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By all accounts, in early 1990 Bob and Dian started having a sexual relationship. Bob was sixty-six, Dian a nymphlike forty-five. Bob's wife of many years had died of lung cancer eight years earlier, and Dian wasn't married. The affair caused instant discomfort among the staff. Bob had become executive producer three years earlier, which meant that Dian was sleeping with the boss. After this shift in status, Dian's friendship with Holly and Janice deteriorated rapidly. "She had the boss's ear, and that's always hard when you have a boss who's listening to the pillow talk," says Holly. Everyone on the set knew — a fact that both Holly and Janice have said Dian made sure of. "It gave her a different stature on the set," says Holly. "It got to be really ugly."
That year, Playboy asked Dian to appear in a spread. Their offer was lucrative. Bob personally went to Mark Goodson, head of the show's production company, to request permission. Goodson took the request to CBS executives; they said no. Goodson then sent a memo to the spokesmodels declaring Playboy officially off-limits.
In December 1991, Dian showed up in Playboy anyway. On the cover, she wore an emerald-green bikini. "I think after doing eighteen years of The Price Is Right and wearing bikinis and swimsuits and lingerie and very sexy things, it was such a tease that I think doing Playboy actually settled the savage beast," she said in 1993. But sometime between the shoot and the publication of the photos, Bob ended
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| Flouting CBS policy, Dian appeared in Playboy for the first time in 1991. She defended her decision, saying that after eighteen years of modeling bikinis on the show, "doing Playboy settled the savage beast." |
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| Dian's second Playboy spread, two years later, was more explicit than the first. It antagonized Bob and many others involved with the show. Dian quit soon afterwards. |
his relationship with Dian. According to Janice and Holly, Dian was furious. "It was daggers being shot across the stage, doors slamming," Janice said.
When Dian posed for Playboy a second time in 1993, she was on her own. Under the headline "An Erotic Encore," she was photographed for the cover spilling out of a white negligee. Bob admitted he was not pleased. The second spread was more explicit, with full-frontal shots featuring ample pubic hair. Bob said he'd never approved the second shoot. When he confronted Dian about the photos, she "went ballistic," he would later claim at a press conference. At odds with Bob and estranged from Janice and Holly, Dian's position on The Price Is Right was untenable. After eighteen years on the show, she quit, just shy of her fiftieth birthday. The show replaced her with a wide-eyed, twenty-two-year-old college student, who would leave just two years later to become a regular on Baywatch.
A year later, Dian re-emerged in the public eye, this time bearing a sexual-harassment lawsuit. She claimed Bob had forced her to have a sexual relationship with him; Bob said it was consensual. Eventually, Dian dropped her suit before it went to trial, citing her doctor's concerns about how the stress was compromising her health. According to some reports, however, she was out of money.
The next year, Holly, then forty-three, went on prescription medication for menopause. The meds caused her to gain weight, and she says Bob told her she needed to lose a few pounds. Bob would later admit that he talked to Holly about dieting, but claimed it was merely a suggestion. A production assistant named Linda Riegert corroborated Holly's version of the story, saying she heard Bob tell Holly she should take early retirement. Bob later said that the show had one too many models, and the producers had decided to cut one loose. Describing Holly as "difficult" and "not well liked," Bob said she "was the obvious choice."
After nineteen seasons, Holly shot her last episode in July of 1995. There was a brief on-air goodbye; she waved to the cameras while the staff surrounded and applauded her. Holly wasn't financially prepared for retirement, but she figured her experience would lead to other modeling gigs. That assumption ended when she saw a story about herself in a tabloid. "I started reading all these things about myself, that I had stormed off the show and this and that, and here I am, unemployed," she says. "I'll tell you, I never worked in Hollywood again after that."
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