It has been described as a playground for adults, but for Lorraine Nicolson the Playboy Mansion was the only playground she knew as a child.
The daughter of actor Jack Nicholson and model Rebecca Broussard shared her experiences in an essay for Vanity Fair, reflecting fondly on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner – even admitting that she was more upset over his divorce from Kimberley Conrad than she was about her own parents splitting.
Lorraine would visit the infamous Los Angeles mansion with her nanny Cis – who worked as Hefner’s social secretary – celebrating holidays and even birthdays there.
She compared being a child in the Mansion surrounded by adults to like being ‘a streaker at Disneyland.’
‘You were ruining the magic,’ Lorraine, 33, quipped.
Although sometimes feeling out of place, Lorraine said she ‘had a quiet reverence for the magic’ of the Mansion when she visited, comparing it the ‘magical’ worlds from Disney movies and describing it as ‘one big unconventional family.’
‘I never went to summer camp. I never had an after-school activity,’ the writer and director recalled.
She continued: ‘From the year I was born, 1990, until I was about 11, I went to the Playboy Mansion, because that’s where my friends were.’
The filmmaker explained former playmate Kimberley Conrad would typically watch her and her younger brother Ray, as well as her sons, at the Mansion using a security camera.
Kimberley, 61, was married to Hefner from 1989 to 2010 and the couple share two sons – Marston, 33, who was born only a week apart from Lorraine, and Cooper, 32.
‘Though there was a time when I went to the Mansion every day, I never became jaded,’ she wrote, describing the ‘green grounds’ which ‘rolled in all directions’ as how she imagined Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden.
‘At that time I really believed no one could be hurt there,’ she recalled wistfully.
Lorraine recalls her early childhood with fondness, writing she ‘loved everything about the Mansion,’ but recalled the grotto – infamous for being a steamy location where many couples hooked up – with particular fondness.
‘I loved the rich smell of enclosed wetness. I loved the fleshy temperature of the point where the pool water met that of the hot tub. I even loved the secret tunnel that connected the grotto to the deep end,’ she reminisced.
While she spent many daylight hours there, she insists that she ‘rarely’ stayed at the Mansion after dark.
‘Not because anything nefarious was going on, but because it was boring,’ she noted.
Lorraine also spoke of the difficulties of becoming an adolescent surrounded by the women – the Playmates – who lived in the mansion.
‘I knew I was not one of them,’ she reflected. ‘I compared myself to the girls at the Mansion, because they were who I wanted to be.’
Lorraine said although she understood that the mansion was never intended for children, she ‘could not have been less curious about sex or sexuality’ and never even picked up an issue of Playboy.
‘I was constantly vigilant, in terror of being exposed to something I wasn’t supposed to see,’ she wrote. ‘I never picked up an issue of Playboy – though they were left in every room.’
‘I never once questioned the original purpose of the mirrored furniture-less room in the game house — or why every bathroom had its own selection of Vaseline and tissues,’ she explained.
The Playboy Mansion has often been engulfed in controversy, with explosive details about the inner workings of Hefner’s world coming to light over the years following his death in 2017.
Earlier in the year, Hefner’s final wife Crystal lifted the lid on the sordid reality in a memoir titled Only Say Good Things.
In the book, Crystal described how the magazine mogul had a ‘cruel streak’ and was addicted to opioids.
But Crystal is not the first of Hefner’s former partners to have spoken out about the dark side of his personality.
In 2022, A&E aired a 10-part docuseries called Secrets of Playboy which delved into the ‘dark underbelly’ of Playboy and how its venues became a seedy playground for drug use, sexual abuse, and even bestiality.
The series delves into the hidden truths behind Playboy with exclusive interviews with insiders, including Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends Holly Madison and Sondra Theodore, as well as former ‘Bunny Mother’ PJ Masten.
Holly Madison, a model who dated Hefner for eight years, also tells how Hefner refused to use protection during sex and how the Playboy Bunny lifestyle a even led her to consider suicide.
She also claimed he kept ‘all kinds of naked pictures’ of women so he could allegedly use them as a form of blackmail.