It was all a question of image for Hugh Hefner, the founder of the Playboy empire, as if true existence consisted not of what he did, but of how he saw himself reflected.
“There was a large mirror on the ceiling and while I was on top of him in bed, having sex with Hugh for the first time, he never once looked me in the eye. “I was looking up, watching what was happening in the mirror,” writes Crystal Hefner, the third and last wife of the creator of the bunny brand, in her memoirs Only says good things: surviving Playboy and finding myself that came out yesterday, a book with the one who tries to make a catharsis.
Crystal no longer wants to be a bunny, an image that has largely disappeared from her current appearance. Her hair is no longer as blonde nor does she wear the flashy clothes she used to wear back then.
At 37 years old, he left the Los Angeles mansion seven years ago, after Hefner’s death in 2017, at the age of 91. The title of the story comes from the fact that, before dying from a heart attack, Hefner made him promise that “you will only say good things.”
He did so until 2019, when he broke his promise influenced by the MeToo movement. Even the Playboy company issued a statement at the time due to “the abhorrent accusations” that several women made against the founder.
Crystal is now trying to get rid of the prejudices of silence and bring to light everything she endured in her luxurious and lascivious existence. There are the objectification and misogyny that she suffered with her husband, the traumas that she is still processing.
But she does not hide, perhaps “I was brainwashed,” that she came in by invitation, that she agreed to stay because of what she promised, and that on one occasion she ran away with a boyfriend. She returned after experiencing “Stockholm syndrome.” It was after that escape that Hugh made her his third wife in 2012, when he was 86 and she was 26.
He had arrived at the mansion when he was 21 for the Halloween party in 2008. That first night he already knew what the matter was about and what the mirrors were about.
Dressed as a French maid, Hefner told her to enter her room. And she entered. She had to put on a silk nightgown. There were four women. The host took a bottle of children’s oil, sprayed it all over his body. “She opened the hugs in a gesture of who is first?” and Crystal approached.
He says that there were no condoms (he hated them), nor were there kisses, caresses or hugs, he went to work like a robot. “There was no love at all. It was just control and power, a performance, like I was in a casting,” he says.
At the end, Hefner told her that “you’re the second one of the night.” She confesses that those orgies were a salvation. She preferred that several women participate because having sex with him alone was not comfortable for her.
Both she and the other women had a kind of curfew, disguised as an agent, and received $1,000 a week, mostly for their personal care. The manicure had to be discreet, if she gained weight she had to lose it immediately. Her brown hair must have looked like Marilyn.
According to her version, her husband was addicted to opiates (always with a prescription) and when Viagra stopped being effective, they stopped having sex. This happened in 2014. Age and health prevented it.
He claims that Hefner became more of a caretaker and a voyeur. In the rooms he had viewing points where he recorded the guests in their relationships. He had hundreds of tapes, he remarks, without anyone knowing: “It’s my house and I do what I want.”
Crystal describes herself as a lovable companion, “the loving and supportive wife in public,” but behind the closed doors of an increasingly decrepit mansion, she was “the nurse who took him to bed every night.”
Despite breaking her promise to say only good things, Crystal still carries the Hefner last name. Business is business.
