Down the Rabbit Hole - Holly Madison

parties. We’d go to the gym, tan, lay by the pool, and cruise around L.A. searching for bargain
clothes. The only other girl I remember spending time with was Lisa.
Besides me, Lisa was the youngest girlfriend in the group at that time. She lived in Bedroom 2,
the largest of the bedrooms, and was still celebrating the release of the issue in which she was the
centerfold. She was a cute country girl who, according to the other girls, dated Kid Rock on the side,
though I never saw any evidence of it. She had first auditioned for Playboy over a year prior to her
Playmate pictorial finally being published. Somewhere along the way, she met Hef, became a
girlfriend, and secured a centerfold after acquiring a new set of Hef-financed breast implants to lift
the mammaries that he’d deemed “too droopy” for a Playmate.
Like most of the other girlfriends, she was both manipulative and manipulated. Becoming a
published centerfold didn’t happen overnight. In fact, Playmate features were often shot 8 to 12
months before they actually hit newsstands. According to Vicky, Lisa had been a girlfriend for several
months before losing patience.
“She threw a fit when we were out one night, asking when she was going to finally shoot her
centerfold,” Vicky once explained to me, rolling her eyes and exhaling cigarette smoke. “She’s the
baby, she always gets what she wants.”
“This is like a boy band,” my friend Britney added. “Hef has to have an old one, a young one, a
wild one . . .”
This brought a cackle out of Vicky, who rolled her eyes.
“He always plays the oldest one against the youngest one,” Vicky explained, eager to share her
expertise on the topic as we gossiped about the situation. “Tina may be his main girlfriend, but she’s
older, so he likes to play on her insecurities by playing favorites with whoever the youngest one is.
And Lisa isn’t special. Before her, he used Buffy to play against Tina.”
I took note of this, but at the time I didn’t want to believe a man as old and accomplished as Hef
could be that petty and immature. Vicky was starting to show her nasty side, so I wrote it off as
jealousy on her part.
Lisa was one of the friendlier girlfriends. In fact, when I walked by her room one morning, she
called me in.
“Hey, wanna go to Target with me later? I need to run some errands.”
“Yeah, sure, lemme know what time!” I said, feeling lucky to be invited. I was hoping she could
fill me in a little more on how things worked around the mansion, since Vicky and the others had
given me the cold shoulder.
“Ugh. I need to get lipo,” Lisa croaked, looking down at her belly and pinching her spare tire.
She was adorable, but had been told to lose weight by a Playboy photo editor.
“No you don’t,” I said. “You look fine.”
“Thanks!” she replied through a toothy grin.
As I knelt down to pet one of her three dogs, she picked up the phone next to her bed, pressed 0
for the butler’s pantry, and ordered a piece of chocolate cake and a glass of chocolate milk for
breakfast. Was I in the twilight zone? Plastic surgery was so commonplace for these women that
liposuction sprung to mind as the obvious weight loss cure before, say, taking chocolate cake out of