Crystal Hefner’s favourite film is The Little Mermaid. When her late husband, Hugh Hefner, the Playboy tycoon and notorious libertine, proposed in 2010, he presented her with a music box. Inside was a miniature Ariel, who twirled to “Part of Your World”, and a ring. “I hope it fits,” was all Hefner said; he never asked her to marry him, and she never said yes. “It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a choice,” Crystal writes in her new memoir, Only Say Good Things. “Like all things with Hef, it was a transaction.”
The parallels between the life of the Disney princess who trades her voice for love and the Playboy centrefold who lost her twenties to Hefner are clear. When Crystal first visited the faux-Tudor Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, she found that “everything was so ornate and everything’s in excess. I thought, wow, I want to be part of this powerful, beautiful world… This finally could be a place where I feel like I belong.” Crystal only left the mansion when Hefner died, aged 91, in 2017.
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