There may be only one blonde better marketed than Cindy Margolis, but she's eleven inches high and can't claim that her breasts are real. Invariably described as "the most downloaded woman on the Internet" — she's the GIF that keeps on GIF-ing — Margolis started out selling pictures of her belly-baring self to car washes; now she lives in the Barbie Dreamhouse you think she does. It's in the Valley, all cream colors and gleaming white marble, with dual cascading stairways and, naturally, a pool under construction in the backyard. Margolis, who married an old friend of mine, Los Angeles restauranteur Guy Starkman, cozied up with me on the biggest bed I've ever seen and told me everything a girl needs to know about breast lifts, in vitro baby-making and how to self-start a career as a sex symbol. —Alisa Volkman

Alisa Volkman: What's with your bed? It's huge! Cindy Margolis: It's custom-built — it's two queen-size beds put together. AV: Why so big? CM: I don't understand how most people can sleep in anything smaller. I don't get it when people sleep on top of one another, spooning all of the time. AV: Even after sex? Some people think that kind of thing is, you know, intimate. CM: My husband Guy and I have been married two years, so it's already . . . well, we're still in the honeymoon stage. Of course I want him there and I love him to death, but when I'm sleeping, it's like, "Go away! Get over on your side!" AV: Weren't you previously engaged? CM: I'd been with someone for almost ten years. But it got so we were more like brother and sister. AV: But were you still having sex? CM: Yeah, but it was boring and mechanical. It got to the point where he was like, "Let's party and then have sex," and I would think, okay, maybe — if I'm wasted. But Guy and I are very happy. It's actually becoming more difficult to even remember life before Guy. AV: Do you think he gets off on being married to a pinup? CM: I'm always wearing sweats around the house. So when he sees me on TV or in a magazine, he's always like, "Who is that? I don't know who that girl is." Sometimes I'll tell him to pick out a picture of me from a magazine, and I'll play that role and get dressed up for him that way. AV: And does he ever get jealous or threatened by what you do? CM: He is so not jealous it gets me mad. He'll always tell me, "Go by yourself, they don't want to see you with me." Even when we got married, he was the one saying, "Don't tell anyone you got married, they don't want to hear that." AV: When did you start getting attention from men? CM: I developed this same body — breasts, everything — by the time I was in sixth grade. My mom was into makeup, so we'd play dress-up, which escalated into my wearing makeup when I was twelve or thirteen. Hello? I was just really asking for it. AV: How did you handle all that attention at that age? CM: My posture's still bad because I didn't want to have my chest stick out so much when I was young. AV: So your breasts are real? CM: I had a breast lift. I'm in love. I recommend it to all. AV: What exactly did they do? CM: It's pretty graphic . . . do you really want to hear this? AV: Please! CM: Okay, they take your nipple off and then they pull the skin up, and then they put it back. So they lift them up, and then they take the extra skin off. AV: Did it leave scars? CM: At first, but now they've completely faded. AV: Do you think you'll ever do nudity? CM: If I was going to do that, I probably already would have, when it would have helped my career. But now, it's like, who cares? Then again, if Brad Pitt wants me to do it for a movie, my clothes are coming right off. AV: How does one launch a career as a pinup? There aren't exactly entry-level jobs . . . CM: I was taking business classes. We had an assignment — if you had your own business, what would it be? So I took one of my modeling pictures and I made it into a greeting card and I turned it in, proposing my own greeting card company. My professor liked it and advised me to get an investor. AV: And who were your first customers? CM: Car washes. My mom and I would go up and down Ventura Boulevard in my VW bug, and car washes started taking them. Then we heard about this convention, which was popular for gifts and paper products, and we snuck into it. We ended up getting a distributor. There were sixteen different cards with stupid sayings — in one, I was in a cop outfit and it said, "Go ahead, make my day." I mean they were the cheesiest things. But they started selling nationwide and doing really well. My mom ended up quitting her job and started handling the bills and orders in the basement with my brother. AV: And it just continued to snowball? CM: In 1995, right when I had shot my hundredth poster, I was pointing my finger at refrigerators on The Price Is Right as one of Bob Barker's beauties. Extra did a segment on me and asked if they could put me on their Internet site. AOL told me the next day that I'd been downloaded seventy-five thousand times in twenty-four hours. I didn't even know what a download was. AV: Your life sounds kind of unreal. What are the hard parts you don't talk about on your website? CM: I would have to say going through in vitro twice and not having it work. I almost feel like I've failed, and I really don't feel like that that often. I'm starting to consider adoption. AV: So for in vitro, Guy had to masturbate into a little tube or something? CM: Yeah, in the hospital. It's really bad. AV: Were you with him in the room? CM: No. AV: Did you leave him with any nice, lasting thoughts? CM: I felt so bad for him, so I made him a little book of his favorite sexiest pictures of me. And I wrote him a really sexy note. So the pictures were on top and on the reverse side were pictures of me holding our friends' babies. So one side was pure sex and the other was what he was doing it for. Because I wanted him to think that he needed to get the best sperm. AV: So did Guy say that the book worked well for him? CM: Yeah, he said it did. He ended up getting his highest sperm count ever.