Miami- She was blond. She was beautiful. And in the 1970s, Carol Ann Marie Vitale was frequently naked in Playboy magazine.
The August 1972 cover girl and Miss July 1974 — later a Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie designer and host of a long-running, eponymous cable talk show — died at her Aventura condo on July 23.
Vitale was 61 and had been suffering from lupus and scleroderma for almost a decade, said Marlie Rosen, her personal assistant.
Still, Vitale was taking it all off for Hugh Hefner as late as 1997. That year, she appeared in a spread called Playmate Revisited: Carol Vitale, shot by Miami Shores photographer Bunny Yeager.
”Young men these days are so hot for older women, and I like men of all ages,” the then-50-year-old Vitale declared. “Just treat me like gold, and you’ll never be sorry.”
At her last shoot in 1998, for Yeager’s Glamour Girls Then and Now magazine, ”She was very much a perfectionist about how she posed and what she wore,” Yeager said. She brought her own stylist and ”looked just as good” as her younger self.
Born into a blue-collar, Elizabeth, N.J., Catholic family with seven kids, Vitale studied ballet and worked as a Sears credit investigator.
Married briefly after high school, she was soon the single mother of a daughter, dancing on a local TV show “in miniskirts and boots, in cages.”
Vitale was still a teen when she came to South Florida with her boyfriend, a hairstylist. She danced, modeled, tended bar, won Miss Gulfstream and made the 1969 Miss Florida-World finals before joining the Miami Playboy Club ”hutch” at 21.
She sported the ears and fluffy tail for five years and, as she once wrote, “cherished every moment of it. I worked diligently and considered myself to be a star student. I performed every task that was delegated to me, including running the coat check, counting inventory and working in the Playmate bar, showroom and lounge area.
“Every job was executed with pride. . . . I would also later appear in several of the Best Bunnies of the Year features in Playboy.”
She won Miami Bunny of the Year in 1972, which earned her the magazine cover. She’s in a white bikini, encircled by a red, rabbit-shaped swim tube, in a hotel pool.
Though she’d have to wait another two years for the coveted Playmate title, Vitale appeared often in ”What kind of man reads Playboy?” ads.
Finally a centerfold in ’74, she posed in a hammock, wearing only sunglasses. Her vitals at the time: five-foot-six, 115 pounds, 37-22-35.
`GOD’S GIFT’
”She had such a gorgeous body, and she thought it was God’s gift,” said close friend and executor Anna Abers, aka actress Anna Marlowe.
Her layouts “were always in good taste. In those years, it was art; today it’s pornography.”
The exposure, as it were, led Vitale into a life of fast-paced glamour with a mob-connected admirer who bestowed jewelry, furs and a Corvette.
When that ended, she toured with the Ray Coussins Revue, which opened for big-name comics like Henny Youngman, Red Buttons and David Brenner.
In 1978 and ’79, Vitale hosted Disco Magic, a Miami-based television series, and dated Miami Dolphins defensive tackle Manny Fernandez.
Then she moved to California, where she got bit parts in minor Hollywood films. But she never sought screen stardom, Abers said.
In 1989, she launched the Carol Vitale Show on public-access cable.
”She loved it,” Abers said. ”Without preparation or cue cards, she’d be asking the most intelligent questions.” While mostly featuring celebrities like Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Mary Hart and Hefner — as well as Playmates and Bunnies — the show also booked businessmen, artists and doctors.
Dedicated to finding a cure for lupus, Vitale raised money for City of Hope, the Los Angeles-area research hospital, and was named the Miami chapter’s Woman of the Year in 1995.
In 2000, too sick to continue, she finally pulled the plug on her show. It still airs in syndication nationally.
Her friend also had osteoporosis, Abers said, “and it devastated her body and her spirit. She was bedridden most of the time and in great pain.”
UNABLE TO ADJUST
Emotionally, she couldn’t adust, Abers said.
“She couldn’t live without having fun.”
Carol Vitale is survived by a daughter, Colleen, of California; father John Vitale and stepmother Connie Vitale of New Jersey; and several step-brothers and step-sisters.
She will be buried Saturday at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, near Los Angeles, where she also had a home.