The Bunny Years (45 page)

I
left Trinidad in 1967 to study in Paris, but after a few days in New York, I decided to stay. When a friend suggested I go to Playboy for an interview to be a Bunny, I felt very rebellious even considering such a thing, but it was all very glamorous to me. I'm Indian, Chinese and Spanish, and I thought they would only want tall blondes, but even though I was small and dark, I was hired immediately.

“On my first day in the gift shop, I hid behind a pillar until I was given the little fur jacket that Door Bunnies wore to cover myself because I felt so naked. But then one of the customers stopped to chat and I saw that he was talking to me, not staring at my breasts. I stopped being self-conscious, and realized that people were not looking at me as a sex object, but as a person.

“I'm a chatterbox, and customers loved my British accent, so I enjoyed being a Door Bunny and greeting everyone who came to the Club. I had long chats with James Baldwin, Woody Allen (who was introduced to me as an ‘up-and-coming comedian') and the Thai Ambassador, a delightful and fascinating man.

O
n the night of the famous New York City blackout, November 5, 1965, I was working hatcheck in a restaurant near Central Park. Sometime around midnight, a group of people came in, and you couldn't miss the fact that there were about 12 beautiful women with two or three men.

“One of the men came up to me and said, ‘Hi, honey, how long you been working in this joint?' I'd been there about two or three months. ‘How much you make here, sweetheart: $20, $30?' I was embarrassed, but I told him, ‘Yeah, something like that.'

“Well, how would you like to make a hundred dollars a night?' Then he gave me his card and introduced himself as Joe Palazzo, Party Room director at the Playboy Club. ‘Call up Lynn Smith, the Bunny Mother, and tell her I told you to call.'

“I was kind of horrified and realized all these girls who came in with him were Bunnies. I'd never been to the Playboy Club and at the time equated Bunnies with hookers. But Joe introduced me to a couple of the girls in his party, and they seemed like nice human beings, not at all like my Southern small-town notion of a hooker. I went for an interview at the Playboy Club and was hired.

“I had grown up with five sisters in a sheltered, rural environment in Mississippi. I had been shy and not terribly popular in school. One of the greatest influences on my life was an elderly maiden aunt who took me under her wing and taught me the gracious old-world manners of a genteel Southern lady. I went to France during my junior year at college and loved it, but nothing could compare to the wide range of people and experience I later encountered while working at Playboy. In part, I think, that's what spurred my interest in studying psychology.

“I wonder if Playboy management had any idea how well they designed the competitive aspects of being a Bunny. I'd competed with sisters, so I had some preparation for the jockeying. The Bunny of the Week contest was based on drink averages. The Big Guns who had the highest drink averages got the best schedules. We were always striving to keep up in order to stay in the Showrooms where you earned the most in tips. I can still remember my great sense of triumph when I walked in on Monday to find out that I was Bunny of the Week.

“The entire time I worked as a Bunny, I continued to take various courses at Hunter College. In 1972, I met a professor who encouraged me to return to college for an advanced degree in psychology. In the summer of 1974, I took a leave of absence from Playboy to do observational research in a primate lab in Georgia. Shortly after I returned from studying the monkeys, the New York Playboy Club closed its doors for remodeling. I collected unemployment and continued with my studies. The whole time the Club was closed, I collected unemployment, which meant I could continue in graduate school. When Playboy didn't rehire me (I was no longer ‘Bunny Image'), I didn't fight it. I was thrilled because I then got severance pay. It was a very generous amount because I had been a Bunny for eight years. The money enabled me to sail through several years of graduate work, virtually subsidized by Playboy.”