The Bunny Years (34 page)

“We came from every sort of background. My own was very chaotic. I never knew my father, Laurence Hutton, who abandoned my mother before I was born. I grew up with a stepfather and took his surname, Hall, although I was never legally adopted. My mother, who was well-born and came from a privileged background, had three more daughters. We had little money. There were problems with alcohol. My mother, who was afraid of everything, couldn't protect herself or us, which is why it was basically left to me to raise my younger sisters. I just couldn't be afraid because it became my job to protect my sisters and take care of the household. And I couldn't wait to get out.

“Back then, everything was a giant adventure. After a year at the University of South Florida, I headed for New York. I saw the ad for Bunny jobs in
The New York Times
and was hired in 1963, not long after the Club opened. There were three other Bunnies with my given name, Mary, so I opted for Lauren, after my father, Laurence. I was hired as a Lunch Bunny, because I was too young to work at night. Lunch Bunnies were there to be looked at—to smile, chat and, incidentally, to serve drinks.

“We all had our little opening routines. When customers heard my name, they would ask if I was named for Bacall, and I'd say, ‘No, for D.H. or T.E. Lawrence.' It was sassy and a hint that I was literate. You never wanted to get too personal, but at the same time, letting them know you had some education was a way of protecting yourself, code for ‘I'm not a hooker.' You were saying, ‘Don't look at me
that way
.'

“I quickly became the Demerit Bunny. My ears were crooked, my tail not on straight, whatever. Every time I had 97–98 demerits and almost got fired, I'd somehow win the bartenders' Bunny of the Week contest. That would give me enough good points to lower the demerits and I wouldn't be fired.

“One of my favorite customers was a white Russian prince, who was head of some company and really fancied me. I liked him because he had the manners of the great old gents I knew as a little kid growing up down South. He was old and sad and full of stories. I became very attached to him, but I never saw him outside the Club. Mysteriously, I started receiving in the mail million-dollar insurance policies, with me named as the beneficiary. Those were the days when airports had machines that sold air-travel insurance. I discovered that before every business trip, he would take out a policy and send it to me.

“The Night Bunnies, the big, bad girls who came in to work as the Lunch Bunnies were leaving, were a tense group. They'd just bump us out of their way. It was all very exciting, kind of dangerous. They were the ones who went to the parties and met all the big shots. Toward the end of the time I worked at the Club, someone in the hierarchy got an eye for me. I started getting invitations to Playboy parties. It frightened me. The hits started coming too hot and heavy. I think I might even then have been worrying about my own attraction to that life if I stayed in it too long. I still think what
if
I'd slept with one of those very rich, powerful guys? Would I have ended up getting married or being kept? I didn't want to get pulled into that world, and I knew it could happen.

“After about a year, I wanted to move on. I was working in a dark club while the sun was shining outside. It was depressing. Also, I was in my very first relationship, a bad one, with a disc jockey I'd fallen in love with in Florida. He was an older guy, and he had a lot of control over me. One reason I never went to parties or saw the other girls outside the Club is that he wouldn't let me out of his sight. So I finally left Playboy in January 1964, and I went to the Bahamas to work in a resort casino with a lot of other former Bunnies. The Italian croupiers used to make pasta for us and they'd sling the spaghetti against the wall to see if it was al dente—if it stuck, it was cooked enough. I thought it was the most European thing I'd ever seen. And an English croupier who had records by some group called the Beatles told us, ‘They're bigger than Elvis, they're going to take over the world!' Then I was fired shortly before the resort's big grand opening because I wouldn't sleep with one of the guys who owned the place. It was a Saturday night and all the cruise ships were coming in, but the other girls went out on strike in support of me. Everybody quit
en masse
.

“I eventually wound up back in Manhattan and found myself standing with two suitcases in front of Tiffany's on a Sunday morning, not knowing what to do. Then I remembered a Bunny I'd worked with, and called her. She and her boyfriend, Arnie, a great born-in-Brooklyn kind of guy, let me sleep on the couch until I could figure out what to do. I needed a job, but I just couldn't be a cocktail waitress again. Arnie looked in
The New York Times
ads and said, ‘Here. You can be a house model for Christian Dior.' You had to be 5'8” and I was 5'6 1/2”, so I went in wearing very high heels and got the job.

Lauren Hutton, the supermodel, actress and talk-show hostess; above, wreck-diving in Pearl Harbor.

“Later, when I was modeling for
Vogue
in the 1970s, I was asked to be one of the speakers at a feminist rally held in front of the New York Public Library. Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were there, and I was very proud to be asked. I stood in the crowd listening to the angry words, and it struck me that I was hearing nothing but a tirade blaming men for everything. I couldn't relate to all that hostility. I turned around and left. My idea of being a feminist was making your own way in the world, being responsible for your own decisions and taking care of yourself, not looking to a man to take care of you.

“When we became Playboy Bunnies, the ‘60s hadn't yet really started. I think we were probably the last ones to come out of an era when women had to make a clear choice between being either smart or sexy—one couldn't have both brains and beauty. As a little girl, this all came home to me with Marilyn Monroe, who was soft, warm, the essence of femininity—but people laughed at her. She had to be a joke because she was sexy. There was also great hostility toward Bunnies. But, of course, a Bunny was sexy, so she, too, had to be dumb and a joke. No choice there. I wondered even as a kid why a real woman couldn't be both smart and pretty.

“But Playboy protected us. In the early 1970s when I was a
Vogue
model and had just signed a contract with Revlon, Hugh Hefner got in touch and said, ‘We've got nude pictures of you. Do you want us to run them?' I said, ‘Huh—what nudes?' He sent me copies and then I remembered what had happened. Ten years earlier, shortly before I started working as a Bunny, a photographer paid me $15 an hour to do a local newspaper ad for plastic garbage cans. After we finished the ad, he told me he wanted to test a ‘nude modeling light.' I had no idea there was no such thing. I was leery about it, but he assured me that since I was under 21, he would never be able to publish the photographs anyway. Could I help him out? I signed the release as Mary Hall, my name then. The photographer's wife made me up and there I was posing in cloth drapings for these pathetic ‘40s-style art pictures.

“When I saw the photographs, I told Hefner, ‘No, please don't publish them.' And he didn't.

“We were young women on the move, out there pushing a new frontier. We were like sisters learning together how to take charge of our own lives. We protected each other. We were a rare bouquet.”

S
USAN
S
ULLIVAN

I
t was summertime, and I was working in Manhattan as a showroom model for a month or so to earn money for my junior year at Hofstra University. The fashion houses always took on extra girls to show the new fall lines, but I needed a part-time job when I went back to school, too. It was then that I saw a huge, full-page ad in
The New York Times
announcing jobs as Bunnies in the Playboy Club. The Playboy Club to me was about
Playboy
magazine, which represented something illicit and erotic. I didn't read it, but I found it sexy to look at when I would see it in some guy's apartment. I suppose it comes from an Irish Catholic background, but the taboo aspect of sex was very erotic to me. The idea of working at Playboy as a Bunny titillated all of the voyeuristic aspects of my nature.

“I never seriously thought I would be hired, but I decided I would at least go and apply for the job. I wanted to see the club, and I figured this would be the only way I ever would.

“It was
really
an adventure. I went on my lunch hour. I borrowed a dress from the line, a very clingy, simple crepe sheath dress. And I wore all of this padding because, to me, the image of Playboy Bunnies was bosoms. So I went in there with my large padded breasts for an interview with some man who was in charge. But then he told me he was going to send me down to see the Bunny Mother.

“ ‘You know, I'm going to be quite honest with you,' I said. ‘I don't think this is going to work out because actually I'm going back to school in September.'