Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself

by Crystal Hefner

For anyone who has ever felt lost on their journey to self-love and self-acceptance—you are not alone.

There were no doors I could lock because there were copies of every key. And Hef, of course, held the master key that ensured no one could ever lock him out. This was his world, and he held the key to everyone and everything.

I used to steal brief moments in the vanity—small shining moments when I could breathe deeply and not have to be “on.” 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.

“And I want to remind you,” he said, his eyes locked on mine, “to only say good things about me.”

In the parking garage, though, surrounded by so many girls just like me, but better looking in my opinion, I was starting to feel a little less amazing. Nobody looked as insecure as I felt. There was an ease to the way they posed and laughed and fawned over one another with giddy praise.

Everyone was beautiful and everyone was confident. I felt like an imposter—an imposter wearing a costume, which somehow made it worse.

We wandered around in awe, feeling like the kids in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory walking into Willy Wonka’s magical land of lollipop flowers and chocolate rivers for the first time. My mouth hung open, but I couldn’t help it. There was no playing it cool or acting as if this was anything less than what it was: a real-life fantasy world.

I clung to Allie’s arm as she pulled me room to room like a tugboat and just stared, trying to soak it all in: There was a Picasso on this wall; a Jackson Pollock on another. There was a Frankenstein head that I assumed was just a Halloween decoration, but everything besides that, from the rich velvet sofas to the sparkling chandeliers, was lush and extravagant.

On the other side of him sat the two sexy twin angels, in matching white fishnet stockings with garters similar to mine attached to short, fluffy, white skirts. Instead of halos they each wore a tiara. Even with the sexy costumes and full makeup, they looked too young to be at a Playboy party.

I was aware of the twins just over his shoulder staring at me, but with their bodies angled toward each other, murmuring and laughing. One of them—I couldn’t tell them apart—rested her arm casually across the back of his neck. After giving my outfit a cursory glance, they both turned away in disdain. Everything about them was aloof and territorial, even a little dangerous. They were like lithe young tigresses, defending their turf.

The twins introduced themselves as Karissa and Kristina Shannon. Hef nodded at them. “Meet Crystal.” He said this as a command, and they jumped to attention. They smiled at me with a fakeness I recognized from so many other girls so many times, but I smiled back and tried to make it genuine.

The first time I remember a man touching me when I didn’t want him to, I was nine years old.

My family was always looking for belonging, for acceptance. We were always trying to get hold of a little piece of the American dream. A house, a nice shiny car, some money in the bank. Success, stability, not having to worry about where the next paycheck was coming from or how the bills were going to be paid. My parents always struggled to provide the basics but dreamed of something more. Fame, fortune, and our name in lights on a marquee: HARRIS in bright bulbs, the opening act. My dad, Ray Harris, was a singer. He had a beautiful voice.

“We need to go home,” she told me. “Dad is dying.” It had happened much faster than they thought. It hadn’t been six weeks. It had not even been half that. It seemed unreal. It seemed wildly unfair.

It felt like there should be someone we could talk to, explain things, and they could fix it. “Oh, I’m sorry, we made a mistake,” they would say, and then they would rearrange the timeline so that my dad did not have tumors the size of lemons in his brain and body, so that there was no cancer and no headaches, so that it was just a normal evening with him tuning his guitar for a show, tying on his dress shoes, calling “Love you” over his shoulder as he went out the door.

“Crystal,” she said, “tell him it’s okay.” “That what’s okay?” I asked. “That it’s okay to go.” I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No no no no.” My sisters started urging me, too. My mother was begging me to say it. I think she thought it needed to come from me—his youngest daughter. “Tell him, tell him,” they all kept saying. “Tell him it’s okay.” I didn’t want to tell him that. It was not okay. But finally, I said it.

I could not cry in front of him. I knew he was gone, but still, I didn’t want him to see me cry. I slammed out of the room and started running, racing down the fluorescent halls like a rat in a maze, desperate to get out.

I tried, for just a minute, to not think. To not think about what had just happened. To not think about how the life I’d thought I was going to have had snapped off like a thin branch. Gone. To think only about the smell of warm asphalt and gasoline in the parking lot. To think only about the rough brick against my back. And then, just above me, a single light bulb in a row of lights flickered—on and off, on and off. I remembered Art and Mildred, the ghosts from our old pub that my dad used to joke about. I thought this could somehow be him, sending me a signal. The lights flickered on and off again, deliberately, it seemed. It was him. I wasn’t sure exactly how to put it into words—whether it was I love you or I’m here or I’ll be with you, but I felt it. I knew it was real.

Everything had changed, but I shoved the pain down. Because I was a woman now, and that’s what women do. I didn’t know much, but I already knew that.

I lost my dad, and then my mom lost herself. With my dad gone, everything fractured. It was like removing a weight from a set of scales that had been precisely balanced.

Now it was just my mom and me, and we were struggling to survive our loss and, alongside the grief, to survive financially. We immediately had to move out of our apartment and into a single bedroom in another family’s house, which we rented for $400 a month.

I felt untethered and adrift. I lay in that room and realized that everything we owned smelled like someone else’s unfamiliar cooking. When I put my head down on my arms at school, closing my eyes for a minute to take a break from everything, even my own sweater didn’t smell like myself, like my own home. It was a constant reminder that we didn’t belong anywhere, that we were out of place and lost—not a real family, just the leftover scraps of one.

She cried constantly. She slept. She still didn’t have her green card, and we were out of money. It felt like we were completely alone in the world—she was all I had, and I knew she was doing the best she could, but she was barely there, just the hollow shape of a person.

Then she pivoted to older, richer men, and two years after my dad died, she married one of them. His name was Lyle, and he was a sports announcer and also a writer for the San Diego Tribune. Lyle was rich, or at least seemed so to me, because he owned a townhouse in La Jolla Village and drove a Mercedes.

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

I dreamed of being just like the other girls in my high school, the ones who seemed to effortlessly have the things I longed for, not just the home and clothes and looks, but the ability to walk around in this life as if they belonged. They had a confidence I desperately looked for on the discount shelves at drugstores and envied on the pages of Lyle’s Playboy magazines. Most of all, they were happy and carefree and seemed so sure that the world was a good and kind place full of good and kind people.

“I’ve never felt the way I felt with you,” he said to me one night. “When I get back, let’s get together and talk. You are the love of my life.”

I wasn’t the shiny, happy Crystal he knew and loved. I had become one of the glassy-eyed people, on edge and brittle. I had traded my bare feet for stilettos.

“I’ve been working out,” he typed. “How do I look?” I saw the message, but I didn’t reply right away. He looked beautiful. He looked like hope. He looked like happily ever after. He looked like peace and contentment and love. He looked like safety. I wanted to say all of this to him, but I needed time to think.

But the next day, on Memorial Day 2007, the Humvee he was riding in drove over a roadside bomb. There were four soldiers in the vehicle, and only one survived. It wasn’t him. I got the news from a girl I barely knew.

“Shorty passed away,” she said, her voice breathless and almost excited. “He’s gone.”

I couldn’t believe he was gone. “Where are you?” I asked. “I’ll come meet you.” I met her at an In-N-Out Burger near Pacific Beach, right off the freeway.

When I stepped out of my car, Jill came running up to me and hugged me. And that’s when I knew it was real. She wouldn’t be hugging me if it weren’t real. The sobs came then, and I held on to her and cried as she told me what happened.

The world was dimmer without Greg in it, and I knew that my life would never be the same. I had once loved someone so brightly and so beautifully, and they had once loved me the same.

Greg’s death had hollowed me out, and there was freedom in the emptiness. 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.

I’d like to be able to say that I thought twice about following them into Hef’s bedroom when they held open the door and invited me in, or that I hesitated when I saw the king-size bed or when the large television screens started playing porn movies. But I didn’t. I was twenty-one years old and had already lost the only two men I had ever loved. I had already lost myself. I thought I had nothing left to lose.

I didn’t like being high. I’d had enough of that with Owen. He’d pulled me into his dark underworld of dealing and smuggling, of cocaine and mushrooms and ecstasy, and I’d gone along with so much I now regretted. I had developed an aversion to substances that altered my reality.

I especially hated the way pot made me feel trapped in my own head. I didn’t want to be stuck inside myself with my whirring thoughts, thinking about what I was doing, judging myself.

This didn’t feel very liberated. It felt more transactional: I want something, you want something. It felt like a performance, and I was an understudy thrown into the show. He lifted Amber off and looked at me. It was my turn. I didn’t hesitate. Go go go, said my brain. Just do it. It’s not a big deal. This is what Playboy girlfriends do. Everybody knows this is what happens here—it’s normal. It’s fine.

My body felt magical with Greg, alive, and when he was inside me and I wrapped my legs around him it was nothing but pleasure and love and ecstasy. It was hot and sweaty and amazing, and we discovered each other’s bodies all over again day after day. Greg would kiss my neck and I’d feel his hot breath in my ear, and there was no room for thinking. Only wanting. This was nothing like that.

Here I was in the Playboy Mansion, in Hugh Hefner’s bed with Hugh Hefner inside me, beautiful naked women surrounding me, and there was nothing sexy about it. This wasn’t about making love. It was about power and control and leverage.

I was instantly replaceable in this bedroom, so there was no pressure in the ways I was familiar with. I didn’t want it to be over so I could go on with my life. For one weekend I wanted to sleep in luxury and pretend this was my home, that I was safe in this big bed next to this powerful man.

We went through the sunken living rooms with their velvet couches, shag rugs, glass chandeliers, and wood-paneled walls. Everything looked expensive, and a little worn around the edges. It was like a time capsule from the 1970s—like Hef had pushed pause at the height of his heyday, and never unfrozen it.

It felt again like I had wandered into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but the adult version. It was a magical, sexy wonderland of riches, and I wanted to touch and taste it all.

The respect he commanded expanded to include me, too. Of course I was still the same exact person I’d been when I’d arrived. But with his approval draped over me, I was better, glossier, more worthy.

“Hello, Crystal,” said the distinctive voice. “This is Hugh Hefner calling. I would like to invite you to move into the mansion.” There was no thinking about it. I packed as fast as I could, throwing all my clothes into trash bags and stuffing them in my car.

I couldn’t help but cry when I drove through the gates. 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. It was that easy. And if there was the sound of a door slamming shut behind me, I didn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear it. Because for the first time in my life I felt like I was safe. I felt like I finally had a real home.

I felt like I was at the center of the universe. Everybody wanted to be here—even the most famous people in the world.

I felt like a girl in a fairy tale who’d grown up a commoner in the village, but had been plucked out of obscurity by a prince and whisked off to a castle. A tiny little hitch in the narrative was that Hef, frankly, wasn’t much of a prince—he seemed wrapped up in himself, rigid and mercurial, and prone to cruelty when things didn’t go precisely his way.

One night when the twins and I were undressing for him, he gave my body a critical look and raised his eyebrows. “Looks like somebody needs to tone up,” he said lightly, but with a warning note in his tone. He gave my hips a light tap, to call my attention to the offending area.