Here Comes the Bride

WE NOW PRONOUNCE HEF

AND MISS DECEMBER 2OO?

HUSBAND AND WIFE

ahead and laugh. (What? Shall we start with the one about how this wedding, from the outset, already had the traditional "something old, some­thing new" parts covered? Oh, there's plenty more material— hang on!) But really, it's okay—just laugh. Because I promise you this much: The newlyweds—privately, publicly, knowingly, lovingly—have been laughing right along with you. Avows the officially sanctioned Lady of the Mansion, with simple off­hand insight that solves the riddle at hand quickly and pretty profoundly, "We're both like kids." Further, "We just laugh—at the littlest things, the silliest things. He even giggles like a little kid. We have the best time together no matter what we're do­ing. I mean, we love putting on our PJs, curling up and watching murder mysteries and The Bachelor—all kinds of fun stuff. I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life." Spe­cifically, this comes from the lustrous, warmhearted, exuberant, unaffect­ed, devoted, innately musical, very human and, yes, freshly pronounced Mrs. Crystal Harris Hefner.

(Okay—if we may just pause here: That legally appended sur­name does register a mild jolt-how could it not, right? But happily surprising epilogues seem never to cease in Hefnerian lore, so... welcome to the latest! As he insists, with Crystal clarity, natch, "I saved the best for last.")

But it's irrefutably true, as are they. "The truth of the matter," echoes her legendary new husband, "is we're soul mates." Indeed, all unrelenting jokes aside (you know, like, "Back when he bought the 3.5-carat dia­mond engagement ring, it was still a lump of coal"), she is in fact the Chosen One—who, as you perhaps may have heard, landed in life six decades and 20 calendar days af­ter the groom made his own historic grand entrance on Earth. (He: April 9, 1926. She: April 29, 1986.

They: So dismissive of any generational divide that, last year, she transformed him into a mad iPadding "Twitterbug" — his coinage—who tweets day and night, unloading pointed, spontaneous Hef-blurts like "You fall in love with a person, not an age." Or "My first marriage was with a woman my own age when I was 23. I've grown older, but the age of my women hasn't." Or "It's ironic that living with three young girls prompted a hit TV show but marrying one prompts humor. Age is still just a number.") Absurdities, of course, are never lost on these two. Mirth actually makes them whole-it's been part of their magic. It's what they do. It's why their strangely logical (trust me on that) and dependably cozy union felt pure and steadfast from initial meeting onward. Cue flashback here (to refresh): When his eyes first fell upon her—albeit when she was cinched up as a saucy French maid at the 2008 Playboy Mansion Halloween bash —he merely (and somehow safely) saw his future, whereupon he mouthed a single word in her distant direction (you), and quite suddenly, within moments, she was ensconced at his side, sharing impossi­bly easy rapport. "It was as if I already knew him," she recalls, still agog at their instant companionable chemistry. (That they were both college psych majors no doubt inevitably further fueled the kismet—she, in her uncompleted last semester at San Diego State; he, well, he was class of 1949 at the University of Illinois, but still....)

"I just couldn't imagine spending the rest of my years with anyone else," de­clared the groom a few scant weeks after word of their Christmas Eve en­gagement shook the world (and/or had much of the world shaking its head, if a bit too reflexively). "It just doesn't get better than this. I mean, we laugh a lot," attests Hef, "and that's what it's all about." And what that is all about he had articulated most succinctly last year, on-screen in Oscar-winning film­maker Brigitte Berman's documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel: "Relationships with younger women are key to my connection to my own childhood," said the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up (so as to champion universal open-minded freedoms in a deadly restrictive society, et al.). "So my life is always continually filled with young women — and young women's laughter. And it is what keeps me alive." When Berman happened to film those comments many months earlier, the most (text continued on page 104)

constant and familiar laughs in his latter-day life (female-wise) had gone missing; although imperceptible to the camera, he'd briefly become a somewhat forlorn Hef in search of heart-fluttering roman­tic recovery (i.e., step-bouncing renew­al), which—from his hep-and-hallowed high school years onward—remains his preferred perpetual state of being. "If he wasn't in love, he felt incomplete and unhappy," confirmed an old class­mate pal of that wide-eyed and dreamy late-teen period—itself the formative sacred time warp that Hef (with iron­clad resolve) has never psychologically quite abandoned, very much to his fi­nancial gain.

But the Mansion, at that juncture, had recently lost the rather famed frolicsome laughter of his original Girls Next Door— the telegenic Holly-Bridget-Kendra love triumvirate whose live-in Hef World adventures drew excellent ratings across five seasons for the E! network (even lately prompting unfortunate rebroad-casts of those past-life episodes some three years after the ladies departed the premises). Holly Madison (a.k.a. Girl­friend Number One), of course, had clearly been the only Real Relationship throughout, and though they quietly if unsuccessfully worked to fulfill her dream of making children together ("I was willing, yeah," he now admits, some­what less enthused in retrospect, having already sired four full-grown extraor­dinary offspring by two wives), she nevertheless drifted toward other pur­suits. (Among them would be her own Las Vegas-based E! reality series, Hol­ly's World.) But because their protracted unraveling took place off camera—"You really can't judge reality by reality TV," quoth Hef—he found himself launching corrective tweets of piqued clarifica­tion soon after begging Crystal's troth: "Back when Holly was here, I was still in a failed marriage & I wasn't anxious to repeat the mistake." "I was still mar­ried, & had no thought of remarrying, when Holly decided to split for Vegas." "I didn't dump Holly.... She left me...." "I think Crystal will be the exception or I wouldn't take the plunge again." "Crys­tal is the one girlfriend, since the end of my marriage, that Kimberley [the second former Mrs. Hugh M. Hefner] & my boys really like. Which says a lot for Crystal." Also, much to the relief of those who know him best, there came this firm assertion: "Life at the Mansion will remain unchanged after Crystal & I get married."

That last volley especially resonated in sly allusion to how his previous bride, PMOY 1989 Kimberley Conrad (who was 26 when he took her hand in July 1989), had enforced a strict choke hold on Mansion life as he (and most humans) knew it. (For starters, no unattached females allowed?) "Kimberley was anx­ious to change my life," he avers, which has famously thrived on regimented

socializing rituals such as Movie Nights, Midsummer Night's Dream parties, gin rummy nights, open-door policies afforded to friends old and new, etc.— none of which was her thrill. "And that isn't," he stresses, "what this is all about with Crystal." (Concurs the new missus, "I don't want to hide Hef away. I love being around the people who make him happy and who he wants to be around.") But what he had projected onto marrying Kimberley was imagined as a soothing idealized coda to the 1980s—his rocki­est decade to date, both personally and professionally, which left him feeling far less vital at the age of 63 than he does today. (Theirs, by the way, was also a union that shook the world—or, as People magazine's cover headline screeched at the time, holy matrimony! before further adding, next week: hell freezes over). Says Hef, "Kimberley was perceived by me as kind of a safe harbor, which turned out not to be so." Still, they made two fine sons, Marston and Cooper, before she fled the marriage after nearly nine years (during which, please note, he had been the faithful one). By early 1998 she and the boys had moved into a stately

home he had acquired for them directly adjacent to the Mansion property for the sake of parental continuity—via proxim­ity. Per similar continuity, it wasn't until March 2010 that their all-but-intermi­nable legal separation finally ended in divorce. "Because the boys were still liv­ing with her [when not away, in recent years, at college], she'd convinced me there was no particular motivation for getting a divorce," he says with a hapless shrug. Nonetheless, within months after her leaving, he had exultantly revived his fabled Mansion bacchanals and had begun gathering serial posses of blonde girlfriends, who flanked him in gaudy giggling packs. "Complicated, yes," he told LA Weekly last year, "though not as complicated sometimes as one wife."

Then again, as he elaborated to me not long ago, "of course it obviously depends on who that one wife is." With this one—whom he permanently moved into his vastly cluttered Master's Quar­ters a month after they met ("We're messy together!" he chirps) and whose soft genuine retro glow not only made her (no preferential bias, he swears) Miss December 2009 but also the adorably

authentic focal point of the sixth season of the reconfigured Girls Next Door (shar­ing screen time with the now vanquished twins Kristina and Karissa Shannon)— he knows he found "the right girl at the right time." Of his blushing bride, he says, "She's somebody everybody loves. With Crystal, it's a relationship that isn't just a safe harbor; it's the security of knowing who you're going to be with a year from now—somebody who doesn't want to change me at all, who loves me the way I am. This is for continuity in my life and a devotion to each other in the sense that I won't be suddenly disappear­ing off the scene. Quite the contrary, it'll be more of the celebration continuing." For certain, she's become a lifetime sub­scriber to his passion for continuity and the inarguable logic of just letting Hef be Hef: "I love going out with him—in pub­lic, to events, wherever—and helping him to continue growing his legend. I'm not like, 'Get over here. Stay in here. Don't go there. ' Indeed, in her early Mansion tenure, she absorbed great slabs of his legacy by assisting in his famous scrap-book attic rooms (which burst with more than 2,400 volumes ongoing, all illustra­tive of the Hefnerian life march). "She has a wonderful knowledge of what came before," he says, beaming. Even so, as a connubial courtesy, he recently offered to remove the panoply of lingerie—intimate souvenirs of bountiful conquests past— dangling from the chandelier above their bed. "And she said, 'No, no, leave them up,'" he marvels. "That'll give you a clue as to the kind of person she is." (Clearly touched by the gesture, she also told me, "Really, I don't care. I'm used to it. I don't even notice them.") She even identifies newfound symbolic connections—which are, in his parlance, "magic"—some­times before he does. For instance, his proposing marriage in December to the previous year's Miss December, which also was the month playboy debuted on newsstands nearly (yes, I'm afraid so) six decades earlier, thus begetting his enduring empire. ("It all started with December!" she enthuses.) Moreover, conceived in England by British par­ents—though born in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where the London Bridge had been reconstructed—she then returned with them to the U.K. for a handful of years (her father had already launched a well-regarded singing career there) that engendered in her an English accent, long faded after the family relocated to San Diego, as well as a genetic burning desire to become a recording artist (cas­ing the footsteps of her beloved dad, who died 13 years ago). Upon learning this, Hef instigated the cherished two-hour, four-times-weekly singing lessons she takes from Seth Riggs, vocal coach to the gods (including Michael Jackson). So thus would come further "magic" early this June—weeks before the wedding—when she performed her first dance single, "Club Queen," at the premiere of the new

Playboy Club London. ("And all of this is happening in the Chinese Year of the Rab­bit," says Hef, extra gleefully, without even having to utter the word magic.)

"I never thought I'd fall for a man who is Hef's age," she has said, quite under­standably. "Day-to-day life, I don't notice his age. It isn't a factor to me." Or else she will just laughingly blurt, "I mean, it's Hefl It's not like there's a numberl" (This age-is-but-a-number mantra tends to spill almost robotically from anyone regularly in his midst—largely because, as editors here will attest, his quicksilver sharpness kind of miraculously dictates it.) But what won her heart from the get-go, she says, is his sense of humor. Which suggests why he could so giddily approve her starring in the recent Funny or Die website commercial spoof as pitch girl for Crystal Harris's Age-Gap Cheat Sheet iPhone app—wherein, accord­ing to the script, she feigns panic before introducing her solution device: "Ack! My fiance is 60 years older than me and I don't understand his references! Well, now you can end the confusion.... When your 85-year-old fiance or one of his still-living friends makes a reference you don't under­stand, simply type in the reference and the explanation is ready within seconds!" She then demonstrates—before-and-after style—by mistaking Casablanca for some dish possibly containing a dairy product rather than what it is: her man's favorite film of all time. (Her iPhone app quickly advises her, upon mention of the title, to simply say, "Here's lookin' at you, kid!"— which, in fact, is also her man's favorite line ever uttered on-screen.)

Of course, Crystal Hefner knows well her Casablanca from her dairy dishes—having beheld the Humphrey Bogart classic a few times already while snuggled up against her mate (he screens it for friends in period costume each year on his birthday week­end), with plenty more viewings to come. (Pertinent premarital Hef tweet: "When a girl goes with me she gets an education in classic films, among other things.") He fan­cies such experiences (or reexperiences) as something more profound than solely a student-teacher dynamic—explaining it several months ago to The New York Times Magazine as "something wonderful...the rediscovery.... It permits you to see the things you love with a fresh eye, makes them exciting again." With his young bride he fully anticipates this freshness and won­der for the rest of his years, mathematics be damned. "It reminds me a little bit of Bogart and [Lauren] Bacall—another May-December relationship," he has said. "But Bogart was reluctant about getting mar­ried [to the much younger woman], and Peter Lorre said, 'What are you going to do with these last years? Are you going to spend them alone or with the girl you love?'" Here, however, even Hef couldn't resist pondering the unfair damned math of it all, before delivering his own trium­phant punch line: "This one probably will be setting some kind of record, though. It's more January-December."

Anyway, may the laughs keep coming. And moreover: Here's looking at you, kids.

See more of Crystal at playboy.com/crystal.

tfl ddtftt W,L

"With Crystal, it's the

security of knowing who

you're going to be with a

year from now—somebody

who doesn't want to

change me at all."