We’ll Be Seeing More of Darva Now That She Appears in Playboy

Darva Conger’s heroic struggle to get out of the limelight took a turn for the worse recently when Playboy published a series of naked photographs of the shy, retiring emergency room nurse.

Ms. Conger became what TV execs call “fresh meat” when she was momentarily married to Rick Rockwell, who claimed to be a multimillionaire but turned out to be a fat dope nightclub comic with a toilet seat in his backyard. Lawyers for the aggrieved Ms. Conger are expected to file an invasion of privacy suit on behalf of the “Virgin Bride,” who’s spent the last few months pleading on hundreds of television talk shows to be allowed to live out her days in peace like some sort of wounded sea otter.

Oops. It seems Darva posed for the pictures. With striking enthusiasm.

(Remember when this was first reported, and that pathetic loser Rockwell moaned, “I’ll be the last guy on Earth to see my wife naked!” Good news, Rick, you don’t have to be last. If you hurry, I’ll show you the pictures before I mail them to my father in Florida.)

Darva is a plague.

Within a month, Darva will be on “Hollywood Squares.” Within six months, she’ll be starring in her first adult film.

I live in fear of “The Darva Channel.”

How much money will it take to get this woman to shut up and go away? I’m in for 100 bucks. Who’s with me?

Before you think me too harsh about Darva, let me give her mad props for the way she looks in the buff. When I first saw her on TV, I thought you could feed her from a dish on the floor. But she clearly has been working out. After seeing the pictures of Darva, one 50ish woman I know scoffed, “She’s all retouched.” Honey, I don’t care if Darva was sanded and stained like a backyard deck. She looks fabulous.

And this proves a point about men and women. The reason men will rush out and buy Playboy is because all men have the same reaction to women in the news: “I wonder what she looks like with her clothes off.” (OK, except Madeleine Albright.)

Women usually won’t take their clothes off for no good reason. On the other hand, men will “drop trou” at the sound of a train whistle. God forbid a woman should remark to a man, “That’s a nice watch.” The man will respond, “You ought to see it with my pants off.” And why? Because guys always think to themselves: “Hey, I could get lucky. This woman might trip and stumble into me.”

This brings me to the current issue of People, which purports to name “America’s 100 Most Eligible Bachelors.” They knew men would happily humiliate themselves. If People decided to do a story on the 100 most eligible taxidermists, every guy they named would offer to pose nude holding a stuffed wombat over (King Gustav V).

It is therefore no surprise that most of the men pictured look like complete jackasses. They couldn’t wait to take off their shirts. Or lie seductively on a couch. Or cuddle with a cat, for heaven’s sake. One guy--a UPS driver--is posing in beefcake shorts. The guy looks like the shipping and handling on his fat behind alone would soak up the federal budget surplus.

It’s simply unbelievable how easily men can be talked into posing like idiots. And one of them is my friend, Dan LeBatard, the brilliant sports columnist of the Miami Herald, who appears to be squatting on a pool table.

“They wanted me to pose coming out of the shower,” he told me. “Or lying on a couch with my shirt open.”

(Actually, LeBatard was spared, because 30-year-old soap opera star Cameron Mathison is in the shower, and 40-year-old personal trainer Les Schmidt is lying on a bearskin rug with his shirt open.

Let’s be honest, every guy on this list is going to take big gas from their friends. So, the only reason to do this is . . . to score chicks!

I am quite sure that even as you read this, LeBatard is in some bar in Miami, with 50 copies of his picture in People stuffed in his pocket, so that he can sidle up to some babe at the bar and . . .

“Oh, excuse me, that must have fallen out of my pocket,” he’ll purr.

Oh, yeah, he might get lucky.

The woman next to him might be Darva.