Down the Rabbit Hole - Holly Madison

CHAPTER 8
“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Would you say that Kendra is ‘growing up’ at the mansion?” posed Jerica, the young, freckle-faced
field producer sitting across from me. It was 2005 and we were in the mansion’s game house filming
my first set of one-on-one interviews for a new unscripted E! series spotlighting Hef, his three
girlfriends, and our lives inside the mansion. The question completely caught me off guard. Don’t get
me wrong, I was excited at the prospect of doing a television show—day-to-day life was so
monotonous that I welcomed any sort of change, opportunity, or even that chance at fame I had once
hoped for—but at the time reality TV still had a pretty negative stigma. My time at the mansion hadn’t
been all that rosy, so I was anxious about what the show would entail. Naturally, this particular
question set off a siren in my head.
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” I said, a bit more defensively than intended. “It sounds gross and
inappropriate. Besides, she’s 20 years old; she’s grown up already.”
It’s not like we really had a choice when it came to doing the show, so all that anxiety was really
for naught. Once Hef approved the idea, it was full steam ahead. No one even bothered to ask our
opinions about filming the show, even if it was just a courtesy. “Trophy girlfriends” are better seen
and not heard. But what did I really expect? At the mansion, it was always Hef’s way or the highway.
We weren’t given a choice in the nudity aspect of the show, either. When the first season started
filming, we weren’t shy about being in front of the camera in various stages of undress—we knew
everything would have to be blurred out in order to air on television and the cameramen shot us from
creative angles to avoid landing any nudity on the show. Halfway through the first season, though,
someone must have realized that nudity could be shown in foreign television markets and on DVDs,
so getting as much nudity as possible on camera became a priority. No one ever consulted the three
stars of the show when it came to this issue, and I wasn’t aware of the change until after it had been
put into effect.
As intelligent as he is calculating, Hef saw the series as an opportunity to capitalize on the new
genre of television that was sprouting up and once again reinvent the brand while bringing in a fresh
audience to Playboy. And the needs of “the brand” always trumped those of “the girlfriends.” It was