The photograph introduced America to a beautiful young woman named Lari Laine.
There was only one problem.
Lari Laine did not truly exist.
Behind that glamorous name was the daughter of a prominent California attorney—a young woman whose sudden appearance in one of America’s most controversial magazines could have disrupted her father’s political ambitions before they had fully begun.
So she concealed her identity.
Follow @allchronologyIt was a fitting beginning for a career shaped by reinvention, Hollywood glamour and the carefully guarded secrets behind a perfect public image.
Born in Brentwood, California, in 1937, she grew up close enough to the entertainment industry to understand both its attraction and its risks. Her mother, Alice Polk Kegley, had reportedly performed as a Ziegfeld Girl, connecting the family to an earlier age of theatrical spectacle.
Her father, Carl S. Kegley, occupied a very different world.
He was a criminal-trial attorney who had pursued political office. His daughter’s decision to pose for Playboy therefore created a delicate family problem. According to accounts of her life, she used the name Lari Laine because she did not want the appearance to interfere with her father’s political future.
In May 1958, the pseudonym entered popular culture.
The young woman became Playboy’s Playmate of the Month, photographed by Ron Vogel. Readers saw the polished image of a confident California beauty, unaware that both her identity and the family story behind it had been deliberately concealed.
But she was not interested in remaining only a magazine photograph.
Before moving deeper into entertainment, she studied journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. That detail offered an intriguing contrast: the woman being photographed and written about had once been preparing to understand how stories themselves were constructed.
Hollywood soon began constructing a story around her.
She appeared on Groucho Marx’s popular television program You Bet Your Life, where she was introduced under a slightly altered version of her stage identity. She then moved into acting, appearing in crime dramas and television productions during an era when glamorous young women were frequently given mysterious secretaries, beauty queens and dangerous romantic interests to play.
Her early film credits included Arson for Hire, in which she played a secretary named Cindy, and The Murder Men. Both appearances were credited under the identity she had created at the beginning of her career.
Follow @allchronologyEventually, however, Lari Laine disappeared.
In her place emerged Corinne Cole.
The name changed, but the doors continued opening. She appeared in television programs including Bachelor Father, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Hazel, The F.B.I. and Ironside.
She also entered one of the strangest and most colorful television worlds of the 1960s.
In an episode of The Monkees, she played Queenie, becoming part of the wildly popular comedy series built around the manufactured pop group that unexpectedly became a genuine musical sensation.
Her film career placed her beside several recognizable stars.
In Murderers’ Row, the second of the Dean Martin spy comedies featuring secret agent Matt Helm, she played a character provocatively called Miss January. The role cleverly echoed the glamorous calendar-and-magazine image that had first introduced her to the public.
She also appeared in The Swinger, starring Ann-Margret as a journalist attempting to convince a men’s magazine that she is far more sexually adventurous than she truly is.
The premise must have carried an unusual irony for the actress.
Years earlier, she had studied journalism while hiding behind an invented name for a real men’s-magazine appearance. Now she was acting in a comedy about a journalist manufacturing a provocative identity to advance her career.
Her work continued in films such as Who’s Minding the Mint? and Blake Edwards’ celebrated comedy The Party, starring Peter Sellers. Although she never became the central star of those productions, she moved through an extraordinary period of Hollywood history, appearing beside performers and filmmakers whose work would remain famous for generations.
Her private life connected her even more deeply to the entertainment world.
In the late 1960s, she married Jack Entratter, the influential Las Vegas casino executive associated with the Sands Hotel. Entratter had helped shape the golden age of Vegas entertainment, when the city’s casinos drew figures such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and other members of the Rat Pack.
The marriage brought her into a world where Hollywood, organized glamour and casino power frequently occupied the same room.
Their relationship eventually ended.
She later married Roger Heffron, with whom she had a child, but that marriage also concluded in divorce. In 1990, she married filmmaker George Sidney, the director behind major Hollywood musicals and comedies.
The connection contained a remarkable personal twist: Sidney had directed The Swinger, one of the films in which she had appeared decades earlier. They remained married until his death in 2002.
By then, the woman once introduced through a carefully protected pseudonym had lived several distinct public lives.
She had been a journalism student, a magazine mystery, a Hollywood actress, the wife of a Las Vegas power broker and later the spouse of an influential film director. She had moved through television comedies, crime dramas, spy spoofs and the glittering social circles surrounding mid-century entertainment.
Yet the secret at the beginning of her story remains its most captivating detail.
Follow @allchronologyThe name created to protect her family did not disappear completely. It survives in vintage photographs, old film credits and the memories of viewers fascinated by Hollywood’s forgotten faces.
The mysterious May 1958 Playmate known as Lari Laine—the woman who later acted in Murderers’ Row, The Party and The Monkees—was Corinne Cole.
