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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.”