Playmate of the Year AMX returns to its original pink

Posted on Mar 31, 2016 in Featured | 2 comments

Photos courtesy Mark Melvin.

For decades, the pink AMX that AMC gave away in 1968 wore one coat of different colored paint after another to hide its factory-original hue. The coverup, however, came not from an overabundance of testosterone on the part of the car’s owner, rather on the part of its pursuers—longtime owner and Playboy Playmate of the Year Victoria Vetri found it difficult to keep a low profile in a bright pink car, even in Los Angeles. But now, one AMC enthusiast has returned one of the most famous AMXs to its original shade of pink as part of a full restoration that he will debut next month.

From 1964 on, every Playboy Playmate of the Year got a car, boat, or motorcycle, typically new and sporty or luxurious; at least for the first 10 years or so of the tradition, the cars the playmates got were painted pink. When AMC inked a deal to host its 1968 dealer meetings at several of the Playboy clubs across the country, it only made sense that the company would provide the next PMOY car, and it only made sense that the car would be AMC’s new two-seater AMX, which the company introduced about a month before the dealer meetings and the presentation of the car to Vetri, who went by the name Angela Dorian for her appearance in the magazine.

Though powered by a base 290-cu.in. V-8, the AMX that AMC gave her was still fairly well loaded, with air conditioning, power steering and brakes, an 8-track, a tilt column, tinted windows and Magnum 500s. (The pink AMX she’s sitting on in the magazine, by the way, was one borrowed from a Los Angeles AMC dealer and hurriedly painted for the photo shoot, not the one AMC gave her.) It even had a special-made six-digit dash plaque of 36-24-35, corresponding to her measurements.

The AMX as Mark bought it.

Vetri said in an interview years later that after her appearance in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, she had the AMX repainted brown (then later gray and again to black) to keep stalkers from following her and even to cut down on the number of times police officers would stop her to see if she really was the 1968 Playmate of the Year. The latter repaints could very well have arisen from other reasons as well: Current owner Mark Melvin says that when he stripped the car down, he found that no corner of the car hadn’t been crunched in an accident—both doors had been replaced, a gash had been torn in the flanks and shoddily repaired, and when he picked it up, the front end had been mashed in. Vetri had stated that she’d have liked to eventually repaint the car pink, but never did.

Not until the summer of 2010 did Vetri—now known as Victoria Rathgeb—sell the AMX, just a few months before she shot her husband and was arrested for attempted murder. (In 2011, she was sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading no contest to attempted voluntary manslaughter.) Mark, who’s owned a 1969 AMX since buying it for himself as a high school graduation present in 1977, said he bought the Playmate of the Year AMX from a used car lot in Venice Beach, California, knowing full well who the original owner was.

“The car is almost mythical,” Mark says. “Everybody who owns an AMC knows about the car and knew that it wasn’t available for the longest time.”

After a couple of years collecting the necessary parts to restore it, Mark called on a few of his friends in the SoCalAMX Club for help with the rotisserie restoration, which required a full teardown and replacement of the rusty quarter panels. He rebuilt the original drivetrain and, what’s more, stripped the black, gray, brown and even most of the pink layers of paint from the body so he could repaint it in pink, just as the factory did.

“My intention was always to restore the car in pink—that’s where the value of the car was,” he says. “Without Victoria’s ownership of the car, it’d just be another AMX.”

While Mark’s friend John Siciliano hosted part of the car’s restoration in his garage, Mark says another friend, Allen Tyler, offered to take in the car and ended up doing about 99 percent of the work on it. “He just can’t stop,” Mark says of Tyler. “He’s always gotta be going.” Where possible, Mark explains, he bought NOS parts or reused the original equipment, such as the 290 drivetrain.

The restoration is just now wrapping up, and Mark now plans to debut the restored Playmate AMX at the SoCalAMX annual West Coast All-AMC Car Show, scheduled for May 30 in Montclair, California, and then display it again at this year’s AMO National show, scheduled for July 22-25 in Cleveland, Ohio.

He’s also kept in touch with Rathgeb over the last few years and hasn’t ruled out the possibility of meeting her with the restored car when she is released from prison. “She wants to see the car when she gets out, and I want her to be a part of the car as much as she wants to be,” Mark says.