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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
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