Crystal Hefner, the widow of Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner, pulls back the velvet curtain on the lifestyle in the Playboy mansion and paints a hard and black picture that is completely different from the flamboyance and colors that was presented on the outside.
Ahead of the release of her personal autobiography tomorrow (Tuesday) "Only Saying Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself", Crystal chooses to be open about her late husband's strict rules towards her and towards other women who lived in the mansion or came to visit the glittering parties.
Sparkling parties at the Playboy Mansion / Photo: EPA
"Our nail polish couldn't be any other color than a neutral color, even without a French manicure," Krystal says of Hugh's demands, adding that he also used to warn her whenever the roots of her black hair began to poke through the blonde dye.
"I had to go and oxygenate my hair again until my scalp burned and I had blisters," she says.
"But for some reason I thought it was normal and that's what it means to be beautiful in his eyes."
60 years older than her. Crystal View Hefner / Photo: EPA
Crystal, now 37, married Hefner when she was 26 and he was 86, bravely revealing that Hefner forced her to finish all her arrangements by six o'clock in the evening, after which she was not allowed to leave the mansion, so that she could free herself to watch a movie with him before attending his planned orgies.
"I was never in love with him," she says.
The famous Halloween party held each year at the mansion included a parade of scantily clad women serving drinks to a male audience of power and influence.
Crystal met Hefner when she was invited to such a party, he invited her to spend the night with him and from there the relationship began.
"At that time I was sure I was at my peak," Crystal told People magazine.
"I thought I just loved everything and how fun it is that I'm his favorite woman. But I lost myself over time."
She describes that groups of other women would come to the bedroom every evening.
In the dim light Hefner would play music and show pornographic films.
After that would come the sexual encounter, which she describes as lacking intimacy and very mechanical.
"Maybe at a younger age he would have enjoyed it, but when I knew him he was already old and it felt like something that had to be done, a strange life routine.
"He had a small black notebook in which he wrote down the names of every woman who came to his bedroom. One day I discovered small holes on both sides of the television where video cameras were hidden. I asked him and he told me that he had hundreds of sex tapes that he had taken."
strict rules.
Hugh Hefner, photo: AP
When Crystal asked her husband if people knew he was taking pictures of them, she says he replied, "This is my bedroom. My house."
Crystal later writes in her book that Hefner claimed to have destroyed all the tapes.
According to Crystal, Hefner had rules about everything from who her friends could come over, how much pocket money she would get, how she would decorate her room and, of course, what she would wear.
"He had opinions about everything. Even about the stupidest things."
Although the mansion looked grand, upon closer inspection you could see decay everywhere.
"No one really cleaned the mansion, there is a lot of mold and everything felt neglected from so many parties and people who were in the house. I was constantly crying over everything and everyone. Everything was an illusion, I was not happy.
"I realized that I was dealing with an imbalance, I'm the little one in front of a very powerful man. This only seems like a life of success and fantasy and fun, but in the end I had to sleep with an 86-year-old man who doesn't stop taking Viagra. Everything has a price."
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