The Bunny Years (27 page)

“But when I mentioned it to my boyfriend, he said, ‘Oh, no, they don't want girls like you—only tall, blond Midwestern types,'” recalled Quong, now Ling Maris, a Connecticut-based interior decorator and children's book author. “Well, I was intrigued. I thought even if they reject me I'll get a chance to see what's going on. Keith Hefner and I hit it off very well, and I was called for a second interview. My boyfriend was shocked and told me I was just being set up for a big disappointment. He was on target; minorities didn't stand much of a chance back then. But Playboy liked the idea of having Bunnies with a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and I was hired. At first there was some debate about putting me in the VIP Room as an ‘International' Bunny, but I got hired to work all the rooms.”

Mei Mei Quong, 1963.

In fact, four black Bunnies were hired in those five days, including Barker,
dubbed a “Bronze Bunny” in the caption that accompanied a news-wire photograph of her wearing a bikini during her interview at the Playboy offices. Barker was sent to work in Chicago until the New York Club opened.

“The building was just a shell under construction when Victor Lownes hired me to do PR,” Barbara Harrison recalls. “And I remember that the press reacted with some surprise in the beginning when Playboy made a point of hiring black girls, and girls from various other racial groups, but that had been a long-standing policy of the organization.”

By the time Harrison was hired, Lownes and Playboy had officially severed ties. Lownes remained as a consultant for the still unopened New York Club, but he had opened his own public-relations firm with offices on 53rd Street next to the Stork Club—with Playboy Enterprises as his first client. Harrison, an elegant, well-spoken, blonde New Yorker, had worked for Georg Jensen, the posh Fifth Avenue silver and crystal store, before joining Playboy. “They really wanted to create a certain image in New York,” Barbara says, “and I think I was hired because I wasn't flashy-looking. New Yorkers are cynical and there is an alienation toward anything coming from the outside. Before the opening, there was an inclination among columnists to look down their noses and characterize Playboy as a kind of corny, hick operation. They called the guys from Chicago the ‘brown-shoe crowd.' “

Despite the hard-boiled cynicism, it was obvious from the beginning the Club was going to be hot. By April 1962, the Club boasted 33,000 registered Keyholders in New York. But the opening of the $7 million, seven-story Playboy Club, at 5 E. 59th St., adjacent to the Sherry Netherland Hotel, proved a more torturous and time-delayed process than anticipated. There were the usual construction problems, compounded by hassles with the city and state's notorious bureaucracies. By spring, the official opening was postponed to September, then October.

Cathy Young, Keith Hefner and Marion Barker.

Meanwhile, the Bunny hiring crept on at a snail's pace month after month. Newspaper articles, such as one claiming that out of some 3,000
“would-be Bunnies,” only 125 would be hired to work in the New York Club and make “lush earnings of $200 to $300 a week,” enticed a steady stream of new applicants well into the fall. Seventeen Bunnies were hired in a four-day audition in late April.
New York Post
columnist Normand Poirier watched the girls “in an endless stream, flow past—dancers, models, actresses, ‘hat chicks,' waitresses, students, nurses, salesgirls, stewardesses . . . ‘Stand on your mark, please, pose for the Polaroid, click, thank you, dear, we'll call you if . . .' “

S
AN
D
RA
D
EETZ

P
layboy was a steppingstone and I've never looked back,” says Deetz, whose 15 minutes of Playboy fame was as the 20-year-old Bunny applicant featured in a
New York Mirror
article on the last wave of auditions a week before the club opened.

Sandra Deetz auditioning for a Bunny job, November 1962.

“I worked at the Playboy Club for three or four months to make enough money to take some classes at Hunter College. I didn't really have any goals back then, except not to go back to Ohio. I'm a natural people person, and I was just made for that kind of ‘let's keep it lively, have a quick laugh, a drink, some fun, some food and move on.' I was good at it, but come on, it was a very undignified job. The big effort was all in putting your lipstick on.

“But I had a lot of fun there and met some great women who have been my friends for over 30 years. In 1976, I became a sports feature reporter for NBC, interviewing everybody from race-car driver Mario Andretti to Triple Crown Champion Seattle Slew. I'm Fate's god-child, and I've been very lucky to have done a lot of interesting things, like dancing in the Copa line, hosting a television talk show and doing a lot of traveling.”

______________________________________

“F
OGGY
”

A
mong the first Bunnies hired in New York was Deede Sterling, now the owner of The Magpie's Nest, a quaint doll shop with ancient stone walls and rough hewn beams in the medieval cathedral town of Canterbury, England.

“I was quiet. Insecure. I was never your typical bubbly Bunny,” recalled Deede. “Keith was always telling me to smile. Now
he
would have been the perfect Bunny. Always upbeat.

“I was so much in my own world that everyone called me Foggy, and that became my Bunny name. I was a million miles away, daydreaming. I could never quite remember which drinks went to which table. I did my job but in my own time. People eventually got their drinks, but I wasn't what you'd call a go-getter. I left Playboy in 1963 to work in the Bahamas, and that's where I met my husband, an Englishman. We married, had two children and, after moving to Canterbury, I opened my antique doll shop.”

Susan King, Martha Faberman, Deede Sterling at the Playboy Offices, 25 W. 56th St.

Deede was stunned to learn that the Clubs had been shuttered for more than a decade. “Really, fancy not knowing the Playboy Clubs had closed. No one mentioned it to me. I guess I really am still foggy.”