The Bunny Years (63 page)

“Three hundred girls showed up for the Bunny Hunt. Alice Nichols, the Bunny Mother, and Joni Mattis, who was assisting her, made little notations on each of our information cards as we left, telling us they would be getting in touch over the weekend. I waited, but didn't get a call.

“On Monday morning, I called Joni and said I'd been out of town all weekend—had they tried to reach me? Joni asked me to describe myself and I told her I was African-American and had worn a pink dress. ‘Oh, we've been trying to find you,' she said. ‘Get on down here!'

“From my first day, I took pride in being professional about the job. I was taught how to look someone in the eye, handle myself with dignity and make an impression. I was exposed to a wide range of people. I learned something from everyone around me, including the Bunnies who came from every sort of ethnic and social background. I earned very good money. And for those Bunnies going to school, Playboy paid 80 percent of the tuition fees. It was a safe haven.

“I did promotional work for Playboy and appeared on Playboy After Dark. I also became close to Barbi Benton, Hef's girlfriend at the time. I think she put in a good word for me, and Hef chose me to be one of the Jet Bunnies.

As women's roles began to change, we caused Playboy's policies to evolve with the times. In 1968, in the days of Angela Davis and the militant Black Panther Movement, I was one of four Bunnies who showed up for work wearing an Afro. I didn't know what the reaction would be but, very shortly, Afros were just another hairdo, and perfectly acceptable.

Pat Lacey, Director of Ring Girls at The Great Western Forum, also works in Playboy's Los Angeles publicity office.

“I always found Hef supportive. I realize that some of the early rules reflected his desire to preserve a mystique surrounding Bunnies. For example, Bunnies couldn't reveal their last names, wear any personal jewelry, meet husbands or boyfriends in the vicinity of the Club or date a Keyholder. Over time, all of those rules were eliminated. The biggest policy change came in 1967, when the Clubs welcomed women as Keyholders.

“I worked as a Bunny for 13 years. I married and left briefly in 1978 to give birth to my son. One day, the Club's general manager asked me if I wanted to start work as a Day manager. I worked in that capacity for a while and was then hired to be the Bunny Mother.

“Christie Hefner, the new president of Playboy Enterprises in 1982, did everything she could to rejuvenate the Clubs, including designing new costumes and hiring male Bunnies [Rabbits]. But the concept was old. It was time to close. We had about four months' warning of the closure. As the Bunny Mother, it became increasingly difficult for me to keep a good staff in place because everyone was looking for new jobs. It was exhausting work. There were so many directives coming out of Chicago, including the one to keep Bunny costumes under lock and key so they wouldn't disappear as souvenirs.

“At the party on the final night, I couldn't help thinking about the first time I walked into the Playboy Club and saw all those gorgeous women in Bunny costumes—and realized I was one, too. I worked at the Los Angeles Playboy Club for 21 years, until it closed June 30, 1986.”

EPILOGUE

“Can we just keep it between us—I mean about having been Playboy Bunnies together?”

O
n a warm summer evening in June 1986, my husband and I went to see a movie in Century City Plaza, a commercial and entertainment center in west Los Angeles. A magazine photographer, an old friend and colleague of my husband's, spotted us in line waiting to buy tickets. He was in a hurry and had cameras hanging on his shoulders, but stopped to say hello.

“The Playboy Club's closing tonight,” he told us. “You want me to get you in?” How could I say no?

We stepped out of line and followed our friend. We crossed the plaza and rode an escalator to an upper tier of shops and
restaurants. High-beam searchlights fanned the sky, drawing a crowd around the door to the Club. I was surprised to find myself genuinely excited and already wondering if I would see anyone I knew.

I had not been inside a Playboy Club since June 1966, my last night on the job in New York almost exactly 20 years earlier. In fact, I hadn't even known there was a Los Angeles Playboy Club in Century City.

I stood at the bar in my cotton dress, scanning the crowd for familiar faces, but my eyes were on the Bunnies. Their costumes were similar to the ones I had worn, but many were in patterns and multicolored prints I'd never seen before. I watched Bunnies saunter up to tables with trays full of drinks, smiling and dipping, making it look easy. I was mesmerized watching them at the service bar as they called in their drink orders and dredged the fruit containers for cocktail garnishes. (I remembered we had called it “garbage.”) Lots of chardonnay drinkers, I noticed. I tried to recall if I'd ever served even a single glass of wine during the entire time I was a Bunny. In the early '60s people drank whiskey with their steaks, and we carried trays laden with gimlets, Manhattans, rusty nails and white Russians.

So much had changed for me—and the world around me—in the 20 years since I had worked as a Bunny. Yet, as I mentally ran through the call-in order from Scotch to cordials, I felt that, in a sense, no time at all had passed. I could probably pick up a tray and pitch in right now, I thought, and wouldn't it be fun to zip myself into a Bunny costume again—silly thoughts for a woman in her 40s. I looked around, mindful that this was the Last Night, the last time I would have a chance to glimpse this brief scene from my past, and savored my memories.

I said “wow” and “holy cow” quite a lot in those days—and so did a lot of other wide-eyed, eager young women like me who arrived in New York fresh out of school with dreams of pursuing a career. At the Playboy Club, I met people from so many different backgrounds, people I could never have met in college or anywhere else in such numbers and variety. I won't ever forget the knish I ate at Coney Island my third day in New York, or my first bowl of
vichyssoise
(that tasted suspiciously like my mother's potato soup) in a French café near Bloomingdale's. That period of my life was a time for me to disconnect/reconnect: to leave the small-town girl
behind, split from my past (as warm and nurturing as it had been) and take charge of my life. Nothing was ever the same for me again.

More than that, it felt as if I had stood on that very spot in time when everything about our society seemingly changed in an instant. I recall those easy, early liberating days of panty hose and The Pill. Incredibly, women still wore hats and gloves, but no longer considered wearing a girdle
de rigueur
. How can one explain to girls of today that lithe, Twiggy-thin young women once wore girdles routinely, not to contain any excess flesh, but because they needed the garters to hold up their stockings? Imagine the thrilling day when one replaced Playtex with panty hose; that moment happened for me when I pulled on my very first pair of sheer black Danskins at the Playboy Club. Wow, these weren't the thick dance tights I wore for mime classes at the Academy. Holy cow, I can wear these in flesh tones with a dress. This was at least a year before panty hose actually took the country by storm.

The Pill and its alternative companion, the IUD, were other items I learned about in the Bunny dressing room. Again, how can one explain that in a roomful of very pretty, nubile young women between the ages of 18 and 21, many (most?) were still virgins? Including me. By choice. We had necked and petted our way through most of our teenage years, managing to stay intact because one careless mistake most often meant not just an unwanted pregnancy, but an unwanted marriage. Abortion was illegal, costly and dangerous. The combination of those circumstances provided us with very clear-cut choices; I was among that number not about to foolishly squander my future, or subject myself to the horror and anguish of kitchen-table butchery. Then along came The Pill and The IUD. Overnight, our world became a sexual playground. Peter Yates' 1969 film,
John and Mary
about two people (Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow), who meet in a singles' bar, make love and wake up in the morning not knowing each other's names, is practically a documentary of that time.

I also remember staring at my very first Playboy payroll check. Again, wow, holy cow. I had already pocketed my daily tip money in cash. But at the end of my second week, I was holding a check in my hands that represented my hourly wages and signed tips, less the cost of a pair of Danskin tights, and it was more money than I knew my Dad earned in a week. Holy cow. On the one hand, embarrassed and feeling a pang of nonspecific guilt, I knew this was a piece of news I would not share with my parents. On the other hand, my 19-year-old sensibilities seized the brand-new idea that I not only could take care of myself, but also do it in style. I could pay my
way through school, and afford theatre tickets and long-distance calls home on the holidays. I could afford to splurge $16 on a haircut, shampoo and set at Vidal Sassoon's beauty salon, Charles of the Ritz. When I sat down to dinner with “Bunny Marie” in the employees' lounge at the Playboy Club one February evening in 1963, and learned that she had already graduated from college and traveled to Europe, I was not in the least envious. It was entirely within my realm of newly perceived possibilities to graduate from the Academy, plan a trip to Europe and live the glamorous, eventful life I imagined she led as one of the older Night Bunnies.

At the same time, Gloria (Bunny Marie) Steinem was gathering her notes for her
Show
magazine article, the
Saturday Evening Post
was preparing a piece on the Playboy Club, in which Bunnies were described as “half geisha and half-double malted, in a swimsuit that shows what swimsuits show. To Club members, a wiggling, giggling invitation to ‘let's pretend' sin; to Playboy promotion writers, ‘a beautiful, personable, fun-loving girl who is working in the most exciting and glamorous setting in the world of show business.' “ To the women who worked as Bunnies, I would like to add: “ambitious, resourceful and precocious precursors to the Sexual and Feminist Revolutions.”