Alice Denham (1927-2016) was born in Jacksonville, Florida. Her father, a stockbroker, lost everything in the Wall Street crash and moved the family to Coral Gables, Fla., where he found work as a property manager for a large company. In 1940 he was hired by the Federal Housing Administration, and the family moved to a Washington suburb, Chevy Chase, Md. After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1949 she won a scholarship to the University of Rochester, where she earned a master’s degree in English the following year, writing her thesis on T. S. Eliot’s plays.
She counted among her many friends Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Gore Vidal and the painter Ad Reinhardt. Denham plunged into the bohemian life. She modeled by day, posing at camera clubs and doing photo shoots for romance and detective magazines, paperback covers, comic strips and movie posters.
In 1955, Discovery, a well-regarded literary magazine published her story “The Deal,” about a young woman, an aspiring artist in Las Vegas, who agrees to sleep with an aged gambler for $1,000. Years of struggle followed. Playboy, after reprinting “The Deal,” with an illustration by Leroy Neiman, in the July 1956 issue that included her centerfold, rejected two more of her stories, informing her in a letter that it did not intend to have any more women’s bylines.
While she searched in vain for a publisher for her first novel, about the love affair between an artist and a composer in New York, she wrote jacket copy for publishers, acted in films with titles like “Olga’s House of Shame” and modeled at industrial shows, appearing as Miss Minute Maid in 1957 and 1958.
Her novel, “My Darling From the Lions,” eventually came out in 1967, attracting little attention. She had asked her many writer friends to contribute a blurb. None did. Denham later wrote the novel “Amo” (1974), about a feminist centerfold who has a fantasy life on another planet, and “Secrets of San Miguel” (2013), a tell-all chronicle of the expatriate artistic community in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which she visited for many years.
Denham’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her husband, she is survived by a brother, John, and a sister, Leila Starke.
