Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself

by Crystal Hefner

In a panic, I hit the gym. I stopped ordering food and limited myself to a few bites at meals. I dropped those offending extra pounds fast. It was like a cold slap in the face: There were expectations, and I needed to meet them.

Not talking about death and not talking about anything unless it related to Hef were rules I learned quickly.

Unless someone had status, fame, or fortune, he didn’t consider them real people. He didn’t notice them. He could be charming and gracious and attentive, and he could be sharp and cold and uninterested. It depended on who he was with and what they had to offer.

The butlers also helped me understand the times Hef ate, and napped, and how he always needed to have a drink in hand with just the right ratio of Jack Daniels to Pepsi. Nothing was too mundane or minor to be fussed over. The butlers, led by Henry, anticipated his every need—placing that perfect drink in his hand before he’d asked for it, clearing paths as he walked, making his environment everything he needed it to be at all times. The entire mansion revolved around his every whim. It was stressful at times, but I learned as much as I could as quickly as I could.

I tried to get to know him, tried to have conversations like normal people do. But he wasn’t interested in conversation, not in the traditional sense. He liked to talk about his life, but these were monologues, not conversations.

Every day there were seventy staff members working at the mansion.

I had gotten a beautiful Cavalier King Charles, whom I named Charlie. He was my one source of joy and comfort, waiting on the stairs for me every time I got home. I loved him and he loved me, and I think our bond was the only example of unconditional love in the house.

Any time I was brave enough to bring up a topic of conversation, instead of just responding to whatever he wanted to talk about, I held my breath, because I didn’t know which Hugh Hefner I would get. Either he would smile and offer a few words back and engage with me: “I love Greece, yes, it’s a beautiful country.” Or he would get angry, sharp, and dismissive. “Why go anywhere when you can live here?” He said that often.

He could be charming, and he could be cruel. He could make you feel like you were the most important person in the entire world one minute, and like you were less important to him than the rugs that he walked across the next. These mercurial switches in his personality were unsettling, anxiety-producing, and kept me on edge more and more.

I eventually came to understand that part of his quick anger when I mentioned travel, or day trips, or even going on a date like a regular couple was because hidden behind the worldly, jet-setter façade was a severely agoraphobic man. It was ironic to think that the thing we most had in common outside of Disney movies was the one thing we would never talk about: We both felt safer living in the mansion. For him, though, it was also where he felt most powerful. The outside world could be unpredictable, and he would fly into a rage at traffic, at crowds, at having to wait anywhere for anything or anybody. In the mansion he had total control.

All of the girlfriends had implants, nose jobs, and liposuction—there was simply no other way to be competitive. It was unspoken but also very clear that there was no other option if I wanted to stay. And especially no other option if I wanted to get the one thing I was sure would catapult me to the next level. I wanted nothing less than the holy grail of the Playboy world: centerfold. I wanted it badly.

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

In college I’d learned about the “sunk cost fallacy,” which is when someone is so heavily invested in something, they don’t walk away, even if it would be better for them if they did.

It never occurred to him to be curious about other people, unless it was for the show or in a media interview. He barely even seemed interested in his own children. I didn’t think he knew how to love.

Hef was not a Disney prince. But of course, I wasn’t a Disney princess, either. And life in the mansion wasn’t the fairy tale I had once hoped it would be. From the outside, sure, it had all the trappings of a fairy tale. But it wasn’t, and anyone who lived there knew it.

Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity. 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.

We weren’t women, just interchangeable body parts manipulated to fulfill the fantasies of a man’s twisted mind. Built to feed one man’s hubris. And then sell that man’s fantasies to the entire world.

Like all things with Hef, it was a transaction—cover of Playboy equaled marriage and marriage equaled the cover of Playboy. I would go along with it because going along with things was what I did. That was my job.

We got married on New Year’s Eve 2012. The last day of the year. I was twenty-six years old; he was eighty-six.

There were only ten people at the wedding besides us. There were my mom and my stepdad, Ted, whom she’d been married to for a while now, and whom I had really come to love. I’d gotten to know him; he was a kind man. And Hef’s brother and his wife, plus a few other of his friends and family.

I felt proud that it was small and reserved, like a sweet old-fashioned wedding from long ago—the opposite of the splashy, celebrity-studded publicity fest that the Playboy machine had originally planned.

What I knew: When you have no money, nobody cares about you. I’d seen my parents go through that. I’d gone through that. When you’re poor and you live paycheck to paycheck, or exist off someone else’s grudging generosity—when they make sure you know exactly what they’re giving you and want you to be grateful—I knew how that felt. And I knew that when you have money, you have power. You have people’s attention. So when you come from nothing and you get access to money, you go from feeling like a speck of nothing to feeling very valuable. And now that I was Mrs. Hefner, at least I had something: I had that name. I had a stamp of legitimacy that I’d never had as a girlfriend. As Hef’s wife, I suddenly didn’t have to say yes to everything or accommodate his every whim. I had more agency, more free will, but I had to pick my battles.

And most of all, everyone participated in this as though it were entirely normal. As though there were nothing abhorrent about the commerce of women, about choosing them like appetizers off a menu. Just another day at the mansion for Hef. Marriage didn’t change anything in that regard, and I was fine with it.

If someone came up to me at a mansion event and wanted to chat, there was a 99.9 percent chance they wanted to get to him through me. Nobody, ever, wanted to talk to me just to talk to me. I was nothing to them but a doorway to Hef.

I put up walls. I smiled and performed the role of wife and hostess, but I put a protective distance between me and anybody else. Everybody had a motive.

When I went to catalogue the millions of dollars of gifts that were supposed to have been put in storage at the mansion, there was nothing there. The storage room was empty except for a few trinkets of little to no value—a child’s music box, some cheap snow globes, some random movie memorabilia. I didn’t have the heart to tell him everything was gone, that people he had trusted had betrayed his trust.

His staff, who were supposed to be like family, or his friends, or his special guests, or his actual family—there was no way to know—had stolen it all. I knew he would never go there in his lifetime, so I kept the secret. But I put a lock on the door, and when new gifts came I catalogued them, I computerized the entries, I subtly let the staff know his estate attorney had a copy of everything in storage and I was the only one who had the key.

I put an end to the demoralizing allowance ritual once we were married—instead arranging for direct deposit of my allowance, so I didn’t have to hold my hand out and beg. I submitted my credit card bills to the office, and the office paid them for me. It was a bit more freedom, and a little bit more self-respect, but I was still saving every penny I could.

I saved and I learned how to invest in the stock market. I formed an LLC, studied real estate, and bought first one house and then another—fixer-uppers that I could flip or rent out. I learned about passive income and did my best to create various income streams. I DJ’ed every Saturday in Vegas at the Hard Rock for $7,500.

I grew my social media. I studied emerging crypto currencies and began building a separate financial portfolio. I got some brand sponsorships. As I worked hard to become a savvy businesswoman, I kept all of this, the rental properties, the day trading, the business partnerships a secret from everyone.

when we were out in public, nobody would know he was starting to get frail or confused. I supported him as discreetly as I could to make sure nobody would notice. He trusted me, and that felt good.

We grew closer and closer keeping up the pretense that the schedule he had created for his life was still manageable. Most of it was, but he tired more easily.

After my Lyme diagnosis, the doctors began taking me seriously. They dug deeper and found that almost everything in my body was out of whack. My thyroid and adrenals had tanked. Hormone levels were way off. Not only had these tick-borne bacteria proliferated in my body, but my body was also attacking itself. It was the implants.

But they all pointed to an autoimmune disruption: the body turning against itself.

I not only had Lyme disease, but also breast implant illness, and my blood work and symptoms also suggested toxic mold exposure. That could only be coming from one place: the mansion.

I hired someone to come into the mansion and take a look. He got up on a ladder, pulled one vent off, and frowned. “This place is absolutely full of black mold,” he said. It was everywhere.

I didn’t really want to talk about his funeral—I’d had enough death in my life, enough loss. I felt trapped in the mansion, trapped in my role as caretaker, but I also didn’t want to lose him. His had been an enormous, outsize presence in my life. He loomed over everything. It was hard to imagine my life without him.

I didn’t stop to consider all the ways I had volunteered for my own captivity—all the ways I had walked into a life that was so stifling of who I was inside. We all make tradeoffs, compromises, and we settle for less than we might need or want or even deserve when it comes to relationships. My entire twenties were spent under the control of a person, an institution, and a myth, that was so much bigger than I had in me to push against.

Hef’s doctor took a sample and ran a panel. The news was bad. He did indeed have a UTI, but it was an extremely aggressive bacteria, a strain of E. coli that was considered a “superbug”—highly resistant to antibiotics and difficult to treat.

The doctor said he was entering sepsis, and that the antibiotics weren’t working. He was too old, too frail; the superbug was too strong.

I sent people out of the room if they said one negative word. If the doctors wanted to discuss his care, they had to step out. I pushed people around, I stood my ground, and I protected him. Taking care of Hef in those final days, I was the strongest and most assertive I had ever been in that home.

There was backlash when the president of GLAAD criticized the media for their praise. She wrote: “It’s alarming how media is attempting to paint Hugh Hefner as a pioneer or social justice activist, because nothing could be further from reality. Hefner was not a visionary. He was a misogynist who built an empire on sexualizing women and mainstreaming stereotypes that caused irreparable damage to women’s rights and our entire culture.”

I thought of the miners I had watched on television years ago emerging from a cave collapse they had been trapped in, their eyes blinking at the sudden light of day, the overwhelm at the crowd and press of people, the shock of freedom after what was most likely a dark acceptance of their fate. It wasn’t the same at all, but I imagined them asking themselves the same question I was: “What happens now?” When you’ve been living so long in a weird and dark world, how do you transition back to the light?

Once I was alone, I lost my composure. I kissed the side of his glossy urn once; it was hard and cold. And then I started sobbing. I cried for Hef, and I grieved for all the mistakes we had made. I cried for the small man under the big myth, who needed so desperately to be propped up by everyone around him.

I cried for Greg. I cried for a boy I once loved and who once loved me. I cried for the sweetness of that love, the simplicity of it, and the lost potential.

I kneeled in the dirt and cried for my dad because I still missed him, and his death had made all deaths hard for me.

I cried for the girl who had excitedly walked up the mansion steps, sure that every beautiful, shiny thing she saw in that house was made of real gold. I was thirty-one years old, and I felt more lost than I’d been before I walked through the mansion doors at twenty-one. I’d spent ten years molding myself to fit into the twisted world of a powerful man.

This life was ending, and I cried because I had no idea what to do, where to go, or how to be. I cried because I had no idea who I was.

But now that I was free to go, I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t see what my life looked like on the other side of the gates. I didn’t know where I belonged, if I didn’t belong to a powerful man. So I stayed in the house for as long as I could, and watched as the mansion staff took the place apart, bit by bit.

I found a tiny little 600-square-foot bungalow and bought it with my own money. I felt safe there. It was high in the hills, tiny, with a view that made you feel you could see anything coming your way. It was like a nest, where nobody could reach me.