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 Jenny McCarthy was born November 1, 1972 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up with her three sisters, a stay-at-home mom, and her father, a steel-plant foreman. In 1992, Jenny was scrambling for funds to finance her second year of nursing studies at Southern Illinois University. She decided to quit school and embark on a modeling career, only to be told she was too curvy. She realized that Playboy prefers full-figured women over waifs, and hand-delivered photographs of herself to the magazine's Chicago office. The editors liked what they saw and paid McCarthy $20,000 to pose as Miss October 1993. A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year title and $100,000 in cash and prizes. Now a certified babe, Jenny McCarthy moved from her native Chicago - where she and her three sisters were raised to Los Angeles in search of stardom. Hollywood auditions proved difficult to come by, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, McCarthy's then-manager and live-in boyfriend, to land an interview at MTV. The network's producer liked what they saw and hired McCarthy to co-host Singled Out, which debuted in the summer of 1995. Funny, telegenic, and able to manhandle legions of testosterone-swollen contestants without incurring (or committing) bodily harm, Jenny was an immediate success. MTV was eager to retain its hot property and coughed up a $500,000, one-year contract that promoted McCarthy to full-fledged VJ and gave her carte blanche to create a program of any format that best suited her talents. Playboy, too, was keen to further its relationship with McCarthy; it offered $500,000 to snap more nude photos. When Jenny demurred, claiming that this was not the career path she was presently pursuing, the magazine settled for re-running old pics. McCarthy subsequently bowed out of her host responsibilities on Singled Out to concentrate her attention on creating a new MTV sketch-variety series, The Jenny McCarthy Show (she envisioned the program as "kind of like Lifestyle1 of the Rich and Famous on acid"). She also developed a (quickly cancelled) sitcom for NBC called Jenny, in which she portrayed an East Coast grocery clerk who inherits a Hollywood mansion. Hey, it could happen. As for big-screen outings, McCarthy appeared in a minute role as "blonde nurse" in the 1995 film Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead; tackled her first substantial screen characterization (a neurotic movie star) in the 1996 comedy The Stupids, opposite Tom Arnold; and played a gold-digging harpy in David Zucker's 1998 sight-gag extravaganza BASEketball. It seems McCarthy is heeding and exceeding advice that her mother proffered years ago: "Be like Vanna White." Dirty Love (2003) .... Rebecca
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