Karen was candid as always in her March 1981 interview in Tucson, Arizona with the Gannett News Service (as published in the Elmira (New York) Star-Gazette). So we’ve finally learned exactly how her father broke the news to her that he had sent her pictures to PB, and how she learned that PB had “accepted” her—an understatement if there ever was one. Family photos sufficed! Karen was at dinner at her father’s house, which confirms our hunch that her parents were divorced. And the article spells out exactly one of the sources of tension between her and her father—his ambition (since she was twelve) that she enter “show business,” which ran up against her desire to teach gymnastics to children, which she was already doing at the time. I hate to think of what he saw as a dad when Karen turned twelve (I’m hoping it was her gift for gymnastics), but I think we all have a good idea of what else he might have seen in Karen, because we as twelve-year old boys would have seen it too. A one of a kind beauty.
That’s a heavy burden to place on a daughter, particularly from a father who may have been most at fault in her parents’ divorce.
Her dad put the prospect to her jokingly in material terms. He asked, would she “like to make $10,000?” She asked how, and he told her how. It’s hard to know how she felt at that moment (she later said she “didn’t feel good” about it), but she said to her father without missing a beat, “You’ve got to be kidding, those girls are 10s.” But Karen must have realized by age nineteen that she was a ten—on an exponential scale (yes, a ten to the tenth power!). And she must have thought about show business, not only because of her father’s urgings and his example as a performer, but because of her interest in acrobatics and the fact that she seems to have discovered already that college (despite her intelligence) was not for her. And the money must have been tempting to an underemployed young woman. So, according to the reporter, “she decided to go through with the Playmate role to find out whether she could stand to be in show business.” It turned out to be a baptism by fire.
As we know from her later interviews, she agonized over her decision, and sought out friends and especially her mother and sister for their opinions—maybe because she trusted them more than she trusted her father. And although I can’t be sure, her relationship with her father might have been more complicated than we think. She was a teetotaler, and she told everyone that it had to do with her values and her concern for her body as an athlete. But she would have said the same thing and have acted the same way if drugs or alcohol had destroyed her parent’s marriage and she wanted no part of them. No doubt she loved her father and wanted to please him—nearly all of us feel that way about our fathers—but as we’ve discussed before, his behavior was
way unusual, and probably in retrospect a sign not only of a show business dad, but of a dysfunctional adult who didn’t quite know how to be a father to a beautiful, gifted daughter he had disappointed. Thank goodness Karen was strong beyond her years, as children of divorce often are, and that her rough initial months as a PM took her back to her own dreams and her own sense of herself. By August 1981 she had righted the ship, and she declared in an interview that she was an “athlete”—she didn’t say model or pin-up or actress. She knew in her heart what she wanted to do. And bless her heart, she did it, as a gymnastics teacher, acrobat, and stunt woman. But the more we learn about why Karen became a PM, the worse I feel about it. If her friends or boyfriend had sent in her pictures, and ambition and a desire for stardom had led her to volunteer, that would have been one thing. Ambition and a short-lived desire for stardom probably played a role. And thank goodness Karen didn’t follow a tragic path to being a PM as some young women did. She wasn’t a lost soul from a broken family, and she didn’t let people take advantage of her. But Karen’s may have been the most unlikely path to PM ever.