Most people know Vanna White as the woman who has stood next to a puzzle board in a designer gown for the better part of forty years. She smiles. She claps. She reveals letters. She has been doing this since 1982, which means there are adults in their thirties who have never known a version of Wheel of Fortune that didn’t have her in it. But before she was America’s favorite letter-turner, she was a broke young woman in Los Angeles trying to figure out how to pay rent. We know what that means – nude photos!
Before Wheel of Fortune, before the fame and the gowns and the Hollywood Walk of Fame star, Vanna needed money. She was a young actress in Los Angeles with a thin resume and bills to pay, and she made the same calculation that a lot of young women in similar situations have made: she posed for a lingerie shoot. The photos were on the racier side of tasteful, see-through lingerie, nothing overly explicit. But they were the kind of images that, if you were planning a long career as a family friendly television personality, you’d probably prefer stayed buried.
In 1987, five years into her run on Wheel of Fortune (by which point she was one of the most famous women in the country) Hugh Hefner purchased the images and published them in Playboy. Vanna had no legal recourse; the photos had been sold legitimately and the rights belonged to whoever Hefner bought them from. She found out it was happening and couldn’t stop it.
The reaction was about what you’d expect, the photos weren’t explicit. By the standards of 1987, her nude pictures weren’t even particularly shocking. Vanna herself handled the situation with a composure that probably did more for her image than any publicist’s strategy could have. She acknowledged it, explained the circumstances, didn’t fall apart publicly, and kept showing up to work. Her autobiography, Vanna Speaks!, came out that same year and became a bestseller regardless.
There’s a version of this story where the Playboy photos end Vanna White’s career. That’s not the version that happened. What happened instead is that she outlasted the controversy, outlasted Pat Sajak, and outlasted several network executives who probably assumed she was replaceable.
Some people are harder to knock down than they look. Vanna White is one of them.
Born Vanna Marie Rosich on February 18, 1957, in Conway, South Carolina, she grew up in North Myrtle Beach, was raised largely by her mother and stepfather Herbert White, and left for Atlanta after high school to study fashion design. By the late seventies she had decided Los Angeles was the logical next step for someone with her looks and ambition. The early years in Hollywood were unglamorous. Small film roles, commercial work, auditions that led nowhere. She auditioned for Wheel of Fortune in 1982 alongside more than 200 other women and got the job. Largely, by most accounts, because of the natural chemistry she had with host Pat Sajak. Her first official episode aired in December of that year. The show took off. So did Vanna. Within a couple of years, the tabloids had coined the term “Vannamania.” Fan mail arrived by the thousands every week. She became one of the most recognizable faces on American television, and she’d done it not by being outrageous or controversial or particularly loud, but simply by being warm and consistent and easy to watch. And she looks fantastic naked!