The Bunny Years (36 page)

“I was always interested in cameras and photography, and I'd been taking some film courses at UCLA. One of my friends, who had earned her M.A., considered herself an intellectual and was into the Black Panther Movement. She was working for a film producer. I asked her for advice about becoming a film editor.

Filmmaker Francesca Emerson.

” ‘Oh, I didn't know Playboy Bunnies were interested in such things,' she said, and then directed me to a film editing program. Thirty years later, we still laugh about how she put me down for having been a Bunny.

“During my training, I worked at MGM, Fox and Universal Studios, gaining experience in all facets of film editing. When I completed the course, I was hired by Universal. I've worked in film editing ever since. Beverly Sawyer, a screenwriter and my former apprentice in film editing, is working with me on a documentary about female friendship, focusing on five women who met as Playboy Bunnies 30 years ago.”

B.J. W
ARD

A
fter graduating from high school in Wilmington, Delaware, I headed straight to New York to launch an acting career. I needed a bread-and-butter job, so I auditioned for the Playboy Club—twice. I thought Bunnies were supposed to look sophisticated, so I pulled my hair back and wore a lot of makeup. They turned me down. Then I went back with the fresh-scrubbed, all-American-girl look and they hired me. I wrote to my parents about the job; they didn't consider it good news. My father sent me one of the two letters I ever got from him. The first was a wonderful letter when I was born and he was serving in the military overseas. The second broke my heart because he equated being a Bunny with prostitution. I had felt so good about
getting a job in such a glamorous place. If you were an actress, like me, waiting for your big break, it was certainly better than working in some dark, crummy bar.

“I found the Bunny Training amusing. Just the idea of calling someone Bunny Mother—like Reverend Mother!—was strange stuff. I remember laughing so much toward the end of the training film when they showed a sequence about projecting the Bunny Attitude. ‘When you walk to work, don't look down . . .' and in the film you saw piles of crap in a gutter. Then you heard this bouncy music and the camera panned to the sky. ‘Look up! You're a Bunny!'

B.J. Ward, the current voice of Betty Rubble on
The Flintstones,
combines comedy with opera in her acclaimed one-woman show
Stand Up Opera
, which she's performed throughout the country, in such venues as Washington's Kennedy Center and New York's Carnegie Hall.

“I relished playing the role of ‘good girl' wearing a provocative costume: ‘Come hither, but don't touch.' But as my acting career started taking off, I lost interest. In April 1963, I married Jeremy Steig, a flautist who played with Bill Evans, and we lived in Greenwich Village. I was studying acting with Sandy Meisner and Phillip Burton. I was taking voice classes. My life revolved around rehearsals, auditions, music and friends in the Village. But every day, I would head uptown to 59th Street to work as a Bunny. It seemed surreal. I took a leave of absence to do summer stock in Cooperstown, New York, and when I returned to New York that autumn, I could no longer cut it as a Bunny.

“I was fired. It happened the day I was working in the Piano Bar of the Living Room and the ‘Tallest Man in the World' walked in. He had hands like shovels. Of course, all the shortest Bunnies were rounded up to be photographed with this giant. I'm 5'3” tall, so I qualified. There were the usual corny remarks: ‘Any more in the hutch like you?' and ‘I could use ears like that on my television set.' It finally got to me. I'd had it. I tipped a drink on a guy. I said, ‘Oops!' but that was it.

“Not long after I left Playboy, I was hired to play The Girl in The Fantasticks. I was invited to do a segment of ABC Nightlife March 10, 1965, with Shelley Berman as the guest host. When I mentioned I'd been a Playboy Bunny, the audience howled with laughter because I didn't look at all glamorous in my kneesocks and a bulky sweater. People love to cling to stereotypes.”

H
ONEY
“B
RiGiTTE
” L
iEbERMAN

R
emember ‘A little dab'll do ya?' I was the girl who came out of the tube in the Brylcreem TV commercials. I had come to New York from Austria to be a model, and my father, who was a police chief in Vienna, flew over to visit me. I told him I needed to earn extra money to live on and was working as a Playboy Bunny. I thought my father might chop my head off when he saw me in the costume, but he liked it. He spoke only a little English, but all the girls came over to his table and made such a fuss over him. My father was proud of me and still talks about that visit. “America was and, even now, is very Puritanical. I think Playboy eased people into a more normal, relaxed attitude toward sexual things. Europeans don't cover up all the time. Nudity isn't embarrassing to us and we don't have some of the sexual hang-ups that come with covering up. But what was most troubling to many was that Playboy combined the wholesome, girl-next-door image with sexuality. A Bunny was the girl you shouldn't take home to mother—but could.”

Today, Honey, the mother of four children, lives on a Long Island horse farm.