There was this bathroom in the Playboy Mansion, just off Hugh Hefner’s bedroom, that was clad in black marble, with a black marble tub, black toilet and heavy curtains to shut out the light. The way Crystal Hefner (née Harris) describes it, this room sounds like a manifestation of the darkest part of Hefner’s mind. When she moved into the mansion as one of his three live-in girlfriends (she became his third wife in 2012, when she was 26 and he was 86), she’d work out which nights he expected sex because, instead of his regular dinner of tinned chicken noodle soup, crackers and cream cheese, he’d order a BLT. He took so much Viagra it made him deaf. Afterwards, the girlfriends and any other blonde guests Hef had invited up from the party would shower off the baby oil he insisted they use for lube, despite their recurring infections, and Crystal would watch the two lovebirds that lived in a cage in the corner.
They were beautiful, these birds – tiny and green, and famously loyal. “The problem was,” writes Crystal, in her memoir, Only Say Good Things, “they kept dying.” The staff would whisk away each little corpse and replace it with another the following day, but neither Hefner nor the maids seemed curious about what was wrong. Were they passing on infections, Crystal wondered. A bacteria buildup in the famous grotto pools, after all, had caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. Was it the lack of sunlight? One day she inspected the cage and realised the water bottle was broken. “The birds had been dying of thirst this whole time and the mansion staff just kept replacing them, bird after bird.”
Crystal moved into the mansion to replace Holly Madison, previously Hefner’s “number one girlfriend” of three he had at the time. In 2008, after sending in her photograph, Crystal had been invited to one of his infamous Playboy parties. She moved in soon after, quitting her psychology degree for a different kind of education. “Once you went in,” she writes, “it was so hard to find a way out.”
Her book is named after a promise she made to Hefner. Does it suggest, I ask, that he knew you were unhappy? She breathes, contemplative, then slowly shakes her head. “I honestly don’t know. Now it seems like a threat. But I do remember someone asking him, ‘What if these women are just after you for your money?’ And he said, ‘Well, as long as they’re after me!’ Hef was on the extreme side of narcissism, so I truly believe that he thought everybody really wanted to be there. Really enjoyed the sex, really enjoyed the old movies, loved literally everything he enjoyed.”
She chuckles lightly. “It was his friends’ country club. They came and got the free buffet and the staring-at-the-girls, and brought articles about him to him and it was just the Hef show.” For years Crystal only said good things; she cared for him, she brushed away criticism, she built relationships with his four adult children. But now, six years after his death at 91, she’s decided to talk about her life “imprisoned” in the Playboy Mansion and, in doing so, ask questions about abusive relationships, identity and the impact of a libertarian culture Hefner helped usher in.
This is not the first time one of Hefner’s girlfriends has spoken out. In a 2022 documentary, Karissa Shannon (who was 18 when Crystal joined her and her twin sister in the mansion) said she’d had an abortion at 19 because he refused to use condoms. Susie Krabacher, who moved in at 18, said Hefner drugged and raped her. In Holly Madison’s 2015 memoir she wrote that at the depths of her despair she contemplated drowning herself in his bathtub.
The difference between their stories and Crystal’s is partly in the timing; she has written this in the long shadow of #MeToo, with all the politics and therapeutic reckonings that entails. Partly it’s that, as his wife, she had a particular, peculiar insight. And partly it’s that this is not a shocking tell-all: though there are revelations about sex and cash, it’s a story about power, celebrity and, in a mansion that looked grand from a distance, but inside was mildewing and falling apart, the dark truths that glamour can hide.
“When I first got there, it was like… Willy Wonka,” Crystal says. She’s sitting at home in LA, a nervous cough rising between thoughts. “Because I came from a world where I didn’t have much of anything.” Born in Arizona, as a child she moved with her parents to the UK, where they lived above a pub in Birmingham. When she was 12, her father died, leaving her and her mother in a precarious situation in the US, and by the time she was invited to the Playboy party she was struggling, both financially and mentally.
“The big celebrities at the time were people like Pamela Anderson and I thought they looked so powerful; they were loved, they belonged.” She wanted to be part of their world. “When I moved into the mansion I saw access and power and thought it was amazing. But then the walls started to close in on me.” She pauses. “I think broken women gravitate towards something like that. I still don’t understand why. I’m going back to school to study more psychology.”
The girlfriends had to be home every evening for a 6pm curfew and none were allowed to work. Hefner would make them queue up to receive a weekly allowance (“gas money”). “The whole mansion had this gross vibe to it. All the misogynistic actors that preyed on women – this was their meeting ground. And I just thought, that’s how people are.” And to be fair to her, many were: she was humiliated on chatshows, blackmailed, controlled.
Even when Crystal led a season of the hit reality show, The Girls Next Door, which followed Hefner’s girlfriends about their syntheticised daily lives, his production company received $400,000 an episode and she received nothing. This was the last mainstream hurrah for the Playboy brand: six seasons of telly that were equally banal and fascinating, with the girlfriends laughing and bickering and grooming themselves. It revealed how being a giggling, beautiful blonde was a full-time job. And the sight of geriatric “Hef” sliding in and out of scenes in his silk pyjamas somehow made him seem even older.
After Crystal had been promoted to main girlfriend, she felt important. But, “I quickly started thinking, ‘How can this person really love me when they want four other people in the bedroom with us?’” She describes the weekly sex as if it was a degrading chore, unkeen to dwell on details – she says she’s easily “grossed out” today. “I did things that I wasn’t comfortable with. I wasn’t physically attracted to an 80-year-old man. I was just trying to get through it. And the other girls? Nobody liked each other. But we’d just be there for Hef.” Things changed for her when, “I realised I had no freedom. Everything was based on Hef’s schedule and I never got a say. Which,” she coughs discreetly, “is the opposite of the liberation and freedom that, supposedly, Playboy was meant to be about.”
Playboy the brand had been in decline for years before Hefner’s death but, in tributes, many praised his progressive politics. Jesse Jackson hailed him as a strong supporter of the civil rights movement and Larry King called him a giant of free speech. But Glaad, a non-profit organisation focused on LGBTQ+ advocacy and cultural change, put out a statement contending that Hefner “was not a visionary” but “a misogynist who built an empire on sexualising women”. “And the thing that’s interesting to me,” says Crystal, looking back, “is that #MeToo happened a month after he died. So like, right on time.”
Obituaries reignited a long debate about his cultural legacy as an architect of the sexual revolution. But as Crystal explains, detailing the ways he’d pat her head and tell her to dye her roots, loudly compare the girlfriends’ bodies, encourage plastic surgery and play them off against each other, it became clear how little his grand project had to do with sex and how, in fact, it was all about power.
She buried him in the plot he’d bought next to Marilyn Monroe (another businessman bought the crypt above her, where he was buried, as per his wishes, face down). The symbolism was deafening. Hefner’s early success had been down to Monroe: at 27, he launched Playboy with a naked photograph that he ran without her consent. Crystal shakes her head. “I went along with everything for so long, but I was brainwashed, really. How was that all OK? I was in the middle of it for a decade and I’m still trying to figure it out. Like, how did he get away with this?” Another small cough.
When he proposed, he offered the ring in a music box that played a song from The Little Mermaid, the story (Crystal writes) of the princess who so wants to belong to a different world that she “trades her voice for a chance to walk around on human legs and find love”. She signed a prenup, almost grateful, perhaps, that this time the disparity was in black and white. Because the worst part about the transactional relationships she and her fellow girlfriends maintained, was that they never made explicit. “You went into his orbit offering all of yourself, and you had no idea what you’d get back.” It might be “gas money”, it might be a Playboy spread, or fame.
“Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity,” she writes, “and generosity is insidious when it’s a camouflage for control. And both power and generosity are confusing when they gaslight you into believing they could be love.” Newly engaged, Crystal felt like another object in this crowded house, “a thing”. One day, after being denied a cut of the $800,000 Hefner would receive for a wedding episode of their reality show, she decided to run away. But, crossing the driveway, she heard his voice boom over the mansion loudspeaker: “Detain her.” “That’s when a light went off,” she says. “I was like, ‘OK my feelings don’t matter.’” She had become small, she writes. She left one more time, telling guards she was going out to buy tampons – she returned, chastened, a year later aged 25 and, on the issue of Playboy with Crystal on the cover, Hefner plastered stickers saying “Runaway Bride”.
They married on New Year’s Eve 2012 but, soon after, she became sick, so sick she believed she’d die. “Oh well,” she thought, ‘I’ve lived a lot of life.’ Eventually, she was diagnosed with Lyme disease, as well as breast implant illness and then, toxic mould exposure. The mansion was literally killing her.
The sex stopped in 2014 and life became easier: she took out the implants, stopped dyeing her hair and transitioned to the role of carer. Though not before going through his acres of shoeboxes containing explicit Polaroids of girls and shredding them. At the end of his life, she writes, Hefner fought suddenly to leave her something: his Playboy retirement fund and a house to live in. She started to think, maybe he did love her, in his way. And her feelings today? “It’s complicated. He seemed like a broken little boy, just trying to fill this void. And that’s why he went on to try to overcompensate for a childhood that didn’t really have any love.”
He was not good at love, Crystal says. “He was good at getting women to surround him and creating the illusion that he was not alone. But in reality, he was very lonely.” How could you tell? “Watching movies, love stories, he would just cry and cry.” How did she feel about him at the end? “It was like Stockholm syndrome, where you start having feelings for your captor. What made it harder with him was there was so much power and celebrity around, which definitely masks pain. When everyone’s going along with something, it’s hard to mentally pull away. I played mind games with myself to try to survive.” She remembers her mother saying, surely you have enough money now, surely you can leave, “And I said, ‘I can’t – he needs me. I stayed until the very end.” Her eyes flash, briefly. “I don’t know why, but it makes me angry to think about. Why did I feel sorry for someone who messed me up, mentally, but… I don’t know.” She shrugs awkwardly.
When, after Hefner’s death, Crystal read that statement by Glaad, she was shocked. Because, she writes, they “had said the secret thing out loud”. She waited for all hell to break loose in the mansion, but the silence felt equally violent. The party was over. She thought of miners emerging from a collapsed cave, the shock of freedom. “When you’ve been living so long in a weird and dark world, how do you transition back to the light?” After she’d moved out she started hearing the stories of #MeToo: “I felt justified. I knew something felt wrong. But you get brainwashed, like, ‘Oh, this is just how men are,’ and you just have to laugh it off.”
That’s when the book started coming together. “The Playboy Mansion and Hugh Hefner were fascinating to so many people. So I think those people deserve this story. I have nothing to hide. I have no one to protect. So that makes it a good time to let everyone know the truth.” Rather than an attempt to undermine Hefner’s legacy, she sees this book as a way to, “Help other people who are in relationships that are confusing and maybe emotionally abusive, or with men with… hard personalities.” She didn’t realise at the time, she says, that while the mind games might have helped her survive, temporarily, “It was all harming me, psychologically. It’s tough knowing your opinion doesn’t matter. And you question your value, you don’t feel worthy, because people lead you to believe that you’d be nothing without them.”
After she moved out, she found relationships challenging. “I realised, maybe being there affected me more than I thought.” A friend suggested she talk to a matchmaker. “They said, ‘What are your hobbies? What do you like?’” She was speechless, “Because, like, ‘What do I like?’” Who was she? She felt… blank. Recently, she started a podcast. “I wanted to talk to other women who had been part of that world or had similar experiences, about how they’ve healed. But a lot of them haven’t. So that’s become difficult for me, realising, ‘Wow, we’re all still trying to figure it out.’”
Since leaving the mansion, Crystal has come to despise celebrity. “I think it’s empty. I feel people chase it because they have some kind of void they’re trying to fill. And then once they get it, they’re angry, because it doesn’t fix anything.” Another thing she’s found uncomfortable is watching the rise of other “toxic men”, like Andrew Tate. “It’s so hard for me to see. Hef wasn’t necessarily an aggressive person, but I think he chose women who were broken and easily manipulated.” Today, she is appreciating her freedom. Or, starting to.
“I still dream about the mansion,” she says. In one dream, she’s racing to get back before her curfew. In her most recent dream she walked into Hefner’s bedroom to find him in a crowd of naked women. And she had this feeling as if she was floating, “like I’d risen above it, they’re down there and I’m up here, and I kind of feel sorry for him again. But then I’m like, oh, I can go. So I say goodbye, and I’m glad you’re in your happy place, Hef. Not heaven, surely. No one would say Hef has gone to a better place, ha. But I just have this feeling like…” Like what? “Like – we don’t need to be here any more.”
‘This wasn’t a relationship, it was a job’
An extract from Crystal Hefner’s memoir, Say Only Good Things
My first time getting allowance was with the twins, Kristina and Karissa Shannon. A couple of weeks after I moved in, I overheard them talking about “getting our allowance from Hef.”
I edged into the hallway where they were standing. “What do you mean, allowance?” I asked.
Grudgingly, they explained: on Fridays we each got an allowance, which we were expected to spend on clothes and whatever other beauty maintenance or accessories we needed in order to present as Playboy girlfriends. Within those general expectations, we got to decide how to spend it. But we had to go and ask for it.
When they headed down the hallway towards Hef’s bedroom, I followed. “Can we have our allowance, please, Hef?” they cooed in unison, in a singsong girly tone. They sounded like teenage daughters asking their father for spending money, but in fairness they were only 18, so they were teenagers.
It was obvious that the asking was yet another performance to please Hef and to remind us of our dependence on his generosity. Hef played his part, the benevolent benefactor. It was obvious that he enjoyed it, that he relished being asked, and wanted to linger in this moment where he had the upper hand.
“Of course, of course,” he said, with fake surprise, as though he needed to be reminded. Theatrically, he pulled out a velvet pouch. From that, he produced a key. He unlocked his special cabinet – the one that held his fancy, inlaid wooden box full of marijuana and pills. The cabinet that held the sex toys. And now I could see it was also the cabinet that held an envelope stuffed full of cash: fresh, crisp $100-dollar bills. Later I would discover that Norma, one of the office ladies, restocked the envelope of cash every week, so that he could perform this ritual with his girlfriends.
He began counting out the bills into three stacks, slowly and deliberately: one… two… three… all the way to 10 – $1,000 each.
I stood there for what felt like a long time while he counted out the money. He seemed to take a long time on purpose, laying down each bill, neatening the stacks. He made us wait. And wait we did, hands clasped like good girls. I felt terrible. I felt like a hooker. Hot shame rose inside me, my cheeks burning; I realised my face was turning bright red. A little voice inside me whispered, “What are you doing?”
I pushed the voice away. And when he held out the stack of bills to me, I took it.
The ritual continued after the twins left, of course: every Friday I, and whoever was living in the other bedrooms, had to go ask for our allowance. It was demoralising on purpose. It was infantile. But since we couldn’t work outside the house, it was our only source of income.
Sometimes I imagined throwing the money back at him. “I don’t need your money,” I would say coldly, and then I would walk away.
But I did need it. If I didn’t have any cash I wouldn’t have gas money, and I’d never be able to leave the house. Hef was careful not to give us too much and he watched to make sure that we spent it on what we were supposed to be spending it on. He didn’t want us building any kind of nest egg.
My fantasy that somehow Hef and I would develop a real relationship was over. This wasn’t a relationship, it was a job, and as soon as I accepted that reality my panicky feelings began to lessen.
My job was to perform. I performed on his television show, for Hef’s friends and guests, and for him, in his bedroom. The sex never changed, only the faces: the silk pajamas. The four big television screens with the same old porn reels playing. Hef getting into bed and reaching for the baby oil. We were all getting infections from the baby oil – it wasn’t supposed to be used as lube. I tried to tell him, I begged Mary to tell him, but you couldn’t really tell him anything he didn’t want to hear. We tried to replace the baby oil with lube, but when we weren’t looking, he would always switch it back.
He kept a doctor on retainer who would come when called to give us antibiotics. The sex had become like everything at the mansion – part of my job.
Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself by Crystal Hefner is published by Ebury Spotlight at £22. Buy it for £18.70 from guardianbookshop.com
