Sally Sheffield Bio
Sally Sheffield is an American musician, composer, glamour and nude model. She was born on June 17, 1941, in New York City, New York. Playboy named her its May 1969 Playmate at 27. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Sheffield has natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-24-35.
Sally Sheffield brought an unusually academic résumé to Playboy. After earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Wellesley College, where she also studied music, she continued into graduate work in musicology at the New England Conservatory of Music and completed a teaching fellowship in English literature. She played piano seriously and also picked up guitar and autoharp for folk music, while describing books as one of the constants of her private life. Her favorites ranged from The Great Gatsby and Lord Jim to Ethan Frome and The Wizard of Oz.
That education was not confined to classrooms. In 1965 and 1966, Sheffield appeared on and wrote music for the NBC children’s program The First Look, putting her musical training to practical use on television. She also spoke French and Hebrew and spent several months living on an Israeli kibbutz, where her work included tending orchards and, rather memorably, artificially inseminating hens. For someone who might eventually have taught music history, it was a decidedly hands-on detour.
Photographer Pompeo Posar shot her Playboy centerfold and later remembered Sheffield as “an interesting lady, so smart.” The session also carried a detail readers would not have known at the time: she was reportedly about two months pregnant when the photographs were made. Sheffield herself was characteristically unsentimental about the decision to pose, joking that Playboy offered a financially rewarding outlet for her exhibitionist side while also giving her ego a welcome boost.
Her ambitions remained broader than modeling. Sheffield talked about returning to piano lessons, learning another language and perhaps eventually teaching music history. Travel still appealed as well, particularly another trip to Israel—next time, she joked, preferably as a camera-carrying tourist rather than a kibbutz worker. Her younger sister, Anita Sheffield, also entered nude modeling, giving the family its own small connection to the glamour world.
What distinguishes Sheffield in the Playboy archive is how naturally those different pieces coexist. Psychology, musicology, television, languages, literature, travel and nude modeling all belonged to the same life without any need to force them into a single identity. Posar’s description may be the simplest summary: the photographs introduced a Playmate, but the woman in front of his camera had considerably more going on than the pictures alone could show.
