The Bunny Years (61 page)

“Bunnies for the '80s.”

T
he last remaining Playboy Club in America closed its doors July 31, 1988, in Lansing, Michigan, its memorabilia auctioned off for charity.

Located in the Hilton Inn, the Lansing Club was the last of five Midwestern franchise clubs that the new 32-year-old president of Playboy Enterprises, Christie Hefner, had opened in the 1980s in an attempt to revive the company's Club division. In the end, a reason given by a Hilton Inn official for closing the Lansing Playboy Club was that “it sometimes discourages group meeting planners from selecting the Lansing Hotel.” The franchised Playboy Clubs in
Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska, had closed their doors that spring. The only Playboy Clubs remaining in the world were five franchise clubs in Japan.

Two years earlier, on June 30, 1986, the last three Playboy-owned clubs in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago (the flagship club that had opened February 29, 1960) had closed. Hugh Hefner, declaring Bunnies “passé,” personally presided over the closing of the Los Angeles Club in Century City. The Playboy clubs, blamed for corporate losses of $3.5 million in the first three months of 1986, had numbered 22 during the empire's heyday in the 1970s.

The New York Playboy Club at 5 E. 59th St., which had opened in December 1962, closed for 17 months in September 1974 for a complete renovation. The refurbished Club reopened in February 1976 and closed for good seven years later in August 1983. The building was sold for $11 million.

Two years later, on November 6, 1983, Playboy's Empire Club, an updated reincarnation, opened in a new location, the Lexington Hotel on 48th Street. “The Playboy-for-the'80s” version featured 55 Bunnies wearing a wide range of newly styled costumes with motifs ranging from Carmen Miranda to Michael Jackson, Cupid and Statue of Liberty-inspired outfits that only nominally retained the classic Bunny corset look. Most costumes came with hats rather than Bunny ears, and few sported the old-style collars, cuffs and bow ties.

The most startling addition was the 20 Rabbits—male “Bunnies,” if you will—who joined the staff to attract female Keyholders. “We wanted to open a club that would be forward-looking, a club for the '80s and '90s,” Christie Hefner said. New memberships sold two-to-one to women. To reflect this gender trend among new Keyholders, three women were appointed to the five-person panel selecting the 75 Bunnies and Rabbits out of the 5,500 job applicants.

“This club comes after the Women's Liberation Movement and the Sexual Revolution,” Hefner said at the time. To have a successful club that could work into the 1990s, female customers and male Rabbits were deemed mandatory ingredients. Playboy's Empire Club, the $4 million enterprise that was launched as a prototype for revitalizing the company's remaining Clubs throughout the country, stayed in business only seven months.

Despite the “updating,” the Club fell victim to Playboy's old-style image—for both new and veteran Keyholders. The new-style Bunnies were deemed “camp” by the yuppie club-goers, too young even to appreciate their nostalgic value. As discreet as the Playboy name and emblem were at the entrance, it could have been any club anywhere. Meanwhile, there were 70,000 Keyholders from “the good old days” who were turned off by loud music, new Spanish tapas-style grazing food, burlesque-show costumes and scantily dressed MALES serving cocktails. The hybrid did not work.

The embodiment of the magazine's much-vaunted philosophy and lifestyle, the Playboy Clubs helped spark the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, but they also sputtered as the revolution rocketed past outmoded images and concepts. Bunnies, daring and unconventional in their day, became as much icons of the past as Roaring '20s Flappers. Even former Bunnies, who loved their jobs, wished the party had ended a decade sooner.

NEW YORK
J
UDY
B
RUNO
B
ENNETT

I
was a Bunny for 12 years—sooooo long that I never saw Saturday Night Live until the reruns came on. There were things that were happening in the world that I never knew about because my life revolved around Playboy.

“When the Club reopened after renovation in 1975, I went back because I thought it was going to be the way it was—the same fun, the same girls, the same good money. But a lot of the Bunnies that I'd known so well were not rehired. The customers were no longer gentlemen. The Bunny Mother was a different kind of person, without the necessary knowledge and discipline to stay on top of things. The management running the Club was no longer top-notch. Everything fell apart, and Playboy lost its prestige.

“To keep up with the times, the Penthouse was turned into a disco with taped music. For a while Lainie Kazan was brought in to book entertainment in the Playroom, and it came to be known as Lainie's Room. She hired jazz musicians like Joe Pass, Sheila Jordan, Damita Jo, Billy Eckstine and Joe Williams—great talent. But there were not a lot of customers who wanted to hear jazz in the age of disco. The era of glamorous Bunnies and a lively nightclub scene were over.

“The Bunnies themselves were a different breed. Times were changing, and women weren't wearing a lot of makeup. It was the hippie era, and women weren't into glamour. The classic Bunny costume was revamped for the Showrooms. They had us wearing psychedelic costumes with stockings and garters that looked like something that belonged on 42nd Street. It was a joke. And we still had to wear a tail and ears with it!

Judy Bruno Bennett.

“After 1975, there were still a lot of girls who were going to college and working to start other careers, but there were also others who just liked to hang out. There were a lot of drugs around in the '70s. Some girls would come down on the floor totally strung out. I don't know how they got away with it, but the Bunny Mother looked the other way. I saw a girl just go really nuts one night in 1981 and I thought, ‘Wow, there's something very wrong here.' By that time, we knew the Club was on its way out and would close.

“Even though I was there during the declining years, I have some great memories. I studied voice while I was at the Club, and in 1980 I was hired to sing in the Playmate Bar for a month. It was a great opportunity. I still do a jazz workshop with Barry Harris in New York.

“I met my husband one night when I was working as a Camera Bunny. The camera wasn't working, and he stopped to help me with it. He was a drummer with the Art Weiss Trio. We weren't supposed to date, but he and I went out to breakfast anyway. We kept our relationship a secret until I left Playboy in 1982.

“The Club at 5 E. 59th St. closed for the last time in 1983 and then reopened briefly, with both male and female Bunnies, at the Hotel Lexington. It wasn't a nightclub. It was a disco on 49th Street in the heart of Hooker Heaven near the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. I stopped in once to look around, and it was very disappointing.

“More than a decade after the Club finally closed, there's an amazing mystique about Bunnies, just as there is about Ziegfeld Girls. We were waitresses and they were chorus dancers, but there'll always be that aura of glamour and sexuality attached to Bunnies and showgirls.

“If Playboy Clubs still existed today and my daughter wanted to become a Bunny, I would tell her, ‘Go for it.' She has a good head, and she could handle it just as I once did. I was not wild and crazy, either. I just had a good time.”

CHICAGO
J
ACQUELINE
W
ILLIAMS