Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself

by Crystal Hefner

Here I am, I’m home, I’ve followed the rules. I’m a good girl.

it never really felt like home. It felt like a place I was forever visiting. Like a hotel I’d checked into, but could never leave. Like a stage I was performing on, observed by so many sets of faceless eyes.

Stop worrying about what I looked like every second. Whether I was smiling the right way. Whether I had arranged my body correctly. Whether I was dressed the way he liked. Whether my hair looked right.

How I compared to the other women. There were always other women around. It was always, explicitly, a competition.

Playing the role of someone else’s image of you every day and every night is exhausting—physically, mentally, and in a way that feels like your soul is actually tired, like some kind of life energy battery is running low.

waiting for someone to rescue her. But nobody ever did. And I had climbed into my tower voluntarily. I didn’t know then that I could rescue myself.

in his mind it was always forty years ago—his hair was thick and dark, his pipe was lit, and women were always grateful, willing, and eager.

in his mind he was still the man all other men wanted to be and all women wanted to fuck. The one with all the power and control.

Being with him was being in a kind of prison; but it had also been safe.

I don’t even think I knew anymore what I really felt and thought, so I fell back on saying what I thought people wanted and expected me to say.

I wished there had been someone to tell me that I didn’t have to fit myself into this particular mold in order to be valuable, to be attractive, to be worthy, to be loved.

so many girls and women who grow up believing that their worth comes from what they look like, and that their value can be given to them by other people, and also taken away.

I lived in a place where the most important thing was how men saw my beauty and desirability. A woman’s value came from being attractive to men, from being the most sexy, the most perfect, the most available.

I had to be malleable. Compliant. I had to let people touch me, casually, like I was a part of the mansion decor. I was a part of the mansion decor.

There was no wiggle room for my own opinion or thoughts, so eventually I trained myself not to have any.

I always wondered what I had done wrong, what message I had given, that made men think it was okay to climb on top of me when I was asleep. Not once did I wonder what was wrong with the guys who did it.

a part of me knew instinctively that assertiveness was the last thing he was looking for. Growing up, I’d learned other kinds of skills. Like how to make myself invisible. Be polite. Fit in. Go with the flow. Figure out who has the most power, and do what they want. Be what they need.

They didn’t hesitate to uproot us for the next possibility. Movement was progress, and progress was good. If you wanted to make it, you had to grab on to the next rung and pull yourself up, even if it meant giving up everything.

Everything had changed, but I shoved the pain down. Because I was a woman now, and that’s what women

at thirteen, I learned that the best way to survive in the world was to be appealing to men.

It became easy to believe my worth as a person was entirely based on what I looked like on the outside, because inside I had nothing left to give anyone.

This was it—my happily-ever-after, my fairy tale come true, my Willy Wonka golden ticket. I joined the exotic zoo of girls and animals at the Playboy Mansion. Except unlike the peacocks, cockatoos, and monkeys, I walked into my cage willingly.

I wanted to please people—I wanted them to like me. I wanted to make myself needed in that home.

he wasn’t interested in conversation, not in the traditional sense. He liked to talk about his life, but these were monologues, not conversations. It quickly became clear that I was only to smile and nod and laugh at the appropriate times. So I did.

My job was to look a certain way and to act a certain way. I was now part of the Playboy mythology.

my job was to embody the ideal girlfriend, and I wanted to do it flawlessly. I was to be happy, fawning, and there when I was needed. Hef’s interests were my interests. My interests were irrelevant.

Every brain cell was firing toward, What else can I do for him? How can I smooth things along for him? What will he need next?

I was desperate to be considered worthy: worthy of love and of taking up space, which I never believed I could grant myself.

True empowerment was a joke. I learned early that being a woman meant submitting. It meant keeping myself small. Safety meant being tucked beneath the shadow of a man’s authority. It meant living up to the standards of what was required of me, so I wouldn’t be abandoned, cast aside, left alone with my aimlessness and grief and self-doubt.

Just be “myself”? I had no idea who that was.

there was also a clear message that money and a powerful man brought you respect, value, dignity, and saved you

I didn’t want real life. I wanted the enchantment.

I reminded myself that this was exactly what I had wanted. This is exactly what I had dreamed of. This was every girl like me’s ultimate dream come true. I told myself everything was absolutely perfect and amazing.

For a moment, I had forgotten to pretend that what he loved to do was exactly the same as what I loved to do.

we were like children who were expected to be seen and not heard. So we frolicked and played and acted helpless and clueless.

I could feel my panic attack waiting at the edges of my permanently happy smile. I’d sneak away to my little space and try to deep-breathe the feelings away. I would berate myself internally for being ungrateful and spoiled. I was angry at myself, at this weakness that had come out of nowhere and threatened to derail everything.

I wanted to be a kid again, taken care of, and held. But another part of me was proud and wanted to show off my new world.

I wanted to tell her I was worried that this wasn’t the best place for me. I wanted her to reassure me that it was or tell me to get the hell out. I wanted to ask her if she believed I could make it on my own, be someone without this world, but I didn’t.

maybe I couldn’t be happy anywhere. Maybe happiness wasn’t a real thing. Maybe it was just a lie that we were all told, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Or maybe I was happy and I just didn’t realize it.

I’d achieved something I was going for, but I felt sad, too. It was a weird blend of satisfaction and regret. The women on the cover of Playboy had seemed confident and powerful, and I thought I would feel the same way.

It was actually a relief to have other women up in the bedroom with me, to not have to be sexual with him all alone. If these other girls were doing it, then I didn’t have to.

The birds had been dying of thirst this whole time, and the mansion staff just kept replacing them, bird after bird.

the men would peruse the magazine like a Playbill and discuss the merits of each body part of the women featured. These men, all over the age of fifty, reviewed, they passed judgment, and they voted.

being controlled never feels comfortable.

In these old movies, a woman was always being saved by one man from another man. Or they were completely passive, except for when they were flirting with a man or trying to lead him into temptation. They were silly, weak, or dumb, and everything in their life revolved around getting the man. They fawned or fainted. They couldn’t make decisions for themselves.

This was the life I had chosen, the life I thought I wanted. But I was bored out of my mind. As much as the world of Playboy represented freedom and excess, I mostly felt restricted. I missed spontaneity. I had longed to be taken care of, to have someone, anyone, make decisions for me, to be in a safe place. But the downside of living in a safe and controlled environment is that you have no control.

I was still competing every day in a race I had voluntarily signed up for, and I had absolutely no idea that I could simply step off the track.

I was shocked that he actually fell for it. How could he not see that for all of us it was an act? Did he really think we were enjoying it? Somehow, he actually did.

Did he just assume that this was what everyone liked, because it’s what he liked? Or was he just this self-obsessed? Or maybe he just didn’t care.

It was clear to me that Hef had never taken a moment in his entire life to figure out how to please someone else.