THE NEW YORK TIMES – The visible vestiges of Crystal Hefner’s days as a Playboy Playmate are mostly gone.
The snowy blond hair that once characterized Ms. Hefner, the third and last wife of Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner, has become more dirty blond. Revealing costumes have been traded for sensible clothes like beige cardigans.
But a closer look reveals a woman who is still acclimating to life outside of the infamous Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, which she left about seven years ago, not long after Mr. Hefner died in 2017.
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Hefner leaned against a pink banquette in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan.
She appeared pensive: It had been less than an hour since she had read an excerpt from her new memoir, “Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself,” to a group of strangers for the first time.
“At the time, I must’ve been brainwashed or something.”
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Ms. Hefner, 37, said she is still adjusting to life outside the mansion, where she lived for almost a decade and where she “was rewarded for being small.”
She’s been trying to shed the conditioning that she endured within its lavish walls. “Coming into power is a work in progress,” she said.
“Only Say Good Things,” which comes out on Jan. 23, is a step toward achieving that power. In the book, Ms. Hefner re-examines her initiation into the Playboy world; details the objectification and misogyny she said she experienced under Mr. Hefner; and mines the trauma that she’s still processing.
Ms. Hefner met Mr. Hefner at a 2008 Halloween party at the mansion. The estate offered a glimpse at how the 1 percent lived, she writes in the book, and she wanted to be part of it.