Bunny Tales (9 page)

5: The Crib.

“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

—John Howard Payne

W
hen you think of the most famous residences in the world, which come to mind? The White House, Graceland, Taj Mahal, Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing St., maybe the Neverland Ranch, and surely the Playboy Mansion. And now, one of those places was my new home! Except the Mansion is like its own little country, with a hedonistic ruler and its own special laws. It took a while to get used to the idea that I lived at the legendary Playboy Mansion. Every time I pulled up to that famous gate with the talking rock and it opened automatically for me, I would take a mental step back and think,
How did I end up living here?
At the beginning, everything was so new and exciting; we were having the time of our lives. The Playboy Mansion is a peculiar place. First and foremost, it is Hef’s house. It is also Hef’s office, an office that employs approximately ten other people at any given time. There is also house management, the video department, the people that work on Hef’s scrapbooks, the butlers, the maids, the gardeners, the animal department, and security. Then of course it became our house as well. All in all, it’s a lot of people. The main problem I had with that was the lack of privacy; the only privacy I ever had was in my room.

The Gothic Tudor house was built in 1926 for a British businessman, Mr. Arthur Letts. According to the house legend, Mrs. Letts haunts the Mansion. I never saw anything ghostly or experienced anything peculiar, but the house does have a creepy feel at night. One of the other Girlfriends, Bridget, with her love for murders and other unpleasantries, believed in the spirit of Mrs. Letts roaming around the Mansion—that’s why she had the ghost-talker come do a séance on one of the episodes of
The Girls Next Door.
It was Hef’s great love, Barbi Benton, who found the house. Hef fell in love with it and purchased it in 1971 for a million dollars, a great investment considering it is now worth an estimated $45 million. It was originally intended to be the West coast counterpart to the now nonoperational Chicago East Coast Mansion. The Playboy Mansion had a “sister” house built next door, which was there before Hef bought it. Though smaller and slightly different, its layout is a mirror image of the Mansion. Hef purchased the neighboring house in 1996. His wife, Kimberly, and their two teenage sons live there.

The Mansion wasn’t like people think—with James Caan ordering drinks at the cabana bar, and bikini-clad women running around. Instead, it was strangely quiet throughout most of the day. The only people you ever saw were the small army of gardeners and groundskeepers it took to maintain paradise, and Hef himself, barreling along one of the shaded walkways in his silk pajamas and slippers, clutching a sheaf of papers on some mysterious errand. Although the house is large, approximately 21,000 square feet, it doesn’t feel that big; there is no danger of getting lost in it. The layout is actually quite simple: The basement contains mainly storage and other functional spaces. On the ground floor are all the common areas, the second floor houses all the bedrooms, and the third floor, or the attic, houses the scrapbooks and video department.

When you enter through the huge golden oak main door, you find yourself in what is know as the great hall. If you keep going straight through this area you’ll get to the backyard. The great hall has an ornate desk with Hef’s picture hanging above it and a guest book below for guests to sign and leave Hef messages. There is also a bench and a throne chair. A painting of Hef ’s second wife, Kimberly Conrad Hefner, also decorates the great hall. During the parties, there is a dance floor put in here, and on the weekends it is an area for guests to mingle. For us girls, it was the place to meet before we went out to clubs or events. We always posed in the great hall for the first of many photographs taken during a night out.

To the right of the great hall is the walnut-paneled formal dining room, with a long oval table and cushy blue seats all around. On the weekends, other chairs are added to accommodate as many guests as possible for the buffet dinner. Hef ’s seat is at the head of the table with the chairs immediately next to him reserved for the Girlfriends, his brother Keith, and his closest friends. There is also another small round table by the window, to accommodate extra guests, and the food tables are along the other walls. There is a Jackson Pollock painting in the dining room that I admired though Hef told me it was a replica; the real one was sold some years ago. Right next to the dining room is the Mediterranean room, a small garden-like breakfast/lunch room that is only a door away from the butler’s pantry and then the extensive kitchen.

The kitchen is open twenty-four hours a day; my favorite thing about living at the Mansion was being able to order food anytime. All I had to do was press “0” on my telephone, or from anywhere in the house, and order anything I wanted. If I could not decide, I would order two meals and eat a portion of each. The way it worked is the butlers would write down our order and when it was ready, they brought it to our rooms on a tray. Now they have a computer to type the order into and keep track of the food. We could order anything anytime! Whatever the craving was, it would be fulfilled. My friends loved visiting and ordering French toast with fresh berries for breakfast; I used to get it all the time too. For lunch they made an awesome Cobb salad or a club sandwich. My favorite dinners were chicken fajitas, salmon, penne pasta in Alfredo sauce, or cheeseburger and fries—they make the best “skinny” fries at the Mansion! And I can’t forget the fresh chips and guacamole. We were really spoiled. But things weren’t always perfect; some butlers were less efficient than others and only realized they forgot about your order when you called an hour later wondering why the club sandwich was taking so long. That was the downside; we were not allowed to go and make our own food, even if we were hungry and didn’t want to wait. In fact, we were not even allowed in the butler’s pantry. After so many of Hef ’s previous girls hooked up with the butlers, there was a strict rule about no socializing with the staff.

People were not the only ones benefiting from the kitchen and butler service; our dogs were pretty spoiled too. My dogs would eat chopped up chicken twice a day (and dog food once a day), which was ordered along with my breakfast and lunch. The butlers would bring it on little white dishes. This was very helpful when I began interning at the Playboy Entertainment Group Inc. a couple of days a week, and I could call them and ask them to feed the dogs; leaving food for them was not an alternative because pugs are piglets and would eat it all. I became so used to pressing “0” and reaching the butlers that when I started working at Playboy, I would press “0” on my phone and say, “Hi, this is Izabella, can you please take two chicken dishes to my room for the pugs and make sure they have water.” It never ceased to elicit a colorful response from the confused company operator: “Who is this? Chicken for pugs? What the hell are you talking about?” I always laughed at myself: This reliance on pressing “0” was out of control. I was actually really embarrassed at how spoiled I was, and I was embarrassed on behalf of the dogs; they were spoiled as well. Sometimes as a special treat I (and I was not the only one) would order a lamb chop for them, but I always made sure to ask for one with as little meat as possible—I just wanted the bone for the dogs to chew on. Then one day when I tried to order two chops the butlers told me that the chef was very angry that several of us girls were ordering lamb chops for their dogs when they were bought especially for Hef (lamb chops were one of his very favorite meals). I certainly did not mean to offend anyone, particularly the chef—I just wanted the bones. The butlers thought it was funny that Emma and I got in trouble for eating Hef’s chops, and I never ordered them again.

Back to the house tour. On the opposite side of the great hall, if you make a left from the main entrance, you will see a beautiful wood twin balustrade staircase, and as you pass under it, you will find the living/family room, although it more commonly functions as the movie room. During the week the room is like a family room with brown leather couches, a piano, and a couple of tables. This is where the Christmas tree stands during the holidays. On movie nights the couches are arranged and rows of chairs are added to accommodate the guests in front of the giant movie screen. Behind the movie screen, which is left down most of the time, stands an old but beautiful tiger print sofa, which I was told is where one of Hef’s Girlfriends, who is also a Playmate, used to have sex with one of the butlers. Past the movie room is the library, with not too many books in it at all. It has a desk where Hef writes his notes for the movies (on Friday nights Hef introduces the movie of the night by reading his notes about the movie, things like background, meaning, etc.), as well as a worn-in couch and a table where Hef plays backgammon on Sundays when the weather is not suitable for outdoor activities, and a cozy fireplace. Hef is always seen interviewed in this room, surrounded by pictures of his family and Girlfriends and an interesting sculpture of Barbi.

Between the movie room and the library is a secret door disguised by the carved wood paneling on the wall. There is a hidden button that when pressed opens up the door and reveals a staircase that leads to a wine cellar. It’s all very James Bond. Emma and I snuck down there one night to retrieve a bottle of my favorite wine, Cabernet Sauvignon. I had ordered a glass from the kitchen, but they had an overstock of Shiraz and that was the only wine they were going to serve until it was finished.
What?
Hef always announces on television that we have a five-star kitchen, but what kind of a five-star restaurant has only one type of wine? So I took the matter into my own hands and searched for the legendary wine cellar; one of the brave butlers showed us which secret button to press on the wall to get the door to open. The next day, one of the butlers reported that a bottle of wine had been removed from the cellar and Hef came charging to my room, upset, as if I committed a crime. Hef’s previous Girlfriends had gone down there and taken a few bottles of Dom Pérignon, which cost him a lot of money, and from then on girls were not allowed to go to the cellar. Hef came to have a “talk” with us about it as if it was a major transgression. It really surprised me that he was so mad; it was just a regular bottle of wine. I was also mad for being treated like a child: “I am sick and tired of drinking that vinegary Shiraz all the time just because they have an overstock of it,” I tried to explain. “How many more months do I have to drink it for, Hef? I would go to the store and buy it myself but I already got yelled at by a butler for having a bottle in my room!” That was another rule: No
bottles
of alcohol in our rooms. Again, it was because girls in the past had drinking problems and so now Hef did not allow bottles in rooms. All I wanted was one glass of Cabernet to relax and I got a huge headache instead. But that was the nature of life at the Mansion. In the end, Hef promised to have the kitchen cabinet stocked with a better selection of wine, and told the kitchen staff that the guests could drink the Shiraz, but the girls were to have any wine they wanted. Another battle won.

And that is all there is to the downstairs—not as many rooms as one would imagine. Unlike the glamorous celebrity homes you usually see on
MTV Cribs
, the Mansion does not have a formal living room or any fancy rooms at all, nor does it contain any remarkable pieces of furniture or decoration. I guess it would be futile to have very expensive and luxurious things when the house is used to entertain so many people on a regular basis.

To get to the second floor, you walk up the twin staircase, at the top of which you will find a brass sculpture lovingly referred to as “brass ass,” in the crack of which, messages are left for Hef. The upstairs is organized in a very straightforward way. You have one long hallway (in the shape of an L) and all the bedrooms are located along it. The first doorway you encounter upstairs is Hef’s bedroom. After Hef’s room are bedrooms numbered from two to six, along with a few closets along the way. At the end of the hall, after bedroom six, you take four steps down and that is where the offices are located. It used to be the maids’ quarters, but the four small rooms have been converted to home offices. When Emma and I were moving in, Holly lived in Hef’s bedroom and Tammy had the next room, bedroom two. Bedroom three had three beds and was used by visiting girls, so whoever took that room had to share (later, before I moved out, Bridget had the other beds removed and it became her bedroom, as it remains at the time of my writing). Then there were bedrooms four and five, which had a connecting bathroom. At the end of the hall was bedroom six, and though it was the second smallest room, it had its own bathroom, so that was the room I chose. I did not want to have to share a bathroom; I really wanted my privacy and wanted to be able to enjoy a relaxing bath without feeling like I was inconveniencing someone else. I also didn’t want Hef popping by all the time and checking up on me. I didn’t realize that during the day, I would have the least privacy because the offices were next to my room. Every time I walked in and out of the door, everyone looked down the hall and saw me. Tammy once told me that every girl who occupied that room did not stay long at the Mansion; the room’s distance from Hef’s room was symbolic of the distance the girl wanted to keep from the group. Ironically, this applied to me in some respects, but I did end up living at the Mansion for a much longer time than I expected.

In the hallway connecting the bedrooms is a gallery of photos taken throughout the years. The walls are literally filled with pictures; every celebrity imaginable is there: Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Willis, Jim Carrey, and hundreds more. There are also pictures of Hef’s friends and Girlfriends over the years. Sometimes at night when everyone was sleeping, I just walked up and down the hall and looked at all the pictures; it could take hours. The Mansion also has an attic, a third floor with slanted ceilings, where Hef’s scrapbooks are stored. Hef has 1,500 scrapbooks documenting his entire life. When he was young, he started documenting his life by drawing cartoons of people and events in his life. When he got too busy to draw, he began using photographs, articles, and other mementos. Hef kept love letters he got from girls, photos, and other special tokens. This is the reason he took hundreds of photos every week, everywhere we went. No moment could be lost. The scrapbooks are an egomaniacal obsession.