Fans Line Up : Jessica Hahn Is Big Wheel at Car Show

Jessica Hahn tugged at her white leather miniskirt, something she says she picked up on Rodeo Drive, fussed with her flowing brown hair and checked her makeup one last time.

“Bill, tell me, do I look all right?” she asked nervously.

She was about to face a horde of mostly drooling young men lined up to get her autograph at the custom car and hot rod show Saturday at the Anaheim Convention Center. “Bill” was Bill Farley of Playboy Enterprises Inc., a friend who had come to help.

“Jessica, you look great,” Farley told her. “The first three guys in line have been standing there for 45 minutes, and they say they just want to tell you thanks for getting rid of that guy.”

“That guy,” of course, is Jim Bakker, the televangelist leader of the PTL Club dethroned last year by his own people after admitting to a sexual encounter with Hahn. Bakker has denied Hahn’s allegation that it was rape. Nevertheless, he paid $373,000 in hush money from church coffers to Hahn to keep quiet about what happened.

If the Bakker incident brought Hahn fame and at least some degree of fortune, it was Playboy that catapulted her to celebrity status: when she moved into the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills and posed nude for the magazine--first as plain old Jessica Hahn from Massapequa, N.Y., then as the new and improved Jessica Hahn, with a few tucks of cosmetic surgery here and there.

Playboy’s Farley was only trying to ease her nerves.

The first 50 guys in line, let alone the first three, barely knew who Jim Bakker was.

They came to see Jessica Hahn the Playboy model.

Richard Vasquez, Rusty Alcoser and Henry Mendez, three friends from Pico Rivera, said they shelled out the $11.50 each for the car show tickets just to meet Jessica Hahn.

“Awesome,” Vasquez said.

“She was great,” Mendez said. “She’s quite a woman.”

Mendez should know. He is 14 years old.

The Jessica Hahn line went around the corner for most of the afternoon. The main attractions were supposed to be the dozens and dozens of shiny, expensive and wonderfully crafted custom cars on display.

Even so, a lot of car exhibitors were interested in Hahn too.

Rusty Coones, a 33-year-old body builder who owns Lords of Limos in Laguna Beach, watched the Hahn line with interest as he stood beside his $75,000 gleaming silver limo truck with a computerized bar.

Who is prettier, he was asked, your limo or Jessica Hahn?

Coones, who had picked up Hahn at the airport the night before and delivered her to her hotel, answered quickly as if he had pondered the question before.

“They are both beautiful in their own way,” he said, smiling. “They are both works of art which have been modified.”

That’s not a line that would bother the 29-year-old Hahn.

She is used to interviews and can snap off quick answers to everything from Jim Bakker to Hugh Hefner to her own improvements.

“I had my nose, breasts and teeth worked on,” she said before her autograph session. “My nose was too long, my breasts were too drooped and my teeth were too wide apart. I looked and said, ‘You have the time and the money; do it now.’ And I’m happy with it.”

She is also happy with her life. She is a full-time radio broadcaster for an FM radio station in Phoenix. She was hired for 30 days at first, but thanks to the station’s ratings jump, she will continue through Dec. 31. She expects to stay on after that. She is also in demand for personal appearances and autograph things like the car show.

She admits that it’s puzzling why so many people want to meet her. She says perhaps it’s because she is someone that everybody knows.

“I don’t know how to say what it is I do. I just call myself a woman in the news. I’m a media creature,” she said. “If you had a dream and the doors open, I think most people would walk through them. That’s what I’m doing.”

She acknowledges that not everyone likes the celebrity Jessica Hahn, especially some of the callers to the radio station where she works.

“What bothers people is that I’ve gotten stronger,” she said. “Everybody likes the underdog. But when you get strong, it’s tough. People think, ‘Well, who is she ?’ ”

She credits Playboy with this new strength. “Playboy was the genesis of a new life for me,” she said.

And she likes talking about her nude pictures.

“The pictures are a testimony that Jessica Hahn is saying, ‘Look, I’ve got control now. This is a strong person here.’ For the first time, I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed. Here is somebody who has overcome something. I’m not Miss Confidence or Wonder Woman.”

Hahn is not the only one who likes her Playboy pictures.

Ray Knight, 19, of Buena Park carried his copy of Playboy with Hahn’s picture on the cover so she could autograph it for him. Knight insisted, however, that he admires Hahn mainly because she has been honest in dealing with the Jim Bakker episode. He even told her that when she signed the magazine. “Thanks,” she said, smiling.

The weekend car show was billed as the California Dreaming Exotic Car Show. But it may have been more erotic than exotic. Besides Hahn, there were the bevy of Coors Light models, the English Leather calendar women and enough other halter tops around the exhibit booths to keep most of the gawkers interested.

Running a close second to Hahn was the four-door Lamborghini Countach Limousine owned by Vini Bergeman of Ultra Limousine in Brea. Hahn’s pictures and autographs were free. Bergeman charged $5 for posters of his Countach with autographs by model Shannon Ray.

“Our cars are not only prettier than Jessica Hahn, so are our models,” Bergeman boasted.

If not prettier, at least more scantily clad. Ray’s bikini could be stuffed in a pocket watch.

But Ray was having fun.

“Jessica Hahn? Sure, she’s great. I hope to meet her,” Ray said.

The operators of the car show won’t say how much they are paying Hahn, except that it’s “big bucks.”

It’s clear, however, that they thought they got their money’s worth.

“I’ve dealt with Playmates at these shows before; a lot of them really think they’re something, and nobody’s ever heard of them,” said Jim Lynskey, the show manager who thought of inviting Hahn. “But Jessica Hahn, she is somebody. We wanted a grabber to bring people into the show.”

Judging by the long autograph line and the packed convention hall, that’s what they got.