The Jilting of Hefner

In the midst of last week’s installments of the Anthony Weiner saga—rehab, further revelations, resignation—another minor media episode played itself out, a little less spectacularly, on the televised stage: Five days before the ceremony, Miss Crystal Harris bailed out on her planned wedding to Mr. Hugh Hefner.

Hugh Hefner with ex-fiancée Crystal Harris

Newscom

Everybody knows Hugh Hefner, of course: the founder of Playboy and professional bon vivant whose swinging bachelor lifestyle has been a staple of American pop culture since the Eisenhower era. But who is Crystal Harris? She turns out to be a 25-year-old ex-Playmate and aspiring singer—whose plans to wed, therefore, might not seem so remarkable, except that Hugh Hefner, at 85, is old enough to be her great-grandfather.

Which raises an interesting, if slightly discomforting, question: What is less edifying, the graphic spectacle of an exhibitionist member of Congress, or an elderly man whose taste in female companionship runs to women fresh out of adolescence?

In The Scrapbook’s opinion, it’s a draw. Anthony Weiner’s conduct was so far beyond the historic norm of congressional misbehavior that it very nearly approached a category unto itself, made more comic (and simultaneously more appalling) by the advent of iPhones and Twitter. It will be a long time before anything remotely approaching the details of the Weiner affair will be seen again in Washington.

Or maybe not. All the ingredients that came together for Anthony Weiner—narcissism, sexuality, political power, social media, new technology—remain in place, and if history teaches us anything, it is that human nature is reliably constant and fallible.