The Bunny Years (19 page)

Real-estate tycoon Sue Gin, who is often described as Chicago's most prominent self-made businesswoman, bought her first piece of property at the age of 17. In 1983, she launched Flying Food Fare, a catering company servicing three-dozen domestic and international airlines, Amtrak passenger railway and a Chicago-based grocery chain. She is the widow of William McGowan, founder of MCI, the long-distance telephone company.

“After reading Gloria Steinem's article in
Show
magazine and commenting on it at the Club, someone asked me if I would debate her on a television interview program. I agreed to give it a try, but I was very nervous getting ready to fly to New York for the interview because I wasn't sure that I could be as articulate as I wanted to be against someone of her stature. Then, for some reason, the plans for the debate didn't mature, which was a disappointment to me. She had taken such a negative approach, and I was ready to defend the job because I truly believed I was reaping benefits; the job was financially rewarding, and I learned a lot about business. I later started a food service company [Flying Food Fare], so I don't think that I spent four years at Playboy not learning anything. But there is no question I was also having a lot of fun, laughing and goofing it up, like you do at that age. Today, Gloria Steinem is one of my heroes, but at that time we had a difference of opinion. I didn't see things the way she did at the Club, but then I didn't go to Playboy to do an investigative piece. When you are on the cutting edge, like we at Playboy were, it's ‘open season'—you have to expect those kinds of potshots.

“I worked at Playboy for four years. I had continued to buy property the entire time I was a Bunny. On Saturday afternoons, I'd go out and buy a piece of property, then go back to work again at the Club. But I wanted to broaden my horizons, and I talked to Playboy about management positions. I was told quite frankly that any management
position I would get probably wouldn't pay the kind of money I was used to making as a Bunny. It would have been a difficult transition for me, so I left to go into the insurance business, and shortly thereafter into real estate.

“I still stay in touch with some of the women I worked with. I spent a great many hours in the club; the result is that I probably spent more time with those girls than I spent with any other group of people in my entire life.”

P
EARL
B
EY
P
RICE

I
t was Opening Night and my costume wasn't ready! There I was, a 24-year-old single mother with a year-old daughter at home with a baby-sitter while a Japanese seamstress named Mrs. Doi was still fitting my Bunny costume. I thought I wouldn't make it, but at the last minute, Mrs. Doi finished and her son drove me to work. There were crowds lined up outside the Club when I arrived. It was a madhouse. I could barely push through, but once I got inside the door I said, ‘I work here, I think,' and opened my coat to show them I was wearing my costume.

Bunny Pearl, 1960. Now a portrait artist and a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

“When I applied to be a Bunny, I had been asked if I had any waitress experience. I told them I'd worked in my aunt's restaurant when I was in school, serving short-order food and 3.2 beer. On my first night at Playboy, a man told me he wanted a Heineken. I'd never heard of it—in fact, it sounded kind of suggestive. I told him to get serious and I'd be back to take his order.

“Before I became a Playboy Bunny, I'd been in the army for two years. That's how I made it out of the Northern California farming area where I grew up. You could work for the phone company or be a cashier in a movie theater, but there weren't many choices if you hadn't found a husband by the time you graduated from high school. I thought there had to be something more. It didn't occur to me that just anybody could go to college.

“While I was still in the service, I met and married my first husband, who died of cancer a month and three
days before the birth of my daughter. By October 1959, I was living in a small apartment in Chicago with my baby, and dating a professor at Northwestern University. I had an office job, but it was hard to make ends meet. When I heard the Playboy Club was opening, I applied.

“Victor Lownes was my nemesis, always pressuring me to go out with him. I turned him down because he went out with so many women and I didn't want to be one of the pack. But he had such a temper. He fired me again and again, but each time, Arnie Morton would ask me to come back, promising that he'd speak to Victor about leaving me alone. I was always rehired not because I was gorgeous or charming, for I was neither, but because I was one of their best waitresses. But one night I was so fed up with Lownes that I went to the dressing room, changed out of my Bunny costume and went back on the floor to find him. Victor was talking with a group of people. I threw my costume in his face and said, ‘You're always trying to get in my pants. Here's your chance. Have a ball!' That's when I quit for good.

“Years later, I ran into Victor in London and he asked me, ‘Do you remember the last time I saw you?' I said No, to be polite, and then he related the story to me almost exactly as I remembered it. He was with a young woman who said, ‘Victor has told me all about you.' I said, ‘
All
?'

“During the years I worked at the Club at night, I had a day job so I could keep up my clerical skills. After I left Playboy in 1965, I became office manager of a commodity clearing firm. I started watching what the guys were doing, and it began to make sense. I then started keeping charts and trading pork bellies and live cattle on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I wanted to be on my own. In 1983, I bought the first IOM [International Options Market] seat that went on sale to the public, thereby becoming one of the first women with a seat on the Exchange. I got a bloody nose in the bargain—literally! It gets very physical on the floor, and some guy inadvertently swiped me right off my feet.

“I still have my seat on the Exchange, but for the past several years I've devoted most of my time to painting. I've now been married for more than 25 years to a bail bondsman I had first met when I was working as a Bunny.”

D
ANA
M
ONTANA

I
was a sponge, soaking up every ounce of knowledge I could about the service end of running the Playboy Club, and saved every penny I earned there. At the age of 23, I opened my own nightclub, the Sugar Shack, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, about an hour out of Chicago. I would never have been able to do what I did for myself if it hadn't
been for the three years I spent as a Bunny. But the ultimate twist is that I reversed the roles and made men the sex objects.

“I absolutely adored working at the Playboy Club. I was hooked from the moment I walked in and got hired. The service was impeccable; there was glamour and a sense of occasion about the Club.

“God, we had fun! The big dance was the Twist, and the Playroom had Twist parties that went on until 4 a.m. Everyone hated working them and having to dance, but I'd stay on to the end. There was a man named Bob who always came in, a big, fat guy who wore a trench coat and always had a lot of money to spend. I'd dance with him and he'd give me a hundred-buck tip. So I started introducing him to the other girls, and suddenly everyone wanted to stay on and Twist with this guy. He'd drop over a thousand dollars a night for about three months. One night, after work, I went into the dressing room and Lucy, the woman who did wardrobe, had the
Sun-Times
open to a story with the headline, ‘Embezzler Caught!' And there was a picture of Bob, who worked in a bank and had stolen money so he could Twist with the Bunnies. For months we'd been asking him, ‘So, Bob, how do you make a living?'