The Hugh Hefner memoir fallout

The widow of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has sparked controversy with a new memoir that lifts the lid on life at the Playboy Mansion.

A former resident of the infamous property in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles and another former wife of the pornographer have both questioned Crystal Hefner's motivation for writing the book, "Only Say Good Things". And reviewers have wondered why she never left the mansion if life there was as she described it.

The background

Crystal, who was married to Playboy boss Hefner from 2012 until his death in 2017 aged 91, wrote that she never loved him and that she felt imprisoned in their marriage.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

She said that she used to "find girls" for sex orgies with herself and her husband, who was 60 years older than her, said the Daily Mail. But "the man who sparked America’s sexual revolution" was said by Crystal to have been "bad at sex", said People. 

Conditions in the house were "rundown and gross", BuzzFeed reported. In the book Crystal recalls how, in 2016, after having blood tests "doctors told her that it looked as if she was suffering from toxic mold exposure".  

Hefner's famous mansion "was breaking me down, one way or another,” she wrote. “The house was literally making me sick.”

She also alleged that animals were neglected and abused at the property. Hefner kept two pet lovebirds caged in his bathroom, but several died, said BuzzFeed. It eventually transpired that their water dispenser was broken and the birds were "dying of thirst".

Hefner "had a zoo license" allowing him to keep monkeys, peacocks, toucans and other exotic animals, Crystal told People, but she said that "all those animals were so depressed and sad looking".

The latest

Other women who were part of Hefner's circle have criticised the memoir and the decision to publish it. Former Playboy Mansion resident Jennifer Saginor accused Crystal Hefner of "playing the victim", reported the Daily Mail.

"Take off your bunny ears," Saginor told her, and "stop promoting a brand and image that you are claiming to be a victim of". Crystal "knew what she was getting into" and "got paid for her services", she added.

Kimberley Conrad, who was married to Hefner between 1989 and 2010, has accused the author of "making a quick buck" with the book. In a statement to TMZ, Conrad criticised Crystal of publishing the memoir "in hopes of riding a wave of headline relevance".

The reaction

In a review, The Telegraph's Kara Kennedy said the book was Crystal's "payback: the proverbial middle finger she never gave to her nonagenarian husband". But "the problem throughout is that Crystal tells us stories forgetting that she, for more than a decade, was complicit". To write about how she "strategically climbed her way to the very top" of this "modern harem" and then to "talk about 'survival' is tiresome", said Kennedy.

From "dismal group sex to pre-coital BLT sandwiches", Hefner is portrayed as a "pathetic old man" in the book, wrote Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. The "best bits" describe "the gap between Hugh's image and the reality", because "far from being a debonair libertine, he was a grumpy old man who ate the same disgusting meals in rotation" and "couldn't tell a woman's arse from her, well, whatever".

The "frank memoir" is an "illuminating tell-all" that "scratches some of the glitter" off Playboy's "notorious legacy of sexual freedom, luxury, and excess", said Kirkus Reviews.

But the question of why Crystal Hefner stayed in the marriage and the property keeps coming up. "The answer, of course", writes Freeman, "was that she liked living in a swanky mansion, with free beauty treatments and plastic surgery on tap."