Crystal moved into the mansion to replace Holly Madison, previously Hefner’s “number one girlfriend” of three he had at the time. In 2008, after sending in her photograph, Crystal had been invited to one of his infamous Playboy parties. She moved in soon after, quitting her psychology degree for a different kind of education. “Once you went in,” she writes, “it was so hard to find a way out.”
She chuckles lightly. “It was his friends’ country club. They came and got the free buffet and the staring-at-the-girls, and brought articles about him to him and it was just the Hef show.” For years Crystal only said good things; she cared for him, she brushed away criticism, she built relationships with his four adult children. But now, six years after his death at 91, she’s decided to talk about her life “imprisoned” in the Playboy Mansion and, in doing so, ask questions about abusive relationships, identity and the impact of a libertarian culture Hefner helped usher in.
This is not the first time one of Hefner’s girlfriends has spoken out. In a 2022 documentary, Karissa Shannon (who was 18 when Crystal joined her and her twin sister in the mansion) said she’d had an abortion at 19 because he refused to use condoms. Susie Krabacher, who moved in at 18, said Hefner drugged and raped her. In Holly Madison’s 2015 memoir she wrote that at the depths of her despair she contemplated drowning herself in his bathtub.
The difference between their stories and Crystal’s is partly in the timing; she has written this in the long shadow of #MeToo, with all the politics and therapeutic reckonings that entails. Partly it’s that, as his wife, she had a particular, peculiar insight. And partly it’s that this is not a shocking tell-all: though there are revelations about sex and cash, it’s a story about power, celebrity and, in a mansion that looked grand from a distance, but inside was mildewing and falling apart, the dark truths that glamour can hide. (...)
The girlfriends had to be home every evening for a 6pm curfew and none were allowed to work. Hefner would make them queue up to receive a weekly allowance (“gas money”). “The whole mansion had this gross vibe to it. All the misogynistic actors that preyed on women – this was their meeting ground. And I just thought, that’s how people are.” And to be fair to her, many were: she was humiliated on chatshows, blackmailed, controlled.
Even when Crystal led a season of the hit reality show, The Girls Next Door, which followed Hefner’s girlfriends about their syntheticised daily lives, his production company received $400,000 an episode and she received nothing. This was the last mainstream hurrah for the Playboy brand: six seasons of telly that were equally banal and fascinating, with the girlfriends laughing and bickering and grooming themselves. It revealed how being a giggling, beautiful blonde was a full-time job. And the sight of geriatric “Hef” sliding in and out of scenes in his silk pyjamas somehow made him seem even older.
After Crystal had been promoted to main girlfriend, she felt important. But, “I quickly started thinking, ‘How can this person really love me when they want four other people in the bedroom with us?’” She describes the weekly sex as if it was a degrading chore, unkeen to dwell on details – she says she’s easily “grossed out” today. “I did things that I wasn’t comfortable with. I wasn’t physically attracted to an 80-year-old man. I was just trying to get through it. And the other girls? Nobody liked each other. But we’d just be there for Hef.” Things changed for her when, “I realised I had no freedom. Everything was based on Hef’s schedule and I never got a say. Which,” she coughs discreetly, “is the opposite of the liberation and freedom that, supposedly, Playboy was meant to be about.” (...)
Obituaries reignited a long debate about his cultural legacy as an architect of the sexual revolution. But as Crystal explains, detailing the ways he’d pat her head and tell her to dye her roots, loudly compare the girlfriends’ bodies, encourage plastic surgery and play them off against each other, it became clear how little his grand project had to do with sex and how, in fact, it was all about power.
She buried him in the plot he’d bought next to Marilyn Monroe (another businessman bought the crypt above her, where he was buried, as per his wishes, face down). The symbolism was deafening. Hefner’s early success had been down to Monroe: at 27, he launched Playboy with a naked photograph that he ran without her consent. Crystal shakes her head. “I went along with everything for so long, but I was brainwashed, really. How was that all OK? I was in the middle of it for a decade and I’m still trying to figure it out. Like, how did he get away with this?” Another small cough.
When he proposed, he offered the ring in a music box that played a song from The Little Mermaid, the story (Crystal writes) of the princess who so wants to belong to a different world that she “trades her voice for a chance to walk around on human legs and find love”. She signed a prenup, almost grateful, perhaps, that this time the disparity was in black and white. Because the worst part about the transactional relationships she and her fellow girlfriends maintained, was that they never made explicit. “You went into his orbit offering all of yourself, and you had no idea what you’d get back.” It might be “gas money”, it might be a Playboy spread, or fame.
“Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity,” she writes, “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.”
She buried him in the plot he’d bought next to Marilyn Monroe (another businessman bought the crypt above her, where he was buried, as per his wishes, face down). The symbolism was deafening. Hefner’s early success had been down to Monroe: at 27, he launched Playboy with a naked photograph that he ran without her consent. Crystal shakes her head. “I went along with everything for so long, but I was brainwashed, really. How was that all OK? I was in the middle of it for a decade and I’m still trying to figure it out. Like, how did he get away with this?” Another small cough.
When he proposed, he offered the ring in a music box that played a song from The Little Mermaid, the story (Crystal writes) of the princess who so wants to belong to a different world that she “trades her voice for a chance to walk around on human legs and find love”. She signed a prenup, almost grateful, perhaps, that this time the disparity was in black and white. Because the worst part about the transactional relationships she and her fellow girlfriends maintained, was that they never made explicit. “You went into his orbit offering all of yourself, and you had no idea what you’d get back.” It might be “gas money”, it might be a Playboy spread, or fame.
“Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity,” she writes, “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.”
