She was one of the girls. But she was also Hugh Hefner’s wife, and now, eight years after the Playboy founder’s death, she tells her story in a memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself. Crystal Harris doesn’t mince words, either. Now 37, she is a former model and an entrepreneur. The title of the book comes from Hefner’s directive: ““I want you to continue my legacy going forward…and I want to remind you to only say good things about me”. Now, she’s way past that.
She was 21 when she first got invited to Hefner’s Playboy mansion. He was 82. “I thought, wow, if I just like everything that he likes and do all the things that he wants me to do, then I’m the favorite. And I was, but I just lost myself in the process” she told People.
Hugh proposed marriage a first time; she accepted, then ran away, then came back and married him. She did love him, she says, but she was never “in love” with him. At 91, Hefner died at his Playboy Mansion, and Crystal initially kept her word: the power she had over the Playboy girls was intoxicating.
Then she came to her senses, she says. Hefner emerges as a petty, micromanaging tyrant, ordering the girls to come to him every week for their “allowance” that he would dole out in crisp bills, while insisting it be spent on cosmetics to enhance their beauty, but following his wishes: only muted colors on the nails, for instance. Crystal was told not to wear a belly button ring because it was “trashy” and his voice still resonates in her head ordering her on what to wear and how to behave. He would tell her when her dark roots showed, and “I’d have to go bleach it and it would burn my scalp and I’d have blisters. But for some reason I thought this was all normal”.
It would be a sad old story: appearance over substance, enslaved girls, the power of an rich old man. But there are also squalid details. Playboy Mansion was rundown, it rarely got cleaned, “Too, too many parties. It was worn out.” The birds in the house, she writes in the book, were dying of thirst and it was an apt analogy for the women living there. Hefner bowed out, Harris noted, just when the #metoo movement was born.
As for her marriage, “I realized I was dealing with a really big power imbalance. It seemed like a world of success and fantasy, but everyone’s having to sleep with an 80-year-old. There’s a price. Everything has a price.”
Among the steamy details in the memoir, some concern the group sex Hefner continued to practice in his old age, taking so much Viagra that he suffered from a side effect losing his hearing in one ear; these were the Sunday Fundays when 200 young women would descend on the Playboy mansion.
On more normal nights, he issued a 6pm curfew for his young wife, who was supposed to share his dinner (chicken soup and cream cheese and crackers) and watch his favorite movies with him until bedtime. “It was embarrassing. I don’t know the most people there’d been in our bedroom at one time but, a lot. Pretty bad. We were like, ‘Oh, now it’s your turn.’ Nobody really wanted to be there but I think in Hef’s mind, he still thought he was in his 40s, and those nights, the people, the mansion, solidified that idea”.
Playboy already abandoned his former owner, stating years ago that it did not condone his “abhorrent actions” and noting it is no longer associated with the Hefner family.
