The Bunnies of Miami

On Tuesday night, May 9, 1961, to the astonishment of Miami's big-hotel owners, some 2500 Floridians with Rabbit-escutcheoned keys in their pockets and Southern belles on their arms queued up eight abreast along a two-block section of U. S. Highway I--known to Miamians as Biscayne Boulevard. It was first night at the second Playboy Club, and though the Club had filled its 300-person capacity faster than you can say jack rabbit, more than a thousand of the boulevardiers and their ladies in waiting somehow found room at the hutch that night.

Encouraging as the tremendous turnout was, it did not exactly take our executives by surprise. For almost a year before the big night it seemed impossible to pick up a Miami, Fort Lauderdale, even an Orlando newspaper without finding an item, and usually an article, about the forthcoming Biscayne hutch. With the opening of the premier Chicago Club on leap-year night, February 29, 1960, the Bunny had leaped, not hopped, into international fame. "Out of a silk ear," said Herb Rau, columnist for The Miami News, "Hugh Hefner is making himself quite a purse."

Though the press at large shared Mr. Rau's properly playful perspective, that small, highly vocal minority who can be counted on to view with alarm whatever has charm, came through with sinister warnings. Typical was a syndicated (text continued on page 145) column by Russell Kirk bearing the headline "Bunny ears are symptoms of a sick society"--prompting one reader to inquire where he could get the whole disease. Predictably, the ban-the-Bunny intentions of the fractious fringe backfired, stimulating the anticipations (not to mention Key applications) of Sunshine Staters.

May in Miami is hardly the merry, merry month. Rather, it's sort of meantime before the summertime season really gets rolling--certainly not, mused local tourist-wise entrepreneurs, the best time to open a swimming pool, much less a swinging club, with a splash. But, as Fort Lauderdale's Ray Baribeau, original manager of the Miami Club and currently regional manager of Playboy International's Southern states operation, explained the delay of the originally planned New (continued on page 222)Bunnies of Miami(continued from page 145) Year's Eve premiere: "Hefner is a crazylike-a-fox perfectionist, and he determined the Club would open only when everything was 'bull's-eye.' "

"Bull's-eye" at Playboy Club International's H. Q. means achieving the just-right relationship between a Club's local color and its family resemblance to other links in the chain. On the one hand, any keyholder should be able to enter any Club and feel right at home; on the other hand, each Club should have its own distinctive features that fit neatly into the physical and mental landscape of the place. Thus, in Miami, for example, where, as in most tropicalities, the pace is siestalike by day and saturnalian by night, Hefner had his designers create a unique, comfortably couched oasis of afternoon ease shelved with hundreds of excellent records and fine books. (On a recent afternoon visit to the Miami Club's Library, we noted a keyholder sipping a daiquiri and dipping into Simone Weil's Waiting for God--a knotty tome rarely found in public libraries. A few hours later, however, when the moon was over Miami, Simone was back on the shelf, and the Library had turned into a swinging showroom.)

Not only major general architectural concepts such as the double-duty Library and the back-door yacht marina had to be "bull's-eye" before opening night--a thousand and two specific questions were raised and resolved. (Sample Q.: Should ties and jackets be required in Miami's Club as they are in Chicago's? Final A.: No, if by day. Yes, if by night.) And a thousand and two Bunny hopefuls had to be viewed and interviewed and, if selected, tutored to a tee.

To aid the cottontails-come-lately in the moves and manners they had to master before winning their posterior puffs, a weeklong cram course called Bunny School was initiated. Presided over by several specially trained Training Bunnies from Chicago, the girls spent their days in such chiropractical maneuvers as bending over backward to learn to bend over backward in the Bunny Dip--a graceful movement that, considering the décolleté cut of their costumes, substantially minimizes their chances of spilling something besides drinks. At night they curled up with a book called the Bunny Manual, an explication of everything a Bunny has to know from how to say "May I see the keyholder's Key?" invitingly, to how to say "You may not see mine," ineluctably.

The fruit of such backstage labors is the unparalleled, ever-expanding success of the Playboy Clubs--and though the Bunnies are by no means the whole show, they are (translate it as you will) the pièce de résistance.

In Florida, of course, rabbits have been part of the local sporting life for decades, but until the amiable invasion by the girls with cottontails on their hind-sites, Les Bunnies of Miami were strictly bunny-sized, felt-covered mechanical lures designed to lead the greyhounds a futile chase at such establishments as Flagler Kennels. With apologies to Flagler's, we admit to getting more kicks watching the 40-some full-scale Bunnies at Playboy's rabbit run--for reasons which should be abundantly clear from the accompanying photographic sampler.

Under their tans, the Bunnies of Miami are a pretty (extremely pretty) fair sample of the 500-plus cottontails who, at this writing, are generously distributed among 13 Playboy Clubs. Their backgrounds (all are at least high school grads and almost half have been to college) and their foregrounds (averaging out to 36-22 1/2-35) do not differ statistically from those of Bunnies everywhere--and yet, there is a sense in which Miami's Bunnies are a beautiful breed unto themselves.

Playmate-Bunny Jean Cannon, who unfolded almost all her endearing young charms in the October 1961 Playboy and began her Bunnyship at the Chicago Club at about the same time, put it this way: "This Club is, well, more leisurely, I'd guess you'd say. You know, the tempo. Like, a guest here will order a tom collins and sip it slowly, and by the time he's finished it, a man in Chicago or New York might have polished off three martinis. You may not like my saying this, but let's face it, one tom collins adds up to a smaller tip than three martinis. But money isn't everything, is it?"

Another lovely young old-timer, Bunny Nancilee Furnish, concurred with Jean's comments on the slower Miami tempo: "What a relief when I came here three years ago all wound up and run down from a hectic stint as a secretary in Washington, D. C."--but didn't concur with Jean's financial statements, noting that by last year, after two years at the Miami Club, she had stashed away enough inedible lettuce to take a trip around the world she used to dream of on the family farm back home in Indiana. "Hong Kong and especially Macao were crazy. I went into East Berlin, too. When I came back I decided to study languages. That's what I do in my spare time now, but here I am chattering about my, ahem, un-Bunny self, and I forgot your question."

It slipped our mind, too (an occupational hazard journalists have learned to expect when the object of their attentions is, ahem, gorgeous). However, Nancilee's sojourning and new knowledge of the world enable us to segue into a matter of no little importance to Bunny recruiters: It's not just what's up front that counts; it's also what's upstairs.

In the brief, bountiful annals of the Playboy Clubs, many a beautiful but not-too-bright broad has been heave-ho'd before she got her foot in the Bunny Department door. "You've got to keep in mind," says Sandra Herron, the smart girl at the desk behind the door, "that we have a special problem in recruiting Bunnies. It's one of those so-called 'happy problems'--the unusually high level of the nearly half million men who hold Playboy Keys. Practically all of them went on from college to executive positions--they've been around. Wait a minute," she said, fishing through a sea of pulchritudinous photos and pulling out a pamphlet titled A Study of Playboy Club Keyholders Conducted by the Conway/Milliken Corp. "Take the worldly-wise angle: 71.7 percent take their vacations in other countries. When you translate that, it means the girls we hire will be dealing with a pretty sophisticated bunch of people. I'm not saying Bunnies have to be Christina Pallozis or Baby Jane Holzers, but it's nice if they know who Christina and Baby Jane are.

"You asked about Nancilee's leave of absence to take a trip around the world. On the one hand, we hated to lose her services even temporarily; on the other hand, in the long run, it's to the Club's advantage to encourage Bunnies in any educational sort of endeavors--night school, travel, et cetera, et cetera."

Back at the hutch on Biscayne, we talked to a girl who represents the opposite side of the travel coin: Bunny Jackie Brown, a beguiling brownette who's been at the Miami Club for three and a half years and has absolutely no desire to shift grounds or, to be literal, littorals. Jackie (she's the one feeding a porpoise on page 136) swears she once caught six sailfish--"little ones"--in 45 minutes, and threw them all back.

Aside from the seaside, we asked her, what's so hot about Miami? It was a question we found ourself forced to come back to with each Bunny, because loyalty to their local Club was a characteristic they all seemed to share to a far greater degree than wanderlusty Bunnies in other hutches.

"It really is different here," said Jackie. "I worked at the New York Club for three months and it was exciting in its own way, but it's such a big Club, I don't think I ever waited on the same person twice. Here you get to know the keyholders--not off the premises, of course. At lunch we see practically the same people every day. I'll bet I can tell you practically what everyone's drinking at the tables right now, without even looking," she said, looking.

"Of course, at night it's sort of the other way around. You can always expect a surprise--Johnny Carson, Tony Bennett or Jackie Gleason. Miami's loaded with, well, big-name entertainers, but I think they have the same feeling about coming to the Club that I do, because even at night when it swings, it swings in a kind of relaxed way. We all get up on the piano, one at a time I mean, and twist, and Art Cecchini--he's the night manager--grabs the mike and gets into the act. We always kid him that he thinks he's Trini Lopez. Can I tell you the truth? You know what my ambition is? If you won't think I'm putting you on--someday I'd like to be a Bunny Mother."

The current Bunny Mother at the Miami Club is Frankie Helms, a champagne-tressed doll with magnums of effervescence. "Somebody told me I ought to go on I've Got a Secret," Frankie told us first thing. "I'm not married, no children, so my secret would be that I have had all these children--about eighty-five during the years I've been here. But you know something, in a way it's true--I'm such a busy Mother I couldn't find time to do it."

For the edification of Dr. Spock and anyone else who does not know what a Bunny Mother does, herewith is a totally inadequate description of Frankie Helms' roles:

She's a Color Analyst: "We have a Bunny here who absolutely won't wear a green costume. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it."

She's a Deployer of Troops: "Something seems strange, I can't quite put my finger on it, then all of a sudden it hits me--all the Bunnies in the Playroom are blondes and the Living Room has nothing but brunettes. Who can I shift?"

She's an Apartment Hunter: "You may not have noticed, but here and there amid the hotels and motels there are some lovely apartments for new Bunnies just coming to town."

She's a Disciplinarian: "You can't spank a Bunny, because she's got that cottontail, so I just tell them to be good."

And because she's in Miami, she's a Sun Worrier: "Down from the North comes a Bunny paleface. Two days later, she's a lobster. You can't imagine the number of problems the sun gives me."

Indeed we couldn't, and Frankie filled us in. "OK, take the strap problem. Suddenly all the girls start wearing those horizontally striped 1920ish bathing suits with the straps, then they slip into their Bunny silks and there it is--a big white line over each shoulder. At least with this problem I don't feel entirely helpless. But there is one little two-tone trouble which is really unsolvable. See if you can spot it."

"It" was a tiny white isosceles triangle on the outer, upper reaches of the Bunnies' thighs. "There's just no answer," Frankie said, "because our costume is cut higher at that point than a bikini. Since our man in Chicago will never consent to lower the hippest part of the Bunny costume, the world will just have to find a way somehow to make the bikini bikinier. I guess," added Frankie, "with all its hang-ups, the world is moving in the right direction after all--forward to Eden."

Though the silk-eared Eves in Miami's garden spot are outnumbered by those in all other Playboy Clubs (except Phoenix), no bevy in Bunnydom is more deliciously seasoned with man's favorite spice--variety.

Admirers of the statuesque will find themselves invited into the Club by Door Bunny Alice Wilder, who, at six feet, three, not counting her silk ears, tops them all. And for aficionados of the-best-things-come-in-small-packages, Bunny Margaret Zamboli's delightfully distributed 89 pounds make her Bunnydom's reigning petite laureate.

Between the long and short of it, Miami's cottontail contingent includes Cam Brock (a first-rate cartoonist), Carole Collins (a highly ranked professional diver), Christy Bertrand (holder of a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne), Bonnie Norris (a dancer who appeared in Guys and Dolls and Pajama Game), Diane Tucker (a poet who, though she is not quite five feet, two, was named, with poetic license, Miss Grand Prairie)--and the highest per-capita quotient of Playmate Bunnies in any Club--from one of the earliest, Joyce Nizzari (who debuted in Playboy's December 1958 issue) to one of the very latest, Pat Russo (scheduled to gatefold next month's Playboy).

Speaking of Playmates, it might be fitting to conclude this paean to Biscayne Bunnydom with more of the same concerning the young lady on page 145 who brings our photographic display to the happiest possible ending--Playboy's Miss January 1965, Sally Duberson. A descendant of President James Monroe, who in 1819 purchased Florida from Spain, Sally, like all her sister Bunnies at 7701 Biscayne Boulevard, adds a nifty look-but-don't-touch nuance to what her illustrious ancestor called "The Era of Good Feeling."

Bunny applications may be obtained by writing Playboy Clubs International, Bunny Department, 232 East Ohio St., Chicago, Illinois 60611.