Diane Webber: The Playboy Model Who Became a Mermaid, a Nudist, and a Belly Dancing Pioneer
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She posed for Playboy twice, played a mermaid queen in a low-budget cult film, testified at an obscenity trial and used it to defend nudism, and later built one of the first Middle Eastern dance companies in the United States. Diane Webber wasn't famous in the conventional sense, but she lived a life so varied and so completely on her own terms that it's hard to know where to start. Most people haven't heard of her. That's worth fixing.
Born Into Showbusiness
Diane was born Marguerite Diane Empey on 29 July 1932 in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Her background was about as showbusiness as it gets. Her mother, Marguerite Andrus, was a Hollywood actress and a former Miss Long Beach beauty contest winner. Her father, Arthur Guy Empey, was a soldier, author, songwriter, and movie producer who had served in World War I. Growing up surrounded by performance and ambition, it's no surprise that Diane gravitated towards the spotlight.
She attended Hollywood High School and, as a child, took ballet lessons from Russian ballerina Maria Bekefi. That classical training would leave a mark on the way she carried herself throughout her career. In the early 1950s, she was working as a chorus girl at Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco while quietly building her modelling portfolio. It was that combination of discipline and daring that would define the next two decades of her life.
A Double Playmate and the Russ Meyer Connection
Under her birth name, Marguerite Empey, Diane appeared as Playboy's Playmate of the Month not once but twice, in May 1955 and again in February 1956. That second shoot was photographed by Russ Meyer, the filmmaker who would later become notorious for his low-budget, exploitation-adjacent movies. The Playboy spreads brought her real visibility, and she started working with some of the most respected glamour photographers of the era, including Bunny Yeager, Peter Gowland, and Keith Bernard, appearing in publications like Esquire and across commercial advertising campaigns.
Around this time she married Joseph Webber, in 1955, and took his surname professionally. The couple had a son, John, born in 1956. It was also during this period that she was, according to IMDB, discovered by the same person who had discovered the young Marilyn Monroe. Whether or not that connection amounted to much professionally, it speaks to the circles she was moving in.
Like Audrey Munson before her, Diane had the kind of beauty that photographers fought to work with, and the kind of presence that made her impossible to ignore in a frame. But also like Munson, her story turned out to be about far more than the images people took of her.
Album Covers and the Sound of the Late 50s
One of the less well-known dimensions of Diane's career is how often her image ended up on vinyl. Throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, her likeness appeared on the covers of several notable music albums, including Nelson Riddle's Sea of Dreams, Les Baxter's Jewels of the Sea, George Shearing's Satin Brass, Marty Paich's Jazz for Relaxation, and Xavier Cugat's Chilie con Cugie. At a time when album artwork was everything, being the face that record labels chose to sell mood music and lounge jazz said something about how she was perceived: glamorous, exotic, aspirational.
Mermaids, Hitchcock, and a Career in B-Movies
Diane's acting career was never going to trouble the Oscars, but it was genuinely interesting. She appeared in a handful of television shows in the late 1950s, including Peter Gunn, Highway Patrol, Markham, and even Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where she played "The Other Woman" in an episode called "The Pearl Necklace" in 1961. These weren't starring roles, but they were solid credits at a time when TV work was competitive.
Her most memorable screen appearance came in 1962 when she played the Mermaid Queen in Mermaids of Tiburon, a low-budget underwater film that has since developed something of a cult following. She reprised the mermaid role in a 1967 episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. There's something fitting about the casting. Diane always had a quality that felt slightly other-worldly, and underwater, surrounded by bubbles and theatrical lighting, that quality was put to good use.
She also appeared in the Russ Meyer short This Is My Body in 1962, playing herself, and had small roles in The Swinger in 1966 and The Witchmaker in 1969. Her final screen credit came in 1974's The Trial of Billy Jack, in which she was cast, with a certain amount of inevitability, as a belly dance instructor. By that point, it wasn't typecasting. It was just accurate.
The Nudism Years and a Courtroom Surprise
In the mid-1960s, as the counterculture began reshaping American life, Diane became a committed nudist. She appeared in several naturist magazines, including Nude Lark, Eden, and The Nudist Idea, often alongside her husband. The family's lifestyle was documented in a 1967 book, Naked and Together: The Wonderful Webbers, written by June Lange and published by Elysium Inc.
Nudism, at the time, sat in a legally murky space. In 1965, a US District Attorney in Sioux City, Iowa subpoenaed Diane to testify in a trial involving the mailing of nudist magazines into the state, presumably expecting her to help the prosecution build its case. Instead, she took the stand and gave what was described as a spirited defence of the nudist lifestyle. The DA had called the wrong witness.
In 1975, she was found guilty in a separate postal obscenity case. The verdict was later overturned. Throughout it all, she didn't soften her position or retreat from her beliefs. Like Anita Berber and Evelyn Nesbit before her, she was a woman whose body became the site of public debate, and she refused to let other people define what that meant.
Perfumes of Araby: A Second Career Nobody Expected
Perhaps the most remarkable chapter of Diane's life is the one that started in 1969. She walked away from modelling and acting and reinvented herself as a professional belly dancer and instructor. From 1969 to 1980, she taught belly dancing at Everywoman's Village in Van Nuys, California, a community arts space that no longer exists.
More significantly, she founded Perfumes of Araby, one of the first Middle Eastern dance companies in the United States. This wasn't a novelty act. She led outdoor performances involving up to 40 dancers, accompanied by live bands playing Middle Eastern music. Her shows were deliberately sensual but explicitly not for the male gaze alone. Women and children regularly attended. She performed on the Stanley Siegel Show in 1981, discussing belly dancing, by which point she'd been teaching the form for over a decade.
Like Josephine Baker, Diane understood that dance could be an act of reclamation. She built something serious and lasting in a field most people hadn't even heard of yet.
Gay Talese, a Wallet, and Lasting Cultural Footprint
In Gay Talese's 1981 non-fiction book Thy Neighbor's Wife, a character is described as carrying Diane's nude photograph in his wallet. It's a small detail, but it says something about how embedded she had become in the erotic imagination of postwar America. She wasn't just a model. She was a reference point, a cultural shorthand for a particular kind of beauty and transgression.
She divorced Joseph Webber in 1986, after 31 years of marriage. In her final years, she worked quietly as a librarian and archivist for a law firm in Santa Monica, a long way from the Playboy centrefold and the belly dancing stages of Los Angeles. She died on 19 August 2008, in Los Angeles, from complications following surgery for colorectal cancer. She was 76.
Why Diane Webber Deserves to Be Remembered
Diane Webber's life doesn't fit neatly into any single category. She wasn't just a pin-up or just an actress or just a dancer. She was all of those things and more, and she moved between them with a fluency that suggests someone who was always following her own instincts rather than anyone else's script. She challenged obscenity laws. She built a dance company from scratch. She appeared on album covers, television screens, and courtroom witness stands, usually on her own terms.
Most women with careers like hers have been forgotten. Diane deserves to be an exception.
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