Happy 75th Birthday, Barbi Benton!

Barbi Benton (b.1950) has been retired for nearly 40 years, so I will forgive spring chickens for not recognizing this omnipresent 1970s television celebrity. But I assure you, there was a time when she was never off television.

Raised in Sacramento, Benton was a teenage model who got her start as an extra on Playboy After Dark starting in 1969, although she was rapidly promoted to Hugh Hefner’s co-host and live-in girlfriend. Benton has said that Hef asked her to marry him four times, but the man in the smoking jacket was hardly what you would call the monogamous sort. She preferred not to enact the farce, though they were together through 1976. As a kid, I didn’t know from Playboy chatter, I knew Benton best as a regular on Hee Haw, the most prominent of the Hee Haw Honeys, basically the sex object in blackout burlesque sketches, usually attired in Daisy Mae accoutrements. She was also a go-go dancer on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In‘s last couple of seasons.

Acting was attempted. In 1970 the inexperienced Benton was actually given the lead role in an international film production called How Did a Nice Girl…? a.k.a. The Naughty Cheerleader. It seems not to be porn? And features legit actors like Broderick Crawford, Lionel Stander, and Klaus Kinski. Hef makes a cameo, I’m sure he’s how all this came about. She had sensibly small roles in the TV movies The Great American Beauty Contest and The Third Girl from the Left, both in 1973, and guested on shows like McCloud, Charlie’s Angels, and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. She actually starred in her own ABC sit-com Sugar Time! in 1977, about an all-girl rock band (it lasted one season). She’s in the exploitation films Deathstalker (1981) and X-Ray a.k.a. Hospital Massacre (1982). And (this speaks volumes) 14 guest shots between of the Aaron Spelling concoctions Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

The latter shows are the kind of thing she was most associated with at her peak, that, and appearances on variety and game show productions like Sha Na Na, Circus with the Stars, The Sonny and Cher Show, Doug Henning’s World of Magic, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,Hollywood Squares, Match Game, Tattle Tales, The Alan Thicke Show, and the 1979 Disco Music Awards.

She also tried her hand at a music career. Her highest charting song was “Brass Knuckles” (1975), which went to #5 on the country charts. In 1982 she co-starred in a musical theatre production called I Love My Life opposite Barry Williams of The Brady Bunch.

Benton stayed in the biz for about a decade after breaking with Hefner, retiring in her mid 30s. The biggest twist for me, the “Rest of the Story” to use Paul Harvey’s catchphrase, was that she was born Barbara Klein in New York City. Her mother was an investment counselor and her father was a gynecologist!

For more on show biz history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.