In 1992, Jenny McCarthy was scrambling for funds to finance her second year of nursing studies at Southern Illinois University. She decided to start a modeling career, only to be told she was too curvy. She realized that Playboy prefers full-figured women, and hand-delivered her photos to the magazine's Chicago office. The editors liked them and paid Jenny $20,000 to pose as Miss October 1993.A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year title and $100,000 in cash and prizes. Then she moved from her native Chicago (where she grew up with three sisters, a stay-at-home mom, and her father, a steel-plant foreman) to Los Angeles in search of stardom. Hollywood auditions proved difficult to come by, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, her fourty-seven-year-old manager and live-in boyfriend, to land an interview at MTV. The network's producer appreciated Jenny and hired her to co-host Singled Out, which debuted in the summer of 1995. Funny, telegenic, and curvy Jenny McCarthy had an immediate success. MTV was eager to retain its hot property and coughed up a $500,000, one-year contract that promotes McCarthy to full-fledged VJ and gives her carte blanche to create a program of any format that best suits her talents

Jenny opted to turn over her host responsibilities on Singled Out to Carmen Electra, and concentrate her attention on creating an MTV sketch-variety series, ''The Jenny McCarthy Show'', which is, in her words, ''kind of like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on acid.'' She developed another sitcom for NBC, in which she is an East Coaster who inherits a Hollywood mansion and gets a job as a movie star's personal assistant. Playboy offered $500,000 to snap more nude photos. When McCarthy demurred, claiming that this was not the career path she was presently pursuing, the magazine settled for rerunning old pics. Although she also declined proposals from Fox and NBC, McCarthy is nonetheless venturing beyond teen-oriented cable channels and gentlemen's magazines. She appeared as ''blonde nurse'' in Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995) and, later, portrayed her first substantive screen character (a neurotic movie star) in The Stupids (1996), opposite Tom Arnold.