Girls of Summer: Linné Nanette Ahlstrand, Miss July 1958

Photographed by Frank Bez.

From her name and slyly amused, distinctly un-cheesecakey pose and expressions, I figured that the lovely and talented Linné Nanette Ahlstrand would be that rare beast, the international Playmate.

I love nearly all of the shots in this pictorial, but this one here is tippy toppy favorite.

Color me all wrong. Ms. Ahlstrand was actually born in Chicago, Illinois, the hometown of Playboy and a city from which a substantial number of early and heyday Playmates hailed. The text which accompanied Ms. Ahlstrand’s pictorial alluded to having discovered her on the beach in Los Angeles but it is rich with malarkey and does not even bother to feature an interview with her, so I have my doubts.

The title of her write-up was “The Laziest Girl in Town,” which also lead me to expect to find her of some German or Swedish extraction. The title comes from the song “The Laziest Gal in Town” a Cole Porter tune, which was a longtime staple of Marlene Dietrich’s performing repertoire.

Adore the color in this shot — bathing suit, lips, parasol. (kissy-finger-pop gesture) Amazing.

Ms. Dietrich was a famously German-American international treasure who kept on ticking unlike her early celebrity companions such as Joan Crawford and the great Garbo and she had begun to tour live around this time (1958) in addition to continuing to appear in movies.

As an example, she made her biggest pictures after age 35, something like an early model of Meryl Streep. Witness for the Prosecution, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright were all made when Marlene was over 40 years old. That is nothing to sneeze at. I have an album on which she sings “The Laziest Girl in Town” and she still has such a wonderful husky strong accent that it sounds like “lay-zeh-est gell een tone.” Love it.

With that in mind, I figured they were establishing with the title of Ms. Ahlstrand’s article a link to Marlene and particularly one of her former screen characters to parallel Ms. Ahlstrand bieng of foreign extraction and languishing in the Western sun. See, Dietrich played diverse roles in her youngest years under Josef von Sternberg but became indelibly known by larger and more modern audiences for portraying a sexy bargirl in the Old West named Frenchy — despite her outrageously strong German accent — in the sweeping frontier film Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939).

The posters for the film claimed that it had “Corralled the greatest cast in cinema history!” Dietrich’s career-making part in Destry Rides Again was parodied by Madeline Kahn, departed queen of all that’s wonderful, in the 1974 Mel Brooks satire Blazing Saddles as the saloon singer Lili Von Schtupp (R.I.P., MK).

Of course all this conjecture came to nothing, like I said, when I realized that Ms. Ahlstrand was from Chicago and not of any exotic blonde overseas extraction. She moved from Chicago to New York to pursue modeling when she was younger, then out to L.A. and environs to dig in to acting in film and television.

Though Linné was best known by audiences for her work in television as a dispatcher on the program Highway Rescue, she was also in several films throughout the late 50’s and early 60’s, including Senior Prom, Beast from Haunted Cave, and Holiday for Lovers. Her most substantial big screen role was in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Living Venus, in which she played Diane.

Unlike the gory funfests for which Lewis later became known, Living Venus is more of a biopic. Related to this post, the subject of Living Venus‘s rise-and-fall story is a publisher very much like Hugh Hefner. Jack Norwall, the fictionalized Hef played by Bill Kerwin, starts a magazine called Pagan.

Pagan’s success leads him to leave his loving fiancee and take up with his lovely and talented model, a waitress he discovered while hatching the idea for the magazine. Ms. Ahlstrand does not play the model, but rather the jilted good girl. The model ends up leaving him and killing herself as he becomes increasingly arrogant and tyrannical due to his success, and Norwall comes to realize that being on top was not all he cracked it up to be. But too late, as he has lost for good his fiancee, best friend, and soul.

I’d like to point out that in my opinion the only part of Living Venus that really parallels Hef is Jack Norwall starting a successful nudie mag. Hef did not leave his wife for another woman; quite the opposite actually. So, no.

A little looker, Ms. Ahlstrand was 5’2″ at the time of her appearance in Playboy, which I believe puts her on an equal footing with Kai Brendlinger (bleah) for shortest Playmate until feisty pocket rocket Joni Mattis’s famously not-nude appearance (love her forever) and eventual eclipsement by Sue Williams who at 4’11” at the time of her appearance in 1965 is the pocketiest rocket of them all, aww — that we know of. It’s tough to say for sure because, prior to September of 1959, the Playmates were not required to complete a data sheet. So unless their height came up in the article or their contemporaneous stats appeared in parallel work elsewhere, the math is fuzzy.

Click below for scans of the original article.

Tragically Ms. Ahlstrand died of cancer in January of 1967. She was only 30 years old and had been married less than a year and a half. R.I.P. to such a young talent.

NSFW November: Donna Lynn, Playboy’s Miss November 1959

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!)