Death noted: UNC grad Alice Denham, author and Playmate

Wonder how many other entries in the Southern Historical Collection catalog include the notation “unpublished photographs…. including a Playboy centerfold”….

Alice Denham was a 1949 UNC graduate, but Chapel Hill seems not to have provided her most vivid memories.

From her 2006 memoir, “Sleeping with Bad Boys: A 1956 Playboy Model’s Escapades with James Dean, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer and the famous writers of the 1950’s beat generation”:

“For my senior year, I cut my hair, worked three campus jobs, refused to go out with Beau, switched my major to English, drove to the woods with Beau every Sunday noon when I couldn’t hold out any longer, retaught myself to type in a week, made Phi Beta Kappa, got a scholarship to graduate school at University of Rochester and decided to be a writer if it killed me.”

 

One thought on “Death noted: UNC grad Alice Denham, author and Playmate”

  1. Lew,
    We’ll leave Alice Denham circa July 1956, tame as it may be by today’s standards, for viewing elsewhere.

    But we’ve got Alice as a UNC junior and senior. And there’s photographic proof that she cut her hair.

    1948 Yackety Yack photo (left page, 2nd row): http://go.unc.edu/e5S9X

    1949 Yackety Yack photo (left page, fifth row):
    http://go.unc.edu/Mo9x2

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