Alice Denham Bio
Alice Denham was an American glamour model, actress, writer and educator. She was born on January 21, 1927, in Jacksonville, Florida. Playboy named her its July 1956 Playmate at 29. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Denham had natural breasts, green eyes and red hair. Her measurements are 36-24-34.
Alice Denham arrived in New York with considerably more on her mind than modeling. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina, she earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Rochester in 1950, writing her thesis on the plays of T. S. Eliot. She moved to Manhattan determined to become a writer and took modeling jobs to support herself, posing for magazine covers, book jackets, comic strips, film posters, and the discreet camera clubs that operated around the era’s restrictions on nude photography.
Her July 1956 Playboy appearance was unusual even by the magazine’s early standards. The same issue carried her short story “The Deal,” making Denham the first Playmate to have fiction published alongside her own centerfold. She described the story as “anti-commercialized sex, but it’s pro-sex,” a distinction that suited a writer already interested in examining female sexuality on her own terms. Playboy later declined two additional stories after deciding it would no longer publish women’s bylines.
Denham remained closely connected to New York’s postwar literary world. Her circle included James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and James Dean, while her own writing career eventually produced the 1967 novel My Darling from the Lions and, in 1973, Amo, an erotic feminist science-fiction novel centered on a “centerfold from outer space.” She also wrote novelizations and worked in film, with credits including Olga's Girls and Olga's House of Shame.
Her later life moved increasingly toward teaching, feminism, and memoir. Denham became a charter member of the National Organization for Women, campaigned for abortion rights, and taught English at John Jay College. In 2006 she revisited the writers, parties, affairs, and ambitions of 1950s and 1960s Manhattan in Sleeping with Bad Boys, followed in 2013 by Secrets of San Miguel. Few early Playmates left behind such a varied record: model, fiction writer, novelist, actress, professor, activist, and eyewitness to one of New York’s most combustible literary generations.
