Married at the age of 16, she had a son and a daughter. Divorced at 21, she moved to Florida to be near her family. She had a $90-a-week job working behind the cosmetics counter of a Miami department store when her mother and stepfather suggested she apply for work at the new Miami Playboy Club, which they had just visited. "I became a Camera Bunny and was suddenly rolling in money, working six nights a week in an era when people gave hundred-dollar tips," she recalled later. 

Connie moved to Chicago and worked as a Bunny at the Playboy Club there. She was recruited by designer Oleg Cassini, a guest at a Playboy Mansion party, for Eileen Ford's modeling agency in New York. That was to be the beginning of a career that has lasted more than three decades. 

A two-year relationship with Cassini's brother Igor, who wrote a gossip column under the pseudonym Cholly Knickerbocker, preceded a brief engagement to a Los Angeles attorney and Connie's 1968 marriage to the Playboy Clubs' talent director Shelly Kasten. Eighteen months later, they separated, a split that lasted for six years before their reconciliation. Still married, the Kastens currently live near Los Angeles, where Connie continues to model. She has also launched a new career in interior design, a path which her mother had followed for 30 years, and which Connie had studied at Parsons Institute when she was living in New York. 

PLAYBOY APPEARANCES: Centerfold, June 1963; "Disneyland for Adults," October 1963; "Editors' Choice," December 1963; "Playboy's Playmate Review," January 1964; "Bunnies of Chicago," August 1964; "Playmates Revisited: 1963," November 1964; "Reader's Choice," December 1964; "The Playboy Mansion," January 1966; "20 Years of Playmates," January 1974; "Playboy's Playmate Reunion," April 1980; "Bunny Birthday," December 1980; "40 Memorable Years," January 1994. 

PLAYBOY NEWSSTAND SPECIALS: "Playboy's Playmates: The First 15 Years." 

PLAYBOY BOOK APPEARANCES: "The Playmate Book" 1996. 

CENTERFOLD COLLECTOR CARDS: June edition. 

MOVIE CREDITS: "Blood Feast," 1963; "Two Thousand Maniacs!" 1964.