Helena Antonaccio Bio
Helena Antonaccio is an American Playboy Bunny, glamour and nude model. She was born on March 21, 1949, in Morristown, New Jersey. Playboy named her its June 1969 Playmate at 20. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Antonaccio has natural breasts, hazel eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 36-24-34.
Helena Antonaccio’s Playboy story began with a rejection. She had travelled from New Jersey to New York City for a wig-modeling audition, carrying just enough previous face-modeling experience to feel optimistic. When the casting director turned her down for not being “sexy enough,” Antonaccio left disappointed and started walking through Manhattan. By chance, she found herself outside the Playboy Club.
Antonaccio had never given much thought to becoming a Bunny, but irritation proved stronger than shyness. She went inside, asked the Door Bunny what it took to qualify and was sent to the Bunny Mother for an interview. After trying on the costume, she was accepted for training as a Mocktail Bunny. What had begun as a failed modeling appointment ended with an entirely new job before she even returned home.
The transformation was particularly unlikely given the life she described back in Morristown. Antonaccio considered herself extremely shy and remembered spending much of her childhood absorbed in a private creative world, dressing dolls, experimenting with their hairstyles, drawing and writing little stories about horses and dogs. She still lived in the town where she had grown up and enjoyed its college atmosphere, but New York suddenly offered a very different kind of education.
She was still learning Playboy Club rituals—from properly arranging the Bunny cottontail to mastering the Bunny Dip—when photographer Pompeo Posar noticed her during Bunny training. Posar was photographing women at the Club when he took Antonaccio’s picture and asked whether she would be interested in posing for the magazine. Her answer required considerably less hesitation than the impulse that had first carried her through the Club doors.
Antonaccio’s route into Playboy has the neat comic timing of a story an editor might hesitate to invent: a young woman is rejected for lacking sex appeal, walks down the street in frustration and almost immediately enters the world that will make that judgment look rather foolish. She later remembered the episode with gratitude rather than resentment. Missing out on the wig campaign turned out to be the most fortunate rejection of her modeling career.
