Blonde and blonder … Karissa, left, and Kristina Shannon, Hef's new girlfriends.Photo: Getty Image
Girl trouble, money trouble. This is not supposed to be the Playboy lifestyle. Times are hard for Hugh Hefner. The pouting face of Hefner's current troubles is Holly Madison, a former glamour model who is 28 years old, boasts measurements of 36D-23-36 (with the help of extensive surgery), and has for the past seven years lived at the Playboy Mansion as one of his official girlfriends. Madison is one-third of a pneumatic trio of blondes who star in The Girls Next Door, a TV documentary about daily life chez Hefner. Her status, in the show and in real life, is "No 1" girlfriend, meaning that she shares his bedroom, while the other live-in love interests, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt, occupy smaller billets down the hall.
Last week, this cosy domestic arrangement fell apart. After weeks of frenzied speculation, on Monday Madison confirmed rumours that she had left Hefner for a younger and wealthier model, the celebrity magician Criss Angel.
The revelation left Hefner deeply upset. It also represented a severe setback for his long-cultivated public image of master swordsman, on which Playboy relies. But worse news was soon to follow. The following night, Wilkinson also confirmed she had ditched Hefner, telling the chat show host Chelsea Lately that she was in love with a Philadelphia Eagles gridiron player called Hank Baskett and had been indulging in "cybersex" sessions via Skype, from her room at the mansion.
For any man in the public eye, this would represent a bad week. For Hefner, always a creature of habit, it has made for a bewildering upheaval in the domestic set-up he has enjoyed since separating from Kimberley Conrad, his second wife and mother of two of his four children, in 1999. At this point, a brief history lesson: from the moment he bought the mansion in 1971, excluding the decade of his marriage to Conrad, Hefner has filled it with a rotating cast of girlfriends, who get a weekly allowance in cash (roughly $US1000 [$1500] at present) together with being fed, watered, and provided with health insurance, a car and free plastic surgery.
Despite rumours to the contrary, he enjoys energetic sexual relationships with them all (thanks, in recent years at least, to Viagra), and lives out the hypocritical male fantasy of a storybook sheik, expecting girlfriends to remain monogamous despite his own promiscuity. The harem has a 9pm curfew, except on two nights a week when Hefner takes them out, to a restaurant on one night, a nightclub the next. MORE
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий