A babe in bunnyland

As the daughter of Hugh Hefner's personal doctor, Jennifer Saginor came of age in the sex-drenched world of drugs and celebrities at the Playboy Mansion. Now, she's trying to grow up.

By Christine Smallwood

Jul 7, 2005 | "It's 1975. I'm six when I see sex for the first time."

So begins "Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion," Jennifer Saginor's sex- and drug-soaked memoir of her youth. Lots of kids walk in on their parents doing it. But in 1975, it wasn't her parents Jennifer Saginor caught in media res. It was "John Belushi screwing one of the Playmates."

The daughter of "Dr. Feel Good," Hugh Hefner's personal physician and Playboy Mansion regular, Saginor was practically raised at the bunny ranch. She caught sight of Belushi on her first visit, and that stay sets the tone for most of her story's 300 pages: hairy older men grabbing at young flesh, "boobs ... flying everywhere," and a scared, immature girl in way over her head. "Playground" traces Saginor's growth from a confused 6-year-old into an even more confused high schooler whose world consists not of jocks and nerds, but Playmates and the men who screwed them.

One man who screwed more than most was Saginor's dad. He rose to fame in the late 1970s as a weight-loss celebrity specialist, becoming "one of the biggest names in Beverly Hills." As he spent more and more afternoons lounging around pools with pretty young things serving him drinks, his wife, not surprisingly, began to sense trouble. An emotionally manipulative man -- when his wife caught him at the home of another woman, he, gun in lap, calmly explained to her that the whole situation was a product of her "demented mind" -- he and his wife divorced before Jennifer turned 6. Although her mother forbade it, on his visiting days he'd drive the girls to the mansion, where he held court and saw "patients" in a private office. The good doctor, knowing full well that the former Mrs. Saginor didn't approve of her little girls' attending "pajama part[ies] for grown-ups," simply encouraged them to lie.

At the age of 15, Jennifer, at odds with her mother and seduced by the libertine environment Hef fostered (not to mention the mild-mannered Uncle Hef himself), ditched her mom and little sister altogether. She moved in with her dad and, like him, split her time between the mansion and his mansion-in-training, where the bathroom cabinets were filled with Xanax and his bed was filled with a string of girls her age. "Playground," like so many true Hollywood stories, focuses on the predictably steady decline that befell father and daughter: Decadence turned into drug addiction (for both); parties turned into coke- and pill-fueled orgies (at least one girl overdosed and died in front of her); and the good doctor's sangfroid morphed into a paranoia so intense that he took to carrying an Uzi around the house.

"Playground" is as bizarre and excessive as Saginor's own life, and as hilarious, disturbing and depressing. But in the middle of the third chapter, I found myself facing a critical dilemma: Was Saginor purposefully writing in the voice of a confused 6-year-old child of above-average intelligence, or was she just a really bad writer?

"My sadness is wrapped around a sort of disbelief that she [Dorothy Stratten, a murdered Playmate] is actually gone," she sighed. "This surreal world and all that occurs begins to not feel real after a while."

Could Jennifer Saginor bend the properties of space and time? Could something that was already surreal begin to not feel real? No. "Playground" could have benefited from a ghostwriter.

Yet a ghostwriter (or even, let's face it, an editor) would have denied readers the signature Saginor style -- a paragraph of average length (three to six garbled, clause-filled sentences) followed by a one-sentence zinger. Sometimes she throws down the super-signature Saginor style, a doubling or even trebling of the one-sentence paragraph, which, obviously, doubles and trebles the zing. Like this solemn incantation:

"At seventeen, I am sworn to secrecy and told to keep a gun by my side at all times.

The freedom package has officially crumbled."

Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of Saginor's writing is that even hundreds of pages of crap like this doesn't take away from the pleasure -- and horror -- and horrified pleasure -- of her story. Reading what feels like the diary of a high schooler, replete with the requisite hysteria and melodrama, one becomes not just a private witness and voyeur to Saginor's life, but a friend and confidante. Laughable as it may be, the one-sentence style creates this eavesdropping effect. The lurid and salacious narrative is intensified by the true-life quality of her decidedly unrefined prose.

And, of course, bad writing can make for a really good read. I mocked "Playground." I called my friends to read them choice sentences ("It was a house call, all right, only the blonde she spotted him with was in perfect condition"). But I couldn't put it down. I read it, bunny-ear cover and all, on the subway. I read it in bed. I took it into the bathroom. Much like the first 10 minutes of a porn movie, that suck you in with the promise that something really dirty, something really bad, is just about to happen, "Playground" hooked me with depictions of topless volleyball, teen sex, blow and backgammon (one of Hef's and Dr. Saginor's preferred pastimes). Blood is dripping from the coke whores' noses onto the Twister mat! Kendall's satin G-string has just slipped off! If I put the book down, I feared, I might miss something good.

Next Page: Calling Saginor's father a misogynist is like calling David Duke a racist

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