Or: “Big surprise, Hugh Hefner is super fucking creepy”.

Although I love biographies, I probably wouldn’t have picked this one up if it hadn’t been recommended to me. A book about a former Playboy Bunny? That doesn’t exactly spell “intellectual stimulation”. Truthfully, though, I couldn’t put it down.

Holly Madison was Hugh Hefner’s “main girlfriend” for seven years. That’s right, seven years. She was 22 when she moved into the Playboy Mansion, and Hef was 75. There’s a May-December romance, and then there’s… whatever this was. Although, from what the book says, it wasn’t much of a romance at all.

Madison loved the idea of being part of Playboy from a very young age, having grown up worshiping the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Jenny McCarthy. Like a lot of people, she moved to LA with the dream of becoming an actress; she thought that getting a centrefold in Playboy was a good stepping stone to doing so.

Through people she knew, she started getting invited to pool parties at the Playboy Mansion- and soon enough, she became a regular attendee. About a year after this, her roommate moved out and Madison was left without a place to live. So she did what any logical, rational person would do: she walked up to Hugh Hefner and asked to live in the mansion.

He said yes. She moved in, and so started her life as part of the Playboy harem.

On her first night out with Hef and his girlfriends, he took her to a nightclub and proceeded to offer her a Quaalude- or, as he referred to it, a “thigh opener”. This apparently didn’t raise too many red flags with Madison, and although she refused, she did get extremely drunk and ended up back in Hef’s room. Here, she goes into quite a bit of detail about what transpired, but I won’t: they had an orgy.

From then on, she was one of Hef’s “girlfriends” (I keep putting that in quotation marks because I still can’t take it seriously). She didn’t get along with the other girls, which wasn’t helped by Hef’s pitting them against each other, and eventually her self-confidence eroded to the point where she developed a stutter. However, all this did was endear her to Hef even more, and eventually she became his No. 1 girlfriend, the “Queen Bee” of the girlfriends. All this really entailed was moving into Hef’s room and standing directly next to him during photo ops; although she did manage to get rid of the other girlfriends and replace them with ones who eventually became her friends.

Hef, to nobody’s surprise, was controlling and possessive. He dictated what the girlfriends wore, wouldn’t let them keep jobs, and required them all home by 9pm- even if he himself were staying out late. He gave them a clothing allowance and would track how the money was spent so he’d know whether or not his girlfriends were putting money away (above all, Hef was insecure about his girlfriends leaving him). They didn’t have any kind of independence.

Madison recalls an incident where she had decided to do something nice for Hef by dressing up as one of his favourite blondes- Marilyn Monroe. She cut her long hair short and put on red lipstick, then asked Hef what he thought. Little did she know, Hef hated red lipstick with an unreasonable amount of passion. He screamed at her, telling her she looked “old, hard, and cheap”. After that, Madison stuck to the script as much as possible.

After seven years of being Hef’s plaything (and with no centrefold to show for it), everything came to a head when Holly spent her first (!!) night away from the mansion on her own. On a trip to Vegas, she met a man who walked her back to her hotel room. Although nothing happened, she woke up to a frantic call from Hef, who had had her followed and was convinced she had cheated on him (oh yeah, did I mention that Hef was allowed to sleep with whomever, but the girlfriends were required to stay completely faithful? Yeah). This, finally, was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Madison decided to leave mansion life behind forever.

The book ends with Madison finally finding her “happily ever after”: marriage, children, and her own TV show. Even if you don’t necessarily approve of her choices, you can’t help but applaud her from how she picked up the pieces of her shattered life after she leaves the mansion. Ultimately, it’s a story of hope, as well as being an eye-opening account of what life in the Playboy Mansion was really like. Read this with an open mind: I swear you’ll find it as interesting as I did.