Julie Clarke

About Julie Clarke

Julie Anne Clarke was Playboy’s Miss March 1991, and she is the reason people still mix up that spring. Christina Leardini was the Playmate inside the April issue; Clarke was the one on the cover, the short tanned Florida girl in the diner outfit, sometimes remembered with whipped cream on her. She was born Julie Anne Clarke on August 11, 1971, in Tucson, and she was nineteen when the magazine came out.

Playboy listed her at 5'5", 34-22-32 and 110 pounds: blonde, brown eyes, a real chest, and almost no waist. She is not the tall hourglass type. She is a compact hardbody, all tan and abs and small natural breasts, the kind of frame you get if you actually do what she told the magazine she did — stairs, free weights, and hundreds of sit-ups. That is what fans still argue about in the comments, along with the bush and that April cover. For a page like this, those pictures are the point. She looks nineteen, fit, and unenhanced, and Freytag was close enough to the skin that you can tell.
She did not come out of a Los Angeles agency. She was an only child, raised around St. Simons Island, Georgia, and she grew up on horses, doing hunter-jumper shows before most of her classmates had a license. After her parents divorced she moved to Naples, Florida with her mother at sixteen, joined the high school diving team, and spent the rest of her time on the beach or on boats. Playboy’s own writeup called her father a globe-trotting FBI language specialist who mailed her bikinis from Brazil. Seven months before the issue hit, she was still answering phones at a health club. Then came a swimwear pageant in Clearwater and a first-runner-up finish at the Venus Swimwear Model Search nationals. A photographer there asked if she wanted to do Playboy. She has said you would not have had to ask twice. The pictures went to Arny Freytag, she flew to Los Angeles for a test, and not long after that she was back at the Mansion to shoot the real thing.

Freytag built her an old diner: plaid, pearls, saddle shoes, and an ice cream sundae that melted under the lights. That retro-teen styling is why the set still gets passed around with “dream teens” captions. Around the Mansion she got lumped in with the other Playmates who had barely left high school — Wendy Kaye, Cady Cantrell, Tanya Beyer, Tiffany Sloan, Echo Johnson, Jennifer LeRoy — the pack collectors later nicknamed after the 1992 Olympic Dream Team. That nickname is Mansion gossip and forum memory, not a title Playboy printed on a check. The gossip itself is pretty consistent. They were young, they treated the place like a senior trip, they grated on some of the older Playmates, and they went over fine with the men who came through. Clarke was hanging around the grotto with Renée Tenison and talking about hitting L.A. clubs, and she still sounded like Naples. Friends called her Jules. She wore out dance partners on the sand floor at Skipper’s in Tampa. After the centerfold she kept taking Venus jobs with Christina Leardini and Cheryl Bachman. “Maybe I’ll settle down when I’m thirty,” she told Playboy, “but not now.”

The after-work was the usual PMOM package: the Video Centerfold, Playmate Private Pleasures, Wet & Wild IV, calendars, specials. She had a small part as Crystal in the 1992 comedy Can It Be Love, and she shot commercials for Disney World, a Toyota Celica, and Ford Splash trucks. Then she got off the circuit. In the mid-90s she put modeling down and worked as a paralegal for litigation attorneys. There was also a stretch assisting a sushi chef, ballroom dancing, and the same two-hour gym habit. She came back to modeling around 2004 and put up her own website, which is still the cleanest first-person version of how the pageant turned into a Freytag shoot. Later notes put her around Fort Myers. There was no second Playboy career and no reality-show afterlife.

On Reddit she is a specific taste rather than a household name: that tight 1991 cover, the tan, the natural chest, the bush, the whipped-cream shot. She is not Pamela Anderson, and she is not one of the tragic Mansion stories. She had a short, very sharp peak and then a regular life.

Playboy appearances
Magazine

Playboy (US), March 1991 — Playmate of the Month; photographs by Arny Freytag
Playboy (US), April 1991 — cover (Playmate of that issue is Christina Leardini)
International reprints of the monthly pictorial include Mexico (March 1991), Japan (May 1991), Australia (June 1991), Brazil (October 1991), Italy and Argentina (November 1991)

Video

Playboy Video Centerfold: Julie Clarke (1991)
Playboy Video Playmate Calendar 1992
Playboy: Playmate Private Pleasures (1992)
Playboy: Wet & Wild IV (1992)
Later March-birthday / Playmate Profile compilation tapes (including a 1997 profile collection)
Playboy: Naturals (1998)

Digital

Playboy Plus: March 1991 pictorial, test shots, and later Daily Double / Playmate Review 1991 reissues of the Freytag shoot