The Bunnies of Detroit

As most of the world can testify, the best-known product of Detroit is the automobile. Gallons of ink, miles of video tape, tons of color film and countless man-hours of creative effort by the highest-priced brains of Madison Avenue are all expended on the annual effort to keep it that way. We'll agree that cars are great, but the admen ought to rearrange their priorities. By rights, the most celebrated resource of Detroit should be its girls, both natives and imports. They're beautiful. For proof, you have only to stop in at 1014 East Jefferson Avenue, the Motor City's Playboy Club and the rabbitat of a group of lovelies whose sleek lines, impressive upholstery, varied options and all-round excellence of performance surpass anything the Big Three's stylists ever conceived on their drawing boards. They're the eye-filling Bunnies of Detroit--72 percent of them horn and raised right in the city or its environs. (When you add the girls who were born elsewhere but have lived ill Detroit since kindergarten days, the percentage nears 90.)

If you could bundle all of Motown's Bunnies into one composite cottontail, she'd be 21 years (text continued on page 159) Bunnies Of Detroit (continued front page 135) and 9 months old, stand five feet, five inches tall and weigh 112 pounds distributed in symmetrical 35-23-35 proportions. Like her city, famed for generations as a melting pot, she'd he a spicy mixture of nationalities: German, French, Polish, Italian, African, Irish, English, Indian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish. She'd be a blend of homebody and wanderer, dreamer and realist, scholar and sportswoman; its short, totally feminine and just a hit unpredictable. Of course, Detroit's Bunnies don't fit into one cottontail costume. They come in all shapes and sizes (from petite Tracy LeBlanc. four feet, eleven inches tall, to statuesque Molly Ballantyne, who's really five feet, eight but claims she's "seven feet, two in heels and Bunny ears"); colors (14 percent are black); interests (from drag racing to haute cuisine); and life styles (from objectivism to mysticism).

What is it about Detroit that keeps this potpourri of pulchritude--which gives the Motor City hutch the highest percentage of local talent in the world-wide Club chain--happy to stay around the old home town? If you ask the girls, they'll tell you it's mainly people power. "I love Detroit," says Bunny Jeanne Tims, who has spent three years in Germany, traveled all over Europe, visited 20 of the 50 states and island-hopped in the Caribbean--and keeps coming back to the Michigan metropolis. "I've been all over," she says, "but this city rates the highest. The people make it. Detroit is a big town filled with small-town people who don't put on airs."

Like many of her sister Bunnies, Jeanne is also an accomplished sailor. Sporting attractions, roost of which have something to do with water, are a big plus for Detroit in the eyes of the Runny brigade. In a state that boasts 3251 miles of Great Lakes frontage, adding up to the longest fresh-water shore line its the world, it's not surprising that most of Detroit's Bunnies list swimming, water-skiing and boating as their favorite warm-weather pastures. Michigan also boasts 84 snow-skiing areas, of which 12 are within two hours' drive of Detroit; so it figures that a natural leader like Bunny Jo Matthews would organize regular winter trips to the slopes on Sundays, when the Club is closed. And then there is baseball's Detroit Tigers, the surprising 1968 American League championship team that turned the whole town into a cheering section and then went on to win the world series. To a woman, Detroit's Bunnies are unabashedly avid Tiger fans. (Other teams have their hutch devotees, too--pro football's Lions, hockey's Red Wings and the collegiate gridiron powers of Michigan and Michigan State.)

The many Bunnies who are theater bulls and music lovers give Detroit equally high marks for its entertainment and cultural attractions. They wouldn't miss the plays and concerts presented at Cobo Arena and the adjacent Ford Auditorium in the multimillion-dollar Civic Center, a Bunny hop, skip and jump away from the Club. Though the Bunnies are likely to visit Cobo Arena to groove with a big-name rock group, you may find yourself there for a convention. But whatever your reason for coming, chances are you'll find yourself in the Motor City one of these days. When you do, stop by and say hello to the Bunnies who grace these pages and the comfortable confines of the Detroit Playboy Club. For conversational openers, here are a few introductory notes about them:

Bunny Kathy Fitzpatrick, four times named Detroit's Best Bunny, has been with the hutch since its opening in December 1963. Hers is a familiar game in Detroit; her lathes-, John J. Fitzpatrick, just retired after 18 years in the state legislature. "I might run for state representative myself sometime in the future," Kathy allows, "just to keep the family name in politics. Besides, I think we need more women in public office. They can usually get the job done faster and store diplomatically than men." While waiting for an opportune moment to toss her Bunny ears into the political ring. Kathy plans to keep busy with her coin collections, her Yorkshire terrier, Maggie, and her favorite sports: jai alai, horse racing and swimming, the last at her parents' cottage in Kingsville, Ontario, 45 minutes Irons the Club. "Right now, I'm reading up on witchcraft and demonology," the hazel-eyed brunette adds with a devilish grin, "and working up a few love potions for some of my friends."

Kathy's companion on a recent month-long vacation junket through the South was Bunny Jill Battler. Jill's Yorkshire terrier, Penny, is a double for Kathy's Maggie, and the pups accompanied their mistresses on the trip. Jill is serious about clogs; her greatest ambition is to raise Yorkshires (ten) and children (six). A native of Springfield, Illinois, Jill will celebrate her fifth anniversary with Playboy in October. Currently, she's the Detroit Club's Training Bunny--responsible for demonstrating proper service techniques to the novices attending Bunny School. "I've learned to wear old clothes ant training sessions," Jill says. "That's the only way to avoid disaster when one of the new girls gets too nervous and spills a tray in your lap. But it doesn't happen often." A cold-weather enthusiast, Jill spends winter weekends skiing at Boyne Mountain, Boyne Highlands. Big Bear or Alpine Valley. Summertime finds her visiting bier parents at their home at nearby Walled Lake, where she scuba dives with her brother. "On a rainy day, I curi up with a crossword puzzle," she says.

Such sedentary pastimes would he unthinkable for Bunny Rusty Zawora. "I'm a doer," she says. "I need a man who's active, too: I'm not much for the idea of sitting home and watching TV." A dedicated skier. Rusty is a five-year veteran of the slopes and the acknowledged schussing expert of the cottontail clan. She's completed her junior year at Eastern Michigan University and hopes to earn a degree in retailing. "I'd like to be a buyer, or to run my own boutique." she says. "I design my own fashions."

Bunny Maria Gurley, too, has a future career on her mind. "I know exactly what I want to do in life," she says. "I want to enter Wayne State University and work toward a degree in modern dance--then open my own dance school." While still a student at Detroit's MacKenzie High. Maria was a teaching assistant in modern dance. She thinks her home town is a great place, especially for its dramatic offerings: a typical week in the 1969 season afforded a variety ranging from classics presented by England's Royal Shakespeare Company at the Fisher Theater to Oakland University's staging of Giraudoux' Amphitryon 38. "My idea of a perfect evening." says Maria. "is to go to the theater, then on to Arthur 'offspring of the New York discothéque] for dancing and finish it all off with a platterful of egg fooyoung at Forbidden City."

You may have seen Bunny Marcie Crumby in an auto ad: she has modeled for Chrysler for a year or so. Before joining the Bunny brigade in May 1968, Marcie spent some time as a dental assistant--but life with Playboy has proved much more exciting, not to mention rewarding. She remembers last year's world series when a keyholding used-car deader, in his (Laid') over the Tigers' triumph, decided to bestow a victory token on the Bunny who happened to be serving his group. "How's that for a tip?" queries Marcie, pointing out her 1963 Comet. This diminutive dynamo pounds a mean bongo and sometimes sits in with the trio in the Club's Living Roost. Oil the job, her interests include night-clubbing, dancing, roller skating and cooking. "I make a beautiful meat loaf, good fricasseed chicken and all kinds of old-fashioned soul food." A dash of soul, Marcie believes, would go a long way toward curing the sicknesses of modern society: most of its problems, she says, could be solved by "broadening small minds."

Bunny Toni Trupiano agrees. "What the world needs most is a big serum shot of love." she says. Toni, who's now in her second year of night school (majors: art and law) at Wayne State, lives in suburban Royal Oak with her family--father, a Detroit Free Press artist; mother, a housewife and doctor's assistant; two younger brothers and two younger sisters. She is serious about keeping her slim (33-21-33) body beautiful; "I go to the health club two or three days a week, for exercise and swimming. I like jogging along country roads, too." Currently, she's saving up to pay for somewhat speedier means of touring Italy.

The late Ian Fleming was reportedly a man of unflappable poise, but lie might have been a bit shaken to discover a Bunny named 007 in the Living Room of the Detroit Playboy Club. The only resemblance between this five-foot, two-inch, 110-pound brunette--whose British parents named her Marie Fuller--and the fictional fames Bond is a certain disposition toward derring-do. "I picked the name 007 because it had an air of mystery." she explains. "I mean, with a name like that, nobody knows what to expect. You can be whatever kind of person you feel like at the moment." Double-0, as she's known around the Club, is an accomplished drag racer, enthusiastic sky diver, novice judo student and a firm believer in spiritualism and ouija boards. "I'm working on conquering various parts of my brain in their psychological aspects," she says seriously. "It's like taking a trip without drugs." Bunny 007 has lived in the Detroit area since she was eight, and somewhere along the line she picked up the area's endemic auto fever, in her case, it's racing cars. "I drove in ten or twelve drag races last season," she says. "Now I want to get a higher-powered car, the kind that needs a parachute to stop it. I'm the only girl I ever heard of who got a set of chrome wheels for a high school graduation gift!"

Adventurous is the description Bunny Kim Stretton pins on herself, too. "You have such a short time, really," she philosophizes. "You should live life to the fullest." King takes her own advice: on one occasion, she set off from Flint. Michigan, with a cousin to visit New York. 'The girls had $18 between then aril nearly got stranded in Buffalo--but they talked a kindly bus driver into a free ride home. Kist has completed one year in psychology at Michigan State University. While in high school at Grand Blanc, Michigan, she won a trophy in an oratory contest and was chosen homecoming queen and Valentine princess. She's yet to celebrate her 21st birthday, hut she's already been a staff writer for The Flint Journal (where she assisted the fashion editor), a secretary, a dental assistant and a receptionist. One still-unfulfilled ambition: to become a top-notch photographer's model in New York.

Taking off when the spirit moves is also the life style of Bunny Fran Witt, whose luminously expressive brown eyes betray her Italian heritage. Not long ago. Fran lit out for two weeks in Florida--"running away from the idea of getting married." Another time, she flew down to Mexico with a pair of girlfriends for two whirlwind weeks in Taxco. Guadalajara, Mexico City and Acapulco--where she boasts of meeting Michael Ansara and Ursula Andress. Fran makes friends easily--sometimes too easily. "I'm a terrible flirt, without realizing it," she says. "You know, if I were reincarnated as an animal, I think I would come back as Flipper--happy, intelligent, friendly and a people lover." Fran worked at the Playboy Club-Hotel in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for three months last year and hopes to be on hand in 1970 for the grand opening of Playboy's newest resort extravaganza, now under construction at Great Gorge, New Jersey.

Red-haired, green-eyed Bounty Bobbi Saxon is a follower of Ayn Rand, a lover of folk music and symphonic works--with Bach and Tchaikovsky leading her all-time hit parade. "I hope to he able to go to college in another year or so and take a hotel-management course," Bobbi says. "This practical experience, serving as a Bunny, should be invaluable. In a way, though, it almost scares me to go back to school, as things are now. Although I'm basically independent, sensitive and--well. romantic--I want to go to a university to learn, not to get involved in a revolution." On the lighter side, Bobbi is mad for swimming and water-skiing. Unlike many of her hutch sisters, she's not a fan of astrology. "I'm a Scorpio," she told us, "and yesterday my newspaper horoscope promised a good day. So what happened? My date showed up two hours late."

Ultrafeminine clothes and supertomboy sports are the seemingly contradictory weaknesses of Bunny Brenda Honey (her real name, so help us), a Hoosier native who's lived in the Detroit area most of her life. "lf I'm not shopping in a boutique, I'm out on the shooting range or riding my motorbike--a Yamaha 180--around the sand dunes near Benton Harbor," she says. Brenda's a dead shot, whether with pistol. rifle or bow and arrow: she also wields a powerful bat at Bunny Baseball, those laugh-it-up games played by Bunnies against varied opponents, often d.j.s, to raise funds for charity. Currently, Brenda is attending Henry Ford Community College; someday she'd like to teach art. At the moment, she's involved in doing pen-and-ink drawings for the walls of her apartment and hooking a rug on burlap in "wild oranges, pinks and reds."

One competitive sport in which Detroit's cottontails have not fielded a team is track. Our favorite in such a rabbit run, should it ever take place, would be long-stemmed Bunny Goldie Morgan. While attending high school in St. Clair Shores. Michigan, she ran on the girls' intramural team and was for two years a teaching assistant in gym. She roller-skates regularly in suburban Mount Clemens, plays touch football, baseball and volleyball. Goldie, whose real name is Donna, picked her Bunny sobriquet out of admiration liar Laugh-In's "dumb blonde," Goldie Hawn. "It makes a good talking point with the guests," she observes. No dummy, Playboy's Goldie is saving up to go to college and study interior design. Her long-range ambition is to be a mother--either the Bunny variety at The Playboy Glob or, in the more traditional style, with a house full of small fry. Regarding a prospective husband, she's looking for "a man, not an adolescent. Some men can be forty but act eighteen. My ideal fellow, bats got to be a gentleman who treats me like a lady, acts natural and has honest insights into himself, me and the world around us."

Bunny Molly Ballantyne, a statuesque blonde Swede, has a different view. "I love men because they're just like little boys." she says. On a date, Molly likes to hit the lively night spots in Windsor, Ontario, just five minutes away across the Detroit River. Until the age of 15, Molly claims she was "the biggest roughneck ever. I have three younger sisters, and I guess we were all making up for the lack of boys in the family." Her most unforgettable experience to date: hitch-Inking to Florida with a girlfriend. "It wok its a week and a half to get to Miami, but we met such beautiful people along the way."

Another tall Michigan beauty, Bunny Karen Talaske, is a blue-eyed blonde of Polish extraction. She comes from a big family--six children--and hopes someday to be the mother of ten and "outdo my folks." One sister, a year older than Karen, is a freshman at Western Michigan University, where Karen frequently heads in her 1968 Malibu for college party weekends. When she's not bargain-hunting in boutiques or cheering from the grandstand at a pro-football game (favorite team: the Packers). Karen's likely to be found in the public library, reading up on everything front science fiction to psychology. She's still looking for lie right guy; he should be "young, from an average family, nice-looking, intelligent and have a job he enjoys. He should also lie a little stern with me. I need to be told where to get off once in a while."

Polish is also the predominant strain in the background of Bunny Ann Welch. A resident of the Detroit area since the age of four, Ann admits to being bugged by Polish jokes. "This is Be Nice to Polacks Week at the Club." site proclaimed one evening. Actually, Ann feels, people are more than nice to her at the Club, "especially entertainers. They treat us Bunnies as if tie were the stars. Last week Dennis Cole, from Felony Squad, was in the Club, and he was great." Like most of her fellow Bunnies, Ann can be found on days off at Metropolitan Beach, which affords volleyball, tennis, basketball and other recreational facilities, in addition to swimming. Or she may lie out at Tiger Stadium, rooting for another Detroit pennant. "They had lust better win again this year," she says. "Last year, it was crazy--the town went wild. You should have seen the Bunnies in Costume, dancing in the street outside the Club."

Irrepressible Bunny Wyndy Williams, a native of the Deep South, describes herself as a Mississippi mud puppy" and claims she's "always getting in trouble for saying silly things. Like, a couple of weeks ago, I said to my boyfriend. 'Let's get married and have fifteen kids,' and I haven't seen him since." Wyndy has a serious side, however; she's taking classes at Macomb County Community College to qualify as a teacher of retarded children. When it comes to sports, "college football is my bag," says Wyndy, who roots impartially for the University of Michigan's Wolverines and Michigan State's Spartans. "I like to skate, too, over at the Arcadia roller rink; and I'm wild about opera. I'm also pretty good at cooking chitlins and ribs."

A return to college studies is planned by Bunny Terri Grant, whose German ancestry shows up in her blonde hair and azure eyes. Terri completed her freshman year at Eastern Michigan University, where she was a dance major. She gave up a chance to be the lead dancer in the university's production of Brigadoon in order to spend three months as a Bunny at the Jamaica Playboy Club-Hotel last year. "No regrets," Terri reports. "Jamaica was fabulous. But now I'd like to get back to school. I plan to take modern dance, ballet and Spanish at Wayne State, here in Detroit, this fall."

If Bunny JoAnn Jordan can overcome her shyness about performing in public, you may be hearing front her. JoAnn, whose natural hair style sets off her classic features in a living demonstration of black is beautiful, sings rock, jazz and ballads and has been steered by the Club's music director, Matt Michaels, to a professional vocal coach. JoAnn works an average of 27 hours a week in the Penthouse, which allows her time for not only singing lessons but driving instruction and a radio course at Highland Park Junior College. When there's an hour or two left over, she'll pack a picnic lunch and head for Metropolitan Beach or invite a date over for dinner, candlelight, good music and wine. JoAnn believes "in giving to the poor, in ending the war in Vietnam" and in her own personal dream for the future: "Ten years from now, I'd like to be sitting down, taking care of my kids and singing because I want to, not because I have to."

Any fine summer day will find Bunny Holly Hampton under sail, usually on Lake St. Clair, which lies east of Detroit between Lakes Huron and Erie. Holly's favorite escort owns a 26-foot sloop and a 38-foot yawl. Once, sailing farther north on Lake Huron, Holly and friend were pounded onto the rocks by the 12-foot waves of a sudden storm and had to be rescued by two teenaged boys in a dinghy. The experience dampened Holly but not her enthusiasm. Rainy days are fun days for Holly, too. She's decorating a new apartment, making a papier-mâché turtle and enormous paper flowers. "And I'm a dedicated junk shopper," she reports. "I haunt all die antique shops within a twenty-five-mile radius and pick up lots of bargains." One of her prize finds is a three-legged brass pot--"It looks like the one you're supposed to find at the end of the rainbow. It cost me two dollars, but I've been told it's worth at least forty dollars since I polished it up."

Sailing was both vocation and vacation for Bunny Cheryl Theisen last summer. She spent three months as a stewardess on a 90-foot sailboat operating out of Fort Lauderdale on charter island cruises. "It was groovy," she recalls. "We visited the Bahamas, Tortugas, Bimini and the Florida Keys. We'd build a fire on the beach and, when the pot was hot enough, we'd dive into the ocean and grab lobsters to cook. You've got to be careful, though, or they'll grab you first." Shakiest experience: snorkeling near a sunken treasure ship anti finding herself face to face with a barracuda. "But I was lucky. He wasn't hungry." Eventually, Cheryl went ashore to apply for a spot as a Bunny at the Miami Club--only to find she was too young, at 19, to meet the requirements of Florida law. So it was back to her home town, Detroit, where she was signed on for the cottontail coterie. "My parents were skeptical at first, but now they brag that their daughter is a Bunny," Cheryl reports. "And my grandmother--she's seventy-three--is trying to get me to pose for Playmate pictures! Maybe," Cheryl adds with a laugh, "that's because I hate to wear clothes!"

Bunny Bambi Batiste's enormous eyes give her more than a passing resemblance to the Walt Disney illustration of Felix Salten's famous fawn; she's also a believer ill a kind of vision transcending the purely optical. "I truly believe in the supernatural," Bambi says. "I have a kind of ESP myself. Like, when the phone rings, I almost always know who it is before I answer it." Someday, Bambi would like to be "a singing movie star. I'm for bluesy rock tunes like It's Your Thing. But right now. I love working at The Playboy Club. The celebrities who come in really sweep me. I've met Ahmad Jamal, a whole bunch of basketball stars anti lots of important people, like the big executives from Motown" (the mushrooming Detroit-based recording empire). Bambi, who describes herself as sensitive but not moody, independent and "very affectionate," is looking for her ideal male. He should lie a professional mint, have a great sense of humor and "know how to treat a woman. You know, like in that old song Little Things Mean a Lot." Hint for Playboy readers who think they might fill the bill: There's one thing Bambi won't tolerate from a man. That's calling her "Baby."

Self-proclaimed "organizer" of the Detroit cottontail crew is Bunny Jo Matthews, a veteran of nearly four years with Playboy, who served as acting Bunny Mother earlier this year. (That was before the arrival of pint-sized hutch momma Judi Bradford. a former Kansas City cottontail about whom you read in the March 1967 Playboy pictorial The Bunnies of Missouri.) Inspired by her success at setting up ski trips for Bunnies last winter, Jo is currently planning a Bunny bowling league. This summer, Jo has shifted some of her attention to boating; she has just bought a 16-foot runabout. Jo became a Bunny on a bet; "A friend said I couldn't do it." She spent off-hours during her first two years at the Club working a second eight-hour shift in the X-ray department of a Detroit hospital. Although she no longer works at the hospital, Jo is still proud of her record there. "When I took the examination for registered X-ray technologists, I rated seventh in the whole country," she reports.

Bunny Ronnie Stekier, too, discarded hospital whites in favor of a cottontail costume. "I finished one year of nursing school, and eventually, I'll go back and get my R. N.," she says. "Butt for now, I want to live a little." To Ronnie, that means plenty of skiing, skating, boating, swimming and driving sports cars. "I'm saving up now to buy a Shelby Mustang." Tall, blue-eyed Ronnie revels in being a Bunny; "Besides, working nights keeps are out of action until my boyfriend gets back from the Service."

Just returned from three months at the Jamaica Playboy Club-Hotel is tall, dark Bunny Renée Burton, bemoaning a new crop of wall-to-wall freckles brought out by the Caribbean sun. "Detroit's really the right speed for me." she says. "I love to drive my brand-new Fiat around for hours, and you can't do that in a rush-rush place like New York." Renée has just taken a glass-wallet) studio apartment in a high-rise, complete with swimming pool, two blocks from the Club. An ex-varitype instructor and professional dancer (her Tahitian and Hawaiian numbers were much in demand at private luaus and at Selfridge Air Force Base USO shows). Renée claims complete satisfaction with her life as a cottontail. "I know I wouldn't enjoy college, even though I had top grades in high school. I'd feel compelled to excel and end up working too hard. I love the life I'm leading now; I don't even drink, smoke or swear, because I don't see any reason to. I'm happy with myself--and with my job, which has a glamor that others just don't offer."

The Bunnies of Detroit--each distinctly different but all strikingly similar in their open and unspoiled approach to life--are unanimous on that point. They're in love with life at Playboy, and this spirit of bonhomie--or should we say bonfemie?--is reflected in the warmth of the atmosphere throughout the Club.

"This is the friendliest Playboy Club I've ever visited." opined one well-traveled businessman as he hoisted a toast at the Playmate Bar. "And the Bunnies here are out of this world!" Though the Motor City's Bunnies appreciate the compliment, they Wright quibble with his choice of words, for they feel very much part of a world that, as far as they're concerned, has a lot going for it. In our view, among the nicest things it has going for it are the Bunnies of Detroit.