Crystal Smith Bio
Crystal Smith is an American Playboy Bunny, actress, glamour and nude model. She was born on August 2, 1951, in Kansas City, Missouri. Playboy named her its September 1971 Playmate at 20. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Smith has natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 37-22-35.
Crystal Smith was already thinking beyond the spotlight while studying radio and television broadcasting at Kansas State University. Her courses covered lighting, programming and audiovisual production, subjects she believed would complement rather than replace her ambitions as a performer. Smith had a practical view of show business: dancing alone was no longer enough, she argued, and performers increasingly needed to understand singing, music and the technical machinery behind television as well.
She knew the stage side firsthand. Two summers earlier, Smith had worked as a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall, and while attending college she taught dance to children at a U.S. Army Special Services Youth Activities Center near Manhattan, Kansas. She also taught classes back in Kansas City, using the income to help cover tuition. Add work as a Playboy Bunny to the schedule, and her student years became a juggling act of classes, rehearsals, teaching and long drives between jobs. Smith insisted she preferred it that way; she was happiest when several things were happening at once.
After college, that appetite for performance took her toward Los Angeles and television. Smith also accumulated a handful of film credits, including a memorably uninhibited appearance as a motel clerk in the 1984 ski comedy Hot Dog... The Movie. It was a very different sort of screen work from the television career she had imagined in Kansas, but another indication that she was willing to move between different corners of entertainment.
Television eventually brought Smith remarkably close to the future she had once described for herself. She spent eight years as an anchor on Playboy Channel’s Sexcetera, moving from the modeling side of Playboy into presenting and entertainment journalism. The student who had deliberately studied how television worked behind the camera had become a regular presence in front of one.
Smith later settled in Las Vegas and, with her husband, operated a video production company. That progression gives her early ambitions unusual continuity: Rockette, dance teacher, broadcasting student, Playboy model, actress, television anchor and eventually producer. She had said in college that a performer could no longer afford to be a “uni-talent.” Her own career ended up making the point rather neatly.
