14 DAY TRIAL // Molly Bloom, the former waitress who ended up as hostess at one of the biggest celebrity illegal poker rings uncovered, which held games at Tobey Maguire’s house and included stars like Leonard DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Maguire himself and the Olsen twins, is opening up about all that in a new book.
And the “Poker Princess” is not mincing her words when she talks about Maguire, whom she describes as possibly the worst person to be around because he’s elitist and petulant and has a perverse sense of humor that can’t but offend.
The book is called “Molly’s Game,” with excerpts from it published in the latest issue of Vanity Fair.
While Bloom says of Ben Affleck that he was calm and cool, and made for a “monumental” presence at the table, Maguire was perhaps the exact opposite of that: “the worst tipper, the best player, and the absolute worst loser.”
He was also cheap and mean to the extreme, the kind who delights in putting people down just because he can. Allegedly, of course, because we only know Bloom’s version of the story so far.
She recalls one instance in which Maguire was holding a $1,000 (€738) and, holding it out to her, he told her to “bark like a seal who wants a fish” and she’d get it. She thought it was a joke, so, naturally, she laughed when she heard that.
“I’m not kidding. What’s wrong? You’re too rich now? You won’t bark for a thousand dollars?” the “Spider-Man” star told her. When she informed him that she had no plans to oblige him and that he could keep his money, “he gave me an icy look, dropped the chip on the table and tried to laugh it off but he was visibly angry,” Bloom continues.
And there’s more than just this example to expose Maguire for the horrible person that he is: Bloom says that all games had to include a machine called the Shuffle Master, which he owned. After some time, he told her that she should pay him a fee for the use of the machine during the poker games, even though all profit from it actually went directly in his pocket.
“I looked past him to the expansive foyer of his mansion in the hills. You could see straight through to the ocean. I laughed. Surely he was joking. He couldn’t possibly be serious about charging rent for a machine he insisted that we use, from the guys whose money he was taking every week. But he was as serious as death,” Bloom writes.
Maguire asked for a $200 (€147.7) weekly rent fee for the Shuffle Master.