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By Root 342 0

are, and what you can do for me.” I should have said that during my first set of meetings with all of the losers before. I learned a big lesson from being beaten down. So I gave her a challenge. I didn’t say, “Fix my problems,” I didn’t say, “Go get me the cover of People magazine.” Her biggest test was to get us into the Transformers premiere. Hank is a huge fan of Transformers and I wanted to take him to the premiere. At this point I wasn’t an automatic RSVP—my name didn’t always get me into things I wanted. So getting me into the Transformers premiere at the very last minute wasn’t easy. She ended up doing it and we hired her. When Kira got that for me, I knew she was the publicist for me. Plain and simple, she was working for me and got me what I wanted. I’d build from there. The two biggest decisions I made in my professional career were based on Pinkberry and Transformers. It actually doesn’t get any more Hollywood than that.

Now I have my agent, Brian; I have Kira, who went from being my publicist to my branding agent; and I have a group of others who, depending on what projects I’m working on, pitch in. I finally took charge of my life, which is a great place to be. I can’t tell you how many people I talk to who tell me they are afraid to fire their nanny or they hate their secretary or business partner. I’ve learned that if you’ve got someone holding you back, you’ve just got to move on from them. Now I know my team is out there protecting my image and working hard to grow my brand. I’ve even got Playboy’s PR people still involved in my life and I’ve learned to love them. As long as I stay on the up and up about Playboy I’m all good. I’m glad I still work with them. (No, they did not make me say that or pay me to say that.) And, of course, I’ve got Eddie.

Ultimately, it was this team and all of their hard work that landed me my own show. The successful transition from Playboy Playmate and supporting cast member of The Girls Next Door into full-on star of my own show, Kendra, had been completed.

Shooting a reality TV show is a lot harder than most people realize. A soap opera or even a sitcom takes a script and rips through that script trying to bang out as much dialogue as possible in one day. Come in, say your lines, head home. Sure, it takes a while to put one episode together, but all in all the words and the story are there and you just have to try to get it right on the first take. If you don’t, you try again for take two. But imagine if the actors actually had to come up with their own material. Or invite the production crew into their home for extra footage. Imagine there was no real script. I think we all saw how Charlie Sheen did in his stand-up routine when he didn’t have the Two and a Half Men producers writing the jokes for him. He bombed and was booed off the stage. That’s my show in a nutshell, a dramedy without a script.

We shoot a whole season over the course of three months. But it could take a week to get one episode’s worth of footage. For season four we started filming in June 2011, with the show scheduled to air in early fall. That is a short period of time for TV. But when you are having meltdowns and marital woes, raising a newborn, and moving all around the country, there’s never a lack of material.

During the first month of shooting, the cameramen act like flies on the walls, just catching up with our lives and seeing what happens. The producers just want to get a sense of what the new issues are, what we’re fighting and crying over, and what’s coming up. They also try to recap some of what the viewers have missed out on over the last few months, what has happened during the time we have been off-camera. The first month is dedicated to natural “real” reality. It’s almost like a documentary; they are just there for everything.

The first month we have ten-hour days, three days a week. Those are the days we don’t schedule too many meetings and I try to live a normal version of my life. And I know everyone thinks reality TV is fake, but here’s the thing: It’s up to me to provide good footage