Melrose Mom

lisa rinna is great with Child

Some pregnant women get cravings for pickles and peanut butter. For Lisa Rinna, the yen was for something grander than that. "I was at the newsstand," says Lisa, whom you may know as Melrose Place's bad girl Taylor McBride, or as Mrs. Harry Hamlin. "I saw a Playboy next to the cash register, and all of a sudden something in me said, You have to do Playboy pregnant."

For a woman from a small town in Oregon who had never even considered posing nude, this suggestion (she says it was as if she heard a voice) came as something of a surprise. "I thought, What?" she says, laughing. "But I was also really excited about it." She polled her best girlfriend, then her publicist, then her husband. The reaction from all quarters, she says, was shock, then consensus: "This could be really cool."

So she pursued the idea--gingerly, cautiously--convincing herself that if it didn't happen, she wouldn't be upset. After all, she could always continue a career that featured a mid-Nineties stint on Days of Our Lives before heating up with her move to Melrose Place, and a life with Hamlin that would soon include the first of the several children she would like to have. "I thought, I'm just going to put it out there, and if the universe says this is what I should do, it'll happen. If it doesn't, it'll go away," Lisa says. "But in a strange way, I also felt that I had to do it. As I talked the idea through with Harry, I said, 'I don't know why, but I just have to do it.'"

She shrugs. "Like every woman, I have always had a fascination with Playboy. My dad got it, I saw it in the house from the time I was young and I was intrigued by the women: What does it take to pose nude, what's it all about? But I never imagined myself doing it--it was just this thing other girls do."

Step-by-step, though, she moved toward doing it. After running the idea by Playboy, she recruited her makeup artist to shoot some test Polaroids one day in Lisa's trailer on the lot where Melrose Place is filmed. "It was spur-of-the-moment," she says, "and I had to fib a little bit. I told her I was taking some pictures for Harry for Valentine's Day."

She loved the results and decided to forge ahead--which is why Lisa, fecund and six months pregnant (daughter Delilah Belle was born June 10), spent a weekend showing off that certain glow we've heard about. She has a point to make here, and it's not just that she looks great. "Society usually deals with pregnancy by covering it up," she says.

"But I think it's something a woman should be proud of, as opposed to saying, 'Put me in a corner for nine months, and once I have the baby and work my butt off to get back to my regular weight, then I'll be accepted again, then I'll be beautiful again, then I'll be loved by my husband again, then I'll be a sexual being again.'"

If she'd like to change a few minds about how pregnancy doesn't diminish sexuality, that may be because the experience has changed some of her own attitudes. "Especially if you're an actress living in this town, you can get preoccupied with how you look and what you weigh," says Lisa, who has long kept toned through grueling martial-arts and aerobic workouts. "But when I got pregnant, all of a sudden I accepted myself the new way I am. It is the most beautiful I've ever felt. I feel the most sexual, the most sexy, the most confident. I just feel great about myself."

Throughout the pregnancy, she adds, she refused to conceal her body in traditional maternity clothes. "There's this sense of 'Oh, she's pregnant, we have to take care of her, don't let her lift things or work too hard. Don't let her show her body. Let's put her in clothes that hide it.' But if I go to an event where I have to wear a long dress, I don't wear a muumuu. I wear a dress that I would normally wear, just a little bit bigger. Women have responded wonderfully to that--but in the time that I've been pregnant, I have also had more men come up to me and tell me how beautiful I am and how sexy I look."

She laughs, and the sound of triumph in her voice is unmistakable. "There is no reason," Lisa says, "why we shouldn't look at a woman who is naked and pregnant and say, 'Isn't that cool?'"