The short and tragic life of Missy Cleveland

At age 19, she was Playboy’s PMoM in April of 1979, and later had a brief film career.

There is quite a bit of misinformation about her online, even at IMDb. I will summarize the facts from a court decision denying a lawsuit filed by her mother.

To start at the very beginning, she was not born Amanda Hodges Cleveland, as reported elsewhere. She was Amanda Hodges, one of seven children of Sam and Becky Hodges. Her mother and sister testified under oath that her natural father sexually abused her for several years, starting when she was about ten. She quit school in the ninth or tenth grade, and at age seventeen, she added “Cleveland” to her name when she married Allen Cleveland and fled to California. There the locals called her “Missy” because she came from Mississippi, thus completing her transition from Amanda Hodges to Missy Cleveland.

In 1979, after turning eighteen, Cleveland posed for Playboy as a centerfold model. She had been discovered by Playboy through the magazine’s 25th Anniversary Great Playmate Hunt, a contest that her mother encouraged her to enter. Soon after she won the Playboy gig, she divorced her husband, and for the next seven years, did promotional work for Playboy and appeared in a few movies.

The Playboy work had run its course by 1986. Cleveland then moved to Montreal to work as the personal assistant of a fellow Mississippian, Nanette Workman, a successful singer who had relocated to Canada. Four years later, Cleveland moved back to Mississippi, where she worked as a bartender, receptionist, leasing agent, and apartment manager. Tragedy struck her life again when she fell in love with a man named Keith Puckett, only to have him taken from her as a murder victim in 1993. Medical records document her lingering grief from Puckett’s death.

In 1995, Cleveland married David White, but the couple divorced two years later. According to White, her drug and alcohol abuse caused their divorce. White described Cleveland’s drinking and her use of Xanax, Valium, meth and crack. This represented a relapse. During her time in Los Angeles, Cleveland had taken pills, used cocaine, and attempted suicide twice.

After a stint in rehab, Cleveland began working as a manager at Stonegate Apartments, were she met and eventually moved in with a man named Ron Allen. Allen was unemployed, apparently disabled from a back injury — an injury purportedly caused by a filing cabinet falling on him. Allen was described as controlling, dangerous, and abusive to Cleveland. According to Stonegate residents, Allen practiced “voodoo” and was “strange.” Allen had a notorious fondness for swords and knives, which adorned the walls of his apartment. He was also into what one witness described as “chanting.” As one resident put it, Allen was a “creepy person” who “did everything in black.” Two witnesses testified that Allen kept Cleveland secluded and drugged.

On April 15, 2000, a filing cabinet allegedly fell on Cleveland while she was working. (Yes, that was the exact same cause of her boyfriend’s alleged disability. It is not reported whether it was the same cabinet.) Cleveland claimed she suffered physical and mental injuries from the accident, restricting her ability to work, and prompting her to file for disability benefits as workman’s compensation.

On August 14, 2001, with Missy’s workman’s comp case still in limbo, Allen found her dead in their home. While no drugs were discovered in the home, the coroner listed Cleveland’s cause of death as “poly-pharmacy overdose.” She had attempted suicide several times between the accident and her death, as documented by several visits to the emergency room, but the coroner did not speculate whether Cleveland;’s death was accidental, suicide, or homicide. Missy’s mother sued to get some compensation awarded posthumously, arguing that there was a relationship between the work-related injury and Missy’s death, but the court rejected that claim, and the appeals court upheld the verdict.

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Nudography:

Missy appeared in one significant film: Brian De Palma’s Blow-Out (1981). Well, sort of. She actually appeared in a cheesy fictional film, Co-Ed Frenzy, that the characters in Blow-Out were working on. But that still counts as appearing in a De Palma film.

Her other nude appearance was in a B film called Let’s Do It, from the later work of Bert I. Gordon, who many years earlier had created a cheesy B&W cult classic, The Amazing Colossal Man.

Videos. Blow Out is available in 4K. In extreme contrast, Let’s Do It is a VHS rip!