THE final wife of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner revealed she thought he was having a heart attack the first time they had sex.
Lifting the lid on the sordid reality of life at the Playboy Mansion in a new memoir, Crystal Hefner described how the magazine mogul had a ‘cruel streak’ and was addicted to opioids.
Her book, Only Say Good Things, serialised in the Daily Mail tomorrow, describes her romance with Hefner, whom she married in 2012 until his death at the age of 91 in 2017.
Living at the Playboy Mansion – famously populated by Playboy ‘bunnies’ hand-picked by Hefner himself – was an experience that left his final wife ‘bored out of my mind’, she claimed.
‘A dream I’d once had that Hef and I would develop a real relationship was long since over,’ she writes. ‘This wasn’t a relationship. It was a job.’
With Crystal, then Hefner’s girlfriend, in the mansion’s scrapbook room in 2010
The ego has landed: Hefner and his bunnies at London airport for the opening of the new Playboy Club, 1966
Hefner and his entourage at the Playboy Mansion in the 1970s
She described first meeting Hefner at his ‘spectacular LA mansion’ for Playboy’s Halloween party and was selected by him to join a sex party in his room.
Despite Playboy’s notorious editor professing a desire to change ‘the sexual mores of his time’, she said, sex appeared to him to be ‘more transactional’.
At the end of their steamy encounter, Hefner’s face ‘contorted as if he was in pain’, she revealed.
She writes: ‘For a second I panicked, thinking he was having some kind of 81-year-old man attack. But after one last moan it was over.
‘He gave us each a little pat on the shoulder. ‘You can stay the night if you want to,’ he said. ‘And you’re welcome to spend the weekend here’.’
Ms Hefner also writes about how Hefner’s ‘opiate addiction was a secret from the rest of the world’ and his hearing had been left ‘shot’ because of the amount of Viagra he took.
**Crystal Hefner’s Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy And Finding Myself is serialised in tomorrow’s Daily Mail, and she is interviewed for the Mail On Sunday’s You magazine.**