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In 1992, Jenny McCarthy was scrambling
money to pay for her second year of nursing studies at Southern Illinois
University. She made a decision to quit school and pursue her modeling
career, but this led to disappointment because people were telling her
she was too curvy. Living in Chicago, she decided to personally deliver
her pictures to the Playboy office.
The editors agreed to pay Jenny $20,000 to
pose as Miss October 1993. In the months following her contract, Jenny
won the Playmate of the Year title and $100,000 in cash and prizes. She
left her hometown of Chicago in search of stardom, and landed in Los
Angeles.
She had a difficult time finding work in
Hollywood, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, which at
the time was Jenny's live-in boyfriend and manager. She finally got an
interview at MTV and landed a co-hosting position on the network. She
was an immediate success, and not only was she telegenic, but she
handled hungry contestants with incurring (or committing) bodily harm.
Jenny McCarthy received permission to
reformat the show to the format that best suited her talents. She became
a full-fledged VJ getting paid an impressive $500,000 for the year.
Jenny decided to leave Singled Out and focus her efforts on creating a
new MTV sketch-variety series, The Jenny McCarthy Show. Her description
of the show was, "Kind of like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on
Acid." She developed a sitcom for NBC, in which she became the
assistant of a Hollywood movie star, helping him with his mansion.
Playboy detected this success; they now
wanted to further their relationship with McCarthy. They offered her
$500,000 for more of her nude pictures. She declined the offer, saying
it wasn't the path she wanted to take. Play.boy settled for re-run
pictures of her for upcoming issues.
Although she also declined proposals from
Fox and the WB, McCarthy was nonetheless expanding beyond teen-oriented
cable channels and gentlemen's magazines. She accepted the role of a
blonde nurse in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995) and
later, portrayed her first substantial screen character as a neurotic
movie star in The Stupids (1996), opposite Tom Arnold.
She later appeared on the movie Basketball
by the creators of the funny cartoon South Park. She was recently
featured in the sequel Scream 3, which proves that she has exceeded the
advice that her mother gave her years ago: "Be like Vanna
White."
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