Traveling between my parents’ homes took a toll on the poor creature. Ultimately, we decided Gray Cloud would be happier living at the Playboy Mansion. There he would be safe. The only time I was allowed into the animal cages was the day we gave my rabbit away. Marston, Cooper, Ray, Cis, and I stood there, surrounded by a hundred bunnies. Gray Cloud was clawing against my arms, already eager to join his brethren. It was time to let him go.
“You can come visit him any time,” Kimberley assured me, and I knew she meant that. I was welcome at the Mansion whenever I wanted.
The pool at the Mansion was never at rest, partly because of the waterfalls that cascaded into each end and partly because someone was always taking a dip. There were invariably people by the pool too: the men huddled around the backgammon table by the deep end, the girls, slick with oil, lying out in the sun. Though not all the girls were young, they were all beautiful. They were like the petals of a rose; those farther from the bud were no less beautiful for being bruised, speckled, or slightly crisp. The younger girls were always terrified of saying hello to Hef. There was a ritual here: One of the older girls would take one of the younger ones by the hand and introduce her to Hef. He’d smile at her, kindly, like he did with everyone. Half underwater and spying, I marveled that someone could do so little and have such an effect.
Whenever my time to say hello to Hef arrived, I’d tense up like I was visiting a god. I was shocked by his warmth. At that time, I didn’t want anyone to touch me or reach my heart in any way, because I was afraid they would leave. But with Hef, I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. Literally. The man deviated so little from routine that, later in life, whenever he left the Mansion to go somewhere else for dinner, he would bring his own lamb chops.
You could order whatever you wanted at the Playboy Mansion, but I only ever ordered mashed potatoes and peas. I didn’t even have to ask for them, actually—they just appeared at lunchtime. I would emerge from the pool, eyes singed with chlorine, and sit with the girls. The Playmates could also be intimidating. The more they cooed over me, the more self-conscious I felt. I would jump back into the pool, potatoes digested not at all, to join the boys my age.
At elementary school, when they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be an actress. This was a lie—I didn’t care about movies at all. The truth was, I wanted to be beautiful, and it seemed to me that the beautiful women, the ones who had everything, all said they wanted to be actresses.
In the early 2000s, as I slid from girlhood to adolescence, problems arose. Though the girls at the Mansion would marvel at my porcelain skin and adorable freckles, I knew I was not one of them. I was prepubescent, my teeth coming in at increasingly odd angles, my skin tainted by misshapen splotches after even the slightest sun exposure. I was neither blond nor tan, and even the girls who were not these things were at least perfect. I compared myself to the girls at the Mansion, because they were who I wanted to be. I wore padded bras and bleached my hair a noxious Sun-In yellow. My mom protested my trips to the tanning salon, but I didn’t care. Cis, my nanny, would take me.
In retrospect, I realize the girls were also comparing themselves to one another. Even though they could order anything, many of them ordered no food at all. More and more of them got their noses fixed, their breasts enlarged. As I chased the beauty of the girls, they chased their perfect measurements—and in so doing became even more unattainable to me.
I was offended that the girls didn’t include me in their conversations about bloating or the men who were disappointing them. It never occurred to me that they might have been trying to protect me. That perhaps, despite all appearances to the contrary, they did not have everything. And that whatever was lacking from their lives they wanted me to have.
The first person I ever knew who died was a regular at the Playboy Mansion, Joni. While she was not technically a girl, being 60 years old, she was a former Playmate. She was famous because in her pictorial she got away with lying face down, showing nothing but her back and a sliver of her derriere. As one of Hef’s social secretaries, Joni was responsible for taking photos. This makes sense, because my memories of her are like a chemical impression: The long whippiness of her hair. The softness of her voice. Crushed velvet—every day—in Southern California.
When I was nine, Joni was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She was already terminal when a doctor attempted a lifesaving surgery. It did not go well. Joni spent the last few months of her life in such agony that they had to strap her down in a bed. Kimberley visited her every day, putting on gloves and a mask. In caring for Joni, she didn’t want to accidentally kill her.
Mansion regulars Alison and Joel also visited Joni at the hospital. That night, they approached Hef trepidatiously at his spot in front of the big screen. Hef always sat in the same spot, in front of the same screen, where he would watch a movie every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night. When they told him that Joni was slipping away, he swallowed hard, then turned.
“Let’s not let it ruin the movie.”
We very rarely stayed at the Mansion after dark, not because anything nefarious was going on, but because it was very boring. They served a massive Thanksgiving-style buffet dinner every night, but I already had mashed potatoes whenever I wanted. The adults would jockey to sit next to Hef—the meals fell somewhere between a family dinner and the court of Versailles. The kids were pretty much ignored because we had no opinions on censorship or the hypocrisy of American sexuality.
Before I began writing this piece, I asked the regulars I still know what had brought us all together. Alison and Joel insisted that Hef was just like anybody else—he wanted real friends, people he could talk to about the stuff that mattered to him. Marston has a very different take. The regulars, those people I saw as family, really only stuck around because they wanted proximity to fame.
“My father was a very bad judge of character,” he told me darkly.
For my part, I had no interest in celebrities. In the same way a kid rolls their eyes at things their parents like—their record collection, their bridge club, their golf obsession—I rolled my eyes at famous people. They all seemed hopelessly uncomfortable in their skin, trapped in the persona that their agent, publicist, or most recent director had created for them. Hef, on the other hand, was a celebrity who loved celebrities. In one hallway he hung photos of all the famous people who ever visited the Mansion, which was a lot. The entire hall was filled floor to ceiling, Hef’s mischievous eyes peering out at you from every picture.
I do remember being starstruck at the Playboy Mansion once. At that time I was an avid reader, and Shel Silverstein was one of my favorite writers. I appreciated the way he wrote about nonsense, because I had a sense that everything I experienced was also backward. There were only a few men brave enough to bare their hairy chests and spindly legs by the pool. One of them, I learned, was Silverstein. No wonder he’s so brave, I thought. He is a genius. One day we were marched up to him, each with a crisp copy of The Giving Tree for him to sign. He not only signed the book but drew each of us our own special cartoon. Later the boys were encouraged by an unknowing nanny to color the drawings in.
I knew the Mansion was not intended for children, but I asked no questions. I could not have been less curious about sex or sexuality. I was constantly vigilant, in terror of being exposed to something I wasn’t supposed to see. I never picked up an issue of Playboy, though they were left in every room. I never once questioned the original purpose of the mirrored furniture-less room in the game house—or why every bathroom had its own selection of Vaseline and tissues.
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