Last Wife Opens Up About Marriage to Hugh Hefner; couple were 60 years apart

The visible traces of Crystal Hefner’s days as a Playboy Bunny have largely disappeared. The snowy blonde hair that once characterized the third and final wife of magazine founder Hugh Hefner has become more dirty blonde. Revealing costumes were swapped for sensible clothes like beige cardigans.

But a closer look reveals a woman who is still adjusting to life outside the infamous Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, which she left about seven years ago, shortly after the death of the magazine’s editor in 2017.

On a recent afternoon, Hefner leaned against a pink stool at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. She looked thoughtful: It had been less than an hour since she read an excerpt from her new memoir, “Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself.” in free translation), to a group of strangers for the first time.

Hefner, 37, said she is still adjusting to life outside the mansion, where she has lived for nearly a decade and where “she was rewarded for being small.” She has been trying to free herself from the conditioning she has suffered within its luxurious walls. “Taking power is a work in progress,” she said.

“Only Say Good Things,” which will be released on January 23 in the United States, is a step toward achieving that power. In the book, Hefner re-examines his initiation into the world of Playboy; details the objectification and misogyny she said she experienced under Hugh Hefner; and explores the trauma she is still processing. “At the time,” she said, “I must have been brainwashed or something.”

She met Hugh Hefner at a 2008 Halloween party at the mansion. The property offered a glimpse into how the 1% lived, she writes in the book, and she wanted to be part of it. Aged 21 at the time, she was one of many guests in revealing French maid outfits who he invited to her room for group sex as the party was winding down.

She soon discovered that visits to the mansion often involved a “late-night visit to the bedroom,” she writes in her memoir. At that time, she believed it was worth it.

Crystal Hefner moved into the mansion two weeks after the Halloween party and began dating Hefner about two years after they met. At the time, he was still married to his second wife, Kimberley Conrad, but the two lived separately.

As a girlfriend and then a wife, she had to routinely maintain her appearance. If she gained weight, he would tell her to “tone up,” she writes in the book, and if her natural brown hair was showing, he would tell her to make it blonder.

She writes about how she and other girlfriends who lived in the mansion received a weekly payment of around US$1,000 (almost R$5,000 at current exchange rates) and how they had a strict curfew disguised as a schedule. Breaking it risked Hefner having a tantrum.

Crystal Hefner said she made several attempts to escape the mansion when she was one of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends. Once, she succeeded: she told the property’s security guards that she needed to buy sanitary pads and moved in with a friend who lived nearby. But she returned to the mansion a year later, she said, because she had Stockholm syndrome.

“I just felt like, ‘Oh, this is my destiny. This is where I’m supposed to be,'” she said. “I was 25.”

She often complied with his desires at the expense of her own, she said, because she feared being replaced by someone younger, livelier, blonder and with “bigger breasts.”

He also said that these concerns were somewhat assuaged by their marriage in 2012, when she was 26 and he was 86. Hefner’s marriage to Conrad ended in 2010 after an 11-year separation; His first marriage, to Mildred Williams, whom he met during his college years, ended in divorce in 1959.

Their union made sensational headlines. Some labeled her a “fortune hunter” and a “dumb blonde”, reducing her to nothing more than another conquest of a man known for dating and marrying younger women.

She didn’t feel comfortable having sex with just Hefner, she writes in the book, so she often invited a friend to join them. In 2014, sex stopped because of Hefner’s age and declining health. At home, Crystal Hefner began to become more of a caregiver than a companion: she described herself as “the loving, supportive wife in public” and “the nurse who carried his bed basin at night.”

When he died of cardiac arrest at age 91, she initially protected his reputation. She writes about how, before he died, Hefner made her promise to “only say nice things.”

Her determination to fulfill that promise began to fade in 2019, she said, when she began going to therapy after watching “Leaving Neverland,” the documentary detailing allegations of sexual abuse from two men who had long-term relationships with Michael Jackson.

Looking back on their marriage now, Crystal Hefner said she feels regret and disgust. She is still learning how to build healthy relationships and break the codependent tendencies she developed during her relationship. “When I started dating again, it was hard,” she said, “because with Hef, he just wanted me to always be there for him.”

It was only recently, she said with a nervous laugh, that she learned the concept of setting boundaries. “I didn’t have any when I was at the mansion,” she said. “If you wanted to be there, you couldn’t have limits.”

She said her husband could be emotionally abusive, and some of his other former lovers made similar accusations. In 2015, Holly Madison, a former girlfriend, released a memoir in which she recounted the strict rules she had to follow at the Playboy Mansion and the mental health issues she faced. Many Playmates were upset by the book when it came out, Hefner said, including herself.

But now? “I see it in a completely different way,” she said.

Before his death, Hefner denied Madison’s accusations and others made against him. After Madison published his book, he said in a statement to People magazine that he was still friends with many of his ex-girlfriends, but that some “chose to rewrite history in an attempt to stay in the spotlight.”

PLBY Group, Playboy’s parent company, in recent years has re-examined allegations against the publisher. Ahead of the 2022 premiere of A&E’s “Playboy Secrets” docu-series, the group published an open letter on Medium that acknowledged “allegations of abhorrent actions by Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and others.”

“We trust and validate women and their stories, and we strongly support people who have come forward to share their experiences,” the letter said. PLBY Group did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Jennifer Saginor, who wrote a book about her regular visits to the Playboy Mansion with her father, a former Hefner doctor, described Crystal Hefner and other women who lived and spent time there — most of whom were young, thin, blonde and white — as “hired props” who helped Hefner cultivate a certain image.

Saginor, who met Crystal Hefner through their shared connection to the Playboy universe, said she had doubts that the magazine publisher’s mistresses didn’t know what “they were, like, getting themselves into” by pursuing relationships with him.

Hefner said his life now is a complete departure from his days at the mansion. She buys and sells real estate for a living and, for the past year, has been traveling between Los Angeles, where she lives, and Hawaii, where she bought a farm.

She’s not sure if Los Angeles is her “forever place,” she said, because she likes the idea of ​​living “somewhere a little less superficial.”