Exotic brunette Mara Corday (who shared her Miss October 1958 title with Pat Sheehan) was a Universal International contract player. A B-movie queen who starred in Tarantula (1955), The Giant Claw (1957) and The Black Scorpion (1957), Corday -- like Vickers -- seemed to specialize in confrontations with enormous mutated creatures bent on world destruction. Film scholars have interpreted these films about armies of insects and radiated freaks as an expression of Cold War-era fear of invading Commies. Of course, in the sexually-repressed Fifties these cheesy monsters were also an awfully convenient way to showcase scantily clad starlets clinging to a last shred of nightie as the giant ants close in.

Tarantula (1955)

Not everyone minded playing the femme fatale. Regarding her continual typecasting as the vamp with a heart of molten lead, Vickers says she relished the opportunity to play such ferociously independent women -- even if they did have a tendency to glad-hand other women's husbands and get trampled like cherry tomatoes by film's end.

"Those are the best parts. Talk to Sharon Stone about Basic Instinct...I think every actress at one point in her life, even Meryl Streep will say, I want to do THAT!"

Even if monster-bait and vigorous games of beach volleyball were the only opportunities available in Fifties productions, movies remained a tantalizing career Everest for Playmates to climb.

In the approaching Age of Aquarius, clearly defined ideas of female sexuality would be radically upended. The Fifties vamp and virgin were about to give way to more diversified female roles.

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