Down the Rabbit Hole (28 page)

It all happened so quickly, I can't even remember how I initially heard about the contract. What I do recall is getting really worked up and marching down to the master bedroom to tell Hef I had no intention of signing.

“I think it's in bad taste to sign a contract to be your girlfriend,” I maintained. Given that the show was about “Hef and who he is dating,” as opposed to any of the three of us (as they liked to remind us regularly), I felt signing a contract with him was taking away my option of walking away from the relationship at any time. It would be just another facet of this relationship that would make me feel like a hooker. “It's just weird.”

“I understand the notion, but it's important to me that you sign it,” he said, looking at me with sad puppy dog eyes. “If you care about me, you'll do it.”

In the end, it was always about Hef. Quietly, I did my best to consider my options. I didn't want to be coerced into doing anything else for this man.

Sensing my hesitation, and realizing that my heartstrings might not convince me, Hef decided to appeal to my business sense, telling me that if we didn't all sign, the network might not order another season.

As further encouragement, Hef had told me Bridget already signed her contract, but I didn't learn until afterwards that she did so completely against her better judgment. As a reasonable person would, Bridget asked to have some time to have her lawyers look over the paperwork but was denied. I imagine she was given the trademark mansion attitude: “If you don't like it, you can leave.” Begrudgingly, she signed the contract.

“Okay,” I finally relented. “I'll look at it, but I want you to know, I don't like this.”

“I understand,” Hef said, unable to contain his smile. He didn't care what the hell I thought, as long as I walked my butt down to the office and signed those papers.

Still in my pajamas, I trudged down to Mary's office at the other end of the mansion. Without saying a word, I sat myself in the chair next to her desk and started playing with her white Maltese pup named Miss Kitty.

“So,” Mary started, looking over the top of her small-framed eyeglasses. “Did Hef tell you about the contracts?”

“Yes,” I grumbled, before pleading my case. “And I'm not thrilled about it. I think it's wrong.”

Mary sat in silence with her arms folded, allowing me my few moments to vent.

“Because the show is about Hef's girlfriends, I feel like I'm signing a contract to be in a relationship,” I whined. I was beyond frustrated. I had my back against the ropes. If I wanted to move forward with the show for a fifth season, I had to bind myself to Hef's production company. What if I wanted to move out? Or do another show? I felt like this contract might make that impossible.

“That's not really what it's about, Holly,” Mary reassured me, her voice smooth and calm. “E! is just hesitant to move forward with the show if their talent isn't under any kind of contract. That's all.”

“I know, but . . .” I allowed my voice to trail off. I'd already had the same argument with Hef and it wasn't going to result in any different outcome with Mary. I fell silent for a few moments before asking, “Do they have to be signed today?”

“Yes,” Mary said very matter-of-factly. “They need them back today.”

“Why did we get them so last minute, then?” I asked, my anxiety starting to escalate again. “We don't even have time to look them over!”

“The contracts are with Alta Loma, dear,” Mary went on, sidestepping any explanation as to why we were just now receiving them. “You know if there's a problem, Hef will release you from it.”

But would he? I know that in Mary's heart, she sincerely thought that Hef was a good man—just as I believed at the time. But a nagging voice in the back of my head kept warning me not to trust this situation.

If signing this contract was really so important to everyone, I decided to just get it over with. I knew that ultimately I had no choice. Hef would find a way to corner me into signing it, so I might as well just save myself any further aggravation.

“Fine, “I said, grabbing a pen on Mary's desk. “Where do I sign?”

I scribbled my name on the contract that Mary nonchalantly shoved under my nose and handed it back to her.

“Now . . . what to do about the Kendra problem,” Mary continued.

Kendra was in the Dominican Republic for a paid nightclub appearance, so she could hardly sign the paperwork by E!'s alleged deadline. But Hef and his team must have found some kind of solution, if all three of our signed contracts were indeed delivered to E! that afternoon.

I can't say this with certainty since I never witnessed pen to paper, but the gossip around the mansion was that someone on Hef's staff must have had to forge Kendra's contract in order to meet the network's deadline. Of course it's also possible that E! never even gave Hef a deadline or that he used a false date to get us to sign without giving us the opportunity to really review the documents. Who knows? All I know is, the whole thing seemed highly unusual to me.

O
UR FIFTH CYCLE WOULD
end up being a season of growing pains. Looking back, I see that it makes sense that this was our last season as a trio. From an outsider's perspective, however, everything looked like it couldn't be going any better. The series had become such a phenomenon, there was even a movie being made about it. Well, sort of.
The House Bunny,
starring Anna Faris, was a comedy set at the Playboy Mansion, centering on a fictional Playmate who finds herself kicked out of the mansion (upon turning 27) and takes refuge in a sorority house. In the film, Anna plays a mansion resident named Shelley, a character clearly based on Bridget.

“You should have been the sporty one,” Kendra teasingly pouted at Anna the first time we met her as she prepared to shoot a scene in the mansion's backyard. Anna was done up with curly blond hair, a frilly pink outfit, and her character had a grumpy pet cat, similar to Bridget's cat, Gizmo. Bridget's pink-striped bedroom was used as Shelley's room in the movie. Even the high-pitched voice and sunny, Pollyanna attitude Anna affected for her character were very much Bridget's style.

We had cameos in the film, playing ourselves for a few scenes. The movie would hit the number two spot at the box office on its opening weekend. Even I couldn't believe what a phenomenon this frilly, frothy, girly (and in many ways make-believe) version of the Playboy world had become.

Not everything in our world was cotton candy and fluffy bunny tails, however. That year, Kendra started taking Accutane for an acne problem she had grown increasingly self-conscious of. To me, Kendra was a beautiful girl, with acne or without, so on one hand I couldn't understand her paranoia, but on the other hand I could. Every girl who ever lived at the mansion knew that her entire value, in Hef's eyes, depended on the way she looked. In fact, in an interview from the previous year for an
Elle
magazine article, Kendra confessed: “I'm very insecure right now about my face. I get scared with Hef looking at me at the mansion and maybe thinking I'm ugly.” I certainly understood how she felt. In that same article, Hef went out of his way to tell the writer that I had only “become beautiful” and that I “didn't look the same” as when he first met me, going on to attribute my new acceptability to my nose job.

Gee, thanks, Hef!

Whether it was an excuse not to have to adhere to the filming schedules she hated keeping or if she really had grown debilitatingly insecure, Kendra often refused to come out of her room to film scenes. I would find out later that this was around the time she started secretly seeing her future husband, Hank Baskett, so maybe that factored into the equation as well. The producers were desperate to find someone to take Kendra's spot, should she decide to stop coming out completely.

No one was talking about adding a new girlfriend or anything, but I was asked to recruit some girls that I thought would be good for the show to stay at the Bunny House for a month or so while we filmed. I chose Laura Croft, a wild and crazy Playmate from Florida; Kayla Collins, the bouncy blonde from the “Go West Young Girl” episode; and Angel Porrino (also from the “Go West” episode), the funny girl with the high-pitched voice from Las Vegas.

Having the girls around proved helpful as Kendra refused to participate in quite a few of the episodes (sometimes she would salvage her spot at the last minute by agreeing to film something by herself; other times she was just missing in action).

When Bridget produced a campy B movie called
The Telling,
Kendra didn't take part, even though she was offered a role in the film. While Bridget and I traveled with Laura, Kayla, and Angel to Chicago, Dallas, and New York to scout Playmates, Kendra chose to stay home.

One evening Hef popped around the corner into my vanity area and announced that he was kicking Kayla out of the Bunny House.

“Why?” I asked. I couldn't imagine what Kayla had done to warrant such dislike and was eager to stick up for my new friend.

“Kendra doesn't like her,” he said firmly. “She thinks Kayla is starting trouble between her and some of the other Playmates. She feels like she is trying to take her place on the show. She's toxic. She has to go!”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I don't get it, maybe I should ask Kendra about it. Kayla likes Kendra, as far as I know. Who is she supposedly starting problems with?” I asked.

“Other Playmates,” Hef reiterated, as if that made him any more clear than before. He went on to say how hysterical Kendra was about it.

I couldn't figure out what this was really about and pleaded for Hef to let Kayla stick around for the remaining weeks that she was scheduled to stay.

“I'll talk to Kendra about it and make sure everything is okay,” I promised, trying to play the peacekeeper.

Hef agreed to let her stay, but threatened to have her leave if she made another misstep. He waved a finger at me and walked out of the room.

I wasn't too worried about the situation; I assumed Kendra felt threatened by another petite, energetic platinum blonde running around in front of the cameras.

She'll get over it when Kayla leaves,
I thought.

Later, I would hear through the grapevine that Kendra's future husband, Hank, was apparently after Kayla before he met Kendra. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it would explain the freak-out.

For the second half of season five, the girls in the Bunny House left and the three amigos gravitated back together. We invited all of our moms (and our house mother, Mary O'Connor) out for a group spa day, visited Barbi Benton's outrageous home in Aspen, and went on a road trip for Bridget's sister Anastasia's birthday. The three of us attended our friend Stacy Burke's wedding in Vegas. Stacy was always identified as “Hef's former girlfriend” when her name popped up on screen during an episode. As if there wasn't any other way to identify her! Hef truly loved to believe that the highlight of any of his ex's lives was the time they spent with him. He also loved to remind viewers of all the beautiful women he “dated.”

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.