Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner apparently didn’t have time to worry about his Viagra-related hearing loss during his life. That’s according to his widow Crystal Hefner, who divulged in her new memoir Only Say Good Things that he all but traded his hearing for the ability to have sex. “Hef always said he’d rather be deaf and still able to have sex,” she wrote of his Viagra use, per The Daily Mail. “Weird.”
Crystal was just 21 when she met the publisher — he was 81. She reportedly addressed the dramatic age gap, as well. “The hardest part of trying to have a relationship with Hef was that it was judged so much,” she divulged in the memoir. “Rightfully so. If that was my daughter now – it wouldn’t happen. All I can say is that if you come from a happy, perfect, loving childhood, you don’t usually end up with someone who was already 60 years old by the time you are born.”
She went on, recalling a time when she found an old photo of them. “The other day I found a picture of me with him at the very beginning,” she related. “It’s just so sad. It looks like a baby. I look back and I feel sorry for that girl. There was going to be this Wizard Of Oz moment where the fantasy fades, you draw back the curtain and see the reality of it. But he who has the money makes the rules, right?”
Crystal pulled back the curtain on her real feelings about Hugh’s infamous sex romps with multiple partners. “Looking back, I think I had a kind of Stockholm syndrome,” she wrote. “There was part of me that always thought if this was real love, there wouldn’t be other women in the bedroom. I reconciled myself to it by trying to believe that Hef loved me as best he knew how.”
Hugh and Crystal, who is now 37, married in December of 2012. The union ended on September 27, 2017, when Hugh died at age 91. She had cynical thoughts about the timing of his death. “You can’t fault his timing,” she postulated. “He dipped out right on time. Hef’s lifespan of 91 years, it ended on the cusp of #MeToo. Coincidence? I think not.”
Only Good Things is scheduled to hit shelves in January of 2023.