Cindy Margolis, Miss December, 2006

In a conference room at Playboy Studio West, Cindy Margolis can't contain her glee. Blonde, buxom and squeezed into a tight T-shirt that reads Go Ahead And Stare, she's grinning from ear to ear as she surveys a long table covered with many of the photographs you see on these pages. It's the first time she's seen the results of the photo session that took place a couple of weeks earlier, documenting a different side of a woman who made her name and fortune with a distinctly PG-13 website and modeling career.

For me even to be in this building, let alone look at myself with no clothes on, was a monumental leap," she says. "And to my pleasant surprise, I loved every minute of it, especially coming here today and being wowed by the pictures. Hey, I look pretty good naked--who would have thought?"

A few of you may have guessed. You know Cindy Margolis under a variety of guises: the queen of the Internet, Guinness Book--certified most downloaded woman on earth, former host of the late-night variety program The Cindy Margolis Show, subject of the reality series In Your Dreams With Cindy Margolis, one of the fembots from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the face and body on a million posters. She's all those things, certainly, and plenty more: poker ace, car collector, savvy businesswoman, mother of three, author-to-be, the ultimate California girl. But for all that, you probably didn't expect to see her on these pages in this state--and neither, to be honest, did she.

"I was 18 when Playboy approached me for the first time," says Margolis, a Valley girl born and bred in southern California who has been on the magazine's radar screen for a couple of decades. "Every other year since then I would get a wonderful call from them, and I would very graciously decline. But when they called on my 40th birthday not only to wish me a happy birthday but also to make the offer again, I thought, Wow, they still want me. And at this stage of my life and career it's empowering and inspiring."

She laughs. "You know what? Now is the time. If I had done it in the past, it would have been for gratuitous reasons or money or to help my career. And I don't need any of that now. I've made it to the point where I just think, Yeah, Playboy's cool."

In many ways Cindy is the ultimate self-branding star of the Internet age, having latched onto the new technology in the medium's early days (she didn't know what downloading was, only that she'd been told people were doing it to her--a lot). "To make it, you have to have more than a killer body and a great smile. Otherwise everyone in L.A. would be on the cover of Playboy," she says. "You have to have the brains and the drive to invent yourself. I came from a divorced family with a single mom in a one-bedroom apartment, and I'm proud I was able to build something on my own and can be sitting here today with everything I have."

An aspiring model who couldn't land an agent, Cindy found a novel way to get her foot in the door. She was taking an introductory class at a Los Angeles university when the professor gave a standard Business 101 assignment: Come up with a plan for your own business. Cindy took some sexy photos of herself, slapped them onto the front of makeshift greeting cards and distributed them to the class. "The professor was like, Did she just pass out lingerie pictures of herself to a class of 18-year-olds?" she says. Not only did she do that but she sold the cards to stationery shops, car washes and the like, and before long she was selling them out of the apartment where she and her mom lived. In a sign of desperation or naivete, she put her home phone number on the back of the cards. ("I would not recommend doing that today," she says.)

The cards led to offers for posters, the posters got her a gig on The Price Is Right, and the TV exposure led her to the Internet. By the late 1990s plenty of people (text concluded on page 175) Cindy Margolis (continued from page 166) were starting to take notice. "The minute you're somebody, William Morris and Elite won't stop calling you," she says. "But at the beginning you're banging on the door and nobody answers. So the Internet was a great way into the entertainment world for me." Still, traditional media remained suspicious. "It did take some banging on those doors, saying, 'Hello, I have an audience of 70 million people. Do you want them?"

It didn't take long for everybody to say yes. The Cindy Margolis empire--and yes, that's exactly what it is--starts with her multifaceted website, Cindymargolis.com, with its free photos and video, merchandise and a section devoted strictly to female fans. But it extends far beyond that. At the moment, she's designing a line of women's T-shirts and tank tops, called the Tattles; she's working on an animated late-night series, Cindy B.C.; and she's the cover model for the Tenth Muse comic-book series.

"I've always been ambitious and thought, What should my next thing be?" she says. "I'm probably the only person who can go on Howard Stern in the morning and play with him and then in the afternoon go on the Home Shopping Network and sell beauty products."

She's now writing a book about her biggest tribulation, the struggle she and husband Guy Starkman went through to have children. The couple tried a variety of treatments over several years before she gave birth to the first of their three children, in 2002. Cindy is now the spokesperson for Resolve, a national infertility association; a portion of the sales of this issue will go to her own charity, the Cindy Margolis Get a Download of This Fertility Fund.

"I told Mr. Hefner that this will be the magazine's best-selling issue of the year," she says with a laugh. "And I'm determined that it will be, not just to prove to him that I'm right but for my charity as well."

Chances are she's not just making an idle boast. When Cindy sets her mind to something, she tends to succeed. Just ask the competitors on NBC's recent Celebrity Cooking Showdown, which she won, or on the World Series of Poker's celebrity open, in which she outlasted every other celeb. "I never cooked before, couldn't even boil water," she says. "Then I win a cooking show. Never played poker, and I take down Jennifer Tilly. Give me a challenge and I do it."

For now, though, she'd rather bask in another accomplishment--the one documented in the photographs sitting in front of her in the Playboy studio.

"I love it," she says, looking across the table. "Me, of all people, the ultimate girl next door, the one who made it by not taking off her clothes. And now my crowning achievement is doing Playboy and being comfortable in my own skin."

See more of Cindy at cyber.playboy.com.