From www.lvrj.com- Alicia Taylor likes to pose nude. On page 40 of the new Playboy, she is lying sideways on a bed, curled up next to an Investor’s Business Daily and a very happy pillow. If you go to her house, you will see, on the walls, more evidence of her in-the-buff artistry.
Taylor’s joy in nudity is, however, not even close to being her defining trait. She is a 37-year-old, self-made multimillionaire — married to her high school sweetheart — and she runs a mortgage company she founded in Las Vegas, after she ran one of the most profitable Wells Fargo financial divisions in America.
On Easter Sunday, Taylor — a tall runner who rarely wears makeup — drove to her mom and dad’s house to share her Playboy photo with her dad, a once-licensed Baptist minister. She was “smiling up a storm,” her mother says.
“I just thought it was so funny,” Alicia says.
Her dad rolled his eyes. But he was supportive.
“Believe me, I’m not excited about seeing my daughter in the nude,” Alvin Taylor says. “I’m not a prude, either. But I don’t think I’ll be showing anyone the issue.”
Taylor is so full of life, smart and charismatic, with her raspy voice and great laugh, she’s in the running to be cast in “The Real Housewives of Las Vegas.”
She used to think she’d be a good fit for Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice,” but she heard the winner pockets $250,000 to work for Trump.
“I couldn’t maintain myself on that,” she says. (She has a shoe fetish, she likes muscle cars, and she and her husband vacation abroad.)
If you run into Taylor around town, be prepared to feel inspired, or to feel you may never own her level of infectious, gabby happiness or success.
“She will make you feel like that because she has so many things going at once,” says Winnetta Cooper, a best friend since childhood.
On a Thursday, I amble into Taylor’s office at Mortgage Solutions. A copy of Playboy is on a desk. A real estate agent who works for her, Paul McCormick, leafs to page 40, where his boss stretches out in the “Women of Wall Street” section, next to a pun about her “assets.”
“Very tasteful, very beautiful,” McCormick says, but he notices Taylor, who is black, looks lighter-skinned than usual in Playboy.
“What happened to my black African queen?” he jokes. She laughs.
“They ran me through a filter,” she says. “The photographer said, ‘You’ve got tan lines!’ I said, ‘Yeah, the sun actually burns us, too.'”
Taylor has read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” 14 or 15 times. She re-reads it whenever she feels she is losing patience with lenders.
Her work approach: “I want you to discover for yourself that what I’m trying to say is right,” she says. “Nobody wants to be force-fed ‘right.'” Her life approach is not, “You have to live a little,” but rather, “You have to live A LOT.”
Alicia strives to make every day an opportunity for joy and success. She’s always been like this. In the fifth grade, Taylor made biscuits, punched holes through their middles and sold them as doughnuts.
At 16, she walked into a McDonald’s with a résumé.
She studied jazz dance but gave it up to focus on playing as a shooting guard on the high school basketball team.
At Rancho High School, she was voted homecoming queen. She wanted to be class president but wasn’t sure she could win.
Her dad — a self-employed insurance salesman, and hotel staffer — had been involved in local Democratic politics, so he told her, if she did exactly what he advised, she would win.
So she walked up to school seniors, looked them in the eyes, extended a hand and said, “I’m Alicia Taylor, and I need your help to be senior class president. Will you help me?”
She won in a landslide.
“She’s a consummate professional,” her dad says. “She knows her product, she knows people, she knows when to push the button, she knows what she’s doing. And she speaks with authority.
“The Bible says something about Jesus,” he says. “He didn’t just speak. He spoke as someone who knew what he was talking about. And when you see someone like that, you stand up and take notice.
“That’s how she does it. She’s been taught to speak with authority and to know what she speaks.”
Alicia’s mother, Levette Taylor, says Alicia got her business acumen from her dad, and her beauty and emotions from her mom.
“My daughter knows no boundaries. She’ll do anything she thinks she can,” the mother says. “If she wasn’t my child, I’d say, ‘Whose child is that?’ … She’s my heart. She’s just my heart.”
Alicia’s father is a college-educated man who grew up with books. Alvin insisted that his kids, and kids who visited them, get a library card. He led study groups at home.
“If you were gonna come to my house, you HAD to have a library card,” Taylor says. When kids said they were coming over, “I would say, ‘Bring your books.'”
“The first time I went to her house, it was like ‘The Cosby Show,'” Alicia’s husband, Darwin Evans, says. “It looked scripted, all these people, and all these (situations). And I’m sittin’ there on the couch going, ‘Is this for real?'”
Alvin would wake Alicia on Saturday mornings with, “The early bird gets the worm.”
“I was like, ‘I’m 8! What kind of productivity am I gonna get done at 8?'” Alicia says.
Alvin taught his kids a big word every day. One day, a very young Alicia asked Alvin if he would “subsidize” her candy expenses.
“I call her ‘Al Taylor with a dress on,'” Al Taylor says.
Her mom never understood why Alicia was a show off, but she was.
“When she was a little girl, she was always posing,” her mother says. “I tell her we don’t have big butts, we don’t have big legs. But I said, ‘Honey, you have to accentuate what you have. … Go with the face and the boobs.'” But mostly, the brains.
Sadly, the family faced great tragedy in 2003. Alicia’s older brother, Alvin Jr., a Marine, was shot to death downtown. The killer wasn’t caught. Alicia calls a detective for updates. It has been hard on the incredibly close family. But they soldier on.
Levette Taylor says her daughter is more giving than she’ll let on — to charities, friends and family.
Alicia gave her younger brother, Robert “Twix,” seed money to start two barbershops named Fade ‘Em All.
Her husband was in law enforcement for years. But with Alicia’s nudging, he opened the Junk Queen a few years ago. His office is two doors down from hers. He and his brother clean up residential and construction sites, taking away desks, tires and busted hot tubs.
“How are you gonna get rid of a Jacuzzi? Here we are to save the day!” Evans says.
“It’s cliché,” Alicia says, “but he’s my best friend.”
When her brother died, she called Darwin first. When she wins little victories, or suffers little defeats, he’s the first person she turns to. They wear matching phone earpieces. When they sit, she slaps his knee when she guffaws.
As a boxing fan, she earned the privilege to be a Golden Gloves judge. She wishes she could be a Vegas boxing correspondent for “The Best Damn Sports Show.”
Her husband says he’d support her, as usual. He was excited about her Playboy shoot, yet relieved when he saw the respectful photos.
There is one potential confusion from the Playboy shoot. People tell her there’s an Alicia Taylor who makes adult films. Typically, Taylor turns this into a positive.
“There’s some Alicia Taylor porn star somewhere. I don’t know what she looks like,” she says. “But if that makes people call my office, and they qualify for a loan, we’ll take it.”
Her confidence brims.
“If they call, I got ’em.”