The Bunny Years (64 page)

As I write this, more than 30 years since I “retired my satin ears,” and more than 10 years after the last Playboy Club closed, passions and phobias about Bunnies still abound. While pretty girls have served food and drink to paying customers for centuries, the “serving wenches” who became Playboy Bunnies must hold the record for being both the most celebrated and most maligned waitresses in history.

In 1960, the Playboy Club reinvented the job description and the glorified waitress, no experience required, became an institution: the Playboy Bunny. The Bunny Image was that of a young, fresh-faced girl with a woman's body, innocent and alluring at the same time. She was chosen for her brains, beauty and personality, and was expected to have aspirations beyond any employment category the club could offer. Potential Bunnies were recruited through newspaper ads targeting college girls and aspiring models and actresses, not want ads for “restaurant help.” Every nightclub in town had food, drink and entertainment, but customers went to the Playboy Club to see the Bunnies. The gorgeous girls in the (hardly by today's standards) scanty satin costumes with the perky Bunny ears and puffy tail were the primary lure attracting customers to the Clubs around the world for 25 years.

Again, I feel that I stood in that very spot of time when, in a blink, I saw the possiblilites for a future in which a young woman could aspire to anything and not have to be relegated to the limitations others defined for her. Imagine my frustration, then, to find that, even today, many carry around the image of the women I worked with as so haplessly downtrodden under the Playboy Club yoke that they couldn't possibly have known exactly what they were doing, that they were not capable of making shrewd and conscious choices on their own. Thus, thanks in part to Gloria Steinem's “women-as-victim” mode, Bunnies are frozen in amber, forever young and dumb, the archetypical female sexual objects forced into positions of servitude to men. My point of view: We willingly exploited our sexuality and, as Bunnies, also exploited our intelligence, wit, upper arm strength, youthful exuberance and full range of survival instincts. We saw an opportunity and grabbed it.

At the same time that I was working my way through school as a Playboy Bunny, my brother back in Minnesota, who is a year younger than I am, found part-time jobs packing takeout in a Chinese restaurant and bagging groceries in a supermarket, earning a minimum wage that exploited
his
youth and inexperience. It's true neither of his jobs required him to wear a brief satin costume with matching pumps, but then I would hardly consider that any more demeaning than humping bags of groceries to an icy parking lot throughout a long, frigid Minnesota winter. Frankly, I would rather have worked as a Bunny serving cocktails than filling cartons with chop suey, too. The argument is often made that women had fewer good job opportunities at that time. To get ahead, we had to be resourceful. On the other hand, my brother wonders ruefully just what options young guys of that time had to earn the kind of money I could as a Playboy Bunny.

It would be nice if Gloria Steinem could be gracious enough to admit that she perhaps sold some of these women short in 1963—even as she takes well-earned credit for implanting some of the feminist concepts that made their later successes and achievements possible.

But had my path not crossed with hers again several years ago, I'm sure it would never have occurred to me to look into Life After Bunnydom, or track down the women I worked with 30 years ago in the New York Playboy Club. Almost all of the women I got in touch with wanted to know up front whether or not I had positive feelings about having worked as a Playboy Bunny. Many of the women, particularly those who didn't know me personally, were initially cautious about being interviewed; they made it clear
they did not want to talk with me if I felt critical of the women who had worked as Bunnies.

“Be honest about it, Kay,” Marcia Donen Roma said. “Just tell it like it really was.”

I have attempted to do so, and in the course of writing about our Bunny years, I have had the enormous personal satisfaction and enjoyment of renewing friendships with a great many exceptional women. Among them, Lauren Hutton, who had begun this whole journey with me the day in 1963 when we were both hired as Bunnies. We met again, after many years, on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. “My God, it's Lady Kathryn!” she laughed upon seeing me. I'd forgotten that had been my nickname at the Club, bestowed on me, very possibly, by Lauren herself. We fell to talking as though no time at all had passed. The supermodel, still at the top of her profession after the age of 50, was filming four independent features back-to-back, had launched a line of eyeglasses (REM), filmed the documentary
Little Warriors
with her boyfriend, director Luca Babini, had gone wreck diving in Pearl Harbor, was stumping for the Women's Campaign Fund and writing her autobiography. Back in her hotel room, laughing and talking about mutual friends, I helped her stuff the last of her belongings into an already overstuffed bag before her flight back to New York. “God, I'd love to see everyone again. Let's get together.”

“We will,” I assured her, and gave her telephone numbers of several of our “Bunny” friends.

On my way home, I realized it was Lauren who had best summed up my own feelings about the Bunny years when she had said:

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.

THE BUNNIES AND THE CLUBS MULTIPLY . . .