Only Say Good Things by Crystal Hefner review — life in the Playboy mansion

‘Resentment-tinged nostalgia” is a term recently coined by the writer Kat Rosenfield about the millennial tendency to look back on one’s youth and see not a golden-hued carefree time but only shocking abuses of power. At the lighter end of the spectrum there are the thinkpieces about why Nineties sitcoms were so white; at the darker the harrowing memoirs by celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

While it seems pretty unarguable that a lot of high-profile women back then were treated badly by those around them, Rosenfield argues we have now overcorrected and see them retrospectively as helpless children — mere pawns in a game that, in fact, they chose to play. “Her shame is gone, but so is her agency — and with it any sense that she had a hand in the current shape of her life,” Rosenfield writes.

Which brings me to Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself by Crystal Hefner, widow of — who else — Hugh Hefner, the founder of the world’s most famous sleaze empire, and a youthful 91 to her 31 when he went up to that great orgy in the sky in 2017.

The title refers to Hugh’s instruction to Crystal as he was nearing the end, meaning she wasn’t allowed to spill the beans when he was gone. But as the existence of this book proves, she was free to go against his wishes, and she did, and fair enough. But this does raise another question: if Crystal hated living at the Playboy Mansion, as she repeatedly says she did, loathing the sex with Hugh and the other women — known, with a babyishness typical of Hugh, as “Playmates” — from her first night there in 2009 (“It was the strangest five seconds of my life”), why did she stay for eight years?

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Crystal writes about Hugh’s fierce enforcement of curfews and schedules the women had to obey — but only if they wanted to stay. If they didn’t, they could just … leave. “I quickly learnt that if I wanted to be a part of this world, the trip to the bedroom at the end of the night with all these other girls was the price. This was the rent,” she writes. Crystal had a mother and friends on the outside, so she was hardly isolated. Yet she writes that when she would see young women envying her life as Hefner’s girlfriend, “I wanted to say: Run.” To which the reader may well ask: so why didn’t you, Crystal?

The answer, of course, was that she liked living in a swanky mansion, with free beauty treatments and plastic surgery on tap. Crystal is not the first woman to exchange joyless sex for living on the ritz, and her story would be more interesting if she were more honest. When she headed off to a Playboy party in 2009 in a French maid costume and then trotted up the stairs to Hefner’s bedroom after he picked her out from the crowd, she absolutely wanted the fame and glitz of the Playboy Mansion, and she got it, so good for her.

Instead, post-#MeToo, she has to fasten on a tone of helplessness even as the narrative tells a different story. It is telling that the one time she did, in fact, leave Hefner it was because she found out he wasn’t giving her a fair share of the profits from a reality TV show set inside the mansion. But on the outside she realised that when she was in the mansion “the public cared about the things I did: what I wore, whether I DJ’d a party, if I fought with another girlfriend. Now, I was just invisible.” And so she went back and married the old goat for good measure, fending off any risk of future invisibility.

An interesting book about Playboy is hidden inside this one. The references to photographs of Hefner with various celebrities — Brad Pitt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Snoop Dogg — are a reminder of how, until astonishingly recently, Playboy was seen as an aspirational brand rather than the masturbation magazine it always was.

Admittedly most people could see this by 2012, when Crystal married Hugh, but it’s not entirely Crystal’s fault that she couldn’t, given her mother, Lee, seemed to think signing up with Playboy was a great career move. Lee helped to dress her daughter in the French maid outfit for the party (um, OK) and was “dazzled” when she later visited her in the mansion. Hugh (in his eighties) told Lee (in her forties) she “could have been a Playmate in her day”.

The best bits describe the gap between Hugh’s image and the reality. Far from being a debonair libertine, he was a grumpy old man who ate the same disgusting meals in rotation: “Canned chicken noodle soup, saltines and a block of cream cheese … If it was a sex night, he would have a BLT sandwich.”

Despite having an enormous amount of sex in his life, he was terrible at it, and no one would orgasm in his group sex sessions — not even him, as he preferred to finish himself off manually. His insistence on using baby oil instead of lubricant meant the women all got vaginal infections. So Crystal “sometimes resorted to anal sex when it was my turn to straddle Hef. I don’t think he could ever tell the difference.”

This is all that needs to be said about Hefner and the Playboy empire: it was tragic, it was transactional, and the wizard behind the curtain was just a sad little man who couldn’t tell a woman’s arse from her, well, whatever.
Only Say Good Things by Crystal Hefner (Ebury Publishing £22). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.