Your eyes tell you true--the lady's beauty is remarkable, her sensuousness unmistakable. Which is why you're looking at the most striking Playmate pictorial ever. How it came to be is a fittingly improbable tale of two newspapers, two women and four cities, of which London is perhaps the most important. It was there that Lillian Müller, a ship's engineer's daughter from Kristiansand, Norway--and, at that point in her life, a restless college student specializing in languages--spotted a newspaper ad placed by a modeling school. It appealed to a long-suppressed desire, with the result that instead of conjugations and declensions, Lillian began to study the ways and wiles of the successful model she soon became, tripping all over Europe to do TV commercials, book and magazine covers, fashion shots and pinups. It was one of the latter, in another London newspaper, that caught the sharp eye of Suze Randall, a former model herself, who'd switched to the other side of the camera a year before. Struck by Lillian's opulent beauty, and the professional possibilities of same, Suze got hold of her through an agent. Not only did the two women decide to do some pictures, they got on so well that they wound up rooming together. That benefited both Lillian, who was still something of a stranger in London, and Suze, who had the opportunity "to just shoot and shoot and shoot." Eventually, she took a sampling of the results to Victor Lownes, a London-based Playboy Vice-President. Lownes took a hard look at the pictures and immediately started dialing for a transatlantic operator. It wasn't long before Lillian and Suze were en route to Chicago, where Dwight Hooker shot her gatefold picture, and then on to Los Angeles, where they spent several weeks in our studio, working under the experienced eye of West Coast Picture Editor Marilyn Grabowski and staying at Playboy Mansion West in Holmby Hills. After Lillian's Playmate shootings were completed, she returned to Norway, while Suze stayed in Los Angeles to work as a free-lance photographer. At presstime, though, Lillian was waiting a bit impatiently for the visa that would enable her to fly back to L.A. She had done just about everything there was for a model to do in Europe, so she was headed for California--where, among other things, she hoped to get into acting. Suze Randall has no doubts about her friend's ability to make it big: "Lillian is an archetypal glamor girl, and somehow she seems to echo all the great beauty queens of the past. When we walked together in Los Angeles, she attracted so much attention I felt like a bodyguard. She's also very ambitious, and she works hard." Indeed. While she was modeling in Europe, Lillian confined her social life to weekends so she could concentrate on her work. And on the eve of her departure for America, she was nothing but optimistic about her chances of emulating the successes of Brigitte Bardot and Ursula Andress, who are among her heroines: "I always think I can do what I set out to do, and I keep on trying until I've done it. I'm always in a good mood." We trust that Lillian has managed to put you in a good mood. We couldn't be happier.
