She Traded Her Mansion Keys for a Pasadena Palace
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Benton married entrepreneur George Gradow in 1979. When she moved out of the Playboy mansion, she traded her lavish lifestyle for something equally as impressive. Benton and Gradow shared a 28-room mansion with an indoor swimming pool. Each room was more opulent than the next with exotic wood flooring and hand-picked amethyst, quartz, and pyrite. If you can picture it, it’s even more outlandish than the Playboy mansion.
Benton enlisted 40 artists to help craft her dream home, but she designed the interior herself. “We’d bring in other designers, and George would go, ‘Zzzz—you can do that in your sleep,’” Benton said. “George has no idea how to decorate till he sees it firsthand. Then he’d say, ‘I like it—but I want it wilder.’ So that’s what I’d try to give him.”
