First off, that name. In an age where names get changed at a whim, Tawnni Cable still has the one she was born with. She has the birth certificate to prove it. Still, when Miss June introduces herself, she gets looks that say, "Suuuure!" She doesn't even like the name that much. To her, it so
...unds like tanned phone lines. Tawnni is, however, tawny. Her Waikiki tan - a shade darker than the pictures in Hawaiian Tropic ads - can be seen in swimsuit calendars sold to panting men all over Oahu. She is also impossible to pigeonhole. Raised in rainy Northwest Oregon, she has carried on a lifelong love affair with the sun, surf and sand. Too free-spirited to tolerate a clock-punching job, she nevertheless wears two wristwatches when she travels - one set for local time, the other for Hawaii time. She once spent a stint as the rarest of combinations, a busty New York fashion model. "I was as skinny as the rest of them," she says, "but I had boobs." On Waikiki Beach, she usually tans in glowing green and orange bikinis; off the beach, she wears black. Once a "wild and crazy girl", she now pines for monogamy and motherhood.
Most of all, Tawnni is relentless fun. Nothing about her is conventional, from her 36-24-34 figure to her fastidiousness ("I never leave the house without doing the dishes and cleaning everything") to her surfing advice ("Stand up as long as you can") to her lingerie (sublime). Other people make career decisions on New Year's Eve. Tawnni left one of New York's top modeling agencies on Halloween. Even her approach to posing for Playboy was unique. "I didn't look at the camera as a lover or anything like that. I thought of a girl I knew from kindergarten through high school. She was Satan's spawn. She made fun of everybody. When I posed, I knew I looked good, and I thought, I want her to see this."
Thousands of gorgeous young women, believing that looks are the essence of acting, fancy themselves Streeps in waiting. Not Tawnni. "I wanted to be an actress. For a while, I thought I would be great," she says. "But I'm junk as an actress. I am the worst actress I ever saw." Working in Miami one summer, she tried out for a role on Miami Vice. Her looks got her an audition. She spent a night practicing the two lines she would read for Vice detectives, working up a different delivery for every possible mood. When her big moment came, a Vice executive nodded and, she recalls, "I forgot my lines. I guess I'd like to be an actress, but it's not in my blood."
She laughs, recalling her moment on the brink of Vice. Tawnni is not the type to brood. She makes do with surf, sand and sun in her Hawaiian paradise, where her daily tanning session is currently tourist attraction number three. Numero uno is Tom Selleck of Magnum, P.I. fame. First-time visitors to Hawaii, she says, invariably rent Selleck-style red Ferraris, hoping that someone will point to them and cry, "There goes Magnum." Honolulu crooner Don Ho is Selleck's runner-up. (Spoofing Ho's signature song, Playboy photographers refer to Miss June as Tawnni Bubbles.) "Don Ho is kind of weird," says Tawnni, who sees the singer in a nearby parking garage "all the time. He'll split a beer with anybody who comes along." If lucky, Ho will one day share a few bubbles with Miss June, the Aloha State's most natural resource.
He knows where to find her. Every afternoon, Tawnni dons a shimmering bikini and stretches out on the white sand of Waikiki Beach. Tourists and natives alike gather around to gawk. "I don't mind being looked at," Tawnni says. This news may do for Waikiki's travel business what Paul Hogan did for Australia's.
