Down the Rabbit Hole (42 page)

When asked in an interview what I thought of the new season, I was honest. Maybe I should have just said that I hadn't seen any of it, but the constant jabs had begun gnawing at me—after all, I'm only human.

“The girls need to focus on what makes them unique and not doing the same things Bridget, Kendra, and I have already done on the show,” I said candidly. “I don't want to look behind, I want to look forward.”

A week letter I received a letter from Hef reprimanding me for my remarks. Hef
loved
to send letters. Prior to sending one, he'd usually make a copy and place it neatly in one of his countless scrapbooks. I don't think he writes the letters with the purpose of getting a response or closure (which is why I never bothered to respond), I think he does it so he can have the last word in even the tiniest event in the story of his life. It's Hef's version of reality, all the time.

When I filmed a guest spot on Kendra's self-titled spin-off, my former housemate confessed to me (off camera) that she got disapproving letters from Hef fairly regularly as well. She told me she was forced to apologize for a quote she gave the media referring to the “whores up there” at the mansion, which Hef assumed referred to the Shannon twins.

I would end up receiving many “reprimand” letters from Hef—it seemed nothing I said in the press met his approval. The whole thing felt sort of creepy—as if he thought he was my dad or something and had some sort of jurisdiction over me. Eventually, when I would see letters from the mansion in my mail, I would throw them away without even opening them. They just creeped me out and brought forth negative feelings. I didn't want him to have that sort of power over me.

Meanwhile, I was taking Las Vegas by storm.
Peepshow
had quickly become the Vegas Strip's new smash hit. Ticket sales skyrocketed, prompting producers to sign me on through the end of the year! I couldn't believe it! I knew how hard I had worked trying to make the show and my performance as successful as possible—and it actually paid off!

Speaking of paying off, I was finally doing well financially. Actually . . . very well. I signed a multimillion-dollar contract with
Peepshow
(and even my breasts were insured with Lloyd's of London for a million dollars—not bad for a $7,000 investment!). People assumed I had been rich beyond my wildest dreams at the mansion and that I must be struggling to get by in my post-
Playboy
life . . . but, in reality, that couldn't have been further from the truth.

I was carving out a pretty unique niche for myself, and the quirkiness of my new showgirl life was becoming hard to ignore. I had been called “one of the most in-demand and beloved celebrities in Las Vegas” by the
Los Angeles Times
. Performing full time in a live show made me different from all the other talent on E! Most reality-show starlets on TV at that time were L.A. girls with a passion for fashion, so being a new kind of Vegas showgirl at least set me apart from all the others. In the summer of 2009, I began seriously discussing a spin-off with E! I was determined to make Vegas work. Luckily, Brenda gave the idea another chance and we started exploring themes for a potential series.

Season six of
The Girls Next Door
was a total disaster. After viewers saw what they were getting on the season premiere, most never tuned back in. The new girlfriends pulled only about half the ratings we did in previous seasons. When the new season ended in August, E! pulled the plug on what had been, less than a year earlier, their number one series. In an effort to recapture some of the
GND
loyalists—who were tuning in by droves to
Kendra
—the network green-lit production for a pilot that would serve as an “E! special” that December called
Holly's World
.

My initial vision for the show was
Legally Blonde
meets a PG-rated version of
Showgirls
.
Peepshow
wasn't enough for me. I wanted my day job to be interning at the mayor's office, learning how to run the city. My pilot centered on a silly plot: me visiting the mayor's office with a complaint about roadwork, resulting in my friends and me going on several misadventures trying to collect signatures for a petition. It was a roundabout way of introducing the people in my life, what I wanted to do, and taking a tour of some unlikely spots and meeting some strange people in the city.

I didn't necessarily assume that my pilot would rate that well. I wasn't an energetic, ditsy, made-for-reality-TV blonde like Kendra. I was quiet and reserved and much preferred reading a book to shaking my ass. While I knew my lifestyle was unique, would anyone really care? When I received word that the special had not only done well, but that E! wanted to order an entire season, my jaw hit the floor! Of course that was what I had hoped for, but I certainly hadn't expected it!

It was official:
Holly's World
was a go. In my head, I thought it was going to be my version of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
—girl moves to a new city post breakup in order to make it on her own. With shooting to begin in early 2010, our first order of business was to lock down the cast. The three friends I had chosen to appear in my pilot were asked back for the full season: Angel Porrino (my bestie and new assistant), Josh Strickland (my charismatic
Peepshow
costar), and Laura Croft (my crazy roommate) rounded out the crew.

Anxious to begin this
Playboy
-free chapter of my life, I was eager to sort out contract negotiations as quickly as possible and begin filming. However, like a bad dream, my past continued to haunt me and the contracts we had to sign while at the mansion carried over onto my new spin-off with E!. It was a lot of baggage to move forward with, but I was in a hurry to get going. And, conditioned by all those years at the mansion, I still wasn't strong enough to hold my ground for long. I had grown a lot in the last year and a half, but I still had a long way to go.

At the start of 2010, cameras began following our wild lives in Sin City as sexy singles looking to balance our wild Vegas social calendars with performances six nights a week—and like all reality shows, it wasn't without its fair share of drama.

I was pressured heavily by production to put my dating life on camera and I stubbornly refused. I agreed to film a “blind date” episode, but anyone I dated in real life was strictly off-limits at this point. I was sick of being thought of as “Hugh Hefner's ex,” and the way I felt like Criss used me for publicity had left a bad taste in my mouth, so I was determined to stand on my own and not publicize my love life. If I was even asked about a rumored romance on camera, I denied it. This resulted in more than one argument between production and me, but I refused to give in.

Over the course of the first season, I bought a house and Angel and her new son Roman moved in. We traveled to Mexico to shoot a calendar and went on a road trip with Bridget, and Kendra paid a visit for a baseball episode. The show followed Angel as she got breast implants and Josh as he went to New York to audition for a new Broadway show. Overall, it was a fun, heartwarming season and the three of us had a blast. Viewers connected with Josh and Angel—they loved Angel's and my chemistry and Josh's endless energy. Laura was the weakest link of the cast—she was crazy and funny in real life, but on TV she was ordinary. In my time I've seen boring, snotty people come off as the life of the party on television, too, which just goes to show that “reality” TV isn't really reality.

Before the show's June 2010 debut, the cast and I were swept into a photo studio to shoot promotional photos for the series. Each sequence was more fun than the last: the cast strutting down a yellow-brick-road version of the Las Vegas Strip; me being shot from above, twirling in a pink dress atop a large cartoon graphic of the city; and me perched on a larger-than-life disco ball rising from the city's skyline. E! was rolling out the red carpet . . . for me! It felt like a dream come true.

Shortly before the show aired, E! flew me to Los Angeles to shoot video promos for the network. All the network stars were required to shoot: Ryan Seacrest and Giuliana Rancic, the Kardashian sisters, Kendra and Hank, and me.

“Everyone's really excited about your show, they're all talking about it,” the makeup artist said, putting the finishing touches on my Marilyn-inspired look. “You are the only one who is getting to be in a shot by yourself. You're so lucky.”

She was right. Everyone else was being shot with their costars or coanchors—and I would be the only E! personality featured solo, wearing a black version of the Marilyn Monroe
Seven Year Itch
windblown gown and elegant opera-length gloves.

“Oh my God! It's like,
so
nice to meet you,” squealed a young, skinny brunette as she swept into my dressing room, seemingly taking stock of the hair, makeup, and wardrobe paraphernalia thrown everywhere.

“We loved
Girls Next Door,
” her buxom companion gushed.

“Totally,” the skinnier one jumped in. “Like, when I first got an agent, I told him I want to be on the
Girls Next Door,
” she babbled, her head bobbing from side to side as she spoke, “and then he was like, ‘No, you need your
own
reality show!' ”

“Oh, thanks! That's sweet!” I responded as an E! executive motioned to me from the doorway, ready to whisk me off to set. “Nice to meet you! I'm sure I will see you around!”

Certain we were a safe distance from my dressing room, I turned to him and whispered: “Who were those girls?”

“Oh, they're the Arlington sisters,” he stated matter-of-factly as if I should have heard of them.

When I gave him a blank look, he continued.

“Did you hear about those robberies in the Hollywood Hills?” he asked, his voice taking on a very Hollywood sales-pitch tone. “All the celebrity houses, like Paris Hilton's? They are the ones that did those.”

He said that as if that were a perfectly reasonable claim to fame.

Needless to say, some of the network talent wasn't necessarily thrilled to be sharing the spotlight with these young felons. Say what you will about how some of us became household names, none of us got there by breaking and entering. The world of “famous for being famous” was getting weirder and weirder.

H
OLLY
'
S
W
ORLD
PREMIERED TO
excellent ratings—nearly 2 million viewers!—and talk of a second season was practically immediate. Between filming the series, watching it unfold on air, and performing six nights a week, 2010 went by in a blur. My turn in
Peepshow
had garnered such fabulous reviews over my first 18 months that I moved from the three-month contracts the show had offered me initially to signing a full-year commitment and had even begun singing lessons so that I could take on an additional role in the production. On top of all that, I had a new gig as the Las Vegas correspondent for the entertainment news show
Extra
. I had little spare time, but was still managing to have a blast!

I was finally standing on my own. Ratings were so strong for
Holly's World,
they were even surpassing those of Kendra's latest season. In fact, there was only one attempt to include a
Playboy-
related plotline in that first season. When producers suggested the cast and I stop by Hef's annual birthday party at the Palms, I wasn't particularly opposed to it. While I wasn't jumping out of my chair to go spend time with Hef and Crystal (particularly after I watched her spiteful
GND
character unfold), I knew that fans loved those sort of on-camera reunions.

The
Holly's World
cast arrived at the Hef suite at the Palms for the '80s-themed soiree (which I assumed was a not-so-subtle wink to Hef's age) in costume. Hef seemed genuinely delighted to see us, as did Mary and a few of the girls I had known from my mansion days. Crystal, however, barely made her presence known. New playmate Claire Sinclair (a Barbi Benton look-alike) acted as a go-between for a pouting Crystal, who spent much of the party tucked upstairs and away from cameras, despite being swathed in a stunning Baracci gown and dolled up to the nines. Hef's new number one girl seemed to resent having anything to do with my show—especially since “her show,”
GND
season six, had been canceled.

The Shannon twins had since departed the mansion. According to the rumor mill, Karissa and Kristina were wild and never really good at adhering to the rules. I can't imagine Crystal was disappointed to see the magnetic twosome go. In their place was a new girlfriend, a gorgeous, baby-faced blonde named Anna Sophia Berglund.

Hef's birthday party eventually moved to Moon Nightclub. When Josh and I arrived back at the Palms—after doing two performances of
Peepshow
—we entered the club and situated ourselves in our designated booth, just a row over from Hef's table. Immediately, he spotted us and, with a big smile on his face, waved to us with both arms and the enthusiasm of a little kid.

“It's like he's signaling for help,” Josh observed. “He looks bored.”

He did look a little bored
and
eager for the cameras to make their way over. Crystal was supposed to have sung “Happy Birthday” for Hef at midnight (something Bridget had done at his party the previous year), but she didn't end up performing. Knowing Hef, he clearly was waiting for his on-camera moment.

After downing a round of drinks, we made our way over to his booth.

Suddenly, one of Hef's security stopped us.

“Sorry,” the hulking guard said. “The boss wants to leave.”

We couldn't have been there for more than 15 minutes.
What was this guy talking about?
I thought.