There was this bathroom in the Playboy Mansion, just off Hugh Hefner’s bedroom, that was clad in black marble, with a black marble tub, black toilet and heavy curtains to shut out the light. The way Crystal Hefner (née Harris) describes it, this room sounds like a manifestation of the darkest part of Hefner’s mind. When she moved into the mansion as one of his three live-in girlfriends (she became his third wife in 2012, when she was 26 and he was 86), she’d work out which nights he expected sex because, instead of his regular dinner of tinned chicken noodle soup, crackers and cream cheese, he’d order a BLT. He took so much Viagra it made him deaf. Afterwards, the girlfriends and any other blonde guests Hef had invited up from the party would shower off the baby oil he insisted they use for lube, despite their recurring infections, and Crystal would watch the two lovebirds that lived in a cage in the corner.
They were beautiful, these birds – tiny and green, and famously loyal. “The problem was,” writes Crystal, in her memoir, Only Say Good Things, “they kept dying.” The staff would whisk away each little corpse and replace it with another the following day, but neither Hefner nor the maids seemed curious about what was wrong. Were they passing on infections, Crystal wondered. A bacteria buildup in the famous grotto pools, after all, had caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. Was it the lack of sunlight? One day she inspected the cage and realised the water bottle was broken. “The birds had been dying of thirst this whole time and the mansion staff just kept replacing them, bird after bird.”
