An interview with Crystal Hefner

About life in The Playboy Mansion - and the demythologising of a pop-culture icon.

Last week I interviewed Crystal Hefner at The Trouble Club in London, about her compelling memoir, Only Say Good Things - an instant New York Times bestseller. The audience was rapt watching Crystal talk and so I wanted to share it with all of you, too. This is a condensed version of our conversation.

Crystal, congratulations on the book. I know a lot of people will pick it up because it’s about something quite salacious and weird, but it’s also a probing, well-written memoir. What made you want to write it?

After Hef died and I left the mansion [in 2017], I went into therapy for about five years. I started writing down lots of notes, which turned down into stories, which ended up as this book. Hef controlled the narrative for so long, it felt like time for more voices to come out of the mansion.

Hugh Hefner died at the age of 91. You had married him when you were 26, and he was 86. It was a job, you say, not a relationship. The job was to “embody the Playboy myth, to embody the Hefner myth” to say - as per the title of the book - “only good things”. What did that job entail, day to day?

My job was literally being Hef’s mirror; reflecting his self-importance back at him. Day to day, I couldn’t do much. I’d go to Disneyland, or go shopping, or get my hair done - maintenance was very important. But I always had to be back by 6pm.

There were movie nights four nights a week - old black and white films like Casablanca, which was his favourite. There were card nights two nights a week and a party every Saturday night which is when all the celebrities and other girls would come. It was like some weird cruise ship itinerary. Hef loved being in control and that was a way of him being in control.

When you first move into the mansion, it’s fun. It’s like candyland. “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 did the penny drop?

The place was beautiful and Hef in the beginning was magnetic and charming. When I first moved in, I was told I could order anything I wanted from the kitchen. I was so excited. I ordered a grilled cheese first and then I tried all the foods on the menu. I gained weight. And Hef hit me on the thighs and went, “Looks like someone needs to tone up’.” And I remember thinking Oh no, I’m slipping. Then it would be, “Wear more colour! Wear the bunny logo! Dye your hair! I had a nightmare that you were brunette.”

I love that that’s the nightmare in all this. You being brunette. 

I know, right!? I’d think, who am I doing this for? I never felt authentic for myself. It was sad. And Hef himself always seemed a bit sad to me. He was never shown love by his parents, so he doesn’t know how to be a father to his children. All the girls he liked when he was a teenager, didn’t like him back. His first wife cheated on him. He started the magazine to overcompensate for something.

He was trying to fill some kind of void. People do it with shopping and gambling and drugs. He did it with women and sex. But those of us who have [self-medicated like that] know that it doesn’t work. So I think he was sad and lonely. Right up until the end.

There is a lot of stomach-churning detail in the book. Hefner would eat canned chicken soup every night except on sex nights, and then it would be a BLT. The sex nights themselves feel pretty abusive: during group sex - the only way Hefner had sex - he refused to use protection, which resulted in one young girlfriend getting pregnant, and he’d use body oil instead of lube, so there was an in-house doctor administering meds for STDs and other infections caused by the baby oil on a daily basis. These orgies put yours and other young womens’ health at risk. Were the risks explained before? Did you sign anything?

There was nothing that you signed. It was just understood. The BLT was No.5 on the laminated menu. And after the sex he’d call the kitchen and say, “I wanna No.5.” Everyone in the house knew what that meant. And I’d be like ugggh. Weird stuff like that gives me PTSD. The same Madonna song that he’d play every time [there was an orgy] and I cannot hear it now. The same porn movie would play. The same everything, always.

And you were encouraged - perhaps to prevent you from forming solidarity with one another and gaining any kind of power - not to bond with the other girlfriends in the house. [Typically there was one wife, two girlfriends and some extra playmates drafted in for the orgies]. There was very much a feeling that you were out “to shank each other.”

My god yes, any of the girls would, given the chance. We were engrained to hate each other on a cellular level. To this day, I am trying to be friends with Holly and Bridget [his former wife and girlfriend] but it’s hard. It feels like we were part of this weird social experiment, which would never be repeated and I’d love to speak to them about it. I remember when Holly’s book first came out [in 2015; Crystal refuted the contents] I was still in the mansion and I thought, how could she say those horrible things?  But it’s all true. Absolutely. My inner voice just pushed it down any ill feelings. Also, this is a time when Hef was idolised by everyone and the media. It was hard to…

… Imagine differently. But it’s not like we didn’t know what was happening. It was on our TV! [Reality show, The Girls Next Door, ran on MTV from 2005-2010.] Hef hid in plain sight. In his silk pyjamas, surrounded by little dogs and women, in his mansion which looked like Barbie’s dream house. It never came across as anything other than seedy and glamorous.

That show was totally dictated. What we wore, how we spoke, what we did. Hef would say, “Be very loving to me. As soon as I walk into the room, run up to me.” One of the first lines they had me say was, “I’m not the new Holly. Holly is the new me.” It was fed to me and after that I thought, this sucks. I remember one time they told me to do my lines again, but with more personality. And I thought, What personality? Everything has been stripped from  me. Who am I? I don’t even know.