Carol Vitale Bio
Carol Vitale was an American Playboy Bunny, fashion designer, television personality, radio host, glamour and nude model. She was born Carol Ann Marie Vitale on November 14, 1946, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Playboy named her its July 1974 Playmate at 27. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Vitale had natural breasts, brown eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 37-22-35.
Her route into Playboy’s pages began behind the scenes at the Miami Playboy Club, where work as a Bunny led to three separate pictorial appearances and ultimately the cover of the August 1972 issue—an early milestone that preceded her later Playmate debut. That sequence gave her a steady magazine presence rather than a single flash of publicity, and it familiarized readers with the poised, sunlit style she favored in front of the camera.
The centerpiece of her magazine work was a centerfold photographed by David Chan, a session its notes describe as emphasizing a warm smile and an easy, all-American polish. Those images traveled beyond the U.S., appearing in European editions of the magazine—France, Germany and Italy—so that Vitale’s photograph circulated to readers who might never have seen the domestic run.
Outside the studio she moved into broadcasting. By the early 1980s she was learning the ropes at Los Angeles’s KIIS-FM and eventually fronted her own program, The Carol Vitale Show, where she traded poses for conversation and cultivated a presence on the airwaves as a radio talk personality rather than simply a photographed face.
Design work rounded another chapter of her public life: she applied an eye for lingerie and fit to collections created for Frederick’s of Hollywood, translating magazine sensibility into garments. Vitale later passed away, but the record that remains is of a career that crossed pages, radio dials and retail racks—an example of a model from the magazine’s heyday who found a range of outlets for the same instincts that first put her in front of the camera.
