Jonnie Nicely Bio
Jonnie Nicely was an American actress, glamour and nude model. She was born Jonnie Faye Nicely on February 25, 1936, in Fort Smith, Arizona. Playboy named her its August 1956 Playmate at 20. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Nicely had natural breasts, gray eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 37-24-36.
Jonnie Nicely’s route into Playboy came with an unusual false start. She had originally been considered for the October 1955 Playmate slot, but scheduling and creative conflicts pushed her feature aside in favor of Jean Moorhead. Playboy nevertheless printed photographs of Nicely in the issue, and the reaction from readers was emphatic enough for the magazine to bring her back several months later.
That reversal became part of the feature’s own story. Playboy joked that its editors had been accused of being “blind as the well-known bat” for not choosing Nicely the first time, turning her eventual appearance into something close to a reader-requested encore. Hal Adams photographed the centerfold, giving the spread the composed, uncluttered look associated with much of Playboy’s mid-1950s photography. Nicely also continued doing pin-up work before and after her magazine appearance.
Modeling was only one chapter of a working life that later moved in a very different direction. Nicely had held jobs as a carhop and seamstress, and she eventually joined Rockwell International in Palmdale, California. There she worked as an electrical installation mechanic at the company’s B-1 bomber plant, a career she maintained for twelve years before retiring in the 1990s.
Nicely remained connected with the Playboy world long after leaving professional modeling. She became a regular presence at celebrity and GlamourCon conventions, where former Playmates and other figures from classic glamour culture met collectors and readers. Her story is an unusually broad one for an early Playmate: a teenager who headed west and found modeling work, a near-miss transformed by reader demand, and later an aerospace mechanic whose working life extended far beyond the pages that first made her familiar to Playboy readers.
