The Big Bunny Hop

In one prodigal hop, the boundaries of Bunnydom advanced to both the Pacific and Caribbean, with the back-to-back openings of the long-awaited Playboy Club on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip, and the Edenesque Playboy Club-Hotel on Bunny Bay, in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. The memorable week of inaugural activities—at both Clubs—was personally supervised by Big Bunny Hugh M. Hefner, Editor-Publisher of Playboy and President of Playboy Clubs International. The festivities began amid the dazzling spotlights of Hollywood with three days of celebrations, celebrities and celebrants, Bunnies and bubbly, and just plain good times; reached a high point—quite literally—in a transcontinental chartered jet flight, which whisked Hefner, special guests, Club executives and a bevy of Bunny beauties the 2950 miles from L.A. to Jamaica; and ended, with a background of coconut palms and the haunting calypso refrain of Yellow Bird, among the tropical wonders of the West Indies.

In the last days of 1964, pleasure seekers were arriving in Los Angeles from every part of the country, drawn by the double attraction of a New Year's Eve Playboy Club opening and Rose Bowl festivities the following day. Hef himself arrived in California several days before the end of the year (met upon landing by a Bunny color guard that turned the L.A. airport topsy-turvy) to make sure all was in order and to confer with his executive crew in his spanking-new penthouse office-pad, which occupies the top floor of the West Coast Playboy Building. Besides Hef's digs, the ten-story, cream-and-gray structure, chopped into a hillside at 8560 Sunset Boulevard, houses the Playboy Club, six stories of office space, and Playboy's Hollywood photo studio.

The Club itself covers three full floors and the initial impression upon entering is, at once, one of spaciousness and intimate warmth. If you look over her ears while being greeted by Door Bunny Nancy Scott (not the most logical place to look, we must admit, since Nancy was a Playmate in March 1964), you'll be able to see across the Lobby and the entire length of the bilevel Living Room beyond, to the swinging combo playing at the Piano Bar. Behind the musicians is a candy-striped curtain covering a rear wall of glass that looks down upon the myriad twinkling lights of the city below. If you decide to enter the Living Room area, you'll discover an elaborate buffet set against a side wall, not visible from the Lobby; you may wish to relax in the comfortable apartmentlike atmosphere, sharing drinks and conversation with a chosen friend and then, at your leisure, enjoy a dinner from the buffet for the price of a drink. The Living Room has walls of walnut paneling, burnt-orange carpets, and seating in upholstered couches of olive and deep (text continued on page 101) blue; it is the center of activity in every Playboy Club, but it is only one of several alternatives that present themselves as you cross the Lobby. To your right is the checkroom and the Playboy Gift Shop, and you may note your name going up on the name-plate board that identifies the keyholders who are in the Club that night; to your left is the entrance to the Playmate Bar, and beyond it, the orange-carpeted stairway leading to the elegant VIP Room, the Playroom and the Penthouse on the two floors above. The dimlit intimacy of the Playmate Bar sets off the warm glow of the backlit Playmate photographs. Not all the Playmates in the Playmate Bar are by Kodak: For example, the real Sharon Rogers is a Playmate (Playboy, January 1964) who will actually take you on—at the Bumper Pool table. Bunny Sharon may not have the hottest cue in cottontaildom, but the distractions of her attractions make it almost impossible for the normal man to best her on the baize. If he does, the game's gratis; but if he loses he owes Sharon one green-and-white wallet-size portrait of George Washington.

One flight up from Sharon's green (text continued on page 104) is the blue-and-silver crystal palace called the VIP Room, the stairway to which is literally a stairway to the stars, producers, directors and writers who have made the VIP Room the most the luncheon and dinner spot in Hollywood since Romanoff's. It is also the home of a truly international set—the curvaceous contingent of Bunnies from Belgrade (Elisabetha Kinkel) to Bangkok (Tina Gamwell). Among them, the multilingual VIP Room Bunnies (all VIP Bunnies must know at least one foreign language as well as English) speak nearly every language except early Danny Kaye—and Danny, a frequent visitor, never gives up trying to teach them.

Also, and always, on hand to help the luscious linguists serve the VIP Room's five-course luncheon and nine-course dinner are butlers so elegantly liveried they give the impression of having stepped right out of the 18th Century as they wheel in silver salvers of chef Erik Jakobsen's chefs-d'oeuvre. Before going to the Hollywood Club, Erik won several of Europe's top awards for culinary skill. One of his specialties was Lapin Moutarde (Rabbit in Mustard Sauce). "He's never made the dish here," says French-bred Bunny Bi Egnell, "because he says the rabbits in America are too scrawny; but sometimes when he's in a frivolous mood he'll look at me and say, 'You know, chérie, I may have been wrong after all.' For all his playfulness, though, Erik is a genuine aristocrat of the kitchen."

VIP Room dining is properly a leisurely affair, and one small but important reason the busiest Sammies in town don't eat and run but sip their brandy slowly in the Hollywood VIP Room is the small blue princess telephone set unobtrusively next to each table. "Most everyone who is anyone in the VIP Room," columnist Joe Hyams recently noted, "gets at least one call during lunch. There's a lot more cooking there at midday than food." An interesting sidenote on the use of Alexander Graham Bell's conversation piece in Hollywood's VIP Room, as compared to New York's and Chicago's, is that here most of the calls are received by rather than made by the diners.

On the level, architecturally speaking, with the VIP Room is the Playroom; and one flight up, on the third floor, is the Penthouse. In the Playroom and Penthouse it's what's up front on the stage that counts. Each of these showrooms seats about 150 and has become so popular that it's a good idea to make reservations before the sun sets on the Strip. There's a new show in each of the show places every two weeks, but because it's Hollywood and there are often more comics and singers in the audience than on stage, something new can happen any time, and usually does. On a recent night in the Penthouse Larry Storch was in the midst of imitating George Kirby imitating Frank Gorshin imitating Jonathan Winters imitating Custer's Last Stand, when he spotted Sammy Cahn in the audience and brought him on stage to give the assembled the rare treat of hearing the composer at the keys. Meanwhile, downstairs in the Playroom Tony Bennett and Count Basie were up from the audience doing San Francisco. The regularly scheduled act that followed the spontaneous Bennett-Basie combustion was a group of song-and-joke men called The Cables, who came out of the wings to remark that "Tony was lucky; like, sure he left his heart in San Francisco, but think of us, we left our cars..." A man who never needs a car ("I let Hef put me in the driver's seat") is Jackie Gayle, king comic of the Playboy circuit, jet-setting world traveler ("I been to Cincinnati, Detroit...") and headliner plenipotentiary at practically every Playboy Club opening, including the New Year's Eve invitation-only premiere of the Los Angeles Playboy Club. To the gentlemen in tuxes and the ladies in mink who paid $65 apiece to attend the charity benefit opening, which yielded $33,000 to the Reiss-Davis Clinic for Child Guidance, Jackie explained from the Playroom stage that for many of the guests this was their first visit to a Playboy Club, but "me, I been around the Clubs so long I can recognize some of the Bunnies by their faces." The remark was greeted by pandemonium—ribbons flew, noisemakers blew and Jackie, absolutely bewildered, leaned over the stage and said to Hefner at ringside center, "Huge, baby, you have just heard the greatest ovation for a comedian in the history of showbiz, and I thought it was my lousiest joke."

"It was, but Happy New Year," said Hef, who suddenly ended his career as the world's most repressed vocalist, jumped on stage, grabbed a mike, and delivered a few bars of Auld Lang Syne.

For all the old acquaintances who should not be forgotten, and a few new ones, too, Hef moved the party from the Club's Playroom to his own penthouse. Shortly before dawn (which is the moment critique at all of Mr. Playboy's parties), Bill Dana arrived and pleaded to join the next night's Bunny Hop to Jamaica. "I've always been just plain Hosé Himénez," he explained; "here's my chance to be Hosé Himénez in Hamaica!" Hef found the argument irrefutable and Hosé was in his seat belt the following night for the next leg of the Bunny Hop. Somewhere over the jungles of Yucatán it became morning in the Electra (a Lockheed which Hefner borrowed from the Los Angeles Dodgers), and while Dana dozed and Bunnies dreamed, Hef and his execs were engaged in the largest established impermanent floating poker game in the sky. Writer Richard Gehman, who for the past three years has been gathering material for his forthcoming biography of Hugh Hefner, analyzed all hands for literary analogies and jotted something down on a scratchpad when Hef drew a king of clubs to a full house. As Gehman was jotting down, the jet was dropping down to the airstrip at Montego Bay. Nobody knew what time it was, but the sun was shining, the Bunnies were bright-eyed after their naps and bushy-tailed after adjusting their snaps. Waiting limousines whisked all the isle landers through 70 miles of seaside greenery to the Club—with the exception of Hefner, Bunny Mary Warren and Vice-President Arnold Morton, who went back in the air in a six-seater Hawker Siddley and arrived at the Club's landing strip 20 minutes later.

Following the flight, a long day's night of informal get-togethers began among compatriot Bunny Hoppers who had planed in from Chicago, New York and Miami. Most of the guests went down to the beach for a relaxing dip before hitting the sack till noon. (For the sleepiest heads, a spirited concoction of brandy, milk and cinnamon, called the Playboy Bracer, was helpful in the rise-and-shine department.) Around three-thirty, 50 uniformed members of the Jamaica constabulary band marched into the hutch and up to the upper lobby and got ready for the official ribbon-cutting ceremony to begin, appropriately enough for an Anglo-isle, at teatime with the playing of the Jamaican national anthem. While the band was tuning up, the Bunny Mother collected her 25 charges and positioned them on each side of the wide curved stairway leading from the Living Room to the upper lobby, in a kind of double-file receiving line, and the prettiest line of the kind ever formed. Halfway up the stairway a Bunny and her opposite number held a ribbon of gold, green and black—the colors of the Jamaican flag. Suddenly somebody said "Ready," the bandmaster tapped his baton twice, drums ruffled, trumpets blared, flashbulbs popped, a movie camera whirred and minutes later, through the gathering crowd, as the band began to play The Star-Spangled Banner, Big Bunny Hugh Hefner appeared with Mr. and Mrs. Chester Touzalin, official representatives of the Queen, and, sharing a huge golden ceremonial scissors, they sliced the ribbon and the Jamaica Playboy Club-Hotel, 13th link and first extraterritorial outpost of what is now truly an international organization, was officially open. Waiters circulated with trays of cocktails and, miraculously, in a matter of minutes everyone had a drink in hand—except Hefner, who elevated up to the fifth-floor Penthouse with V.P. (continued on page 200) Big Bunny Hop (continued from page 104) Arnold Morton for a press conference. "Yes, Playboy plunked down two and three-quarter million dollars to purchase the resort and spent upwards of a million more on improvements... That's right, many of the non-Jamaican Bunnies were imported especially to train local prospects and as soon as the home-grown girls win their silk ears the Bunny staff will consist mostly of islanders.... Well, sure, the success of this Club-resort could lead to other Playboy Club-Hotels elsewhere around the world... Gentlemen, it's time for dinner."

Dinner in the Nordic-blue VIP Room rotunda was (and always is) strictly Continental except for some interesting island appetizers such as pearls of pawpaw, tamarind juice and Caribbean spiced herring—and Jamaica's own marvelous Blue Mountain coffee. Adding savoir to the fare on opening night, Club Manager Gordon McKay introduced the home-grown and far-flung dignitaries—among the latter, a 28-year-old multimillionaire keyholding sheik from Kuwait named Bader Almulla. Hugh Hefner then thanked John Pringle, Jamaica's Director of Tourism, for his gracious assistance and presented him with a solid-gold Playboy key, number J-1. The occasion was celebrated with an astonishing concoction called a Herbie Special—a citrus-and-papaya libation atop an immiscible foundation of equal parts dark rum, light rum, gin and vodka. A few others ordered Herbie Specials, too, and all lived to tell the tale and enjoy the facilities and felicities of Mr. Playboy's new Playground of the Western World.

The Club-Hotel, on the north coast about ten miles from the town of Ocho Rios, is a majestic structure in brilliant shades of lemon and vanilla, set on ten blue-green acres that slope gently down to a sculptured, reef-enclosed cove rimmed by 800 feet of bone-white sand and recently christened Bunny Bay. The Hotel boasts 160 spacious rooms in the main building, whose two large wings flank contoured formal gardens and the spectacular circular VIP Room. Many of the rooms feature step-down living-room areas, private patios and nine-foot sunken Grecian tile baths. Add to this 44 lanai rooms by the sea, where occupants are lulled to sleep by the rhythmic lapping of the waves. For those accustomed to the best of the best, an opulently appurtenanced beach cottage is available and—high above the main lobby—a deluxe penthouse apartment. The arcade adjoining the main building houses barbershop, beauty salon, and several meeting rooms. The Jamaica Club is a perfect place for top-level business conventions, as, for examples, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Sealy Mattress and General Electric have recently discovered. One 3M executive wrote, "Our final selection was Jamaica Playboy Club-Hotel in Ocho Rios, chosen because of its ability to handle a group of our size, the excellent accommodations and, most importantly, its flexibility in meeting our varying needs."

The Club's international cuisine is offered on a modified American plan—breakfast and dinner included in the room rate. Early-rising guests can dig into a hearty American ham-and-eggs-type breakfast or kick off the day in British Isle style with eggs and kippers. You can lunch in the Playmate Bar, on the Playmate Patio, at the Bunny Hutch buffet (adjoining the pool) or—for sun worshipers who can't bear to leave the strand—at the Beachcombers' Grill, where you may charcoal your own franks and burgers or leave the cooking to us. Befitting the casual resort atmosphere of the Club, coat and tie are required only for dinner in the VIP Room, where liveried butlers and Bunnies in black tie and white tails bring you a dinner which, from pâté to flambé, is truly haute, mon!

Entertainment in the Club is as lavish and tasty as the cuisine. Featured in the Playroom—largest night spot in the West Indies—during opening festivities was the clown prince of mimicry, George Kirby, backed for kicks by a cottontail chorus line—plus songstress Susan Smith, backed by the Gene Esposito Trio. In the Penthouse, pianist-singer Jo Henderson kept things swinging.

On Monday nights the entertainment goes native with George Curry's fireeating and dancing-in-the-sparks feats, Chinapoo, and the mad aquabats. Tuesday nights the stage is set for top acts from the U.S. Playboy circuit. On Wednesdays, it's a floodlit water show at the pool with a fireworks finale. Every Thursday night everybody gets together on Bunny Bay for a beach ball, and Fridays it's more top talent from the U.S. Saturday nights, Stateside and island performers team up for the greatest show on this part of earth, and Sunday night's a fine time to take in one of the first-run British or American films (which are shown every night at the Club's outdoor theater), then win a bundle at the parimutuel crab racing.

Every day, there's dancing at the beach or poolside to the Club's own Shipwreckers, a straw-hat troupe of calypsonian wandering minstrels, and to the jazz combo on the Patio from cocktail hour on. The Shipwreckers are music makers for daily ska and limbo lessons at the beach or on the Patio.

If you'd rather dive than dance, the Club-Hotel boasts the largest fresh-water swimming pool in the Indies—attended by bikinied Bunny lifeguards—and instructors in scuba diving will start you out with free lessons in the pool. There's tennis day and night (the courts are illuminated for P.M. play), and pro Cecil Heron will be glad to help you brush up on your backhand. For shuttlecockers, a good game of badminton is not hard to find, and shuffleboarders who learned at sea will find that the Club's courts never tilt.

Nominal fees are charged for golfing at nearly courses, flying (there's an airstrip a Bunny hop from the Club), water-skiing, sailing, speedboating, deep-sea fishing and escorted undersea explorations of the sunken wreck on the coral reef. For those who prefer to sight down barrel rather than gaze at coral, there are trap and skeet shooting and dove hunting, to say nothing of crocodile hunting. Or you can raft down the Rio Grande. If you'd rather go after cards than crocs, sail into the Living Room any time and you'll find a game going—maybe even a tournament. The Playmate Bar has dart boards, TV and the greenery of the billiard tables.

Though the Club is a world in itself, it is also a world within a world of historic landmarks and scenic spectaculars. The most must-see spot is Dunn's River Falls, a roaring 600-foot cataract where the trick is to climb to the top, boulder by slippery boulder, and back again.

Wherever you stay or go in Jamaica, the main attraction is an unlocatable, ineffable something called atmosphere. It's made up of three parts pellucid aquamarine waters, two parts dulcet tropic air ever so slightly scented with the musky fragrance of ripening akee and the sudden emerald flash of a doctorbird in the bougainvillaea. Christopher Columbus dug the scene in 1494, and 471 years later it's better than ever.

For further information on the Los Angeles Playboy Club and the Jamaica Playboy Club-Hotel, write to Travel Director, Playboy Clubs International, 232 E. Ohio Street, Chicago, Illinois 60611.