Everything Hugh Hefner's Ex Girlfriends Have Said About The Playboy Mansion
For decades the Playboy Mansion kept its secrets close, with its high gates and invite-only policy contributing to its storied history as a hidden bastion of hedonism and imagined promiscuity, with parties filled with beautiful women raging into the late hours of the night. As is was considered the ultimate pleasure palace, an invite to the Playboy Mansion was the hottest ticket in town; the who's who of Hollywood yearned to get a glimpse of the notorious party property and the man who resided there, Hugh Hefner.
But in 2005, the doors were busted wide open for all to see when The Girl's Of The Playboy Mansion debuted on Channel E! Following the daily lives of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's three live-in girlfriends, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson, the show was a huge success for the network, lasting 92 episodes over 6 seasons. And for the first time, the general public was invited inside the iconic Holmby Hills home. With beautifully manicured landscaping and large oak finished bedrooms, the mansion looked to all well seeing eyes as a beautifully kept piece of Gothic-Tudor architecture.
But after the cameras shut off and the girls had moved out, they made no secret of how they really felt about the California home, and how all was not as glamorous as television made it seem to be.
8 A Whole Lot Of History
Originally built in 1927, the mansion was purchased by Playboy in 1971. Playboy founder and editor-in-chief, the late Hugh Hefner, rented the mansion from his company, living there from 1974 until his death at 91 in 2017. The west wing of the mansion was used as the editorial offices for Playboy magazine, with the rest of the property used for living and entertaining. The mansion comprises 29 rooms including a wine cellar and a screening room with a built-in pipe organ. The grounds contain three zoo buildings with an aviary, basketball and tennis courts, and a waterfall and swimming pool area with a grotto, sauna, and bathhouse.
7 Substandard Amenities
Polish actress Izabella St. James met Hefner in an LA nightclub when she was 25 years old. Two years later, Hefner invited her to move into the mansion and become one of his official girlfriends. St. James stayed in the mansion until May 2004 when she ended her relationship with the famed lothario. Two years later she published 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."
6 Off To The Nursing Home
British glamour model Carla Howe spent three years from 2012-2015 between the UK and California, but described her time at the Playboy Mansion as more akin to an old person's home than "a place of excess with orgies and topless girls."
"[Hefner] almost never leaves home and refuses to change anything 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 describe the bedrooms as damp cold and unused, and that residents had to sit down to dinner with Hefner at 6:30 pm every night for beef with parsley sauce that "tastes like hospital food."
5 No Boys Club
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 9 pm curfew, and the girls were not allowed to invite friends over to see them. Strictly no male visitors were accepted. "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."
4 Pooches And Payments
While St. James was living in the house, Hefner would gift the girls a weekly allowance of $1000, a process, 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."
3 In Bed By Nine
Kendra Wilkinson, who found fame on The Girls of the Playboy Mansion as Hefner's third girlfriend, recounted in her book Sliding Into Home how the 9 pm curfew made her feel trapped. As the other Playmate models who lived in the adjacent house down the street were allowed to go 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."
2 Trapped and Vulnerable
Holly Madison left the mansion in 2008 after seven years living with Hefner as his number one girlfriend. While initially proclaiming on The Girls of the Playboy Mansion that she wished to marry and start a family with Hefner, she later described her feelings toward him as being attributed to Stockholm Syndrome. Madison released Down The Rabbit Hole, a tell-all book about her experiences in the mansion, in 2015, and said that despite pretending "everything is so great here," she was miserable inside.
"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 infamous metal gate was meant to keep people out. But I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in...I’d invested every part of myself in the mansion and had nothing waiting for me outside those gates. I felt so trapped and so vulnerable...the climate inside the mansion was toxic."
1 "I Saw A Woman"
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 saw a woman," she said, presuming it to be the ghost of a former employee. "My sister, myself and my friend Stacy were all sitting on my bed,” Marquardt recounted. “We were talking, having a glass of wine, and the TV was on. All of a sudden, out of the corner of all of our eyes, we saw a woman standing in my closet. Of course, when I turned to look at it straight on, it was gone."
"[There are] ghost stories dating back decades from that mansion,” she went on to explain, recalling other encounters such as slamming doors and visitors describing "weird vibes." Hefner even told her that the home's original owner had died on the property, and haunted the grounds to this day.
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