Izabella St. James (real name, Izabella Katarina Kasprzyk) might be best known for her role as “Jimmie’s Girlfriend” in the 2008 cinema classic Ninja Cheerleaders, except that she once played the role of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend.
The Polish-born beauty was never a centerfold, but she has has written a tell-all book, Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion in which she describes a somewhat less-than-glamorous reality:
For Izabella, the Playboy Mansion was far from the glamorous pleasure palace she had imagined. ‘Each bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture . . . 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. . . .
‘Hef was used to dirty carpets. The one in his bedroom had not been changed for years, and things became significantly worse when Holly Madison moved into his room with him as Girlfriend No. 1 soon after I moved in, bringing her two dogs.
‘They weren’t house-trained and would just do their business on the bedroom carpet. Late at night, or in the early hours of the morning — if any of us visited Hef’s bedroom — we’d almost always end up standing in dog mess. . . .
(The girls got $1,000 weekly allowance and free plastic surgery.)
Freedom of a kind came on Wednesdays and Fridays, the official nights out, which were the prelude to the twice-weekly sex parties in Hefner’s bedroom.
The girls travelled with Hefner in a white limousine which had a leopard-skin interior, with Playboy bunny logos sewn onto the seats. As they left the mansion, they drank Dom Perignon champagne and downed Quaaludes, a prescription-only sedative drug popularised in the Seventies and now handed out by Hefner. . . .
At around midnight, according to St James, Hef would take his Viagra. ‘After that, he would constantly check his watch to make sure we left at the right time because if we didn’t, or the timing got messed up, he wouldn’t be able to perform later. . . .
‘I wanted to see if this experienced King of Sexdom knew anything the rest of us did not,’ she recalls. ‘But he just lay there like a dead fish.
‘We often wondered why he did it at all. He must know deep down that it is just a show. But he is trying to live out this fantasy he has been selling to people since 1954. He wants to live up to the Playboy image he created and the expectations people have of him.’
Shabby furniture, dirty beds, dog poop on the floor, bad sex with a Viagra-gobbling geezer — c’mon, ladies, who can resist that?
