Playmate of the Month October 1983 - Tracy Vaccaro

Tracy Vaccaro can walk into a Hollywood restaurant, be seated at a table next to Neil Simon and Sally Field and never give them an idle glance - as can some yogis. Tracy's poise, though, comes from a purely Western discipline learned during her childhood in Las Vegas: "Heed well, Grasshopper; look n ...either to the left nor to the right but at your own cards, for therein lies your fate." Who knows what they teach in Las Vegas schools?
Whatever the curriculum, social or academic, Tracy studied her lessons well.
"I don't have a whole lot of style," she says. "But I have class. I can carry myself. I can go anywhere. I can deal with it. I'm grateful for that."
She's a scrapper, street-wise, critical of everything, wary of everyone. She came of age in a town of rampant excesses, and at 21, she hardly ever gets the vapors. For the first 16 years of her life, Tracy thought she was going to be a ballet dancer. She had trained for it daily since the age of six. She becomes wistful when she talks about it now: "I wouldn't have been the best in the world, because physically I got too big. But I would have danced. I would have danced. I had a scholarship to go to Europe to study classical ballet. At the time, I was dancing eight hours a day and I'd been on point for a long time. Well, I ripped the ligaments and tore the cartilage in my knee. They told me, 'You are never going to put these dance shoes on again.' And I just felt like . . . what do you do? Something was torn from me. 'Wait a second. Is that it?' It was all I knew.
"I was an extremely hyperactive, nervous, out-of-my-mind kid who could not, did not want to be around children. I never played with dolls, never played with toys. I wanted to be around adults. I thought I was an adult from the time I could walk. I never had any friends. I was a loner. Loner, loner, loner - but I was dancing, you see, so it was all right."
Tracy's injury forced her to re-evaluate her life. She had to find another career. Compared with ballet, the rest of life seemed slow and unimportant, and she viewed most nonballet people as slow and unimportant, too; it was not an attitude that won friends. Early on, she had acquired and cultivated a reputation for being pushy, bossy, opinionated and rambunctious: "In the fourth grade, they had sent me home from school, saying something like 'Your daughter is left-handed and tormented by the Devil.'"
Without the future she'd planned, Tracy was lost. She left school before graduation and began modeling. Her sights were set on an acting career. Between modeling assignments, she managed to rack up two movie appearances, one in A Rare Breed, directed by David Nelson, and another in the Dorothy Stratten biopic Star 80, directed by Bob Fosse. Then, by good fortune, she ended up at Playboy's West Coast studio and tested for the centerfold.
She evaluated her chances with cool objectivity. "I don't think that my face is extremely beautiful. I don't have that kind of look. But I've got a real nice body, and I've got . . . beautiful legs, so I'm lucky, you know. I sort of have a Playboy look - this fresh, clean-air kind of look."
The superior quality of Tracy's legs is documented. Honed to close tolerance by years of balletic torture, they were recently selected best among those of 150 other entries in a promotional contest to find The Woman with the Most Beautiful Legs in the World. Her gams were subsequently signed to play the part of Legs in Blake Edwards' film The Man Who Loved Women, starring Burt Reynolds.
The entire Tracy then landed the title role in Candy the Stripper, a video production for The Playboy Channel.
She voiced some trepidation before shooting started - about the part and about her ability to do it. "If I take this script and pull it off, I'm a hero. If I don't, I'm a jerk - even worse, because there's nudity. But I just have this feeling, for some reason, that I can bring something to it, that I can pull it off.
"As an actress, I have a lot of work to do. I need a lot of experience. But I've got a good sense of people, and that helps."
As it turned out, she did pull it off and in the process revealed to herself to be a very promising and talented actress. It was an extraordinary debut - and the nudity didn't hurt one bit.
It appears that Tracy has found her second career. And with her recent marriage to actor Fred Dryer, a former L.A. Ram, she's given up being a loner, too.

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