Miki Garcia Bio
Miki Garcia is an American actress, glamour and nude model. She was born on February 17, 1947, in Kingman, Arizona. Playboy named her its January 1973 Playmate at 25. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Garcia has natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 38-22-36.
Long before Miki Garcia became part of Playboy’s inner workings, she had already accumulated an unusually eclectic set of public-facing roles. Because her father served in the U.S. Air Force, she grew up in places ranging from Japan and Germany to Panama, Hawaii and several American states before the family settled in California. She later attended Balboa College in Panama, then entered the pageant and promotional world back in California.
Garcia worked as assistant director and emcee of the Miss California Bikini Pageant at the California State Fair while also competing as Miss Sacramento in the Miss California World pageant. Television brought another distinctive credit: for three years she appeared as “Miss Wrestling” on Sacramento’s Big Time Wrestling. It was an appropriately colorful prelude to a career that would eventually move well beyond posing for photographs.
Her association with Playboy lasted roughly a decade and became far more substantial than a single pictorial. Garcia rose within the company to the position of vice president, giving her a rare perspective from both sides of the Playboy enterprise—as a woman who had appeared in the magazine and as an executive working behind the scenes. Photographer Mario Casilli shot her centerfold, and in December 1979 she returned to the magazine for the retrospective pictorial “Playmates Forever!”
Garcia made one brief excursion into film acting with a small role in the exploitation feature Stacey, but the more consequential chapter came after her years at Playboy. In 1985, she and former Playboy Bunny Brenda MacKillop testified before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. The appearance contributed to a long rupture between Garcia and Hugh Hefner, a disagreement that, according to later accounts, was not resolved for roughly a decade. It remains an unusual turn in Playboy history: a former Playmate and company executive later becoming a public critic of the organization she had once helped represent.
In later years, Garcia built another career in California real estate, working as an agent for Prudential California Realty in El Dorado Hills. She also wrote an advice column, “Ask Miki,” for several publications. Her career is unusually difficult to reduce to the familiar Playmate narrative—pageant contestant, television personality, Playboy executive, actress, critic, real-estate professional and columnist all belong to the same story.
