Playmate – Alice Denham. Newport Jazz Festival, Fiction by Alice Denham
Alice Denham : The Topless Model Who Wrote For Playboy
Alice Denham squired James Dean (a tender lover), Joseph Heller (good kisser), Philip Roth (“on fire”) and Hugh Hefner (“a good ride, a steady canter”)
“Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty, I drank… Sex was my great adventure”
– Alice Denham
Alice Denham was the Playboy centerfold, who could write and dreamed of becoming a best-selling novelist. Denham, a divorced Florida native and University of Rochester graduate, where she’d earned a masters degree in English (a copy of her thesis ‘T. S. Eliot: His Theory and Practice of Poetic Drama’ can be read at the Rush Rhees Library), arrived in New York City in the summer of 1951 in search of “intellectual freedom”. Mingling with the finest minds of Manhattan’s male-dominated literary salons, Alice’s writing ability was outshone by her sex appeal. “Having flunked marriage, I sought romance, sexual ecstasy, fun and games,” she wrote in her 2006 kiss ‘n’ tell memoir Sleeping With Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties. “Passionately I yearned to be a writer, as a nun yearns to marry Christ. No man could satisfy that desire.”

Men were happy to try. Alice scored dates with many and rated their pluck. She squired, among others: the actor James Dean (smelled of vanilla); writers James Jones (short on talent), Joseph Heller (good kisser), David Markson (“stud lover boy”), William Gaddis (“an insinuating air”; “a fine centerpiece”), Evan S. Connell and Philip Roth (“on fire”); and the publisher Hugh Hefner (“a good ride, a steady canter”). It was the latter who featured Alice’s mind and body in his Playboy magazine, showing readers topless photographs of the writer alongside her short story The Deal (plot: a woman left short of money in Las Vegas sells herself to a gambler for a night). As she put it: “The fact that they would pay more for some sexy pictures than for their featured story just about set sets the tone of the magazine.”

“Of course he was no egalitarian,” Ms. Denham wrote of Hefner. “But he possessed one of the finer male characteristics I was aware of: He liked my writing.” Up yo a point he did. In 1956, Hefner republished The Deal with Alice Denham elevated to the centerfold. He rejected two more of her stories and told her Playboy would no longer be featuring women’s bylines.