Between me and Hugh Hefner

We are all as dumb as cabbage when we are in our 20s – but how smart was Crystal Hefner’s decision to marry a man in his 80s?

Hugh Hefner and his young wife Crystal Hefner attend Playboy Mansion's Annual Halloween Bash at The Playboy Mansion on October 25, 2014. She’s written a book about the sordid goings-on at the mansion when he was alive.

At the Golden Globe Awards in 2011, host Ricky Gervais joked that 24-year-old Crystal Harris only agreed to marry 84-year-old Hugh Hefner because he’d lied about his age. “He told me he was ninety-four!” whinged Ricky, channelling Crystal. Encouraging her to “hold out, just don’t look at it when you touch it”, Gervais then performed a brief pantomime of a girl engaged in a manual exercise while gagging as she repeatedly looked at her watch.

Tina Fey laughed, as did Halle Berry. Everyone got it – even Hugh Hefner, who publicly cheered Ricky’s routine as “a blast”. As for Crystal herself, she has never mentioned it. Perhaps it was a little too close to the bone.

Only Say Good Things is ostensibly by Crystal Hefner, although she says she burst into tears the first time she read it.

Only Say Good Things is Crystal Hefner’s tell-all memoir of her near decade living in the Playboy Mansion. She first darkened the door as a 21-year-old wannabe model, her hair bleached platinum blond, her breasts enhanced by silicone, her single mother encouraging her to “go for it”.

Let’s dispense right now with all those cliched truisms that apply when a 20-something girl marries a rich octogenarian; that she was an adult, entrusted with the vote and the driving of automobiles, and thus knew exactly what she was doing. We all know that, in our 20s, we were all as dumb as cabbage, and that the age of consent is an arbitrary benchmark that shifts depending on imaginary lines on a map, a criminal at 11.55pm becoming marriage material if he waits till after midnight.

The question here is whether Crystal Hefner has a story to tell, whether she tells it well, and whether she does so with intentions that are at least not lousy.

Hugh Hefner and his young wife Crystal at the Playboy Mansion on October 24, 2015. She has written a book about their life together, which contains on sordid detail after another

The answer to the first question is undoubtedly yes. Only Say Good Things is quite a ride, fuelled as it is by the wretched glamour of a self-knighted prince lording over a kingdom of balloon-chested blondes in pursuit of fame. Pages have never turned quicker, each sordid recollection outdone by the next. The cynical promise of the book’s title is delivered, the product having done what it said on the tin. Crystal Hefner has not said good things at all – quite the opposite, Hugh’s deathbed prayer to his wife having fallen into the worst hands possible. The second question is vexed. To be blunt, Crystal Hefner did not write this book. The story is hers, for sure, but the prose is too slick, deep, and introspective for the college dropout from Arizona. Kudos must go to Lara Love Hardin, a New York Times best-selling author whose riches-to-rags-and-back-again memoirs have furnished her with a career as a top Californian publisher and literary agent. Crystal Hefner is Lara’s client, the “author” admitting in the back-page acknowledgments that “this book wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you”, and Hardin’s wistful, downtrodden brood is all over Only Say Good Things.

Crystal Hefner on Instagram

Compare any interview with Crystal Hefner, which are legion online, with this: “Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity. 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.”

Fair suck of the sav!

Crystal Hefner celebrates 1,000,000 Instagram followers, saying: “Thank you from the bottom of my heart! I love you!!!!" Picture: Instagram

Yes, ghostwriters are de rigueur in the realm of celebrity memoir but the best of them write in the voice of the subject, to at least give the reader a sense of the human whose face is on the cover. If the thoughts aren’t Crystal’s, then one doubts the entire enterprise – its story, its message, the sucker with the book in its hand. Even Crystal herself let the cat out of the bag when she told US Weekly in August 2023: “When I read the first manuscript, I just burst out crying” – an odd reaction from one who

is supposedly intimately familiar with the text.

But the most conflicted question of all pertains to Crystal Hefner’s motives for writing Only Say Good Things. It’s been 14 years Hef’s former girlfriend Kendra Wilkinson published Sliding Into Home, and nine years since Holly Maddison published Down the Rabbit Hole, an explosive memoir that catalogued the abuses and trials she suffered as Hefner’s main squeeze.

The shit really hit the fan in 2022 with Arlene Nelson’s extraordinary documentary series Secrets of Playboy, which comprehensively poleaxed any doubt the world may have had about Hugh Hefner having been a heritage-listed creep. Only now has Crystal Hefner decided to engage the Zeitgeist, her book revealing nothing that hadn’t already been exposed by others. While she was waiting, Crystal walked away from Hef’s grave with a purported US$7 million ($10.7m). As his widow, she has every right to it.

Never smile at a crocodile: Crystal Hefner poses with a toothy grin on Instagram.

But there’s something kinda’ slack about her timing. While going to pains to point out that five years of therapy has saved her, she neglects to do any soul searching, not a single decision her own, the whole of this wreckage thanks to Hugh Hefner, her dirty ex boyfriends, her dastardly stepdad, the “patriarchy”. Crystal claims she wrote the book as a warning to other young girls, but of what? Hugh Hefner is dead, the Playboy Mansion no longer a dungeon. Had she published it 20 years ago it would have been very useful indeed. Now, not so.

It is notable that Crystal’s “transformation”, her journey to “find herself” again, to shed the trappings of her “nightmare”, was not so thorough as to extinguish Hefner’s name from her brand.

Texan iconoclast and general stirrer William Cowper Brann once wrote that women were clearly man’s intellectual inferior because of “the simple fact that for thousands of years man has been able to hold her in that ‘state of subjection’ of which her attorneys so bitterly complain”.

This book makes a truth of Brann’s satirical sledge. Pity.

Jack Marx is a Walkley Award winning writer and culture critic