Jenny McCarthy visited Today With Jenna & Friends, where she looked back on the job that launched her entire career, but left her parents “devastated.”
The Masked Singer judge revealed to Jenna Bush Hager and guest host Chloe Fineman that she secretly posed for Playboy when she was younger to help start her career in Hollywood.
“I come from a very strict Catholic family. My dad worked three jobs to put us through Catholic school, but I was $20,000 in debt from college and I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna get to Hollywood,’” she recounted on Today. “So, I went to a modeling agency they altered me down, and the Playboy building was right across the street. So I was like, ‘Do I go?’”
“Did you just walk into Playboy?” Fineman asked.
“Yeah I just walked in,” McCarthy responded. “I got very lucky.”
The John Tucker Must Die actress was told she would be Miss October, so she decided to send her parents “away” when the issue came out.
“I sent them on a cruise so they didn’t see it on the news but they came back they were devastated. It was horrible,” she recalled.
Bush Hager then pointed out that McCarthy had her sister tell their parents the news. “I actually wrote a letter, gave it to my sister to give it to them and I took off,” McCarthy said with a laugh.
By the time her parents “finally recovered” from the news, McCarthy was crowned Playmate of the Year, which earned her enough money to clear her family’s debts.
“I took that money, sat down and said, ‘I’m going to pay off all of your bills,’ and I paid off the rest of the mortgage, all their credit card bills,” she recalled. “We were so poor so it was a great thing to be able to do. So, to me, it was still 100% worth it.”
McCarthy has always been frank about her time as a Playboy bunny. She once told Andy Cohen all about the parties at the Playboy Mansion where she witnessed “so much sex going on with gross celebrities in the grotto areas.”
“There were only hot women and the ugliest dudes,” she said of the parties, adding, “They were really, really old. It was Viagra central.”
Today with Jenna & Friends airs on weekdays at 10/9c on NBC.
