Down the Rabbit Hole - Holly Madison

subconscious crap to surface, but luckily I was still tucked safely into my corner of denial and quickly
repressed the thoughts.
“How do you feel about the nine o’clock curfew?” Jerica asked, resting her chin in her hand.
People were always fascinated by the curfew. As I’ve said, I was a homebody anyway—and little
did outsiders know that the curfew was hardly the worst thing about mansion life. Like a robot, I
happily went back to my Hef and Playboy-friendly responses, the hard questions dodged for the day.
Though The Girls Next Door marked a sudden change in Bridget’s, Kendra’s, and my lives, the
series wasn’t created overnight. Throughout 2004 and early 2005, different entities had expressed
interest in developing a Playboy Mansion reality show. At first I paid no attention to the rumblings,
thinking it would have nothing to do with me. The ideas that were being thrown around didn’t center
on the girlfriends. Ideas surfaced like, “Growing Up Hefner: What Life Is Like as Hugh Hefner’s
Son” or “Upstairs, Downstairs: The Butlers of the Playboy Mansion.”
We were sat down for test interviews, along with the butlers. There is no doubt in my mind
everyone on the other side of the cameras thought that Hugh Hefner’s three girlfriends would be the
most demanding, unreasonable bitches of all time, making the staff’s life hell at any given moment.
None of these people, not even the executive producer (a close friend of Hef’s), had ever gotten to
know Bridget, Kendra, or me.
My test interview, for the most part, was relatively uneventful. I was asked all the usual
questions about what life at the mansion was like: How is it having a nine o’clock curfew? What do
you order from the kitchen? Where do you shop? Do you mind sharing your boyfriend? And I, like the
drone I had become, answered all the questions with the same rote, dry answers I gave everyone else.
The three repressive years I had spent at the mansion had drained all the personality out of me
anyway, so I’m sure I sounded like a robot.
Then I was asked a question that threw me for a loop: “When did you first realize you were
beautiful?” I started a bit, taken out of my hypnosis by an out-of-the-ordinary question.
“I never did discover I was beautiful,” I snapped. “I made myself beautiful.”
One of the head producers would later say to me that this answer led him to believe that they had
something with the girls and maybe there was more of a story here than just “how do butlers deal with
demanding, spoiled bitches while naked Playmates are running around them all the time?”
The answer I gave was the one honest, spontaneous thing I had said all day, and it alluded to so
many things:
1. That I had been conditioned to believe that I was not beautiful.
2. That I was possibly entirely composed of plastic surgery (I wasn’t; I stopped after the
nose job).
3. That there was a little more going on in my head than most people would assume: that I
was in on the joke.
It was finally Lisa Berger, then president of programming at E!, who suggested she would like to
see what life at the mansion was like through the eyes of the girls: a Dorothy in Oz kind of take on the