The Bunnies of Dixie

Sara Patricia Atkinson, who many keyholders think is the best Bunny in the Atlanta Playboy Club, is all the sweetness of the South rolled into one caramel package. She's blonde and blue-eyed, with a gentle voice, a delicate mouth and a smile that could melt Sherman's statue. When you talk to Sara, she speaks shyly of her devotion to her family, her childhood on her father's farm in rural Georgia and her feeling of cozy security at the Atlanta Club.

What does she do in her spare time? The soft gleam in her azure eyes gives way to a hard glitter. "I have a little burgundy Mustang--my prize possession," she says. "A real fast one, with four on the floor. It flies." The words tumble out, and suddenly we're transported out of the old South into the new as we picture this little Southern belle barreling along Atlanta's Northwest expressway, while she unwinds after a night's work at the Atlanta Playboy Club. "I drive thirty, forty-five minutes, just to relax and enjoy the quietness of Atlanta in the early morning. I love the wind and I love speed--planes, cars, anything, just so long as they're fast."

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Sara Atkinson epitomizes a new breed of cottontail--the Bunnies of Dixie, a swinging, staccato but ever-so-sweet blend of venerable traditions and space-age ideas. Though this combination perplexes a few outside observers not caught up in the mystique of the new South, the Dixieland Bunnies themselves remain delightfully unconfused. In the Atlanta Club, for instance, where almost half the girls are from that city and most of the rest from elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon line, the latest fad is Japanese motorcycles. Off-duty Bunnies in hip-huggers and pastel tops roar along historic Peachtree Street astride Hondas, Suzukis and Yamahas. In New Orleans, where Cajun influence--like the sultry atmosphere itself--suffuses every corner of the French Quarter, olive-skinned Bunnies from the bayous stroll down Bourbon Street in their off-hours, chattering in patois about the latest dance craze. The Playboy spirit matches the ebullience of the South in the Sixties; the Dixie Playboy Clubs--like their cottontailed inhabitants--cannily combine the best of two worlds, in a mixture that has proved both unique and enduring.

In this case, the South surrendered to change without firing a shot. The fine old restaurants and jazzy night spots of Atlanta and New Orleans welcomed the Playboy key chain on the oft-proved theory that competition breeds success. Southern business and professional men. like any others, prefer their drinks strong, their food tasty, their women attractive and efficient, and Playboy meets the test uniquely. Even the red-necked Bible-Belt orators, well known for their stands against many aspects of 20th Century life, are strangely silent, perhaps because the Clubs are drawing people from piny woods as well as pine-paneled offices. One Atlanta Bunny even has a rock-ribbed Southern Baptist preacher as a regular customer. "It took some time before he told me who he was," she says. "But he loves the Club, and we get along famously."

Many things besides a golden sun tan and a molasses drawl unite the Bunnies of Dixie. They love water and water sports, rate the beaches of Florida and the Gulf as their number-one vacation spots. Almost to a girl, they dig the latest in dances and jump at a chance to perform at wee-hours sessions in the show rooms. Fewer than the national Bunny average of 42 percent have been to college, simply because schooling for the fair sex is often regarded as superfluous in the South. Future Bunnies are usually groomed at home, and the product, as devotees of the Southern Clubs will attest, is a warmth and genuineness that beats book learning all hollow.

Southern Bunnies read voraciously, though, and Gone with the Wind is their bible. Two thirds of the Atlanta Bunnies say it's the best book they've ever read. The reason may be more wish fulfillment than entertainment. As Atlanta Bunny Mother Bev Powell says, "They all think they're Scarlett O'Hara." And they do like that Southern cooking, but with a contemporary twist--fried chicken and Scotch for Atlanta's Ruth Lewis, fried green tomatoes and a torn collins for her hutchmate Arlene Smith.

"The Southern girl is absolutely delightful," says Bunny Mother Bev, a statuesque blonde from Kansas City. "She's softer, more feminine. Does she play dumb? Ooh, yes. She may not always be more sincere, but she always appears to be. She's really just as intelligent as the Northern girl, but she uses what she has--her femininity--to better advantage." Managers of the Atlanta and New Orleans Clubs are deluged with compliments from keyholders on the warmth and quality of their service, and credit goes to the Bunnies. Says Neil Wannen, Atlanta Club manager who was formerly with the Los Angeles Club: "In L. A. a lot of the girls were eager to break into show business. Here they're just ail-American girls, not potential starlets but down-to-earth kids looking for a good job. To be a Bunny is something special to them, and they show it."

They certainly do, agrees Bob Tobias, candy-company executive who frequents many of the Playboy Clubs. "The thing I look for is personal rapport, and I find it in the Southern Clubs." Bob said recently. "New Yorkers and Chicagoans are more aloof. Mere the girls, and the guys, really know you and talk to you. It's important to me when Camille conies up and says, 'Hi, Candy Man.' " Camille, it turns out, is a striking Bunny from Dublin, Georgia, who dispenses Southern charm with every drink. She tilts the beer bottle, holding the glass straight, in the approved fashion, and says: "Don't worry, I have a very steady hand." She also has a very fine frame, which the key-holder is free to visually enjoy while the beer is slowly, ever so slowly, filling his glass. One of the few pig-tailed Bunnies in captivity, Camille plaited her hair despite protests from the resident hairdresser. "She told me not to tell anybody she was responsible. 'It looks awfully Victorian,' she said." Awfully attractive is more like it.

Before Playboy came to Atlanta, the city boasted little night life and no night spots consistently booking top acts. As a space-age boomtown with new buildings sprouting on every block and an unemployment rate half the national average, Atlanta seemed ripe for the Playboy operation. When the Club opened, on March 6, 1965, it was a rousing and immediate success. After initially drawing Atlanta's burgeoning population of suburbanites, traditionally home-based entertainers, to the Club's plush redcarpeted rooms, the multifaceted Playboy entertainment fare has kept them coming back for encores.

The Club is located in the Dinkier Motor Hotel, headquarters for a steady stream of conventioneers, a block and a half off Peachtree, the famous main drag that divides the city east and west. The Club is laid out in two stories, with the Playmate liar and Living Room on the first door, Penthouse and Playroom on the second.

Like Playboy Clubs everywhere, both Southern Clubs bow to local rules and customs. Atlanta, advanced as it is for a Southern city, is not entirely liberated from fundamentalist strictures. The Club must stop serving at 1:30 A.M., and since not even a beer can be sold on Sunday, Playboy, along with most entertainment spots and restaurants in town, shuts down. The New Orleans Club doesn't open on Sunday, either, but only because New Orleanians are seventh-day stay-at-homers. In the unfettered bayou city, you can drink 24 hours a day every day, as long as you're over 17 and sober enough to hold a glass. Obeisance in New Orleans is paid to architecture rather than temperance, and the results of strict aesthetic zoning laws can be pleasing, indeed. The New Orleans Club, in the heart of the French Quarter, is an artful mixture of early Creole and Playboy modern. The building is 185 years old, a respectable age in the Quarter, and used to be La Louisiane restaurant, owned by the legendary Diamond Jim Moran, who wore diamonds on his fingers, in his stickpins, even in his shoestrings. Playboy International's design team, required by law to leave the building's facade intact, decided to leave a good deal of the interior as well, and gatefold transparencies and Neiman paintings now hang in perfect harmony with a glittering crystal chandelier, a hand-leaded glass door and a massive mahogany banister. (The banister has proved irresistible to a few acrobatically inclined guests. Trouble is, they sometimes don't see the supporting strut halfway down, which brings them to an abrupt--and unexpected--halt.)

In conservative Atlanta, Playboy's guests come early and leave early; in freewheeling New Orleans, they come late and stay later--till four on weekdays, five on Saturdays. Atlantans, say the Bunnies, are straight 15-percent tippers; New Orleanians are somewhat freer with the gratuities. Bumper pool is highly popular in both Clubs, and some of the Bumper-Pool Bunnies are crackerjacks with a cue stick. New Orleans' best is Bunny June Riviera, who keeps the table busy even on a slow night. How docs she do it? "Everybody loves me," says June, batting her brown eyes. June's 36-23-35 frame seems to attract admirers, (continued on page 116)Bunnies Of Dixie(continued from page 112) and she's unabashedly aware of it. "In bumper pool, it's what's up front that counts," June says, tapping her forehead and wearing a smile.

Bunny June obviously is a straightforward young thing with a weakness for sports. She loves horse racing and has been an aficionado since she was 13. A fair handicapper in more ways than one, she's now raising a thoroughbred filly herself and plans to race her at the New Orleans Fair Grounds next January. She's also a fine bowler, rolled an exhibition match against champion joe Joseph in May and, thanks to a little tinkering with the rules, beat him by a pin. She bowls in a woman's league at nine every Wednesday morning, arriving at the lanes after nine hours of table-hopping and four more of early-morning reading (her favorites: Erskine Caldwell and Civil War literature). June has two Bunny relatives in New Orleans--her sister, Susie Saladino, and cousin Carol Bruno. Susie is a short, athletic brunette and a fine amateur tumbler who now bowls a formidable game of tenpins herself.

New Orleans' rabbit warren boasts three full-blooded Cajuns, all well-built, dusky-skinned beauties who grew up on gumbo and jambalaya. The Cajiest of the group is Robin LeBlanc, from the minuscule metropolis of Cut Off, in Lafourche parish, a shrimp-fishing town where Cajun French is the vernacular. Robin's grandfather speaks only Cajun, and she spoke it even before she learned English. "Parisian" French in school was a terrible chore for her, and in the Club she's constantly mystifying, and being confused by. real-French-speaking guests. The big event of the year around Cut Off is the Tarpon Rodeo, which draws thousands of fishermen to nearby Grand Isle. Robin and her family used to take part each year, but she now sticks to sailing, swimming and sun-bathing, three of the most popular pastimes among Dixieland Bunnies.

The other two Cajuns are Roni Gros and Eve Latiolais. Eve is a quiet girl from Lafayette who, it takes a while to find out, digs drag racing. She has a red '65 Galaxie that she drives in time trials. "I get a lot of challenges," Eve says. "I guess they think a girl driver means an easy victory. But I beat most of them--the car has 390 under the hood, which is pretty hot." Roni, tall and well proportioned, is from Houma, a onetime plantation area now devoted to offshore oil drilling. She drives home nearly every weekend and thus manages to retain a homespun charm not often found in big-city night clubs.

Aside from its Cajuns, New Orleans' chief attraction for rabbitues is a fresh. young breed of Bunny. Unlike Atlanta, the New Orleans Club can legally employ 18-year-olds; arrestingly different, youthfully effervescent cottontails have been the happy result. Angel Frillot is an ebullient 19-year-old who readily admits most keyholders think she's much younger. She has long light-brown hair and all the allure of a Lolita. Angel came to the Club from a "terribly dull" job at a New Orleans bank. At the Club she quickly established herself as the resident nut, a flibberty Gidget who talks incessantly and owns two dozen pairs of shoes with matching Shirley Temple purses.

Angel, of course, is crazy like a fox, and so is her youthful counterpart, vivacious Sam Glynn. Both Angel and Sam realize, as Sam's Bunny roommate says, that "those little-girl looks are their greatest asset," and off duty they enhance them to the utmost with dresses. bows and what not. Sam is from New Iberia, Louisiana, where Tabasco sauce is made, and was understandably miffed when Playboy's personnel office in Chicago, seeing "New Iberia" on her application, queried the New Orleans Club: "Is this girl an American citizen?" Sam, of course, is not really Sam. She's Linda, but there's another Linda at the Club, so to avoid confusion she changed her name. Bambi, Pete and, yes, even Lolita were rejected first--Lolita, said management, was "too suggestive." (Masculine Bunny names are not unusual nowadays, a trend that may have started at the New York Club, where a Bunny called Irving, so the story goes, became enshrined as "the husband's excuse." "I was out seeing Irving last night," key-holders could tell their wives.) Sam's button-cute charms have won her a big following in the New Orleans Club. "A lot of times keyholders bring their sons in to meet me." says Sam. "Everybody's trying to marry me off."

Overseer of the New Orleans Bunny brigade is Meg Marriott, executive secretary of the Club, who has been doubling as Bunny Mother. Meg is a quick-witted and well-educated young lady from London who has the British gift of directness. "I disliked the South and New Orleans when I first arrived," she says. "People regarded me as I'd regard somebody from Patagonia. I like it now, though, and find the job fascinating."

New Orleans boasts its share of exotic backgrounds in jet brunettes Sandy Ray and Dolores Braquet. Bunny Sandy is half Cherokee and hails from Comanche, Texas. Her father raises whiteface cattle, which Sandy helps round up whenever she's home. New Orleans, she laments, has "very few places to ride," so she spends her free time reading Civil War novels and 11th Century poetry. Bunny Dolores is half Castilian and half Filipino, has lived in the French Quarter for years. Hired by the Club as a 94-pound weakling, she's now a very pleasing 105.

Two carpetbaggers at the New Orleans Club are Bonnie Leigh, from Pennsylvania, and Luanna Rathman, from Minnesota. Luanna studied sociology for a year at the University of Minnesota, headed South when she found the climate too cold for comfort. She's taking French lessons (no Cajun, thank you). intends to finish college and teach. For relaxation, "aside from dating, I read-- mostly Ayn Rand. And I write, mostly unromantic short stories. I love to talk to people--that's what I like most about being a Bunny. Some time back I served a small man who must have been (65, who was just beautiful. He told me he was a sea captain who now lives in Las Vegas and writes adventure stories and Westerns. Sells them, too. He and his wife ride motorcycles all over the country--in black-leather outfits. Can you imagine a cop stopping them and her taking off her helmet and saying. 'Yes, sonny?' They're beautiful, just beautiful."

Bonnie was a Bunny at the Jamaica Club before hopping to New Orleans. She misses Jamaica, but is nevertheless pleased with the change. For one thing, tips in New Orleans run considerably higher. For another, small-town community life in Ocho Rios was too demanding. "Sometimes you just didn't want to put on make-up just to go to the post office," says Bonnie, "but you felt you ought to. because the whole town knew you were a Bunny." Platinum-haired Bonnie is transferring to the London Club as one of ten "exchange Bunnies," and she's already anticipating her first weekends in London and Paris.

Everybody has some idiosyncrasy, and Martha Hellwig's is taking bus tours of Louisiana. "I make all the tours with old-maid schoolteachers." she says. "No joke. I visit all these ante-bellum homes and what not. and that makes me a real booster for the state. I tell the keyholders facts and figures and they say, 'You ought to work for the tourist division of the chamber of commerce.' " Like many another girl. Tara Fife submitted her Bunny application on a dare ("If somebody dares me. I can't say no"). She got the name Tara from--you guessed it-- Gone with the Wind, and she's thankful she wasn't christened Scarlett.

New Orleans Bunnies come pattering into the Club with bare midriffs and sometimes bare feet. They drop in at Felix's Oyster Bar next door for stuffed Gulf lobster or something less caloric, like cottage cheese and lettuce, which locals have dubbed "Rabbit food." After work they may amble down Rue Iberville to the King's Room for a drink. In the small hours of Sundav. with the week's work done, a little group of (continued on page 155)Bunnies Of Dixie(continued from page 116) regulars drops in at the Sho-Bar, a Bourbon Street bistro featuring all the new dances. "Everybody knows we're Bunnies," says Mickie Picone, a Colombian native who's a leader of the Sho-Bar group, "so they almost never get fresh. In case they do, the manager keeps an eye out for us. You wouldn't believe how everybody looks after us in the Quarter."

The New Orleans Club is a mecca for naval officers as well as for entertainers playing French Quarter night spots. "The guys working Al Hirt's, Pete Fountain's, the Blue Room at the Roosevelt drop by," says Bob Patterson, Club manager. "We've had Frankie Laine, Johnny Desmond, Jerry Colonna, Fats Domino, and most of the movie stars who've been on location in the city. On any given night we're likely to have at least one name entertainer or actor as a guest." Tall, colorful district attorney Jim Garrison is a regular; he celebrated both his election and his re-election at the Club.

"This Club is different from other New Orleans night spots," says Patterson. "It's relaxed and sophisticated. It's also on the level. Our keyholders know they'll be treated fairly and honestly here, not like at some of the places on Bourbon Street." In both New Orleans and Atlanta, the Playboy Club's success has sparked the highest form of flattery, in the guise of a sackful of copycats. At one place in New Orleans the girls wear shorty togas, and an Atlanta "club" features fake hares called Kittens. Needless to say, the imitators haven't had much impact.

Playboy's Atlanta business is very good, indeed, and with the Braves in town and the N. F. L. Falcons soon to follow, it promises to be even better. Atlanta, long the business and cultural center of the Southeast, will soon be its sports center as well, which will mean even more action at the Club. Bunnies and bartenders alike have become Braves fans overnight. A Bunny color guard rode in the Braves' opening-day parade, and Bunnies working in the Club try to catch a play or two from the radio broadcasts of the games while waiting for the bartenders to fill their orders. N. F. L. stars are already beginning to slip into the Club--to sip coffee or tomato juice.

Atlanta has a notably lively and active bunch of Bunnies. Take, for instance, Jackie Hendrickson, a Dallas brunette who drives in sports-car rallies and lives in a trailer mounted on blocks beside an Atlanta lake. Jackie, valedictorian of her high school class, spent two years at a college in Leeds, England, then picked potatoes in Limestone, Maine ("hardest doggone work I've ever done"). She came to Atlanta to teach school, but when she found out the pay was only $4200 a year, she traded classroom for Playroom. "I practically had my hair back in a bun and quill pen in hand," she recalls with a chuckle, "but somehow I got the job."

Jackie's car mania dates back to high school, when she became the first girl ever admitted to a Dallas hot-rod group called the Asphalt Angels. "I've got a little TR in mind," she says. "I've been economical for a year, and now I want something to have fun with again." Jackie has traveled to Europe twice. On the first trip she took a bike and a bedroll from hostel to hostel, amused herself by "posing as a French girl and eavesdropping on unsuspecting American tourists."

One of Atlanta's most beguiling and self-sufficient Bunnies is Gary McQuarrie, a tall blonde with a sweet smile and a purple belt in karate. Gary, who was queen of a Northridge, California, rodeo at age 13 (she says she sold the most tickets), took up karate with a girlfriend "just for kicks." She had to break a board with her hand to win the purple belt, but says wistfully that she's out of practice now; there's only soft, gentle flesh where there should be calluses.

At 4'9", Neenah McDonald figures she's the shortest Bunny in the business. But her height doesn't stop this fiery redhead from pursuing her major interest, athletics. She's captain of the Bunny Softball team and a top scorer on the Bunny basketball team--thanks in part to a convenient rule that Bunnies under five feet may use a stepladder. Peaches Coombs is also on the short side, and like Susie Saladino in New Orleans, has an acrobatic past. Peaches traveled with a professional group called The Flying Nesbitts for two years, specializing in tumbling, foot juggling and other anti-gravity feats. She still thrives on exercise and practices yoga--an antidote, she says, to that occupational disease of all diligent Bunnies, tired feet. Peaches was the first Negro girl hired for the Atlanta Club, and she admits she had a few apprehensions about going South. " 'You don't want any part of that place,' everyone told me. But I tell you, I thrive on new experiences, and life at the Club has been wonderful." How does she get along with the other girls? "I love everybody here, and I think they feel the same about me."

Another Northerner come South is Bobbie Goodley, a Brooklyn-bred girl who has taken Dixie to heart. "I adore Atlanta," says Bobbie. "New York is too last for me now. Everything here is only live or ten minutes away, and there's green grass, trees and parks." Bobbie, who once studied drama, worked for two and a half years in the New York Club, but prefers the Atlanta atmosphere. "It's a little more personal, more intimate," she says. Bobbie likes to introduce key-holders to her favorite drink, the pink squirrel, which she says "tastes like a cherry malted--a nondrinker's drink." Bobbie's Atlanta apartment houses a pair of poodles and two German shepherds. She recently traded in the Atlanta Bunny's companion, a Japanese motorcycle, for an MG. With her alabaster skin, black hair and large dark eyes, Bobbie in a black Bunny costume looks like one of those fetching old photographs of Clara Bow.

Kim Hester is as fair and Southern as Bobbie is dark and Northern. Kim has delicate features and blonde hair, and likes to wear tiny pearl earrings. She went to the University of Georgia on a music scholarship, studying flute and piccolo. She's hoping to join the newly vitalized Atlanta Symphony, which will have Robert Shaw as its permanent conductor next year. "I didn't think I had what it takes to be a Bunny," says Kim. "I thought you had to be really stacked. And even though boyfriends told me I was pretty, I thought they were just prejudiced." Kim's rabbit-eared regalia proves how wrong she was.

Perhaps the most outspoken of the Dixie Bunnies is Atlanta's Judy Rose Pressley, who hails from oil-rich Midland, Texas ("I'm not a millionaire's daughter," she notes dryly), and was glad to get away from the place. "Everybody was working for the dollar there. Here in Atlanta people have time to slow down and be decent," Judy says. Her favorite book is A Nation of Sheep, an indictment of American thought, foreign policy and culture. "Americans just don't know enough about what's going on in their own country," she says. "They accept what's presented in the papers and on TV as gospel." She leans toward limited government and views life with amused detachment, finds that "the world is full of put-ons--everybody's pretending. Many times if a guy wants to talk with you it takes him twenty minutes just to become himself." Counterpointing Judy's outward cynicism is a tender affection for the simple things in life. Her happiest experience, she blushingly admits, was a wonderful, warm, old-fashioned Christmas with relatives in rural Georgia.

Playboy's commitment to international flavoring has sprinkled foreign-bred Bunnies through all the Clubs. It would be difficult, indeed, to pick a Miss Overseas Bunny from this general assembly, but Atlanta's Grete Christensen would rank near the top of any list. Grete (pronounced Gray-tah) grew up on Denmark's rainy Jutland Peninsula--which gained historical fame during World War One--and has lived in Berlin and London. When Grete was still in her early teens, way-out stories of Playboy and its Clubs filtered into Denmark: "We thought they were naughty places for men only, where the Bunnies were some kind of odd creatures." No odd creature herself, Grete is a sun-bronzed, green-eyed beauty with classical Scandinavian features and long, lustrous brown hair. She drives an Alfa-Romeo sedan, which is like being square and swinging at the same time, and finds Americans more polite than her countrymen. She thinks a Bunny's best assets are good legs and a smooth complexion, and insists that it's best to be a tiny bit overweight. "Men," she explains, "want to look at a healthy girl."

The Atlanta Club has not yet produced a Bunny-Playmate, but hopes are high for Bunny Lana Brewer, a 36-23-35 lifelong resident of Charleston. She speaks Greek and once served as secretary to South Carolina's late Senator Olin Johnston. In the manner of the Bunnies of Dixie, she reveres Gone with the Wind and digs modern dances like the Boston monkey and the duck. And in that same manner, she sees nothing inconsistent in cultivating such disparate tastes.

Like most of her satin-eared Southland sisters, Lana is eager to abandon traditions--such as reaction and paternalism--that are no longer meaningful in today's world. But she's just as anxious to preserve those vestiges of the Southern heritage--such as cordiality, chivalry and femininity--that she still finds worthwhile. As the best of the old and the best of the new, she nicely epitomizes the cottontails of the land of cotton.

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