine, and the TV used to be on. All of a unexpected, out of the corner of all of our eyes, we noticed a woman standing in my closet. Of course, once I became to have a look at it instantly on, it was once gone."
"[There are] ghost tales relationship back decades from that mansion,” she went on to give an explanation for, recalling other encounters similar to slamming doorways and visitors describing "weird vibes." Hefner even instructed her that the home's unique proprietor had died on the assets, and haunted the grounds to this present day.
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