In June 1994, Jenny McCarthy sat down with Dini Petty as Playboy‘s Playmate of the Year, chosen for the magazine’s fortieth anniversary. She was 21. A year earlier she had been selling lottery tickets at a Polish grocery store in Chicago, and the distance between those two facts is what the conversation is actually about.
The best of it is the rejection. She talks about the first modelling agency that laughed in her face and told her she would never work — and then about what she did the very next week, which is the part most people leave out of the story. She talks about telling her Irish Catholic family, about the nuns at her old school, and about the parents who backed her anyway. She is direct about the mechanics too: how you actually become Playmate of the Year, ten thousand photos, fifteen-hour days, what Playboy paid, and Petty’s blunt question about whether they are real.
She is also unusually clear-eyed about the business she has just entered. She discusses the Anna Nicole Smith blueprint, the Marilyn Monroe mythology the fortieth anniversary was built on, and what Hefner’s empire looked like from the inside at that moment. Then she lays out the plan: hang up the bunny ears, make her money, and go home. The hosting and the acting she describes as next steps are, at the time of taping, entirely speculative.
This is Jenny McCarthy before the fame, calling everything that came next. Unseen since it first aired in 1994, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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