According to the book Bunny Tales by former Playboy Bunny Izabella St. James (pictured above), the Playboy Mansion is like a combination of smelly rest home and filthy home for wayward girls on the plastic surgery gravy train. If it’s true, the accounts are pretty eye-opening. The book is not new, but the Daily Mail just published an in-depth look at life with Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion centering on St. James’ book and experiences, with added storyline from other sources to bring it up to date. I read it much in the same way you eat a bag of greasy potato chips. Can’t stop once you start, even though you know it’s not good (it’s also sex-negative in parts)… The curfews, the sex party etiquette, all worth a glance. Here’s a snip:
(…) For Izabella, the Playboy Mansion was far from the glamorous pleasure palace she had imagined. ‘Each bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture,’ she recalls in her autobiography Bunny Tales. ‘It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room.
‘Although we all did our best to decorate our rooms and make them homely, the mattresses on our beds were disgusting — old, worn and stained. The sheets were past their best, too. (…) She adds: ‘But then Hef was used to dirty carpets. The one in his bedroom had not been changed for years, and things became significantly worse when Holly Madison moved into his room with him as Girlfriend No. 1 soon after I moved in, bringing her two dogs.
‘They weren’t house-trained and would just do their business on the bedroom carpet. Late at night, or in the early hours of the morning — if any of us visited Hef’s bedroom — we’d almost always end up standing in dog mess.
‘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.’ (…read more, dailymail.co.uk)
I don’t know about you, but this kind of pisses me off. I mean, all the money in the world to make the ultimate castle fuck pad, and this is what you do? This is the limits of your imagination? If I could make my own Adult Disneyland, it would be a revolution and a work of art, forever.
So this is the desired end result of the Playboy lifestyle? This is the sum total of the male ideal Playboy sold us? Go on, Hefner. LIVE THE DREAM.
(Derp.)
… love Miss Conduct’s comments. Why wouldn’t he hire some people to do the housework? Surely he doesn’t expect the women to scrub the baths and toilets in additiion to sexually servicing an indulgent octogenarian? And why on earth wouldn’t he hire some interior decorators, too? As usual, more strange (except not in a good way!) and much less decadent than we could imagine … or indeed create ourselves … ;)
It does surprise me that Hef hasn’t hired a competent butler-type person to see to the cleanliness of the storied Playboy Mansion. Hef’s been wealthy for a long time, and you don’t get that way by spending money unnecessarily. It speaks to the girlfriends’ real status that their personal quarters, where sex with the boss doesn’t happen, is not important enough to spend any money on. Also, old people can’t see or smell well and their houses are almost always gross unless a younger person cleans it. I know this from experience!
Hef is probably living his dream. He’s exactly where he wants to be. If he wasn’t, he’s got the resources to change it.
And the women living in his house are making it happen for him. If they didn’t like it, they’d move out.
Men – old or young – are generally happy exactly where they are so far as interior decoration goes. Sure, they could paint the walls, shampoo the carpet, buy a new bed or two, take the curtains to the laundromat…. But they don’t.
Sounds to me like Hef should hire someone who ISN’T there for the sex or the free booze or whatever. Someone who can play the heavy-handed housekeeper.
And if Hef don’t like it, just roll over honey, and paddle those sagging cheeks.
At the risk of being a heretic, I have to say that Hefner has been a disturbing figure to me for a while. While I can respect him as a pioneer, I see him as someone stuck in a puerile fantasy that was appropriate (maybe) years ago but no longer. The article didn’t say anything that doesn’t fit into that picture.
I’d actually be really interested to hear how you would design your own “Adult Disneyland,” Violet. I have a feeling it would be much more interesting than what Hefner built.
I’m honestly not surprised at all that it’s like that. You can give the tailer trash money, but that won’t take the trailer trash away. Just look at Kendra’s reality show and you’ll see how a millionaire sports star and his well-off wife live in squalor in a barely decorated house with dogs making messes all over the place. I’m not surprised the day to day life of the Playboy Mansion is the same especially packing it full of these women.