Hugh Hefner Meets Paige Young in Hell

Saturday, September 21, 2024. It was 1968, at a car show in Boston. I was 14 years old. November 1968 Playboy Playmate Paige Young was signing autographs.

When it was my turn, my dipshit friend nudged me, reminding me that he dared me to ask her to sign the centerfold.

Paige deftly demurred, and signed a non-nude page instead.

I was spellbound by her poise and beauty. I quickly changed the subject to her portrait of Truman Capote featured in her pictorial and she brightened luminously. We talked about art, for about 10 minutes before the crowd behind me got testy. At 14, She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She would die by her own hand 6 years later, in 1974, at the age of 30. The photo above is not Paige, but does resemble her strongly. This is for Diana Cotterell.

Hugh Hefner stepped off the escalator into Hell like a man who thought he’d arrived at another one of his parties, half-expecting someone to hand him a drink and say, "Welcome, Hef."

But there was no red carpet, no silk-clad women, no velvet ropes. Just a thick, sticky heat and the sulfuric stench of rot that clung to him like a bad cologne. Hell had no use for luxury.

He lit his pipe—one of the few things they didn’t take from him—and made his way through the crowded ballroom of lost souls. His silk robe clung to him in the swelter, no longer a symbol of his control but a joke, a relic of his long-expired myth.

That’s when he saw her.

Paige Young. She was seated in the far corner, her face expressionless, but her eyes locked on him the moment he entered. No emotion, no drama—just the cold stare of someone who’s been waiting a very long time, (43 years, if you’re curious).

Hef hesitated. That familiar knot of unease twisted in his stomach—one he hadn’t felt since the rumors started swirling back in the ‘70s. But back then, he’d had handlers, lawyers, money. Hell didn’t care about any of that. Here, it was just him and her. No filters, no gloss, no one to clean up the mess.

“Paige,” he muttered, approaching her like a man who knows he’s walking into a firing squad. “It’s been a long time.”

Her lips curled into something that could’ve been a smile, but it never reached her eyes. “Not long enough.”

He cleared his throat, feigning nonchalance. “You look... good.”

Her laugh was low, bitter. “I looked better before. Before you. Before all of it.”

Hefner shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his usual composure fraying at the edges. He had faced angry women before—hell, half of Hollywood had screamed at him at one point or another. But this was different. Paige wasn’t just angry. She was hollowed out, the kind of broken that never got fixed.

“Look, Paige, I don’t know what you think happened,” he started, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

“You don’t know?” Her voice was sharp, slicing through the muggy air. “Let me remind you.”

She stood up slowly, her movements deliberate, as if savoring the moment. She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a crumpled, faded photograph. She unfolded it, smoothing it out with careful fingers before handing it to him.

Hef took it, squinting at the image. It was a collage, a mess of words and pictures, scrawled accusations in blood-red ink. Hugh Hefner is the Devil. Used. Thrown away. Exploited. It looked like something a tortured artist might make after years of abuse—because that’s exactly what it was.

“I made that for you,” Paige said, her voice steady now. “Right before I blew my head off in front of it on an American flag.”

He froze. The air in his lungs turned cold. The rumors he’d tried so hard to suppress came rushing back, ugly and undeniable. Paige Young, one of his Playmates, had killed herself—everyone knew that. But the details? The LAPD had been kind enough to smooth those over for him. They had called it an overdose, said she’d gone quietly. Sleeping pills and booze. A sad, beautiful woman slipping into eternal sleep.

“I didn’t—” he started, but the words died in his throat.

“You didn’t what, Hef? You didn’t know?” She stepped closer, her face inches from his now. “You didn’t know that I wasn’t just another girl in your mansion, waiting to be used up and tossed aside? You didn’t know that when you passed me around like some cheap cigar at your parties, you were breaking me? You didn’t know that I was screaming inside, that I was falling apart, that I couldn’t take it anymore?”

“I didn’t force anything,” he muttered, the line he’d used a thousand times before, to himself as much as anyone else. But here, in the dead, suffocating silence of Hell, the words sounded ridiculous.

Paige’s eyes flared, a cold fire burning in them. “You didn’t have to force it, Hef. I was a bi-polar starving artist living on a rented house on the beach. You had all the power. All the money. All the connections. And I had nothing. Nothing but my face, my body, and the knowledge that once they were no longer useful to you, or your pals, I’d be forgotten. You knew that.”

He swallowed hard, the pipe burning warmer in his hand. His fingers trembled as he gripped it tighter, his usual smoothness gone. “It wasn’t like that.”

Paige laughed, shaking her head. “You tell yourself that, Hugh. You tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night—or used to sleep at night, anyway. But I’ll tell you what it was like.”

She stepped back, her voice rising now, her words sharp and cutting. “It was like drowning in shame. It was like watching my life become a sick parody of itself, all because I wanted to be famous, wanted to be seen. And you—you—made me believe that you were the gatekeeper to that world. That I had to smile, had to pose, had to let them touch me because that’s what girls like me did, right? That’s how we got ahead.”

“I didn’t know—”

“Bullshit!” she snapped, her voice cracking like a whip. “You knew exactly what was happening to me. And you didn’t care. But you did care enough to destroy my last work of art, my truth tableau of your sick villainy, telling them you were the Devil. You didn’t care when I locked myself in that room with a gun.

But you sure as hell did care that they covered it up for you, made it look like a nice, clean overdose so you could keep selling your shame-washed image.”

The room seemed to close in around him. The walls of Hell were pressing down, suffocating him, the heat unbearable now. But more than that, it was the weight of her words, the truth he’d spent decades burying under silk sheets, Quaaludes, and champagne bubbles.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice barely audible.

Paige stared at him, and for a moment, there was nothing but silence. Then, slowly, she shook her head. “Sorry doesn’t matter here, Hef. Sorry doesn’t fix anything. Sorry doesn’t bring us back. April 7th, 1974 may have been a Palm Sunday, but Hell has no do-overs”

She turned her back on him, walking away without another word, leaving him standing there, a relic of a man who had once controlled much, now lost in a place where control meant nothing.

Hefner sank into a chair, his robe clinging to his skin, drenched in sweat and something far worse. For the first time in his life—or afterlife—he realized that this was it. There was no escape, no PR team to clean up the mess.

Hell wasn’t the flames or the pain. Hell was being nestled into a crowded ballroom of consequences.

Hell is facing what you’d done, and knowing it would echo through time and never be forgotten. Hell is no do-overs.