Playboy Mansion Dog Was Addicted to Cocaine

One of the not-so-secret secrets revealed in the forthcoming A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy is that the Playboy mansion was, to absolutely no one’s surprise, filled with drugs. An adjacent if perhaps slightly more surprising revelation, however, is that the mansion was once home to a coke-addicted dog.

During its heyday, the Playboy mansion was famously a literal menagerie, from the pups and pets that called it home to the extensive collection of animals housed in Hugh Hefner’s personal, on-property zoo. As it turns out, some of the animals got a taste of the Playboy lifestyle for themselves.

According to Sondra Theodore, a Playmate and former girlfriend of Hefner, a poodle belonging to a close friend of the Playboy publisher picked up a coke habit after being exposed to the “huge vials” of cocaine found throughout the mansion.

“John Dante was Hef’s best friend. He had a dog Louis and this tiny poodle got hooked on cocaine,” Theodore says in the series. “There were drugs everywhere. The dog could smell it from across the room. He had to lock that dog up when people were around.”

According to Theodore, the dog’s coke problem got so bad that the pup was known to lick cocaine off of guest’s faces, including that of a “very famous person” Theodore did not out by name.

“A very famous person walked into the house one night and that dog jumped off the couch and was licking her up the nose,” said Theodore.

While the idea of a coked out pup running around the Playboy mansion exposing stars’ drug habits is inevitably kind of funny, it’s actually pretty sad and also, I would assume, literally animal abuse. I’m no expert on canine health, but based on what we know about what cocaine does to humans, I doubt it’s great for dogs either. Letting a dog get exposed to cocaine at all, let alone to the point of addiction, seems like pretty reckless behavior. Unfortunately, with a ten-part series set to expose Playboy’s darkest secrets, it seems this kind of casual animal abuse was far from the worst thing going down at the Playboy mansion during Hef’s (and cocaine’s) heyday.

Secrets of Playboy is set to premiere January 24 on A&E.