The declarations of love from Criss flowed freely and he talked in front of his friends about wanting to settle down with me. He took me back home with him to Long Island to show me off to everyone he knew. As the holidays approached, I was treated like I was already a member of his family. Since we were both December babies, I began thinking ahead to our birthdays. Criss had already scheduled our joint birthday celebration to be held at his favorite night spot, LAX, but I also wanted to keep a tradition that I’d developed over the last several years: a trip to Disneyland with a group of friends. Near my birthday, Criss and I planned a day trip to the Magic Kingdom and invited my usual guest list, which included a few girls from the mansion.
As the day grew closer, my mansion “friends” suddenly became unavailable.
“You won’t believe it,” said one of the girls who lived at the Bunny House. “Hef heard you were going to Disneyland for your birthday and decided to take his new girlfriends the same day you’re going.”
Seriously? I thought. Hef abandoned making the trek down to Anaheim years earlier. He suffered from chronic back pain, so having to walk more than a few steps at a time was incredibly uncomfortable for him. What are the chances that he all of sudden decided to go to Disneyland on the very same day I would be there celebrating my birthday? It was a pathetic attempt to get in my face and perhaps try to remind me of his earlier accusation: that the girls were my friends only as long as I was his girlfriend.
“I don’t know what to do,” she grumbled. “He invited me to go with him and I feel like I can’t say no because I live in his house. This is really awkward.”
Several of the girls called to explain that they wouldn’t be going with either of us. It was obvious Hef was trying to force them to pick sides—and they didn’t want to get involved.
If Hef wanted to go to Disneyland, that’s fine, I told myself. He wouldn’t deter my birthday celebration. Criss and I ended up spending the afternoon by ourselves. I asked our tour guide to help keep me from running into Hef’s group, which was also on a guided tour, which I’m sure soured Hef’s plans of ruining my day and flaunting the guests he had ripped away from my celebration.
Despite the fact that we avoided Hef, it still wasn’t the most relaxed day at the park. Criss spent the whole day trying to orchestrate “candid” paparazzi shots without seeming obvious, which I found embarrassing. I never mind having my photo taken, but I hated his sneaking around. The way he tried to hide his oh-so-obvious agenda from our tour guide made him look, to me, like a complete idiot. This was the first time I felt embarrassed to be with him, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Back in Vegas, Criss and I filmed a TV segment together for a local New Year’s Eve special. The bubbly reporter who interviewed us was very interested in the diamond ring that sparkled on my finger. It wasn’t an engagement ring, but the large diamond birthday gift Criss bought me piqued the press’s interest nonetheless.
For Criss’s birthday, I wanted to get him something special. But what do you get the man who has everything—or at least could afford to buy himself anything he could ever want? I started reading interviews he had done online, hoping that it might offer me a clue or two.
Criss had told a reporter that he was a huge fan of Salvador Dalí. I’d never heard him mention art before, but why would he make something like that up? During one of my final trips to Los Angeles, I tracked down a rare Salvador Dalí print at a Beverly Hills gallery.
When I gave him the present, Criss tried to act impressed and thanked me vigorously, but didn’t offer too much more. His manager, who was also in the room, seemed way more impressed than Criss.
Huh, I thought. Maybe he doesn’t really care about art after all. This was just one example of how the public Criss and the private Criss seemed like two very different people to me.
For Christmas, I played it a bit safer. Criss had mentioned wanting to shoot a snowboarding episode of Mindfreak, so I commissioned Burton to create a custom snowboard and snowboarding gear. Believe it or not, he actually had the gall to ask me if Burton did that for me for free. So much for its being the thought that counts! All Criss seemed to care about counting was pennies.
In return, Criss showered me with an audacious diamond cross necklace—making the previous pendant he bought me pale in comparison. He also presented me with another necklace, this one with a large diamond-encrusted infinity symbol pendant. On the back, next to the clasp, was a little charm that read, in tiny diamonds, “XO CA.”
Reading the huge smile on my face, Criss whispered that he had designed this especially for me and that he’d never designed jewelry for anyone before, not even his wife.
Criss had been married before, to his hometown sweetheart, but they filed for divorce after she learned that he had been spotted with an A-list movie actress. Criss never missed an opportunity to remind me of his high-profile conquests.
“Wow,” I exclaimed, truly breathless at these elaborate gifts. “I don’t know what to say. I love them!” He picked me up in a huge hug.
No one had ever lavished me with such elaborate romantic gestures before. Even though Hef had dropped a few pieces of jewelry on me, they were always pieces of mass-produced Playboy-branded merchandise, made even less personal by the fact that identical pieces were given to his other girlfriends at the same time.
To me, it was the care that mattered . . . not the carats.
Criss offered to fly my parents to Las Vegas to celebrate the holidays with us. I was impressed and flattered that he showed such an active interest in getting to know my family, something Hef had never done.
“I think Holly should have her own perfume,” Criss told my parents one evening over dinner. “The slogan could be Holly Madison: Bring Out the Bunny in You.”
My dad couldn’t help but stifle a laugh.
“Can you even use that?” he asked Criss. “Isn’t that kind of a Playboy thing?”
Criss was beside himself. He’d spent his entire career surrounded by yes people, so he was completely at a loss for words and clearly uncomfortable that someone dared disagree with his idea. Ever the entertainer, Criss could charm the pants off anyone (in some cases . . . literally), but I was disappointed to learn that, just an inch below the surface, he didn’t appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed.
Whenever he announced his next “great idea,” I usually fell silent. I didn’t have the heart, for instance, to tell him that I wasn’t interested in cohosting a regularly scheduled “LoveSex” Pool Party (yes, that was the real name he actually came up with) at the Luxor with him. I felt sorry for him and didn’t want to embarrass him.
Criss asked me what my parents thought of him as we rode the elevator back up to his suite. He was clearly in need of some affirmation.
“They liked you,” I said with a big smile. After all, they hadn’t told me they didn’t like him. My parents confided in me that they found him a bit controlling, but they were seeing things I wasn’t necessarily ready to accept. On the other hand, they saw that I appeared truly happy. Plus, seeing me with a man closer to my own age had to be a lot easier to swallow.
He then asked me if I had told them I was “in love” with him.
“Um, I told them I really liked you,” I offered honestly. I’d already moved in with him, adopted so much of his life, and gushed relentlessly about him to the press. I wasn’t going to profess my undying love to my parents after just four months of dating, no matter how much of a whirlwind our time together had been or how often we said it to one another.
Criss pouted, crossing his arms, turning away from me, and, grumbling, asking why he was even wasting time on this relationship.
“Hey,” I said defensively, “I don’t introduce my parents to many people. This was a really big deal for me.”
THE WARM MEXICAN SUN beat down on my shoulders as Criss and I sat at our beachside table eating sushi and drinking Coke Lights with our friends Barbara and Ron. Enjoying a few days off from the show, Criss swept me
away to Cabo San Lucas for a late January getaway.
“We’re going to miss you guys,” I bemoaned to Barbara beneath a perfect cloudless Cabo sky after a boating excursion. The couple’s trip overlapped with ours for only a few days. They were longtime friends of Criss’s—and would soon become close friends of mine. The couple kept conversations lively and fun—they were the perfect antidote to the dark energy that I was starting to feel from Criss more and more lately.
“Let me give you my info,” Barbara said. “Text me any time you’re bored and want to go to lunch or something.”
“Thanks!” I said, pocketing the business card with Barbara’s information.
After we finished our leisurely lunch and said our good-byes, Criss and I went back to our suite.
Criss snapped at me as soon as the door had shut behind him. He demanded I give him the card and forbade me from texting her.
“Why?” I asked, confused. She seemed really sweet, but perhaps there was something about her I didn’t know.
He put his hand out, motioning with his fingers for me to cough up the card. He gave me a lame excuse about Barbara being “over the top.” It was clear that he presumed this was an acceptable explanation and he considered the conversation over.
Begrudgingly I handed the card over to Criss. Thankfully, I had already saved her number in my phone while we were still at lunch. After the holidays, I finally began recognizing Criss’s behavior as unusually possessive. In addition to his unreasonable temper tantrums, hoarding my most valuable possessions, and encouraging me to quit my job, he was showing yet another troubling sign: isolating me from my friends. He didn’t want me spending time with anyone else. He often found excuses to keep me away from my phone and recently began demanding to see it when he saw me texting. Needless to say, I was scared of where this relationship was going.
For the remainder of the trip, Cabo was hardly as relaxing. I soon learned that TMZ was reporting on our vacation. I never spotted the photographers; judging by the photos, they appeared to be shooting us from boats off the coast or from neighboring hotel balconies. I later learned that Criss tipped off the paparazzi—he never turned down an opportunity for more press to distract from his show, which was now seeing more horrendous reviews. A review in the Los Angeles Times had recently said: “If Criss Angel were blindfolded, straitjacketed, run over by a steamroller, locked in a steel box and dumped from a helicopter into the Pacific Ocean, he still might be easier to salvage from disaster than ‘Criss Angel: Believe.’ ” Yikes.
That night Criss and I got into an awful fight—one of the first of many dramatic rows that would soon become a constant theme in the remaining weeks of our short-lived relationship. While the catalyst for the fights varied, the arguments themselves became somewhat formulaic. Here’s how I would describe them:
1. Criss would become insanely jealous—usually a trigger associated with Playboy.
2. He’d accuse me of being a slut.
3. He’d say we should break up.
4. Criss would freak out if I didn’t try to convince him otherwise or make attempts to “save the relationship.” (I never did try to save the relationship during these tantrums. His outbursts scared me!)
5. He’d calm down and tell me what a wonderful person I was and how lucky he was to be with a sweet girl like me.
6. He would then take me in his arms and tell me he loved me.
I barely said anything during these rants, especially during the parts when I felt him getting hostile. His anger seemed irrational to me and was somewhat terrifying. By this time it had become clear to me that I had traded in one controlling megalomaniac for another. If there was one thing you could say about me at that time, it was that I definitely had a type! There were differences, though: Hef was a master of manipulation and knew how to cripple a girl’s self-esteem. Criss, on the other hand, just scared me. His anger filled a room, and while he never threw a punch at me, I was scared that something of that nature might be lurking around a corner.
Once again I was sleeping with the enemy. Only this time instead of being trapped behind the mansion walls, I was Rapunzel locked high away in the penthouse of the Luxor hotel. Criss had become so controlling that security shadowed my every move—I wasn’t even allowed to go downstairs to grab a Starbucks in the lobby without a security guard or assistant being ordered to follow me.
I started to wonder: Was I really any better off than I had been at the mansion?
AFTER OUR TRIP TO Cabo, Criss’s performance schedule started to catch up with him physically. He no longer had the energy for any of the off-day excursions we used to do—and during his on days, I had no choice but to adopt his routine. Criss wanted me to be with him 24/7 and he balked when I asked to go on simple errands by myself. We slept in most of the day, ate Mexican food in bed, and headed straight backstage two hours before the curtains went up so Criss could begin his preshow ritual: get an hour-long massage, eat a sandwich, and sit for hair and makeup.
And I thought mansion life got monotonous! Not only was I beyond bored, but my body ached from lack of exercise and activity.
Fueled by his failing show, recently called “a dog” by Variety, Criss’s treacherous outbursts became more and more frequent. I spent most days walking on eggshells, hoping to avoid yet another land mine. My nerves were so frayed that I often felt faint and nauseous, causing female members of his staff to joke that perhaps I was pregnant.
As I was showering one day, Criss popped his head into the stall. With a false air of casualness, he said he saw that Bridget was hosting a Valentine’s Day party in town that week and asked me if I was planning on going. I think he was itching for a fight.
I felt my body weaken and the light start to darken as my eyes rolled towards the back of my head. Criss swooped me up before my knees could buckle, pulled me out of the shower, and ran over to place me on his bed. He grabbed his terry cloth robe to lay over me and snatched a leftover chocolate cookie from Subway that was sitting on his dresser.
“Here, eat this,” he said, tossing it to me from across the room. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I uttered breathlessly. “I just felt really faint all of a sudden.”
I unwrapped the cookie and took a few bites as he stood over me and watched.
“I didn’t plan on going to Bridget’s party,” I finally said. “I didn’t think you’d want to.”
I was scared to mention Bridget in front of Criss. He had become so controlling, always demanding to look at my phone and trying to keep me from seeing or speaking to any of my friends. He seemed to have a major problem with Kendra ever since she announced her plans to marry Hank at the mansion (which I always thought was a strange choice, considering the Kendra I thought I knew would probably have preferred a beach wedding). Criss was wild with jealousy at the very thought that I might attend.
Apparently, that was the right answer, because his spirits immediately brightened.
“No, let’s go to her party!” Criss said, in what had become a rare moment of happiness. I continued lying in bed for a moment, enjoying my cookie, my boyfriend’s good mood, and the security in knowing he had just rushed to care for me. I was so relieved to have avoided another major blowout that I didn’t even worry about what caused me to feel faint in the first place.
In the first few months of 2009, my primary occupation was being Criss’s moral and emotional support. When he flew to Los Angeles to tape a segment on Larry King Live, I traveled with him.
“Do you want to go on with Criss?” one of his managers had asked me as Criss was being summoned onto set.
Huh? I thought. I didn’t come here to be on the show. I thought I’d just be sitting in the greenroom with the rest of the entourage that made the trip to Los Angeles.
“No, I’m okay,” I said, waving my hands at Criss as if to say “go ahead without me.”
Criss pleaded with me to go with him, gesturing towards the sound guy, who was already holding a second
mic pack.
I didn’t feel like I had a choice in the matter.
“Uh, okay,” I said, hesitantly, thanking God I wore makeup that day and wondering what I would talk about.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but apparently I was the sideshow attraction that was to be trotted out to distract viewers from the disastrous show reviews that Larry would certainly be bringing up. I had become used to being used for publicity at this point, but was still completely surprised by this particular ambush. Before I had been used for photo ops, planted articles, and local Las Vegas programs, but this was prime time, national television. It felt very uncomfortable.
“So . . . you’ve been on this show before,” Larry said, giving me a pointed look. In 2005, I’d appeared on Larry King Live with Hef, Bridget, and Kendra to promote The Girls Next Door. It was obvious to me what he was thinking. To him, it seemed as if I was jumping from one rich boyfriend to the next with no purpose or pursuits of my own beyond being professional arm candy.
And in a way he was right. It hadn’t been my intention, but the relationship with Criss proved so controlling and consuming that I hadn’t been able to make any professional moves of my own. All of those dreams that I had been so enthusiastic about just a few months before had been shoved under the rug as my primary focus became being at Criss’s side. Once again a lightbulb went on, and I resolved right then and there that I needed to make a change.
It had become increasingly clear to me that I had jumped headfirst into this relationship way too soon. Having striven hard for fame the first 35 years of his life, Criss was an expert at putting on a charming facade and being able to win people over. After I had spent several months with him, the facade faded and I started to see what was underneath, what the real Criss was like. I learned that our views on politics and most social issues were vastly different. He had a fifth-grader’s sense of humor. (His entourage had to muster up convincing fake laughs every time he repeated the same joke we’d heard a million times.) I found him to be unintelligent and he seemed virtually illiterate. (He misused the word “misnomer” so much—even during interviews—that it made me cringe for him.)
Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny Page 26
