Phyllis Sherwood Bio
Phyllis Sherwood was an American Playboy Bunny, glamour and nude model. Born Phyllis Sowicki on September 30, 1937, in Niagara Falls, New York, she has also been credited as Phyllis Spivak. Playboy named her its August 1963 Playmate at 25. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Sherwood had natural breasts, hazel eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 34-22-35.
Her centerfold was photographed by Pompeo Posar, a studio hand whose compositions helped define much of the magazine’s glossy portraiture. The credit is a practical one: those images remain the clearest public record of Sherwood’s brief moment in front of Playboy’s cameras.
Sherwood’s route into that frame began on the club floor. She relocated to Fort Lauderdale in 1959 and spent two years at the Miami Playboy Club, working the Bunny role and literally stepping into the uniform that became an icon of the era. During that period she continued to model for other photographers and travelled to different cities on Playboy-related assignments.
Outside the spotlight she put down different roots. In 1972 she married Merrill Spivak, settled into family life and raised two sons and a daughter. The family lived for a time in Chicago and then returned to South Florida in 1996, a move that prefaced the next chapter of her working life.
In later years Sherwood and her husband co-owned a condo-management business, with Phyllis taking an active part while residing in Davie, Florida. The sequence—club stages and a remembered centerfold, followed by marriage, children and small-business ownership—marks a practical, midcentury American arc: public moments in the press followed by a quieter, hands-on life at home and in the neighborhood.
