The Bunny Years (15 page)

“The Bunny job and promotional work helped me learn how to deal with people—and hang on to my sense of humor. My photography work at the magazine engendered the idea that I could actually have a career in design and also gave me a sense of how to handle myself in the corporate world.

“For more than 15 years, I've had my own New York-based interior design firm. I've come to realize that my career was motivated equally by the Playboy years and by my early environment. As a teenager living at the Mansion, I was introduced to antiques: fine furniture, paintings and other works of art. From my childhood came indelible memories of the light and color of changing seasons and spatial proportions of the giant redwoods surrounding our small log cabin.

“I was born in Hastings, Nebraska, but when I was still a baby my parents became migrants, traveling from Northern California to Oregon, stopping wherever they could find work. My father, who had been a featherweight Golden Gloves boxer and aspiring actor, looked for carpentry jobs. We finally settled in Grant's Pass, Oregon, where we built a log cabin. There was a lot of creative stimulation in those rustic surroundings, but I was not good in school. Many years later, I was diagnosed as having all the classic symptoms of dyslexia. In those days I was just regarded as ‘backward' and a slow learner. My parents' only hope was that I would get enough schooling to be able to find work. I left school at 16 without finishing seventh grade. By that time, we were living in Los Angeles.

“My father knew he had a very pretty daughter who might become a model or actress. A photographer friend of my parents took some stills of me, fully clothed, and sent a few to
Playboy
. Ultimately, it was photographer Bill Graham and his wife Shirley who did the centerfold story and photographs. They befriended me and became surrogate aunt and uncle to me.

“In 1960, it was considered very prestigious to be a Playmate. At the time I was still a 16-year-old kid, and far from the prettiest girl chosen to be a centerfold. I think I was also the only fully dressed Playmate. I met Hef for the first time in Los Angeles after my centerfold pictures had already been shot, and his first words to me were, ‘My God, if I had seen you before we went to press, I would have brought you to Chicago for a re-shoot.' I have a feeling if I'd done a reshoot, the pictures would have been less modest.

“One Sunday in July 1960, the Grahams invited me for brunch. Shirley said to me, ‘Delilah, nothing is going to happen with your life here in Van Nuys. Why don't you go to Chicago and work as a Bunny?' Sometime later I leaned that my mother wrote Hefner a letter asking him to ‘take care of my little girl.' But I think my parents felt instinctively that I had good sense and could handle this opportunity. As a teenager, I was fairly independent. I spent most of my time around adults, listening. I didn't want to hang out with other kids my age, doing silly things.

“At the time the Playboy Mansion became my home, Hef didn't own the entire building. As individual leases expired, he would acquire the space. Hef knew that girls were coming to Chicago from all over the country to become Bunnies or Playmates, and they had no place to stay. As more apartments became available, they were refitted to become part of a dorm, known as the Bunny Hutch. The Mansion's kitchen was open 24 hours a day so the girls always had food available, even if they worked at the Club till 3 a.m.

The Playboy Mansion, Chicago.

“A small one-bedroom apartment on the very top floor was available when I moved in. I shared a connecting bath with the apartment where [writer] Shel Silverstein and [artist] LeRoy Neiman stayed. Both of my ‘roommates' were great guys, and we had loads of fun. I told Shel one day that ‘the girls are going to find you more desirable if I creme-rinse your fuzzy beard'—and he let me do it. LeRoy Neiman loved fine wines and the best of everything. In those days, Hef had nothing but
Baccarat crystal, exquisite china and the finest napery. One night while LeRoy and I were drinking an incredibly good wine, he said ‘Why don't we see Chicago by helicopter?' We had the cook make us a picnic hamper, grabbed a bottle of the wine and the Baccarat glasses and flew over Chicago in a rented helicoptor just to see the sights. It was like a fairy-tale world in those days.

“Bonnie Jo Halpin was one of the first girls I met when I arrived in Chicago. She just opened her arms and told me, ‘I'll be your friend.' She was dating Victor Lownes at the time and said, ‘I can tell you everything that's going on around here.' A few weeks after I moved in, Bonnie Jo was staying overnight with me. It was the night Hef was throwing a bachelor party for Sammy Davis Jr., who would marry Mai Britt the following day. Hef came to my apartment and told us he was going to lock the door from the outside and that, ‘under no circumstances do you two come out!' Bonnie said, ‘That's interesting. I guess they're going to have an orgy.'

‘Oh, lots of food and things.' I was thinking ‘banquet.'

‘My dear,' Bonnie said, ‘there is more to an orgy than just a whole lot of food.'

“Bonnie and I became great friends. Joyce Nizzari, a very elegant, feminine girl who was both a Bunny and a Playmate, was my roommate for a while. Later, two other centerfold Bunnies, Terre Tucker and Carrie Radisson, roomed with me.

“The Playboy Mansion was a bachelor's fantasy. Hef would give parties that went on until 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning. People who worked until 3 a.m. were still revved up and loved having a place to unwind. He served them sumptuous buffet breakfasts. It was a fast world, and boy, everybody wanted to go to the Chicago Playboy Mansion parties. Intellectuals, movie stars, politicians, sports figures—really interesting people of every sort, including celebrities: the Shah of Iran, Elizabeth Taylor and Lenny Bruce.

“Hef was into hypnosis and very good at it. At smaller gatherings of 10 or 12 close friends, he was at his best. Under hypnosis, a subject's body language and voice would change to that of a 6-year-old, and Hef would ask questions. ‘Where are you now?' ‘What do you see?' Unfortunately, he had a problem bringing people out if it. On one occasion I watched him hypnotize Joni Mattis, a Playmate and Bunny whom he was dating. While she was under, he told her that after he brought her out she would revert to a hypnotic state whenever she saw him with a bottle of Pepsi-Cola. Well, he drank Pepsi all the time! In the middle of a party she saw him with a Pepsi in his hand. Bam! She was under.

“Although the opportunity was there, all around me in Chicago, I never strayed into the fast lane. I never got mixed up with ‘wise guys.' Partly, I'm sure, because I lived at the Mansion and Hef kept an eye on me. Also, when I became Hef's receptionist at
Playboy
, I was exposed to a different world. I was attracted to people on the magazine—the editors, photographers and the entire creative staff—and enjoyed the intellectual stimulation. I did a minimum of talking, a lot of listening and learned a great deal. When
I turned 18, I started working as a Bunny again and went to New Orleans for the opening of that Club.

Delilah and “Maxie” the cat at home in her Manhattan penthouse.

“I've always had an eye for design. A small contribution to improving the look of the Bunny costume was my suggestion of using a cat brush to fluff up the Bunny tails and then attach them higher on the fanny to give the girls a prettier line. My next idea was to use the soft cottontails as bra push-ups. It became a running joke that we all had three tails. I worked with the wardrobe mistress to fit the costume higher on the hip to make the legs look longer and give more definition to the waist.

“From the outset, Hef and I had very good rapport and he always listened to me. I went into a rage one day at the Club because of the way one of the managers was treating a Bunny. When I told the man that I was going to speak to Hef about it, he fired me. ‘I don't think so,' I said. On that particular day, Hef was in the Club being interviewed for a Canadian television documentary. That didn't stop me. I marched up to him. ‘There's something you have to hear. It's very important.' Without knowing what my complaint was about or what I would say, Hef told the camera crew to keep rolling and invited me to sit down. ‘Let's talk,' he said. ‘Tell me what's going on.'

“In 1964, I began working full-time in the photo department at
Playboy
and no longer worked as a Bunny. From the beginning I admired Hefner's great respect for professional women. He took pains to advance their careers, promoting women who had started as secretaries to executive positions. I had no idea I had creative talents that could lead to a career until I was given an opportunity at
Playboy
to do setups for various pictorials on food, stereo equipment and clothing items. I traveled to Europe to work on various shoots, helping to select the women and the locations.

“In 1967 I fell in love with Enrico Sarsini, a New York-based
Life
magazine photographer, who came to Chicago to shoot a cover for
Playboy
. I was chosen to be the model photographed behind a shower door tracing the Playboy rabbit in the steam. After the shoot, we commuted back and forth and talked endlessly by telephone. Eventually, he asked me to move to New York. We lived together in his West Side apartment for a year
before we broke up. He became a Vietnam War photographer, while I remained on my own in New York modeling and doing television commercials.

“Later, after we had split up and I had traveled the world, my interior-design career sort of found me. Friends asked me to redecorate their apartments because they liked my eclectic style and the way I handled the chronic New York problems of limited space and light. A textile manufacturer approached me about designing his new showroom to feature his art collection. By the time I started my interior-design business, I was into the next chapter of my life and no longer mentioned my background with Playboy. No one, I thought, was going to hand over a half-million dollars to a ‘Playboy Bunny' to do a design project. Above all, I had to avoid being mistaken for ‘someone's cute girlfriend who's redoing the place.'

“Also, I had personally become more conservative while I saw
Playboy
magazine becoming more risqué. As a businesswoman running my own firm, I didn't want to be associated with that image. Up until a year ago, I didn't even want to be identified as ‘Teddi Smith,' my pseudonym as a Playmate, and avoided giving any interviews for
Playboy
. Hef, who remains a good friend, has respected that decision over the years. But after I finished a major design project for a Fortune 500 company earlier this year, I had a change of heart about my Playboy experience. It had to do with feeling more secure about my professional standing and less concerned about giving up some of my privacy. I was very pleased to appear in the 1996
Playmate
book.

“I've also renewed my long-standing relationship with Hef. Today his home in Los Angeles is architecturally beautiful, but almost casual in decor compared with the Chicago Playboy mansion I remember in the ‘60s. But, you know, these days he has a family life with kids and dogs, so it's a different lifestyle. Times are changing for women, and Hef has always been receptive to evolving social attitudes. I've talked to him about including older women, and not just older celebrity women, in
Playboy
's pictorials. Hef was warm to the idea and said that he was moving in that direction.

“I love my work. I love scouting through warehouses for vintage architectural pieces I can rehabilitate and mix with modern design. I love the engineering work involved in creating sculpture out of unexpected materials. It's magical. It's interesting to me how much the influences of my youth still shape my life. My parents were always helping their neighbors build a house, cut down a tree, fix something broken. Maybe it's just called survival, but that ‘helping out' was always a part of our everyday life and it's ingrained in me. One thing I would like to participate in now is setting up a charitable program among the Playmates and former Bunnies to assist women who need help making a transition or getting back on their feet. Financially, psychologically and emotionally, we can offer a helping hand to those who just need a boost so they can once again support themselves.”