Holly Madison: Life in Playboy Mansion was ‘gross,’ drugs were ‘used for sex’
An ex-Playmate is calling foul play at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.
“I felt like I was in the cycle of gross things and I didn’t know what to do,” Holly Madison, former Playboy pinup and ex-girlfriend of the late Hefner, says in an explosive new clip for the forthcoming A&E docuseries “Secrets of Playboy.”
In a preview for the 10-hour exploration into the once-heralded Playboy empire — set to debut Jan. 24 — Madison, 41, unveils the mental and emotional anguish she endured as a Playmate from 2001 to 2008 at the hands of Hefner — who died of sepsis in 2017 at age 91.
“I got to a point where I kind of broke under that pressure and being made to feel like I needed to look exactly like everybody else,” says Madison, who starred as one of Hef’s three voluptuous lover girls on E!’s reality series “The Girls Next Door.”
The blond bombshell said that after six months of living alongside a gaggle of equally fair-haired and full-figured vixens, she arbitrarily chopped off her lengthy golden locks as a confidence boost.
But she claims Hef’s reaction to her new look was a total bust.
“I came back with short hair and he flipped out on me,” says Madison of the Playboy powerhouse. “He was screaming at me and said it made me look old, hard and cheap.”
Madison’s claims of Hefner’s outrage are confirmed on the show by his friend Jonathan Baker.
“I remember when she cut her hair,” the mogul’s buddy said. “He was very unhappy about it. Yup, his world.”
“Hef would be pretty abrasive in the way he said things to Holly,” chimes in former Playmate and Madison’s “Girls Next Door” co-star Bridget Marquardt, 48.
“She came down with red lipstick one time and he flipped out, said he hated red lipstick on girls and [told her] that she needed to take it off right away,” adds Marquardt, who says Hefner never erupted when other Playmates donned a crimson lip color.
“It was very frustrating to live with every day,” she continues. “All of the drama that was going on and the tension. I could definitely see that [Madison] was getting depressed and sad and her demeanor was starting to change.”
Madison — who ultimately deemed her affiliation with Playboy a “dangerous choice” — wasn’t the only Playmate to experience Hefner’s sinister side.
“Hef pretended that he wasn’t involved in any hard drug use at the mansion, but that was just a lie,” says Hefner’s ex Sondra Theodore, a Playmate from 1976 to 1981. “Quaaludes down the line were used for sex,” she says, noting the “lovely” sensation the hypnotic sedative induces.
“Usually you just took a half [of a Quaalude]. But if you took two, you’d pass out,” Theodore, 64, reveals. “There was such a seduction, and men knew that they could get girls to do just about anything they wanted if they gave them a Quaalude.”
Hefner’s former secretary and executive assistant corroborated Theodore’s claims of the tycoon’s penchant for drugging women.
“Quaaludes were what we called leg-spreaders. That was the whole point of them,” Lisa Loving Barrett says in the show. “They were a necessary evil, if you will, to the partying.”
Barrett, who worked at the Playboy Mansion from 1977 until 1989, admits to joining Hefner and his executive staffers in securing prescriptions for medications in order to maintain a steady flow of drugs into his lair of lust.
“We would have prescriptions in some of our names,” says Barrett. “There were prescriptions in Sondra’s name, in Hef’s name and in my name and Mary’s name … We kept a desk calendar that would say ‘Lisa’s Q’ or ‘Hef’s Q’ or ‘Sandra’s Q.’ ”
Barrett said the mansion’s wealth of illicit substances “enabled four or sometimes five prescriptions for the same medication to feed the machine.”
The “Secrets of Playboy” show will also unearth the sexual assaults, drug abuse, prostitution, suicide and murder that, for more than six decades, allegedly were sheltered by the glossy façade of Hefner’s empire.
