Elizabeth Ann Roberts Bio
Elizabeth Ann Roberts is an American glamour and nude model. She was born on August 4, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois, and has also been credited as Elizabeth Roberts. Playboy named her its January 1958 Playmate. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Roberts has natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 34-22-34.
Roberts’ centerfold was shot by Arthur James and Mike Shea, two photographers whose framing gave the images a crisp, practiced elegance that belied the shoot’s awkward aftermath. She arrived at the studio with her mother, who supplied a written statement asserting Roberts was of legal age; when that claim proved false, the matter crossed from publicity into the courts. Hugh Hefner was summoned to a domestic relations hearing on a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor; the charge was later dropped after it was judged unlikely he had known her true age.
That disquieting episode accompanies an otherwise spare record: Roberts holds the unusual distinction of being the youngest Playmate ever and, by birth cohort, the first from the following decade to appear in the magazine. After the centerfold and its controversy, she remained connected to the enterprise, working as a Bunny at the Chicago Playboy Club.
Taken together, the photographs, the legal brush, and the later club work make Roberts a complicated footnote in the magazine’s archive — an image whose making and aftermath illuminate the practical and ethical limits the publication encountered as it moved from concept to cultural institution.
