In some ways, taking up residence at the Playboy Mansion seems like a decision that someone would only make with plans for a tell-all memoir already baked in. It’s one of the most iconic, mythological locales in Los Angeles; the site of countless A-list parties and sexual escapades, and the longtime home of controversial Playboy founding editor Hugh Hefner. Seems like the stuff that first-person literary dreams are made of.
Crystal Hefner, née Harris—the third and last of the mogul’s wives and the person who primarily kept him company up until his death in 2017—makes it very clear in her new memoir that accepting Hugh’s invitation to move into the mansion was a choice that she made, at age 21, under the assumption that total safety was finally hers. All she had to give in exchange, she writes in Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, was everlasting loyalty, unconditional love, and every facet of her body and free will.
Crystal’s revelations about her own subjugation are scary and sad in equal measure. She had sex with Hugh, who was 60 years her senior, the first night she met him on Halloween in 2008 with no reluctance, and married him four years later. She then spent the majority of her twenties shut away in the Playboy Mansion, beholden to the routines of a deteriorating Hugh, who she describes in her book as a “narcissist.”
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But the author’s allegations concerning her late husband—who has been accused of coercive sex, drugging, and bestiality, among other offenses—don’t end there. Below, see the most shocking revelations from Only Say Good Things, out next Tuesday (Jan. 23).
Hugh had a “secret” addiction to Percocet.
Drug use at the Playboy Mansion has been widely discussed over the years, including by Sondra Theodore, a former Playmate who talked about the rampant use of quaaludes. But Crystal claims that Hugh was addicted to Percocet, which he was prescribed freely and abundantly, and that everyone in the mansion was aware of this fact and did not speak about it.
“Hef’s opiate addiction was a secret from the rest of the world,” she writes. “It had started because of his back pain, originally, legitimately. His doctors had given him an ‘earthquake supply’ of Percocet. We didn’t know until much later just how much he had tapped into that earthquake supply.”
She later writes: “When he started getting less coherent and falling asleep in the middle of game nights and movie nights, we decided to check on the earthquake supplies. They were gone, all of them, bottles and bottles of pain pills just empty.”
Hugh secretly filmed the women he had sex with through holes in his bedroom wall.
“He kept a little black book where he wrote down the names of every single woman who went up to the bedroom,” Crystal writes. “And I’d discovered little spy holes on either side of the big televisions...where one might set up cameras.” When she asked Hugh about the holes, Crystal writes that he responded, “I used to do a lot of filming. VHS. I had hours of video, hundreds of sexy tapes.”
When Crystal asked her husband if people knew he was filming them, she says that he answered, “It’s my bedroom. My house.” Crystal also writes that Hugh claimed he destroyed all the tapes after being spooked by the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape scandal.
Sex with an elderly Hugh was as strange as you would imagine.
Crystal describes the Viagra-assisted sex she had with Hugh over the years as rote and impersonal; he refused to use condoms and it was an unspoken rule to never ask about protection. The group sex always took place in his bedroom, and he preferred to listen to the Madonna song “Dress You Up” during the act. His preferred form of lubricant was baby oil, which presented its own host of problems.
“We were all getting infections from the baby oil,” Crystal writes, adding that she sometimes resorted to anal sex with Hugh in order to avoid vaginal infections. “I tried to tell him, but you couldn’t really tell him anything he didn’t want to hear. He kept a doctor on retainer who would come when called to give us antibiotics.”
Hugh resorted to blackmail to keep the Playboy Mansion’s secrets.
On a few occasions, Crystal was secretly recorded by a man who, under the guise of selling wine to the Playboy Mansion, got her to open up about how she really felt about living there. The man caught her on tape saying that life at the mansion “kind of sucks,” and Hugh ended up paying the man $15,000 to destroy the recording.
Crystal was paid nothing for her appearances on Girls Next Door, and close to nothing for her show Marrying Hef.
Shortly after Hugh proposed marriage to Crystal by simply offering her a ring (he didn’t ask out loud), Playboy and E! set up a reality series, Marrying Hef, that would track the preparations for their lavish wedding. When Crystal saw that she was being offered only a token talent fee of $2,500, while Hef and the producer were each being offered $800,000, it prompted her first exit from the mansion.
Crystal and the other girls were, meanwhile, given weekly allowances of $1,000 in cash during their residencies; the cash was distributed by Hugh himself and was intended only to be used for the upkeep of their appearances.
She compares living at the Playboy Mansion to imprisonment.
While living in the mansion, Crystal and Hugh’s various other girlfriends who were permanent residents were allowed to drive their cars for brief errands, but there was a nightly curfew, and they were never supposed to be gone for long.
On one evening, enraged by being shortchanged by Marrying Hef, Crystal got into a fight with her then-fiancé and stormed toward the mansion gates to leave. Hugh, however, wouldn’t let her leave. “‘Close the back gate!’ he boomed,” Crystal writes in her memoir. “‘If Crystal tries to leave, detain her!’”
As bodyguards approached, Crystal writes, “I thought I was a figurative prisoner...I never thought I was an actual prisoner.”
She did manage to escape the mansion, fleeing into the arms of Dr. Phil’s musician son Jordan McGraw, with whom she had a brief fling. But eventually, out of money and out of options, she went back to the mansion, married Hugh, and spent the rest of his days with him shut away from the world until his death in 2017.
During those final years, Crystal was diagnosed with Lyme disease and a debilitating illness related to the leaking of her silicone breast implants. She also discovered that the mansion was making everyone, including Hugh, sick: she invited a contractor to the home who discovered that it was infected top to bottom with black mold.
“I felt sad for him,” she ultimately writes of her late husband. “He created this world that brought to life his wildest dreams, but it was empty.”
