Playground
A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion
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4.2 • 24 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the vein of Running with Scissors, Playground is the glitzy, glamorous, and surreal true story of a young girl who grew up inside the Playboy Mansion and never learned where the party stopped and the real world began.
You are six years old. Every day after school your father takes you to a sprawling castle filled with exotic animals, bowls of candy, and half-naked women catering to your every need.
You have your own room. You have new friends. You have an uncle Hef who's always there for you.
Welcome to the world of Playground, the true story Jennifer Saginor who grew up inside the Playboy Mansion. By the time she was fourteen, she'd done countless drugs, had a secret affair with Hef's girlfriend, and was already losing her grip on reality. Schoolwork, family, and "ordinary people" had no meaning behind the iron gates of the Mansion, where celebrities frolicked, pool parties abounded, and her own father—Hugh Hefner's personal physician and best friend, the man nicknamed "Dr. Feel Good"—typically held court.
Every day was a party, every night was an adventure, and through it all was a young girl falling faster and faster down the rabbit hole—trying desperately hard not to get lost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On her first visit to the Playboy Mansion, six-year-old Saginor happened across John Belushi having sex with a Playmate. What was a child doing alone in such a place? Saginor's dad, a "fitness" doctor liberally prescribing weight loss and other prescription pills to show-biz types, sports figures and Playmate wannabes, had became one of Hugh Hefner's cronies, with his own quarters at the Mansion. Divorced from Saginor's mother, he took his daughter everywhere and let her run wild once there. Saginor grew to love the Mansion, her own "magical kingdom" with constant attention from servants and Playmates, where she never had to follow her mother's boring rules. As soon as she could, she asked to be in her father's custody, though she feared his bipolar rages, aggravated by compulsive promiscuity and the ubiquitous drugs of the 1970s and '80s. Predictably, as she grew older she joined the nonstop party; as a high school sophomore in 1985, she dated both an older soap-opera actor and, surreptitiously, Hef's own "girlfriend." Names have been changed throughout this made-for-daytime-talk memoir, except for walk-on celebrities (who misbehave only when safely dead, like Belushi), but readers seeking colorful general-issue dish, sleaze and bad behavior will find it in spades.
