The Vegas Diaries, page 26
Mary’s smile disappeared momentarily.
“The other girls took a limo and went shopping. Why don’t you book some spa services or something?” Mary suggested. Her gentle and careful tone made it obvious that she felt bad that I had been so clearly excluded from the other ladies’ plans.
“Oh, we can do that?” I asked about the spa services.
Mary nodded cheerfully. “And order in some room service, too.”
“Great. Thank you!” I exclaimed, directing my appreciation toward Hef, though he didn’t acknowledge my presence.
When Bobbi and I scheduled massage appointments, we were surprised to find out the practitioners could come to us! I had never had the means to visit a nice spa before, let alone order a massage to my hotel room. While I was in awe of how luxurious this all was, I couldn’t help feeling terribly insecure.
Why had they excluded us? I wondered. Did they not like me? Had I accidentally offended someone?
In the beginning, I always tried my best to be friendly to everyone in the house. I believed that my life with Playboy would be the sorority experience that I had never had.
Maybe they had just been really anxious to get going, I consoled myself. Maybe it was just an oversight.
After our massages, Bobbi and I began getting ready for our first night out in Las Vegas. With the clothing allowance we were given, I was able to stock up on a few items suitable for our club nights. I kept it practical with reasonably priced mall fare and versatile pieces that carried just enough flash to align with Hef’s less-than-classic taste. That evening, I wore a black lace Bebe dress, which I liked because it reminded me vaguely of a Dolce & Gabbana number Britney Spears had recently sported at an awards show. When it was time to leave, we took our obligatory group photo in the villa’s entryway and piled in the limo to get to our destination. We were headed to Bootlegger Bistro, an Italian restaurant at the south end of the Strip, to celebrate Lisa’s birthday.
When we entered the restaurant, the host led us to a long table next to the dance floor. I waited for each bottle blonde, including Bobbi, to take her spot at the table. After everyone was seated, I claimed the last empty chair, next to April. Since no one bothered to include me in the conversation, I kept myself occupied by reading about the family restaurant’s history on the paper place mat in front of me. Suddenly, the piano player serenading the room started playing an upbeat jazz tune.
“This is called ‘Playboy’s Theme,’” Hef informed us. “It was the theme song to a show I did in the sixties called Playboy After Dark.”
“It must be bizarre,” Lindsay pondered, “to barely ever leave your house, and when you do, everyone treats you like you are visiting royalty.”
“Yeah, that could turn just about anyone into an asshole,” Hannah added. “Then what happened?”
Hef asked Lisa to dance, and April, who was sitting next to me, suddenly got teary-eyed “I wanna dance, too,” she said sadly, a single tear rolling out of one of her heavily made-up eyes. At the time, I thought she was being drunk and dramatic, but it was really a foreshadowing. Being one of seven girlfriends can make even the most confident person feel extremely unspecial. Feeling a loss of identity was pretty much a standard symptom among all of us. It didn’t matter if you thought you knew what sort of a situation you were getting into or how much money and glamour would be thrown your way. At the end of the day, everyone wants to feel valued, respected, and loved.
After the birthday dinner, we headed back to the villa to change. Well, five out of the eight girls changed. I was one of the ones who didn’t. I had only thought to bring two outfits per day, a casual one for daytime and a dressier one for the evening activities.
“Don’t forget your IDs,” Mary warned us, “the casinos are strict. You can’t get into a club without an ID here.” This was new to us. No one ever carded any of Hef’s girls when we went out in L.A., allowing him to routinely bring women who were under twenty-one out to the clubs. April quickly scrambled back to her room in a panic, certain she’d left her ID in L.A. After about ten minutes, she finally emerged victorious, driver’s license in hand.
When we arrived at Studio 54 at ten-thirty, it was empty. By Vegas standards, we were used to going out super early, so there was literally no one there. We were placed in a balcony table overlooking a giant moon that was meant to be a replica of the “moon and the spoon” that hung in the original New York club (minus the infamous spoon, though).
“I guess I’ll bring mine tonight,” Hannah joked.
“Sh,” Lindsay hushed. “I wanna hear!”
Once again, I grabbed an empty spot next to April and we dove into our first round of vodka cranberries. I decided to try and strike up a conversation, telling her the story behind the moon, which I had heard on a documentary I had seen a few years earlier.
“You know, the moon that hung in the original Studio 54 had a giant cocaine spoon leading up to its nose,” I shared, thinking she’d get a kick out of the trivia.
April looked at me witheringly, with glassy, drunk eyes. After staring at me for a beat, she said, “I know everything about sex and drugs.” She stood up, grabbed her drink briskly as half of it sloshed to the ground, and walked away from me, squeezing into a seat on the other side of the table.
This was an alternate universe. I was feeling so insecure and out of sorts, I did the only thing I could think of to help me get through the night.
“You drank,” Hannah chimed in.
“I drank,” I repeated.
When the evening was over, we arrived back at the villa and Bobbi and I changed into our pajamas before deciding to check out the gourmet dessert spread that had been set out for us on the dining room table. The villa was oddly quiet. Bobbi peeked through the open door of Vicky’s room and noticed it was empty.
“I don’t think they’re here,” Bobbi shrugged. Once again, the girlfriends had decided to take the limo out but failed to invite Bobbi or me. I wasn’t quite sure why we were on the receiving end of five sets of cold shoulders, but I decided that I was much happier settled in the villa, getting a good night’s rest in the most comfortable bed I’d ever slept in.
The next day was quiet. Bobbi and I slept in and ordered room service. At one point, Mary popped in to let us know what time we were expected to be ready for dinner that evening. I put on the other outfit I had packed for a night out: a pair of knee-high black boots, a black miniskirt, and a crop top with a dark faux-fur vest.
On the ride over, I tried making small talk with Vicky, attempting to perhaps mend any fences that may have been disrupted. She shot me an annoyed glance, rolled her eyes, and made a noise like she didn’t want to be bothered having to talk to me. Suddenly, she turned toward Carolyn and April to chatter loudly about how amazing their night had been.
Are they just trying to make me feel worse? I wondered as I listened to their stories of debauchery. Apparently they had visited a strip club one of the girlfriends had worked at previously and got crazy wasted. Lisa and Tina were making small talk with Hef as he bobbed his head, clearly not hearing what the others were reminiscing about.
“That sucks!” Lindsay said with a frown. “To talk about it right in front of you like that.”
“I think that was the point,” I said. “I felt like I didn’t belong, and the other girlfriends were trying hard to make it clear I was an outsider. I couldn’t figure out what I had done to piss them off.”
We started the evening in a private dining room atop the Rio. The restaurant, which sat on the fiftieth floor, offered a dazzling panoramic view of the city. Bobbi and I smiled when the server arrived with our whimsical Witch’s Brew cocktails that were gigantic and overflowing with steam from the dry ice.
After dinner, we were whisked away to the Luxor to catch the Blue Man Group. As we filed into the theater, I dutifully followed the bleached-blond pack in front of me to our seats. One by one, each girlfriend took her place, and I ended up next to April, who occupied the aisle seat. Throughout the show, she kept leaving and coming back with daiquiri after daiquiri—which wasn’t out of the ordinary for any of us. We all routinely turned to drinking out of boredom or to escape our personal demons. By the time the show was over, April had gotten pretty wasted, stumbling over her stilettos on the way backstage to meet the cast.
The Blue Men were posed on a giant metal staircase behind the stage. As the girls gathered around the stairs to surround Hef and the performers, I was crowded out of the shot. It didn’t really matter to me, but Hef’s photographer, Elayne, was a kind woman who always went out of her way to make sure everyone was included.
“Holly, go up one more step so we can see your face!” she instructed.
I obliged, climbing a stair and peeking my head over the towering platinum bird’s nest of an updo in front of me. Were they crowding me out on purpose? I wondered. No, I thought, they probably just want prime place in the photo. Hef’s personal photos sometimes ended up in “World of Playboy,” the social page in the front of the magazine every month, so if a girlfriend hadn’t yet scored a centerfold, she could thrill to the fact that her name and photo were at least somewhere in Playboy.
After dinner, we were expected to hit one of the largest, most popular clubs in town, Ra.
“What’s Ra?” Lindsay asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Ra was a nightclub at the Luxor,” I explained. “There weren’t nearly as many nightclubs in Vegas back in those days. In fact I think Ra and Studio 54 were the only two major ones.”
Ra was an absolute blur. We all got pretty wasted, and when Hef made the decision to call it an early night, not even the “mean team” attempted to stay out any later.
We filed into the limo, one after the other, in a drunken stumble. Like I said, it was understood that Tina, the main girlfriend, always sat on one side of Hef, and Lisa, his second favorite, on the other. When it came to the other girls sitting down the length of the limo, I was usually relegated near the far end, but I hadn’t noticed a specific hierarchy past Tina and Lisa’s positions. I sat down somewhere near the middle of the seat and paused for a moment to unzip one of my brand-new stilleto boots, which had been killing my feet all night.
“Move over,” one of the girlfriends barked at me.
“Hang on, I really need to get this boot off,” I answered, fumbling with the zipper.
“Too big for your britches!” she spat angrily as she flopped past me.
She immediately starting hissing to the rest of the girls about me, and they all laughed loudly and made nasty comments as if I wasn’t even there. Bobbi just looked down at her hands and kept quiet. I didn’t expect her to stick up for me. She was new and wanted to keep a low profile.
As the limo pulled back through the unmarked gate and into the exquisite MGM Mansion driveway, I couldn’t feel any less glamorous. I knew we were expected to go back to the bedroom with Hef, but there was just no way I was going to participate in that farce with this vicious horde of girls. I was the last girlfriend to trail into the villa, suddenly acutely aware of my place in the group, and broke off into my bedroom to get ready for bed. I really wanted to be under the covers before Bobbi came back from the master bedroom. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
“Yoo-hoo,” squeaked a voice as the door to my suite slowly lurched open. It had been twenty minutes or so since we had gotten home, and Tina apparently had been sent to come look for me. She said that Hef was really concerned that I didn’t come to bed.
Tina so far hadn’t been catty toward me, so I felt reasonably comfortable explaining to her everything that had happened since we arrived, capped off by the childish display during the drive home.
“I’m not comfortable,” I told Tina. “I don’t want to be in there with them.” As the “main girlfriend,” Tina was expected to play the role of “mother hen” and wrangle all the girls according to Hef’s whims.
Tina attempted to appease me, insisting that Hef just felt terrible that I was hurting.
“So why didn’t he say so himself?” Lindsay inquired.
“Tina had just walked through my door a few minutes earlier to see what the problem was,” I reminded her. “Hef didn’t even know what the issue was yet. How could he be upset I was hurt? She was probably just saying what she thought she had to say to smooth things over.”
Tina reported back to Hef about what had transpired, and he in turn scolded the girl in question for being rude and hurtful. The reprimand spurred her into survival mode. Trying quickly to save face, she accused my close friend Britney of trying to steal her spot as a girlfriend. She hinted that she thought it would be appropriate for Britney to be banned from the mansion.
Her accusation packed a punch. Not only was she taking the focus off her behavior, she was also striking a blow that would hurt me. If Britney got banned, which in essence meant I would lose the last friend I had, I wasn’t sure I could last at the mansion. Maybe that’s what she was aiming for all along.
The truth was, Britney had no interest in becoming a girlfriend. The other girlfriends seemed to simply resent the fact that one of my friends had access to the mansion without paying any of the dues that they had to. None of them ever regularly brought friends to the mansion. I’m not sure why, but maybe it had something to do with not wanting to show people what their lives were really like there . . . or perhaps they didn’t want any more competition.
“And Hef fell for this,” Lindsay gaped.
“Apparently.” I shrugged. “Although I’m fairly certain he just liked the idea of Britney vying for girlfriend status. Either way, I started thinking that maybe my days at the mansion were short-lived, but even if I was to leave, it wasn’t fair for Britney to get the blame.”
I knew that broaching the conversation with Hef meant that I risked getting kicked out. But I couldn’t let my friend be thrown under the bus.
I took a deep breath and marched my way down to Hef’s office (after clearing it with Mary, of course—I wasn’t that ballsy).
“Hi,” I said, squeezing through the opening in the doorway.
“So . . . you wanted to talk to me about Britney?” he said, taking off his reading glasses and looking up from his papers.
“Yes,” I announced in a shaky voice, as nervous as if I were back in high school, about to give a speech in front of the entire student body.
“Britney isn’t trying to steal anyone’s spot,” I blurted out. “And she’s never had an unkind word to say about any of them. I don’t know why the girls are saying that, but it’s not true. Please don’t ban her over this. She’s my friend.”
Hef scrunched up his face, took a moment to think it over, and finally said, “Well, if you feel that strongly about it, I won’t ban Britney.”
I was so relieved I barely heard the rest of what he said, but it was something like a few disclaimer sentences on how important it was for him to have “harmony” among the girls and how he would have to keep an eye on this situation.
“It’s kind of sad, really, because it would be years before I felt confident enough to stick up for myself again.” It wouldn’t be much longer until the mansion politics and the manipulative way Hef treated us would completely break me down.
It was all such crap. I had to wonder if Britney and I were on her shit list for an incident that happened weeks earlier. Britney had been hanging around waiting for me one afternoon and overheard a heated exchange between her and Hef. Apparently she had broken the curfew the night before and Hef said something to her like “Why can’t you just try to be a good girl, like Holly?” The second he turned his back, she made a gagging face and said, “Fuck that!” Hef had poor hearing, and the girls knew it, so they would often say things just out of earshot that they would never say to his face. When she strutted out of the room, she spotted Britney and realized Britney had heard everything.
That trip was kind of the end of any hope I had that I would ever get along with these girls. The fact that they would try and get my best friend banned just to take attention off themselves seemed unnecessarily cruel.
“You should have written that story,” Hannah decided. “Bitches of the Playboy Mansion.”
“Maybe someday.” I shrugged. “I’m just afraid of how everyone will react to the truth.”
“Okay,” Hannah began, “so because of all those years of being fucked with, now you feel like you have to be quiet and lie, saying everything was so great there. Why? Because of what ‘everyone’ will think of you? Who gives a fuck? When are you going to start telling the truth? It’s like you’re letting your past control you.”
She was right. And she was saying something I needed to hear. No one had ever forced me to look at my demons head-on. I had the same uneasy feeling I had as when Mark tried to broach the subject, although here, eight months later, I felt closer to being able to admit the truth.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. Hannah looked at me, sincerity in her eyes. She was here for me. She was my friend and this was a safe place, I tried to remind myself. I’d been skipping over the truth for years to avoid facing these dark, painful memories that I wasn’t quite ready to deal with.
I made checklists and set constant goals to feed this incessant need to always be doing something. There wasn’t a moment to spare or rest idly when you’re setting out to prove to the world that you aren’t the woman everyone believes you to be. My life had become manic because I was terrified to be alone with my own thoughts. I was scared to hear all the chatter, both in my own head and from the outside world. It was time to finally ask myself, What makes Holly run?
For years, I’d made excuses . . . dodged and weaved.
By opening up in this small way, I was starting to realize that, in order to rid myself of my dark past, I needed to start by accepting it for what it was. I knew that wouldn’t happen overnight, but I had to try.
I had made a decision that had long-lasting consequences. I had lived a lifestyle that some people would never approve of. And that was okay. I was okay.
“That sucks that it wasn’t all good times,” Lindsay offered, “but it made you into who you are today. I mean, you had to learn whatever lessons you did for a reason.”
