What was Hugh Hefner, the founder of the Playboy empire, really like? Following the publication of his widow's tell-all book in yesterday's Mail, Tanya Gold exclusively interviews CRYSTAL HEFNER.
The first line of Crystal Hefner's memoir “Only Say Good Things” is reminiscent of the first line of the gothic novel “Rebecca”: “Last night I dreamed of this [Playboy] Mansion again… Terror claws and claws at my throat. “I step on the accelerator, desperately trying to drive faster so I can get back to the ivy-covered Gothic house surrounded by redwoods before six o'clock.” At the time, Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine and perhaps the most famous sex addict of the 20th century, needed it , his young third wife home.
The ego has landed: Hefner and his rabbits at London airport for the opening of the new Playboy Club, 1966
Crystal met Hefner on Halloween in 2008, when she was 21 and he was 82. She sent her photo to the villa and was invited to a party. He beckoned her over, and they went to bed with other women, as was the custom in the manor: a few weeks later she was living with him and the rest of the harem. Crystal stayed for ten years until Hefner, whom she married in 2012, died in 2017, a few weeks before the #MeToo phenomenon. Her presence before me on Zoom – stern, reserved, very beautiful – is proof that she survived. She's now 37. She called the memoir “Only Say Good Things” because that's what Hefner wanted to hear.
Crystal begins the interview in a whisper. She pauses and often says, “I don’t know,” but she has spent a lifetime searching for her voice. Later, when she is more relaxed, she will laugh, for example when I tell her that I met Hefner in London 20 years ago for the Chron and my only strong memory is that he smelled good. Playboy Cologne, she says: He always wore it. Hefner was a brand, and the mansion was not a home but the headquarters of a company – and a cult.
When I finished reading Only Say Good Things, my question wasn't why such a beautiful woman would sacrifice herself to an extremely wealthy octogenarian. Given her backstory, why wouldn't she? There was mounting trauma that began when Crystal's father, a “magnetic” British musician, died when she was 12. Her mother and her two older sisters “can be timid types,” but with her father “I just felt so safe.” Afterwards, her mother was “very depressed and crying all the time.” Then I felt like I had to grow up too fast – to be able to help her.” She became the good child (she would also be the good child for Hefner ), but she didn't feel it inside her: “I started dying my hair and wearing things I shouldn't wear.” It's not well known that beauties have a hard time becoming themselves because of male expectations be. Crystal manifests this perfectly.
At night Hefner took Viagra and the playmates, who were paid $1,000 a week, performed
Her mother married a man who treated Crystal like Cinderella: her stepsister was valued, but she was not. She became pregnant by her teenage sweetheart Greg, had an abortion, and left him because she felt “not worthy, broken, or not deserving of certain things.” Greg, a soldier serving in Iraq, was killed just as they were about to reunite. There were also non-consensual sexual experiences: she said no but was ignored. And when Hefner beckoned her over this Halloween, she was emotionally prepared for a man who would make her look important to others but still use her.
“When I first came to the villa I went to a psychic,” she says. “She told me, 'You've already met your soulmate.'” It was Greg: even now she can't visit his grave. “I knew all along that Hef wasn’t really my soulmate” – and she laughs – “because what soulmate wants to bed a bunch of women?”
At first she was enchanted by the villa. She said it was “the most absolutely magical thing I've ever seen in my life.” I had only been in apartments or houses before. Hef had pajamas of every color and tanning beds and the gym and the playroom. It was like a Willy Wonka feeling – the staff, the people who go back and forth and can help you with anything you need.”
What Crystal needed was to please Hefner. She was cast in a carefully curated life that reportedly cost $10 million a year to run: There were parties, movie nights, and a reality TV show (for which she was paid a pittance). “There was a zoo department, a scrapbook department and a video department,” she says, “security, his office staff, housekeeping.” He had 3,000 books documenting his life because he firmly believed he was someone with whom “That's what people would be dealing with for centuries.” She had a nose and breast operation that alienated her from her own body. “I look at pictures of myself and what I looked like back then with the bleached white hair and the massive implants.” I look ridiculous – like a sex doll. Like a prop.'
There were evenings when Hefner took Viagra and his playmates performed. They were paid $1,000 a week – of which they had to maintain their appearance – and Hefner paid the money in cash. “He seemed to intentionally take his time putting down each bill and cleaning up the stacks,” Crystal says. “He kept us waiting. And wait until we do it, hands folded like good girls.' She found a friend in the villa: Amber, who arrived at the same time.
Hefner and his entourage at the Playboy Mansion in the 1970s.
Crystal rose through the hierarchy: first girlfriend, then fiancée, and finally wife. Why did he choose her? “I think I kept things light and fun,” she says. “Hef was like a child, a child at heart.” I really didn't think about marriage or ask him about it. I remember him saying, “Oh, you're not really asking anything of me.” Maybe I was the quiet presence in his life that he was looking for, but I'm not sure.” She quotes Hefner's longtime secretary: “Mary said : “He always likes the broken ones.” I don't know if it was because they were more manipulable or because they touched something inside him. Both could be true. Then Crystal says, “I think because I was so malleable and pleasant, it was easier for me to stay there for so long.”
I think there is more: there is an obvious sincerity towards the woman, a decency: perhaps that made her more attractive to corruption. Or maybe he loved her for her own sake. But all women had to live in his pornography because it was the only place he knew. I can't bear to ask if she was ever attracted to him. Instead, I think of the film Sunset Boulevard: silent film star Norma Desmond trying to live as she did in her prime (Hef is Norma) while the world has changed; the fake paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock in Hefner's mansion – in reality a stage on which he projected the man he wanted to be.
He was this sad little boy who tried to make amends in a grand way but couldn't fill the holes in his soul
There was rot inside – not just metaphorically, but literally. It was filled with black mold: the source of the infection, Crystal discovered, was in the vent above her room. “People think the mansion is an incredible place – and that's what I did in the beginning. 'When you realize it's all fake and it's raining and dripping inside and it's just like that… this place is disgusting.' She was never relaxed there. “I felt like I had to be “on” all the time. For ten years – 24/7. That's crazy.'
Hefner, another prisoner at the mansion, was, according to her memoirs, agoraphobic and a drug addict. “The parties came to him,” says Crystal, “the doctors came to him.” He ate in the house. He never wanted to go to a restaurant.' She realized he suffered from agoraphobia, “and with all this money and power he can easily hide it – he got very nervous when we went out.”
Crystal suggested they go to a themed restaurant: “He liked fried chicken and watching the girls ride the mechanical bull, but he never really wanted to go.” He took Percocet (a notoriously addictive opioid painkiller). . “He had severe back pain, he didn’t make it up,” she says. “But the pills…there were a lot of them.” To the point where he fell asleep while trying to play cards with us.”
Hefner turns out to be a narcissist full of worry and neediness. Why? “When he was a child, he said his parents weren't very loving,” she says. “He didn't have love growing up, and they didn't really show love.” She adds, laughing, now vacillating between wistfulness and something bolder: “He definitely tried to make up for it, that's for sure!”
“I really felt sorry for him,” she says. “I don’t know if he ever really knew how to love or let love in. I think he did the best he could.” To me, he was just such a sad little boy who went through hard times and tried to make up for it in such a great way, but still never filled the holes in his soul. People would come up to him and say, “Hugh, you're the man!” “But that wasn't true.” To Crystal, he was “sad and clingy.”
She left him in 2011 and had a relationship with Jordan McGraw, the son of television psychologist Dr. Phil, but when Hefner called her back, she left. Why? “Maybe I was manipulated to some degree or brainwashed or had Stockholm syndrome,” she says. “But I was worried about him. I saw the broken little boy. He was never satisfied or felt truly loved or whole. This man who could have anything and everything in the entire world and he's just… broken. As he got older, I felt even more sorry for him.” Sometimes she thought, “I don't know if I can still be here, I just feel so trapped, but at the same time I can't leave him.” He needs me. “I think he was trying to use sex to fill a void in his soul, but it never worked.”
They married in 2012: She signed a punishing prenuptial agreement without objection. “I just went along with everything. I didn't want to get into trouble. I didn't want him to be mad at me and think I was after the wrong things.' However, that was the end game: both have changed. Crystal became more assertive (but with his sanction): “Hef called out and said, “When Crystal makes a request, treat it as if it came from me.”
With Crystal, Hefner's girlfriend at the time, in the scrapbook room of the villa, 2010
I started to have more of a say. He would introduce me as his wife. He no longer paid any attention to the women who showered their attention on him. He just became really dependent on me.' He bought her a house. She took a job as a DJ and started selling real estate, and he allowed it. I wonder if he fell in love with her? She had stopped dyeing her hair, had her implants removed – they were making her sick – and was dressing like a normal woman. She became real. “The sex,” she writes, “stopped completely in 2014…and I was relieved.”
Hefner sold the Playboy Mansion for $100 million in 2016 – to the owner of a bakery – and stipulated that he would live there for the rest of his life. (Today it is used for corporate events.) In 2017, he fell ill and died of sepsis in bed within two weeks: “I knew how much he hated the hospital,” Crystal says. “He would say, 'Don't ever take me to the hospital, that's where people go to die.'” Of course, Hefner feared death more than most: boys shouldn't die.
Crystal was distraught. “I know Hef was older, but in some ways he felt like he was forever because he had been 'older Hef' for so long.” She couldn't watch him being taken out of the villa and stayed inside for weeks. She hasn't been at his grave – next to Marilyn Monroe's resting place in Westwood Village Memorial Park – since the funeral. She says she feels guilty: “I tried 100 percent to be the person he was always looking for.”
It wasn't her responsibility to be that. I like Ms. Hefner, and I think she won her bargain: he tried to make a sex doll out of her; she made him a dependent husband. But she was shocked by it. She now lives high in the Hollywood Hills – perhaps a reflection of the boundaries she once lacked. She sells real estate and grows lychees in Hawaii. She has traveled to nearly 40 countries since his death and is chairwoman of the Hugh M Hefner Foundation, which blessed the memoir. She's dating someone and is trying to meet someone she can be serious with because she would love a family: “I'm still going through the phase where when you meet someone nice, you just try “To get involved in it and not to sabotage it.” . I still have problems with it.'
Does she miss Hefner? A long pause. “Sometimes it feels like a dream: ‘Did that really happen?’” The pause continues. Finally she says slowly, “In a strange way, yes, then I think maybe the world could say the same thing – the people who knew who he was.” Crystal is still a good kid. Even now she can't completely get rid of Hefner. But she completely exposed him by telling the truth.
Only Say Good Things by Crystal Hefner is out on January 25th from Ebury, £22. To pre-order a copy for £18.70 by February 4, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. UK delivery is free on orders over £25.