Bunny Tales by Izabella St. James Page B

a mental step back and think, How did I end up living here? At the beginning, everything was so new and exciting; we were having the time of our lives. The Playboy Mansion is a peculiar place. First and foremost, it is Hef’s house. It is also Hef’s office, an office that employs approximately ten other people at any given time. There is also house management, the video department, the people that work on Hef’s scrapbooks, the butlers, the maids, the gardeners, the animal department, and security. Then of course it became our house as well. All in all, it’s a lot of people. The main problem I had with that was the lack of privacy; the only privacy I ever had was in my room.
    The Gothic Tudor house was built in 1926 for a British businessman, Mr. Arthur Letts. According to the house legend, Mrs. Letts haunts the Mansion. I never saw anything ghostly or experienced anything peculiar, but the house does have a creepy feel at night. One of the other Girlfriends, Bridget, with her love for murders and other unpleasantries, believed in the spirit of Mrs. Letts roaming around the Mansion—that’s why she had the ghost-talker come do a séance on one of the episodes of The Girls Next Door. It was Hef’s great love, Barbi Benton, who found the house. Hef fell in love with it and purchased it in 1971 for a million dollars, a great investment considering it is now worth an estimated $45 million. It was originally intended to be the West coast counterpart to the now nonoperational Chicago East Coast Mansion. The Playboy Mansion had a “sister” house built next door, which was there before Hef bought it. Though smaller and slightly different, its layout is a mirror image of the Mansion. Hef purchased the neighboring house in 1996. His wife, Kimberly, and their two teenage sons live there.
    The Mansion wasn’t like people think—with James Caan ordering drinks at the cabana bar, and bikini-clad women running around. Instead, it was strangely quiet throughout most of the day. The only people you ever saw were the small army of gardeners and groundskeepers it took to maintain paradise, and Hef himself, barreling along one of the shaded walkways in his silk pajamas and slippers, clutching a sheaf of papers on some mysterious errand. Although the house is large, approximately 21,000 square feet, it doesn’t feel that big; there is no danger of getting lost in it. The layout is actually quite simple: The basement contains mainly storage and other functional spaces. On the ground floor are all the common areas, the second floor houses all the bedrooms, and the third floor, or the attic, houses the scrapbooks and video department.
    When you enter through the huge golden oak main door, you find yourself in what is know as the great hall. If you keep going straight through this area you’ll get to the backyard. The great hall has an ornate desk with Hef’s picture hanging above it and a guest book below for guests to sign and leave Hef messages. There is also a bench and a throne chair. A painting of Hef ’s second wife, Kimberly Conrad Hefner, also decorates the great hall. During the parties, there is a dance floor put in here, and on the weekends it is an area for guests to mingle. For us girls, it was the place to meet before we went out to clubs or events. We always posed in the great hall for the first of many photographs taken during a night out.
    To the right of the great hall is the walnut-paneled formal dining room, with a long oval table and cushy blue seats all around. On the weekends, other chairs are added to accommodate as many guests as possible for the buffet dinner. Hef ’s seat is at the head of the table with the chairs immediately next to him reserved for the Girlfriends, his brother Keith, and his closest friends. There is also another small round table by the window, to accommodate extra guests, and the food tables are along the other walls. There is a Jackson Pollock painting in the dining room that I