[7][4] From April 1950 on Hadley appeared in newspaper photo spreads as a model for California-based retail events, trade conventions, and fashion merchandise.

[11] This meant that viewers saw only specific features of her, such as hands for a fountain pen ad, teeth for a toothpaste commercial, without seeing her whole face and body.

[12] Her modeling gigs would lead to a television appearance, on a local Los Angeles program called Hollywood Studio Party during April 1951.

[13] Later that year, she was selected as the photo representative for a heavily promoted musical called My L.A., which opened in Los Angeles in early December 1951.

[20][21] Hadley's acting career seems to have started at age 21 in March 1952, as the female lead in an original stage production, which is known only from a single advertisement.

She did a two-week run in Champagne Complex with co-star Joe Flynn under the direction of William Schallert at the Laguna Playhouse, followed by another two weeks doing the same play at the Tustin Playbox.

[32] During October 1957 she opened with the touring company for the then Broadway hit The Tunnel of Love, playing with Tommy Noonan, William Bishop, and Narda Onyx to excellent notices by reviewers.

[35][36][37] Hadley told columnist Gene Sherman that after eight months of continuously wearing a wedding ring for the play, she got used to it and kept it on even after she got engaged for real.

The hero usually gives you a slight kiss at the end of the show, but nothing very passionate because he has to have another girl in the next episode.Her second film, Frontier Uprising in early 1961, would become a mainstay of television in later decades.

She was now thirty-one, an age at which leading women in television who hadn't yet reached full star status either turned to character acting or faded away.

Publicity surrounding her choice as Miss Los Angeles revealed she was 5' 5" tall and weighed 117 pounds at age 21, with brown hair and dark blue eyes.

[42][43] Columnists announced the couple had sunk their savings into their new production company, Alger Films, which was to make a movie Falvo had written and in which they both would perform.