For Izabella, the Playboy Mansion was far from the glamorous pleasure palace she had imagined. ‘Each bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture,’ she recalls in her autobiography Bunny Tales. ‘It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room.
‘Although we all did our best to decorate our rooms and make them homely, the mattresses on our beds were disgusting — old, worn and stained. The sheets were past their best, too.
‘Every Friday morning we had to go to Hef’s room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance: a thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred-dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases,’ she says.
‘We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn’t happy about in the relationship. Most of the complaints were about the lack of harmony among the girlfriends — or your lack of sexual participation in the “parties” he held in his bedroom.
‘If we’d been out of town for any reason and missed one of the official “going out” nights [When Hefner liked to parade his girls at nightclubs] he wouldn’t want to give us the allowance. He used it as a weapon.’
The allowance was also withdrawn if there was any infringement of the strict rules imposed by Hefner on all his girlfriends.
‘Little did I realise that by moving into the mansion I was losing all the freedom I associated with the Playboy lifestyle,’ says St James.