My life with the final word Playboy: Exclusive with CRYSTAL HEFNER
What was Hugh Hefner, founding father of the Playboy empire, actually like? Following serialisation of his widow’s tell-all e-book in yesterday’s Mail, Tanya Gold completely interviews CRYSTAL HEFNER.
The first line of Crystal Hefner’s memoir Only Say Good Things echoes the primary line of the gothic novel Rebecca: ‘Last night I dreamt about the [Playboy] Mansion again… The terror claws and scrapes at my throat. I press on the gas pedal, desperately trying to go faster, to make it back to that ivy-covered gothic house surrounded by redwoods before the clock strikes six.’ That was when Hugh Hefner, founding father of Playboy journal, and presumably the twentieth century’s most well-known intercourse addict, required his younger third spouse again house.
The ego has landed: Hefner and his bunnies at London airport for the opening of the brand new Playboy Club, 1966
Crystal had met Hefner on Halloween in 2008, when she was 21 and he was 82. She despatched her {photograph} to the mansion and was invited to a celebration. He beckoned her over, they usually went to mattress with different girls, as was the customized within the mansion: just a few weeks later she was residing with him and the remainder of the harem. Crystal stayed for ten years, till Hefner, who she married in 2012, died in 2017, just a few weeks in need of the #MeToo phenomenon. Her presence in entrance of me on Zoom – austere, contained, very stunning – is the proof that she survived. She is 37 now. She referred to as the memoir Only Say Good Things as a result of that’s what Hefner wished to listen to.
Crystal begins the interview in a whisper. She pauses and says ‘I don’t know’ loads, however she has spent a lifetime on the lookout for her voice. Later, when she is extra relaxed, she’s going to chuckle, for example after I inform her I met Hefner in London 20 years in the past for the Daily Mail, and my solely robust recollection is that he smelled good. Playboy cologne, she says: he all the time wore it. Hefner was a model, and the mansion was not a house however the headquarters of an organization – and a cult.
When I had completed studying Only Say Good Things, my query wasn’t why a lady so stunning would sacrifice herself to a stratospherically rich octogenarian. It was why wouldn’t she, given her again story? There was incremental trauma, starting when Crystal’s father, a ‘magnetic’ British musician, died when she was 12. Her mom and two older sisters ‘can be anxious types’ however together with her father, ‘I just felt so safe’. Afterwards her mom was ‘very depressed, crying all the time. That’s after I felt like I needed to develop up too quick – to assist her.’ She grew to become the great little one (she can be the great little one to Hefner, too) however she didn’t really feel it inside: ‘I started dyeing my hair and wearing things I shouldn’t be carrying.’ It’s too little understood that beauties discover it exhausting to be themselves due to male expectations. Crystal manifests this, totally.
Her mom married a person who handled Crystal like Cinderella: her stepsister was cherished however she was not. She bought pregnant by her teenage sweetheart Greg, had an abortion and left him as a result of she felt ‘not worthy, broken or that I don’t deserve sure issues’. Greg, a soldier serving in Iraq, was killed as they have been about to get again collectively. There have been non-consensual sexual experiences, too: she stated no however was ignored. And so, when Hefner beckoned for her that Halloween, she was emotionally ready for a person who would make her look vital to others however use her all the identical.
‘When I first came to the mansion, I went to see a psychic,’ she says. ‘She advised me, “You’ve already met your soulmate”.’ It was Greg: even now she will be able to’t go to his grave. ‘I knew all along that Hef wasn’t actually my soulmate’ – and he or she laughs – ‘because what soulmate wants piles of women in the bed?’
At first, she was bewitched by the mansion. She thought it ‘completely the most magical thing I’d ever seen in my life. I’d solely ever been in flats or homes. Hef had pyjamas in each color and tanning beds and the health club and the sport room. It was like a Willy Wonka sort of feeling – the workers, folks going right here and there who will help you with something you want.’
What Crystal wanted was to please Hefner. She was solid in a rigorously curated life costing a reported $10 million a 12 months to run: there have been events, movie nights and a actuality TV present (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 truly believed that he was someone people would be studying for centuries.’ She had nostril and breast surgical procedure, which alienated her from her personal physique. ‘I look back at pictures of me and what I looked like then with the bleached white hair and the massive implants. I look ridiculous – like a sex doll. Like a prop.’
There have been the nights when Hefner would take Viagra and the playmates would carry out. They have been paid $1,000 per week – from this they needed to preserve their appearances – and Hefner doled the cash out in money. ‘He seemed to take a long time on purpose, laying down each bill, neatening the stacks,’ says Crystal. ‘He made us wait. And wait we did, hands clasped like good girls.’ She made one pal within the mansion: Amber, who arrived on the similar time.
Hefner and his entourage on the Playboy Mansion within the Seventies.
Crystal rose within the hierarchy: to chief girlfriend, then fiancée after which spouse. Why did he choose her? ‘I think I kept things light and fun,’ she says. ‘Hef was like a kid, a child at heart. I really didn’t take into consideration marriage or ask him about it. I bear in mind he would say, “Oh, you don’t really ask me for anything.” Maybe I used to be the calm presence in his life that he was on the lookout for, however I’m undecided.’ She quotes Hefner’s longtime secretary: ‘Mary said, “He always likes the broken ones.”’ I don’t know if it was as a result of they have been extra manipulable or as a result of they touched one thing in him. Both may very well be true. Then Crystal says, ‘I think because I was so malleable and agreeable that it was easier for me to be there for so long.’
I believe there’s extra: there’s an apparent sincerity to the lady, a decency: maybe that made her extra thrilling to deprave. Or maybe he did love her for herself. But all girls needed to dwell inside his pornography, as a result of it was the one place he knew. I can’t bear to ask if she was ever interested in him. Instead, I consider the movie Sunset Boulevard: of the silent-screen star Norma Desmond making an attempt to dwell as she did in her heyday (Hef is Norma) whereas the world has modified; of the faux Picasso and Jackson Pollock work in Hefner’s mansion – actually a stage on which he projected the person he sought to be.
There was rot contained in the place – not simply metaphorically however actually. It was stuffed with black mould: the centre of contagion, Crystal found, was within the vent above her room. ‘People think that the mansion is such an incredible place – and I did in the beginning. When you realise everything’s faux and it’s raining and it’s dripping inside and it’s identical to… this place is gross.’ She was by no means relaxed there. ‘I felt like I had to be “on” all the time. For ten years – 24/7. That’s loopy.’
Hefner, it’s apparent from her memoir, was agoraphobic and hooked on medicine, one other prisoner of the mansion. ‘The parties came to him,’ says Crystal, ‘doctors came to him. He ate in the house. He never wanted to go to a restaurant.’ She realised he was agoraphobic, ‘and having all this money and power makes it easy for him to mask that – he would get very nervous whenever we would go out’.
Crystal would recommend they go to a themed restaurant: ‘He liked fried chicken, and he could watch the girls ride the mechanical bull, but he never really wanted to go.’ He took Percocet (a notoriously addictive opioid painkiller). ‘He did have bad back pain, he wasn’t making that up,’ she says. ‘But the pills… there were a lot of them. To the point where he would nod off while he was trying to play cards with us.’
Hefner emerges as a narcissist, all fret and wish. Why? ‘He did say that his parents weren’t very loving when he was a baby,’ she says. ‘He didn’t have love rising up they usually didn’t actually present love.’ She provides, with fun, as a result of she veers between wistfulness and one thing doughtier now, ‘He definitely tried to make up for it, that’s for positive!
‘I did feel sorry for him,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if he ever absolutely knew methods to love or let love in. I believe he did one of the best he knew how. To me he was simply this type of unhappy little boy who had exhausting occasions and would attempt to make up for it on this grand approach, however nonetheless by no means ended up filling these holes in his soul. People would come as much as him and be like, “Hugh, you’re the man!”’ But it wasn’t true.’ To Crystal, he was ‘sad and clingy’.
In 2011 she left him, and had a relationship with Jordan McGraw, son of the TV psychologist Dr Phil, but when Hefner referred to as her again, she went. Why? ‘Maybe to some degree I was manipulated or brainwashed or had Stockholm syndrome,’ she says. ‘But I did worry about him. I did see the broken little boy. He never was content or really felt loved or whole. This man who could have anything and everything in the whole world and he is just… broken. As he got older, I felt even more sorry for him.’ Sometimes she thought, ‘“I don’t know if I can be here any more, I just feel so trapped, but at the same time I can’t leave him. He needs me.” I believe he used intercourse to attempt to fill some void he had in his soul, however it by no means labored.’
They married in 2012: she signed a punishing prenuptial settlement with out demur. ‘I just went along with everything. I didn’t wish to get in bother. I didn’t need him to be mad at me, to assume I’m after the improper issues.’ That was the endgame, although: they each modified. Crystal grew to become extra assertive (however along with his sanction): ‘Hef called down and said, “If Crystal makes a request, treat it as if it’s come from me.”
With Crystal, then Hefner’s girlfriend, within the mansion’s scrapbook room, 2010
I began having extra say. He would introduce me as his spouse. Women that have been spilling throughout him he didn’t take note of any extra. He simply grew to become actually depending on me.’ He purchased her a home. She took work as a DJ and commenced to promote actual property, and he allowed it. I’m wondering if he fell in love together with her? She had stopped dyeing her hair, had her implants eliminated – they made her ailing – and dressed as a standard lady. She grew to become actual. ‘The sex,’ she writes, ‘stopped altogether in 2014… and I was relieved.’
Hefner bought the Playboy Mansion for $100 million in 2016 – to the proprietor of a bakery firm – whereas stipulating that he ought to dwell there for his lifetime. (It is now used for company occasions.) In 2017 he fell ailing and died inside two weeks, of sepsis, in mattress: ‘I knew how much he hated the hospital,’ says Crystal. ‘He would say, “Never take me to hospital, that’s where people go to die”.’ Of course, Hefner feared dying greater than most: boys shouldn’t die.
Crystal was distraught. ‘I know that Hef was older but in some ways he felt eternal because he’d been “older Hef” for therefore lengthy.’ She couldn’t watch him be taken out of the mansion, and stayed inside for weeks. She hasn’t been to his grave – subsequent to Marilyn Monroe’s resting place in Westwood Village Memorial Park – because the funeral. She says she feels responsible: ‘I tried 100 per cent to be the person he was always looking for.’
It was not her duty to be that. I like Mrs Hefner, and I believe she gained her cut price: he tried to make a intercourse doll of her; she made a dependent husband of him. But she was shattered by it. She now lives excessive within the Hollywood Hills – maybe a manifestation of the boundaries she as soon as lacked. She flips properties and farms lychees in Hawaii. She has been to virtually 40 nations since his dying, and is president of the board on the Hugh M Hefner Foundation, which blessed the memoir. She is relationship, and making an attempt to satisfy somebody she might be severe about, as a result of she would love a household: ‘I’m nonetheless going by the steps the place if you happen to meet someone who’s good, you simply attempt to lean into it and never sabotage it. I nonetheless battle with that.’
Does she miss Hefner? A protracted pause. ‘It sometimes feels like a dream: “Did that really happen?”’ The pause ekes out. Finally she says, slowly, ‘In a weird way, yes, then I think maybe the world could say the same thing – the people who knew who he was.’ Crystal is an efficient little one, nonetheless. She can not solely solid Hefner off, even now. But she has uncovered him totally, by telling the reality.
Only Say Good Things by Crystal Hefner will likely be revealed by Ebury on 25 January, £22. To pre-order a duplicate for £18.70 till 4 February, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or name 020 3176 2937. Free UK supply on orders over £25.
