Leslie Bianchini Bio
Leslie Bianchini is an American glamour and nude model. She was born on February 12, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois. Playboy named her its January 1969 Playmate at 21. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Bianchini has natural breasts, blue eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-24-37.
Leslie Bianchini carried a bit of rural Illinois with her long after her family moved west. Raised on a turkey farm until the age of ten, she still described herself as a country girl even after settling in northern California. San Francisco was the exception to her general dislike of cities: she found it alternately cheerful and melancholy, a place with enough personality to keep revealing something new whenever she wandered through it.
That attachment to the outdoors showed up in the way she spent her free time. Bianchini bought a pony named Toby, whom she treated less like a show animal than an oversized companion, often taking him along on walks through the woods. Gardening was another constant. At the same time, she had an unabashed weakness for fashion and admitted spending more than she probably should on the bright, inventive clothes of the late 1960s.
Her interests were hardly limited to clothes and flowers. Bianchini came from a family with a strong technical streak: both of her brothers earned doctorates in physics and had built a C/Gas Chevrolet that set a national record in 1965. She shared enough of that fascination to talk enthusiastically about learning her way around a Corvette engine. With a father who worked as a stockbroker for the Chicago Board of Trade, she also hoped one day to become an investor herself.
Mario Casilli photographed the centerfold that gave Bianchini one of the strangest afterlives in Playboy history. Years later it emerged that her image had been secretly placed into Apollo 12 mission material by NASA insiders, alongside pictures of fellow Playmates Angela Dorian, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers. One of the images ended up in astronaut Alan Bean’s cuff checklist—a private joke folded into the machinery of a lunar mission.
That unlikely journey into space gives Bianchini’s Playboy story a wonderfully period-specific coda. She may have thought of herself as a country girl with a pony, a garden and a weakness for new clothes, but one of her photographs wound up travelling farther than almost any model could have imagined.
