Aurora Starchild
When American Sports Executive and Los Angeles Lakers heiress Jeanie Buss thought about her bucket list, she realized there was one important goal missing. To be in Playboy. So, in 1995, she wrote the magazine and pitched the idea. It doesn’t seem like there was much pushback. She’s gorgeous. Shortly after her pitch, Playboy featured her in the May 1995 issue.
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Jeanie Buss Had Everything — Except Her Playboy Pictorial
Jeanie Buss grew up as American sports royalty. Her father, the late Jerry Buss, was the majority owner of the Lakers. He also co-owned the World Team Tennis team Los Angeles Strings, the NHL Kings hockey team, the Blades roller hockey, the Lazers indoor soccer team, and the WNBA Sparks. Jerry Buss had so many teams that he had to buy his own arena, the Great Western Forum.
Jeanie grew up with sports as her life. A graduate of USC, she was deeply involved in the business side of her family’s sports teams from the young age of 19. Money, men, and fame were always at her side. But what she felt was lacking was the empowerment that would come with posing for Playboy, a publication that she’d admired since she was a young woman.
“I thought, what are all the things I’ve wanted to do?” Jeanie Buss told Playboy in 1995. “Being featured in Playboy was one of them. As an 18-year-old, I couldn’t have done this… But I feel I’ve matured into a woman who’s confident in her sexuality, in how she looks and in how she takes care of herself. This, to me, was the perfect statement that I wanted to make about myself.”
Buss Was Featured in the May 1995 Playboy Issue When She Was In Her 30s
At the time of her Playboy pictorial, Jeanie was 32. She’d had enough time to figure out what she did and didn’t want, and what she was comfortable with. But while posing for Playboy was her own personal goal, she doesn’t think that other women who want to get into the executive world of sports should feel compelled to follow in her footsteps.
“I only say that because I posed in Playboy,” Buss said on the Daddy Issues podcast in May of 2020. It had been 25 years since her pictorial. “And it doesn’t mean to get into my position, you should pose in Playboy. Because me posing in Playboy had nothing to do with business. That was like a personal decision.”
Jeanie Buss elaborated on her personal decision to appear in the magazine.
“When I posed, I was 32 years old,” she said. “It wasn’t like I was making a mistake that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. For me, I was at the maturity level that I could do it. And I was like every other model, I had to go through the test photo shoot and all that kind of stuff. It was my own personal goal, not anything to do with business or anything. Just something I wanted to do.”
Father Jerry Buss Said His Daughter’s Playboy Would Be the Only One He Never Read
Buss added that her “brilliant” father, who was a fan of Playboy, had a “perfect” response to hearing that his daughter was going to be in the magazine. Jerry Buss had once owned the Playboy Club in Phoenix, Arizona.
“’It will be the first issue of Playboy magazine I’ve never read,’” Jeanie quoted him as saying. “Meaning, he’s endorsing the magazine, but I’m his daughter, right. He can walk that fine line of not being judgmental or putting me down.”
Jeanie Buss’s 6-page pictorial featured her as the sports aficionado that she is. Granted, she was also scantily clad and, in some photos, completely nude. In some photos, she’s wearing a black bra and pantyhose but no panties and holding a basketball. She can be seen in a stadium, slowly dropping her clothes, and then hanging out bottomless like it’s no big deal.
Some of Jeanie’s photos feature her in front of a row of Lakers trophies. She starts with a white and black blazer, pantyhose, and bra, and then progressively loses items of clothing. Other photos went with the “hockey” theme, featuring Jeanie in hockey shoulder pads, socks, sneakers, and holding a hockey stick. Very few of Jeanie Buss’s photos include underwear.
Jeanie Admitted She Thought Her Pictorial Would Help Her Business
Buss is naturally very slender and toned. And, probably due to living in LA, she had a killer tan at the time of her photos. Her large eyes, plump lips, and dirty strawberry-blonde hair made for a perfect pinup model. One would almost forget that she’s a brilliant businesswoman, except she admitted that she had a feeling the photos would be a boon to her businesses.
“With these photographs, I finally realized my fantasy: to wear the uniform and not just be cheering from the sidelines,” Jeanie told Playboy. She added, “I’m not going to deny that this might help my business.”
As a side note, many people get Jeanie Buss’s Playboy photos mixed up with an iconic photo she did with Sports Illustrated and later decided to use for her Twitter avatar at one point. That photo features Jeanie with a blue backdrop, holding two basketballs. The Sports Illustrated photo was shot in 1998, years after she appeared in Playboy.
“It was kind of like I was like a mermaid underwater with a blue backdrop,” Buss reminisced on Daddy Issues. “They used to show mermaids holding pearls, like this, right, and so instead of the pearls, I got basketballs. And I’m not naked but I might look like I’m naked. I get people [who say], ‘How dare you put a naked picture of you on Twitter. It was in Playboy.’ And it’s not. It was from Sports Illustrated.”
