Neva Gilbert

[Fabrizio]

the Playmate for 07-1954

&

('Playmate Forever', 12-1979)

A popular pin-up and starlet from the mid-Fifties, Neva came to the pages of PB via the files of the Baumgarth Calendar Co.
"In those days, I was an aspiring actress", she said when she resurfaced in "Playmates Forever!" in 1979.
"I'd go on assignments with Marilyn Monroe. We did some calendar shots for a photographer named Tom Kelley. Some months later, I heard the pictures had appeared in a new magazine called PB, but I couldn't find a copy. I didn't see my centerfold until this year."

Mod note
Girl in fishnets pix determined to be Eileen Maxwell
So we copied and split 2 posts from this thread and moved one to Eileen's thread
RBK

[edison01se]

[Immy]

Neva among the first nighters at Bing Crosby's musical play in The Country Girl (1954).

http://www.filefactory.com/file/2lic...ountryGirl.avi

6 MB
640x480
0:29

[Mad_Hatter]

Neva's bio card.

[masque51]

From the Japanese Photo book "Playmates 312".

[kevinconder]

Intro 1954-07

[mameylopez]

Mod note
Post copied to Eileen Maxwell thread to split out one pic of Eileen.
Reloaded gallery and removed the Eileen pic
RBK

[bigbobnobody]

Miss Neva is now confirmed as the oldest living Playmate.

[cuerina]

I found this article in the web
She’s been a catalog model, cigarette girl, Vegas cocktail waitress, New York theater actress and bit part player in an Oscar-winning movie.
But it was one unremarkable photo session in the early 1950s that sealed Neva Gilbert’s claim to pop culture fame.
“I’m the oldest living Playboy Playmate,” she proudly tells people.
Why shouldn’t she boast a little? There she is, Miss July 1954, a beautiful, long-legged blonde posed alluringly across a tiger skin rug in an early centerfold from Hugh Hefner’s iconic men’s magazine.
And here she is, sipping a glass of wine in a Lake Worth restaurant, a friendly, frank-talking, 87-year-old who can’t believe her story could be interesting after so many years.
“I never dreamed it would amount to anything,” she said of her Playboy appearance. “It was just another photograph.”
Neva Gilbert’s life has been anything but ordinary. She’s been on the go since she got kicked out of convent school for smoking and ran away from home at age 14. Even in the straight-laced, uptight ’50s, she was an independent, liberated woman. She lived how she pleased and loved whom she wanted.
She’s had tough breaks, but the word she keeps using is lucky.
“I’ve done everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” she said. “I’ve had a ball. I’ve had the most wonderful life.”
Just one hitch: She never expected to wind up in Lake Worth, where she resides in a building for seniors on a fixed income. Money is tight. So she’s hoping publicity about her Playboy past will boost an online gallery sale of a small model sculpture she owns by her “last love,” the abstract artist Clement Meadmore.
After decades of living and working in New York, Gilbert misses the bustle and noise of city streets, and being able to walk around the corner to get groceries. She hasn’t quite adjusted to the slower pace of South Florida retirement.
And there’s one other thing she wasn’t expecting: She’s probably not the oldest living Playboy Playmate.
Neva Gilbert was born in New York in September 1929 — one month before the Wall Street crash. Her mother Hannah was a waitress and her father disappeared early. After her mother remarried a builder and tavern owner, they started a new family. Teenage Neva felt left out, unwanted.
So, in the ’40s, she found a tiny apartment in the city that she shared with a roommate for $10 a month.
“I went to work at Sears and Roebuck, telling them I was 21,” she recalled. “I’ve been lying about my age ever since.”
She met her only husband, fresh out of the Navy, at “the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway.” They married when she was 16, divorced a few years later, but she kept his last name.
Eventually, Gilbert made her way west, where her youthful looks were a natural for California photography studios and modeling agencies that provided fresh-faced images for the popular pinup girl industry. She modeled for catalogs and calendars, posing in bathing suits and cocktail dresses, wedding gowns and active wear.
Coming and going from jobs, she’d occasionally bump into Marilyn Monroe. Along with Monroe and others, Gilbert appeared in “Pinups,” a classic photography book of ’40s and ’50s Hollywood glamour by Bruno Bernard, who was known as “Bernard of Hollywood.”
“One of the most exciting new faces and figures to grace Hollywood’s Sunset Strip this or any other season is taffy blonde, powder blue-eyed Neva,” reads a caption on one sun-kissed magazine layout from the era.
In between modeling gigs, she worked in Las Vegas as a cocktail waitress. Gambler friends wouldn’t roll the dice without her. One night, she brought home $5,000 in tips.
She had fun on the side, posing for poolside and nightclub photos with visiting celebrities. She’d meet everybody from singers to mobsters, and dated actors Hugh O’Brian and Dan Dailey.
She described it all as “playing at show business” — placing second in a Miss Sea and Ski contest, lounging in a bubble bath at a Los Angeles trade show. On the side of the tub, a sign read: “Neva Gilbert Takes Her Softwater Bath Here!”
“All the men gathered around,” Gilbert said. “They wanted to see if I was naked. I wasn’t.”
Not that she had a problem with nudity. One day in the early ’50s, Hollywood photographer Tom Kelley — a proper professional who always worked with his wife — called her into his studio. There was an animal rug. Gilbert doffed her clothes, strategically placed her red-painted nails on a tiger’s head, stretched out her legs and gazed into the lens. She might have earned $20 an hour.
“I didn’t think it was dirty,” she said of the photos. “I felt they were in good taste. I thought nudes were lovely.”
Kelley’s images eventually made their way to the John Baumgarth Calendar Company in Chicago, where they might have ended up adorning a monthly marker on a gas jockey’s wall. But Gilbert’s picture was bought instead by a man who dreamed of starting an upscale gentleman’s journal that tweaked the era’s conformist tendencies. And if you weren’t interested in that, there would be plenty of pictures of naked women.
His name was Hugh Marston Hefner.
Playboy magazine was a success from its first issue in December 1953, with Kelley’s red velvet nude photo of Marilyn Monroe as “Sweetheart of the Month.” Controversial, too. Over the years, feminists have derided its objectification of women, especially Hefner’s creation of the centerfold “Playmate of the Month,” which began in January 1954.
Gilbert was Playmate No. 7, one of the first, but claiming the title of “oldest living Playboy Playmate” is trickier.
Little verifiable information is available about Playboy Playmates’ birth dates. According to birth dates listed online, Gilbert is the oldest living Playmate in the magazine’s inaugural class of 1954. But Playboy’s website and other Internet sites credit Miss August 1957, Dolores Donolon, as being alive at 90.
“You’re kidding,” Gilbert said when told she likely isn’t the oldest Playmate. “I’m surprised. How about that? I can’t have my claim to fame anymore.”
Not quite. She’s still, according to all searchable evidence, the second oldest living Playmate. Whatever the ranking, Playboy’s senior director of public relations, Teri Thomerson, wrote in an email to The Palm Beach Post that she wished Gilbert well on behalf of the magazine.
“Unfortunately I can’t provide you with any specific information as to why Neva Gilbert was selected to be a Playboy Playmate back in 1954 but I can tell you that Hugh Hefner’s fond memories of the pin-up art of his youth helped guide his instincts when choosing the Playmates for the magazine.As brand ambassadors, the Playmates will forever be a cherished part of the Playboy family and its legacy.”
Gilbert was blessed in one respect: She squeaked into the Playboy family while Hefner was still crafting his magazine’s vision. He was determined to find everyday women who embodied his Playmate philosophy of the (naked) girl next door.
In his 2008 biography, “Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream,” author Steven Watts said that meant Hefner soon discarded his early reliance on professional models shot by outside photographers. According to Wikipedia, Gilbert’s photo was the last one Hefner used that was purchased from the Baumgarth Calendar Co.
Amazingly, Gilbert said she never owned or saw a copy of her Playboy issue until decades later. People sometimes mentioned her appearance in a magazine, but she was used to being recognized from photographs and didn’t think anything of it.
When Gilbert was Miss July 1954, the magazine didn’t feature a Playmate fact sheet, listing turn-ons and turn-offs.
“I’ve had very few turn-offs,” she said.
Turn-ons?
She paused.
“A man that loves,” she said. “That would be nice. I wish I’d had a child, but that didn’t happen, unfortunately. A good man, I miss. But I’ve outlived them all.”

[Sonnet]

Hi-res centerfold scan (4,350 x 6,800 pixels - 7.61 MB)