Jenny McCarthy was the second of four daughters born to a foreman in a steel plant and a housewife. At six, she would dream of being Olivia Newton-John or Lynda Carter. When she was nine, her mother suited Jenny in a country-and-western get-up and her grandmother’s gargantuan sized bra stuffed with socks for a Dolly Parton Halloween costume. Jenny remembers, “I didn’t have any guy crushes, I just wanted to be that girl star.”

The family lived on the south side of Chicago and her father worked extra jobs to send his girls to an expensive Catholic school across town. She attended Southern Illinois University to study nursing but quit after two years to embark on a modeling career. The agencies told her that she was too fat; she was five and a-half feet tall and weighed 137 pounds (seventeen more than she weighs now). After leaving one of the modeling agencies in tears, being a believer in angels, she looked to the sky and saw the Playboy building. She says that, “Something drew me there. My self-conscious was going, ‘No, no, no.’ but my inner drive was going, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh’.” She realized that Playboy prefers full-figured women to waifs, and hand delivered pictures of herself to them. The editors liked what they saw and offered Jenny $20,000 to pose for Miss October 1993. A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year title along with a $100,000 salary, and a bevy of promotional duties. Now a certified babe, she moved from her native Chicago to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune.

Jenny soon learned that auditions were hard to come by, but her live in boy friend and manager Ray Manzella worked incessantly to land her an interview at MTV. Fortunately, MTV’s producers liked what they saw and Jenny was hired to co-host ‘Singled Out’, which debuted in the summer of 1995. Her charisma, snappy banter and amusing facial expressions along with her ability to handle fifty testosterone filled contestants made McCarthy an overnight success. MTV was eager to keep her as host and came up with a whooping $500,000, one-year contract that promoted her to full-fledged VJ. They also gave her an opportunity to create a program on any format to best suit her talents.

McCarthy decided to drop out of her host responsibilities of Singled Out to concentrate on creating a new MTV sketch-variety series, The Jenny McCarthy Show. Jenny has said it to be “kind of like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on acid”. She also developed a sitcom for NBC’s called Jenny. Playboy was also keen to further its relationship with her and offered $500,000 for more nude pictures of the blonde beauty. However, Jenny declined saying that this was not the career path she was presently pursuing and the magazine settled for rerunning old pictures of her.

McCarthy has ventured out into the pastures of film and appeared as “blonde nurse” in 1995’s “Things To Do in Denver When your Dead”. In 1996, she appeared opposite Tom Arnold as a neurotic movie star in “The Stupids. It looks like this is one Playmate that won’t be replaced when the months over, nor the year, maybe not even the decade.