from www.bostonherald.com – Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion is a shabby dump with mismatched furniture, stained rugs and pets who leave surprises all over the floors.

And if that’s not bad enough, sex with the octogenarian swinger was like doing it with a “dead fish.”

So says ex-Playmate Izabella St. James, who skewers Hugh Hefner and his Playboy empire in her new autobiography, “Bunny Tales.” The ex-Playmate met Hef in a Hollywood club in 2002 and soon thereafter he invited her to move into the manse with the rest of his seven-woman harem.

But the Playboy pad isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, according to Izabella’s memoir, which is excerpted in London’s Daily Mail.

“It disguises a grubby world where some girls feel they are no better than prostitutes, paid pocket money by an octogenarian obsessive who funds plastic surgery to turn them into his physical ideal, and yet must still take huge amounts of Viagra to manage sex with them,” said the paper.

St. James describes the West Coast party pad as a dilapidated castle, where everything “felt old and stale.” Thanks to the endless stream of pets, the hallways and curtains had “a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay.”

The ladies of the house were paid a weekly stipend.

But in return were expected to participate in sex parties with Hef.

“Every Friday morning we had to go to Hef’s room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance: a thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred-dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases,” St. James writes.

But the wad of cash wasn’t forthcoming if the gals didn’t participate in Hef’s “parties”: late-night, Viagra-fueled orgies where Hef generally refused to wear a condom.

St. James’ tell-all comes on the heels of Hefner’s recent engagement to Crystal Harris, a buxom blonde (big surprise!) who, at 24, is 60 years his junior. Harris was one of the girls who came into the Mansion in January 2009, after St. James finally jumped ship.