Surrey Marshe, Playmate of the Month January 1967, pictured in Playmate of the Month pictorial, Unmelancholy Dane. The text accompanying the photos read:
Unmelancholy Dane
Playmate-bunny Surrey Marshe is Scandinavia’s gift to Gotham
Nearly a millennium has passed since Leif Ericson and his cohorts tested the wrath of the Atlantic, but the Scandinavians remain an adventurous breed. Surrey Marshe, our Miss January, is a latter-day Viking who left her native Denmark a year ago (at the time, Surrey had never heard of Playboy) and, with the wages from a brief modeling career in her purse, flew to New York City, where she soon found a home as a Playboy Club Door Bunny. The flaxen-faired graduate of a Scandinavian mannequin school told us in free-flowing English, “It was always my dream, to come to America. I love to go to strange places and meet strange people, without any special plans or much money in my pocket.” Living in the American metropolis is a “big adventure” for 19-year-old Surrey, who matured into Playmate form on a farm near Aalborg, where her family (she’s the youngest of three children) raised the usual barnyard fauna. The unmelancholy Dane enjoys New York from dawn to dawn, whether she’s dining in an Oriental restaurant, absorbing the sights and sounds of a discothèque while sipping a daiquiri with a date, strolling solo through Manhattan on a rainy afternoon or passing the time in her 40th Street apartment, which she shares with two roommates and her snow-white poodle, Frosty. Surrey is equally dexterous at knitting (she fashions clothes not only for herself but for friends as well) and picking out tunes on her guitar (“I grew up singing – our family always sang together, mostly religious songs, and when I was alone on the farm I would sing to myself”). A skiing enthusiast, she had little opportunity to perfect her form on Denmark’s modest hills, and was obliged to frequent the more satisfactory slopes of her neighboring Scandinavian countries; since her emigration to these shores, Surrey has found New England’s nearby mountain ranges more than adequate for practice and pleasure. Miss January still dreams of further travels: an excursion to Miami (“It took 32 hours by bus”) has whetted her appetite for warmer climes, and she envisions herself journeying to California – then, perhaps, across the Pacific, on a good-Samaritan mission to the Far East. “I would love to be a nurse in a place like Hong Kong or Formosa,” says Albert Schweitzer’s fairest disciple (Surrey has read each of the doctor’s books at least twice). For the nonce, though, Miss January is happy to have had one dream fulfilled, and is likely to stay ensconced in New York – welcome news to patrons of the Manhattan hutch, where Miss Marshe would be sorely missed.
Pipe and PJs: The Sixties 