Our Best Guess

Think of it as a secret initiation rite for the exceptionally beautiful. Late on a serene moonlit evening this past spring, Diora Baird and her closest girlfriends came down from the Hollywood Hills to feast their eyes on an image so savagely attractive, so primal in its sexual urgency that it's sinful to think of it as a mere advertisement. "It was my first billboard," she explains, understandably tickled to be towering above the cars on La Cienega Boulevard.

Like other rites of passage, this one was equal parts joy and mystery. Guess had photographed Diora in all sorts of fabulous finery, and here were the glorious results. "Of course they went with the bikini shot," she says with a laugh. "I'm like, 'Oh great, people are gonna get so sick of looking up at my boobs.'"

That theory was disproved the next morning (and the next and the next and...) when traffic snarled even more than usual at the busy intersection not far from the hipster coffee shop where Diora, 22, is now recounting her other Hollywood firsts--her first job (folding shirts at the Gap), her first acting lesson ("No role is worth taking just because some sleazy bozo who wants to sleep with you flashes a card that says Producer") and her first big project, Wedding Crashers. The comedy co-stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as enterprising womanizers who sneak into weddings to romance the bejesus out of desperate bridesmaids, including one played by Diora.

There, too, the Miami-born model-actress's bounteous talents entered the picture. "The first scene we shot was the bedroom scene," she says with a mouthful of sweet-potato fries.

"We didn't know what the movie's rating would be, so we did two different takes, one with a bra and one without. Needless to say, the first take was without. It was basically, 'Owen, nice to meet you. These are my breasts.'"

You chuckle, but the truth is, encountering Diora for the first time can be a challenge, albeit a sumptuous one, for the sophisticated modern gentleman. Even in her badgirl ripped jeans and sexy gold sandals, Diora is sweet and approachable, the sort of green-eyed angel next door you would have built a three-story tree house for as a kid. But it is tough not to stare. The biological impulse is to let one's gaze drift southward during conversation to the natural 32DD attractions she keeps mentioning and--here's the killer--accentuating with careless tugs at her black bra strap or the occasional yogi-rific back arch.

Fortunately she feels your pain. "I know men like to look at women, and I can't control that," she says. "I just wish they were more up-front about their intentions sometimes. You want to be my friend? Great! Next thing you know I'm like, 'What are you doing?'"

The last five years have been quite an education for Diora. She came to Los Angeles alone at 17 to try her luck at acting full-time, knowing she could always fall back on modeling, which she'd been doing since babyhood. "The plan was to come out for a month, strike it rich on Dawson's Creek or something and move back home. Unfortunately that didn't happen."

What did happen was that Diora, who shares her modest residence with a husky, a Rhodesian ridgeback and a pair of turtles, worked her butt off, acting in every student film and indie movie that would have her (she calls herself a "minor film geek") while doing whatever she could to score extra cash, including playing Tinker-bell at children's birthday parties. Her big break came when her current manager found her, oddly enough, doing construction work. Her next gig: a role in a UPN pilot called South Beach, produced by Jennifer Lopez. "I play a Guess model from South Beach," Diora says. "What a stretch!"

Much as she likes L.A. and its countless options for "surfing and wake-boarding and generally getting wet," Paris is Diora's city of dreams. She has a thing for Frenchwomen--how they walk, how they talk, how they get everything they want. "Their attitude toward life speaks to me so much," she says. "They take pleasure in food, in sex, in love, in beauty."

Diora loves French movies, too, particularly Belle de Jour, which she calls the most erotic film of all time. "Everybody used to say I looked like Catherine Deneuve," she says. "I got addicted to her movies and wanted to be like her." What struck Diora was the glamour Deneuve embodied in a time before Botox and plastic surgery were considered routine in show business. "She had an amazing body and looked like a real woman," says Diora. "She's an inspiration to me. When I first came out here I tried to hide that I had big boobs because I was competing against 20-year-olds who looked 14. Then I looked at Catherine Deneuve and went, Ah, now I get it. Being womanly is cool. Let it fly."

Then she smiles. "Every day I get a little more comfortable with myself, with being unique, with letting it all hang out. I just hope the rest of the world is ready for it."

See more of Diora's pictorial at cyber.playboy.com.