Ladies and gentleman, your Playboy Miss November 1959 — the lovely and talented Donna Lynn. (applause.)
As far as I know the whole shoot was photographed by Frank Bez.
As you can see, Playboy was starting to get their shit together and have a strong budget by this point, enough not to cobble together hack photographers and shitty sets in eight different crummy apartments to put together a single spread. Consistency is important for the overall feel of a shoot. These look like they were all done around the same place, a nice spread of house with a good-sized backyard in some smoggy shithole suburb of L.A.
Art direction was actually beginning to play a part in the magazine’s design and composition. Sex sells. Slickly packaged sex sells better, and for more.
I find it just so unforgivably rude when people screw around on the phone when you are trying to have an in-person social conversation.
Miss Lynn was like bazillions of buxom blondes, a pretty girl who made her way from the midwest to Los Angeles with dreams of being a star. She must have had a smidge of tinfoil and gritty hustle behind that vacuous smile, because she came closer than most, landing not just a plush job and a centerfold spot, but a movie part from a big name, too. The Playboy sez:
Cocktail Waitress on the Sunset Strip
In Hollywood even the girls who wait tables are beautiful!
It is news to nobody that Hollywood is the cutie capital of the country, racking up more shapeliness per square inch — or maybe we mean round inch — than any other city in the nation, probably the world. To its sun-drenched purlieus swarm America’s loveliest lasses, all eager for film and TV stardom. Of course, stardom doesn’t usually come overnight and while they’re waiting the hopeful honeys take jobs as waitresses and car hops, cashiers and receptionists — which accounts for the high degree of pulchritude among Hollywood’s hired help. Even in such a splendorous setting, blonde Donna Lynn is a standout. As a waitress, she brightens The Cloister, a smart supper club on Hollywood’s famous Sunset Strip. There recently Mickey Rooney spotted her and signed her up for a part in his new motion picture The Private Lives of Adam and Eve. There recently we spotted her, too, and decided she was just what we’d been seeking for Miss November.
In the imdb’s cast list for the 1960 Rooney flop (guess it must have been one of the ones he drank his way through), she is credited as “Wednesday,” along with several other cast members named for days of the week. Her next part is listed, bizarrely, as “10 year old girl” a decade later on a 1971 episode of The Partridge Family, which I’m going to chalk up to a mistake.
Tan lines are like highlights for what you are not ordinarily allowed to see. Ladies, STOP laying in the booths naked. Way more hot to be stripey.
In fact, the credits her file at imdb lists from that point really take a nosedive in believable accuracy, so I’m assuming there was some kind of huge mistake in identity, because I seriously doubt that in 1981, having been born in 1936, she was in any shape to play “Kiki” in Hollywood High II (“It’s the end of the semester and finals are near, but that doesn’t stop the girls of Hollywood High from having fun. From the pool to the beach, they cavort with their boyfriends, drink, and smoke a joint or two!”). Her final alleged credit is 1988’s Hollywood’s New Blood, a horror film about which one imdb user commented, “A nursery school pageant is more professional.”
Malibu? Laguna?
Here she is, back in 1959 where we can be sure it was she, and reasonably clad to boot, washing a pretty freaking sweet indeedy Renault Dauphine; they did not always make teeny cars built to demolish one another jostling for parking on the streets of Paris. Even the French automaking industry was in the post-WWII car manufacturing heyday a decophilic slave to the beautiful trappings of finned and glorious car architecture.
Marvel of design. Car’s okay, too.
Hef & Co. were also very concerned with the physiology of sleep and how well you were resting, evinced by the cover theme. (That bunny looks twisted. Dude is toe up. I hate when people get animals drunk!)
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