"Remembering Anna" in Playboy

(Noticiascadadía).- Late in 1991 Playboy's Photography Department received a package from Texas: photos of a girl named Vickie Lynn Smith. She wanted to be a Playmate. The magazine's photographers and editors, who get about 1,000 such submissions a year, were impressed enough to fly her to Los Angeles for a test shoot.

ARNY FREYTAG, Playboy Senior Contributing Photographer: I rejected her Playmate test. She had a great face, but she was overweight. I said she should lose a few pounds and maybe we'd test her again.

MARILYN GRABOWSKI, Playboy West Coast Photo Editor: And I said, "No way! She's so pretty." You couldn't help being mesmerized.

FREYTAG: Marilyn said, "This girl has got to be a Playmate."

GRABOWSKI: She was still Vickie then. She seemed shy, a sweet girl who wasn't comfortable posing for nude photos. The moment we stopped snapping pictures, she'd grab a robe and cover up. As it turned out, she'd been a stripper back in Texas. So was that shyness a persona of hers? Was she faking it?

ALEXIS VOGEL, makeup artist: The photographers didn't want to deal with her. They had beautiful girls going through there every day for Playmate tests, and this one was heavy. It would be hard work to drape her just right, hide the weight and get the perfect angle.

GRABOWSKI: She weighed 160 pounds. A tall girl, but still----

VOGEL: Still she had that incredible face. And being an exotic dancer helped her. She could really turn it on when she wanted to.

GARY COLE, Playboy Photography Director: Vickie was pretty unpolished. I met her at our Santa Monica studio, and the first thing she said was "I'm glad to be anywhere that isn't Texas." When we saw her pictures, we saw something special. It's hard to say what makes a person photogenic. The stock answer is great bone structure, good skin, big eyes. She had all that plus something undefinable, a sort of camera charisma you can't teach. As I was picking pictures for this month's tribute to her, I went through a stack of black-and-white contact sheets, 36 exposures each, and couldn't find one bad expression. She never blinked. She never looked goofy like the rest of us. That made it easy to edit her photos, because they all looked good. But at the same time it made it very hard to edit her photos, because you couldn't run them all.

After an attention-grabbing debut as cover girl of the March 1992 Playboy, she made the Centerfold two months later. Signing her Data Sheet as Vickie Smith and claiming to weigh 140 pounds, Miss May listed a bold ambition: "I want to be the new Marilyn Monroe."