Down the Rabbit Hole - Holly Madison

types were earning roughly $40,000 to $50,000 for a pictorial. Hef’s former girlfriends the Bentley
twins each received $100,000 for their cover and pictorial years earlier. When it came to actual
celebrities (like Denise Richards, Drew Barrymore, or Cindy Crawford, for example), paydays could
be near a million dollars.
Truthfully, Hef had been so stingy with opportunities for the girlfriends to appear in the
magazine that I wasn’t expecting much. At that point, I was just grateful for the chance. For years the
mansion was hell because girls were fighting over this very opportunity—and here I was. Not them.
When we got to her office, I quickly scanned over the release she pushed under my nose. I didn’t
think much of it until I noticed the $25,000 fee we were each being paid for our pictorial. Since this
was technically considered a “celebrity pictorial,” part of me thought we deserved more than the
stock fee. Even something like $30,000? Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the dollar figure that upset me,
it was that we were viewed as no greater a commodity than any other girl who had walked these
halls. We were simply a dime a dozen.
Still, $25,000 was the most money I’d ever had! I immediately started planning what I would do
with it. I knew I wanted to put some in savings for the investment property I dreamed of buying—and
maybe I could use a bit to buy that Louis Vuitton travel case that I’d been lusting over for years. It
seemed like a fun way to commemorate this major goal I had just achieved.
This is exactly what I need to get back on my feet, I thought.
Bridget had tested to be a Playmate years earlier, so she knew what Playmates were paid and
that with the growing popularity of the show, we deserved much more than what Playboy was
offering. But she also knew there was zero point in arguing about it. She slowly put her pen to paper
and signed away the photo rights. But worse than our bottom end of the scale pay for the pictorial was
the fact that despite being the stars of the show, Hef and the producers decided that Bridget, Kendra,
and I wouldn’t receive a single dime for the first order of The Girls Next Door. Hef would later
argue that he considered our pictorial fee our payment for season one. He clearly knew the value of a
“buy one, get one free” deal. I recall someone connected to the show reminding us that we got “free
room and board” at the mansion. This guy clearly didn’t realize the heavy price of this “room and
board”: how restricted our freedoms were and all that was expected of us.
While the filming on the first batch of GND episodes was wrapping, Kendra had finally gathered
the courage to bring the issue up during a meeting the three of us had with the show’s highest-ranking
producers.
“Shouldn’t we like . . . be getting, like . . . paid for doing the show?” she asked nervously. It
really was a valid question and she broached the topic in a delicate way. We were working countless
hours, opening up our private lives, and baring our bodies for public consumption, so in her mind that
was worth something. She wasn’t being accusatory; she was just being logical.
The response she received was not what any of us were expecting to hear.
One of the producers took a deep breath and suddenly became very firm before spitting out
slowly and methodically (so that our tiny little brains had time to absorb this fact): “You. Are.
Replaceable.” (That would become the unofficial motto of GND for seasons to come.) “This is not a
show about the girls who live at the Playboy Mansion. It’s about Hugh Hefner and who he chooses to