Sam Amico
MTV brought Jenny McCarthy to fame in the early 1990s, back when the station showed little beyond videos, some game shows and the Real World.
Videos by Rare
But even before that, McCarthy was a model who posed for Playboy, and it created a stir.
Playboy actually offered McCarthy $20,000 to be its cover girl and pose inside its pages. She accepted and was the October 1993 Playmate of the Month. At the time, late magazine publisher Hugh Hefner cited McCarthy’s “wholesome Catholic girl” image as the reason she was selected over 10,000 other applicants. So needless to say, McCarthy’s Catholic upbring was featured, and she donned some schoolgirl attire for the shoot.
That didn’t sit well in her Catholic neighborhood. Her house was pelted with eggs. Her younger twin sisters were mocked at school. Some close to McCarthy, including nuns, talked to her about future damnation.
But McCarthy had no regrets. In fact, she told People she was “really proud” of the way the photo shoot turned out.
Jenny McCarthy for Playboy
In 1994, she moved to Los Angeles to become host of Playboy TV’s Hot Rocks, a show featuring steamy music videos. A year later, MTV chose her to co-host the dating show Singled Out. All of that led to parts in movies, a stint with the World Wrestling Federation and the MTV sketch comedy show entitled, simply, The Jenny McCarthy Show.
Oh, by the way, McCarthy was named 1994 Playmate of the Year,
McCarthy, now 49, actually returned to the magazine’s pages more than a decade later, posing again in 2012 at the age of 39.
“The pictures are really gorgeous and classy. They could be out of W magazine,” she said. “They’re really elegant. It’s probably a lot more sophisticated than a lot of the stuff you’d see of people with their clothes on.”
At that time, McCarthy’s popularity and facetime on television shows had waned. She had long left MTV. She wasn’t quite as popular as she was in her heyday with MTV.
But she continued to reinvent herself, stay in the spotlight just enough, and eventually went on to host a SiriusXM radio show called Dirty, Sexy, Funny with Jenny McCarthy. She also became a co-host of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, alongside Ryan Seacrest, for a decade, before walking away.
Somewhere in there, she became a panelist on The Masked Singer.
But before all that, the world found out about McCarthy via the pages of Playboy.
