While the Playboy Mansion was painted as a glamorous location, one of Hugh Hefner’s former ‘girlfriends’ has unveiled the grimy truth behind the glittering façade
The Playboy Mansion had a reputation for glamour, boosted by its incessant celebrity-packed parties and association with Hugh Hefner’s soft-porn empire.
But the day-to-day reality of the 20,000 square foot property in LA’s Holmby Hills had very little glamour attached, according to former Playboy Playmate Kendra Wilkinson.
Hefner’s infamous grotto was “gross,” Kendra told Aussie radio hosts Kyle and Jackie O. “I didn’t like going in there,” she added, “ It was always so horrible.”
And the rest of the mansion was, if anything, worse. “It was very run-down and not as great as everyone thought it was pretty nasty,” Kendra explained. “There was dog poop everywhere and Hef would just wobble by and just pick it up with his bare hands.”
Kendra had become one of Hefner’s rotating cast of leggy blonde “girlfriends” after meeting him at his 78th birthday party in April 2004. Despite dark rumours of sexual exploitation emerging after Hefner’s death, Kendra – who was 19 when she first started dating the elderly porn mogul – said that “nothing bad” ever happened to her while she was living at the mansion.
“I was just a fun, wild, young, dumb blonde and I own it. Nothing ever bad happened to me.”
Kendra was one of three “girlfriends” selected for MTV’s hugely-successful Girls next Door series, alongside Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt, which ran for five seasons before the trio were replaced. She went on to feature in her own spinoff show, which followed Kendra’s story as she moved out of the Playboy Mansion, met and eventually married NFL star Hank Baskett and had her first child.
Her two Girls Next Door cohorts also spun off reality TV careers, with Holly and Bridget eventually launching a regular podcast reminiscing about their time at the mansion. Holly recalled how the sprawling property was filled with odd, and sometimes downright macabre knick-knacks the Playboy founder had collected over the years.
Holly described seeing one particularly unusual piece of custom-made furniture at the mansion: “The sex chair was this weird chair somebody made in the Seventies. Dorothy Stratten’s husband was trying to get it patented or he was in a business that made them or something.
“There was one at the mansion in the bath house area …there was no gym back in the Seventies, but there used to be a sex chair there. They talk about it in Secrets of Playboy about how some people would like use it at parties – really gruesome detail is that in the Dorothy Stratten murder that was part of the whole thing…”
