ONLY SAY GOOD THINGS: SURVIVING PLAYBOY AND FINDING MYSELF BY CRYSTAL HEFNER. (2024) BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
PUBLISHED
BY EBURY SPOTLIGHT: AN IMPRINT OF EBURY PUBLISHING.
BOOK
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This memoir is a fascinating read. In 2008, Crystal Harris,
then aged twenty-one, was an American beauty who didn’t know in what direction
she should be heading in life. Her beloved father Ray, a musician, had died
when she was a teenager and she felt lost without him for years afterwards. She
was close to her mother, who remarried shortly after her husband Ray’s death,
but she was conscious of having to make a life for herself, independent of
family.
In 2008, that fateful year, while working as a model, she was invited
to a snazzy Halloween costume party at the Playboy Mansion in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles,
California, an exclusive address for the super-rich.
At the Mansion, she met Mr. Playboy himself, Hugh Hefner, who
had founded the Playboy magazine in 1953 with a loan from his mother.
The first edition featured nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe, who was unaware
that Hef had possession of these intimate pics which had been taken for
something else, not for Playboy. He also didn’t pay her for her work.
Anyway, the lonely, rootless young woman that was Crystal
Harris- no relation- was completely awestruck by what she encountered at the
Mansion. Hef motioned her over to sit on his lap because she was his exact
type: blonde, busty and beautiful, dressed in a barely-there sexy French maid’s
outfit.
At the end of the night, she was ‘chosen’ as one of the
gorgeous models he’d take upstairs to bed with him every night. Also present
were the Shannon twins and a couple more models, all clones of each other with
their long blonde hair and fake new breasts.
The sex sounds soul-destroying and anonymous. Any existing
girlfriend would have to show the newbies what to do. The then seventy-seven
year old Hef would sit on his big bed in his trademark silk pyjamas and smoking
jacket.
He’d take a small blue pill- for virility- and lubricate his
penis with baby oil. (Not being intended as a sexual lubricant, the baby oil
would give the girls irritating vaginal infections.) Each girl would have
to take a turn straddling him- no condoms- and, when he was done, he’d simply roll over and
go to sleep. The girls could stay overnight, but in the morning, they’d have to
go.
Only, Crystal was never asked to leave. She found enough
favour with Hef that she was asked to move in, which she did without a second’s
deliberation. When she was with Hef, the billionaire owner of Playboy and
the Playboy mansion and supposedly the greatest lover of all time, she felt like
she was special, like she was somebody. No-one but her dad had ever made
her feel like that before. She lapped it up, not surprisingly.
Her new life was very different to the one she'd had before. At
first, her bedroom wasn’t next to Hef’s but a few doors down. She had to sort
of ‘leap-frog’ over the other girlfriends who lived permanently in the house in
order to attain the bedroom next to Hef’s, which sounds very demeaning.
Hef apparently encouraged a lot of ‘friendly’ competition for
his attentions amongst his ‘girlfriends’- he had several at any one time- but
the competition sounded fierce and unforgiving to me, the way Crystal puts it.
The poor woman made herself ill from the stress of always
having to be ‘perfect’ and ‘on,’ because, if you weren’t, you could be bumped
down the list of favourites and maybe even bumped out of the mansion door.
Crystal had to work hard to maintain her looks, her body and
her fitness, and she had to make sure that her demeanour towards Hef at all
times was loving, affectionate, respectful and admiring.
That’s why the book is called, ‘Only Say Good Things,’ because
Hugh Hefner couldn’t bear to hear or read anything negative about himself and
ordered the girls to ‘only say good things’ about him if anyone asked.
He had to be the man other men envied, and the man all
women wanted to fuck. Let me tell you, there’s only one reason anyone would
want to fuck an eighty-eight-year-old man, and it crinkles.
Cameras rolled at the Mansion all the time, especially during
the filming of the reality TV show, The Girls Next Door, all about the
girls who frequented the Mansion. Crystal hadn’t a clue Hef was going to marry
her until he presented her with a ring on the show. She had to pretend she was
the happiest girl in the world on camera while, inside, she was confused, desperately
lonely and in dire need of a friend.
Hef was an egotist who couldn’t be bothered with
conversations or news articles unless they were about himself or directly
involved him. He wasn’t interested in Crystal or any other girlfriend’s feelings
or emotions or even backstory and family history. He met Crystal’s mum, Lee,
but other than that, the only part of her he was really interested in was the
physical body she showed to him and the outside world.
Every week, she and the other girlfriends queued up for their
‘allowance’ like teenagers asking ‘Daddy’ for their pocket money. She could
leave the Mansion during the day if she needed to, but she had a strict ‘curfew’
and, if she broke it, the Playboy billionaire would scream at his staff
to find her immediately. She likens it in her book to being akin to a prison and
it certainly sounds like one.
You can read the book if you want to know how the story of
Crystal’s marriage to Hugh Hefner finally finishes, but I just want to say one
thing, and, as I’m not connected in any way to the Playboy empire, I’m
not obliged to 'only say good things’ about him.
Hef was lauded in his day for being some kind of great sexual
‘liberator,’ for bringing porn (yes, goddammit, Playboy is porn!) into
the mainstream and ‘empowering’ women by persuading them that taking their
clothes off for the titillation of men was a good thing for them.
In reality, he was just a creepy old porn merchant with bad
dress sense and a small willy- I’m assuming- who was terrified of growing old
and infirm like other mortal men. He lived in the past, re-living his glory
days over and over again in faded photos and film reels, and never seemed to really quite make it into
the twenty-first century.
Was he empowering his girlfriends when he compared them
unfavourably to previous girlfriends so they’d freak out with worry and anxiety
and starve themselves to get back into favour? Was he empowering them when he
encouraged them to jump through hoops to get on the cover of Playboy magazine
or inside it in a pictorial?
Was he hell. He was being controlling, a puppet master, a
jerk. Thankfully, his day is done now and Crystal Hefner is living her best
life without him. Long may it ever be so.
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