The Bunnies of New York

"This town's so big," according to the old saw, "they had to name it twice--New York, New York." Actually, in the 345 years since Peter Minuit traded $24 worth of trinkets to the Manhattan Indians in exchange for their island real estate, the city has been named and nicknamed many times--formally and informally, affectionately and derisively. Starting out as New Amsterdam, it became New York, New Orange, then New York again; more recently, it's been called Big Town, The Big Apple, Fun City. It's also been called ungovernable and uninhabitable. Befitting its stature as our largest metropolis, New York is also the nation's most controversial city. You either love it or you hate it.

The Bunnies of New York love it and, if anyone can turn it into Fun City, it's this lively group of 90 young beauties who staff the Playboy Club at 5 East 59th Street, just around the corner from Fifth Avenue. Their infectious enthusiasm permeates the seven-story hutch and their devotion to the city isn't just a professional pose or a passing fancy. More than half of New York's cottontail contingent hails from within a 100-mile radius of the Club--nearly a third born within New York City itself. But even those who come from farther afield--Norwegian Marta Andersen, Filipina Kelia Carrillo, Austrian Marie Henn, German Anya Sonders, Jamaican Leigh Jefferson and Briton Pauline Nicholls, as well as dozens of girls from distant Southern and Western states, Puerto Rico and Hawaii--have come to Manhattan for the same reason the natives stay there: It's the place to be.

"It would take a bulldozer to get me out of New York," says Panama-born Barbaree Earl, whose parents named her--appropriately--for the hauntingly lovely old sea chanty High Barbaree. She sold cars on St. Croix in the U. S. Virgin Islands before coming to New York, where she had planned to become a Trans-World Airlines stewardess: "I took this job as a Bunny to kill a month and a half before (text continued on page 216) Bunnies of New York (continued from page 151) starting training with TWA; that was in September 1968, and I'm still here." But Barbaree still manages to travel. Last summer, she and Nancy Keosayian (a Carnegie Institute jazz-ballet student in her spare time) took a six-week leave of absence from the Club and drove crosscountry to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Traveling companions of longer standing are Ava Faulkner and Ricki Shapiro, who met at a Miami night club when the band struck up Dixie. Georgian Ava and Tennessean Ricki found themselves the only guests standing for the unofficial Southern anthem; they introduced themselves and the subsequent conversation soon deepened into friendship. In 1968, Ava, who had been a Bunny at the Miami Club for nearly a year, persuaded Ricki to move north with her. "We looked like the Beverly Hillbillies, with a car packed to the brim," says Ava. Both girls were hired as Bunnies at the New York Club, where they remain close friends but pursue separate off-duty goals: Ava hopes to become a band vocalist and Ricki is taking night-school courses in order to teach mentally disturbed children.

There seems to be a special esprit de corps among the Bunnies of Playboy's Manhattan outpost--an attitude that many of the girls attribute to the tactful personnel-management skills and genuine warmth of Bunny Mother Jadee Yee, a New Yorker of Chinese-American extraction who is herself a former cottontail. "Jadee's wonderful and the girls are very cooperative," says Bunny Azuca Jackson, who came to New York from Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, to model and attend the City College of New York, where she majored in Spanish and art. "The other Bunnies are fine to work with, especially in comparison with models, who are likely to cut your throat. Here, everybody pitches in to help."

Cottontail camaraderie has in some instances spilled over into business affiliations. Bunnies Lindsay Corey and Patti Hopkins are preparing to trundle out a daisy-covered health-food cart this summer; operating around Central Park near the Club, the wagon will dispense carrot and fruit juices squeezed fresh to order. It has taken the girls several months of digging through red tape and city regulations to get the venture going, but once launched, they hope the pushcart will draw enough customers to enable them to expand into a full-fledged health-food store. Bunnies Carole Navarro and Marcia Donen operate a wholesale-jewelry enterprise; they call it Rings & Things--the things including bracelets, medallions and earrings designed by the girls and cast in various metals by local craftsmen. So far, most of their customers are other Bunnies, but they, too, hope to branch out.

Like many other cottontails, these fetching entrepreneurs are planning to further their education with tuition paid for wholly or in part by Playboy's program to encourage employee self-advancement. Carole and Marcia intend to take Spanish classes. Their friend Joi Kissling is already attending the Steno-type Institute, where she's learning to become a court reporter. Door Bunny Germaine Henderson, who is earning a degree in film and theater from Hunter College, is a budding moviemaker now putting the finishing touches on an animated film. Bunny Dorothea Kutler's busy schedule finds her four nights a week at the Club, two at Pratt Institute, where she's studying architecture, and five days in the office of an architect, with whom she works on problems of space utilization. One of Dorothea's most challenging recent design projects: Exodus House, a home for the rehabilitation of drug addicts in East Harlem.

Denise Schweighardt is scheduled to take her bachelor's degree in nursing this year from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Denise became an R.N. in 1969, but opted to go on for the prestige and security of a college degree. The whole program, which she began in 1966 with a hospital nursing course, was financed by her Bunny earnings, but in the early days Denise had to confine her cotton-tailing to afternoon or early-evening private parties because of the hospital's strict student-curfew rules. Denise sees possibilities in combining her career interests: "The way Playboy is growing, the organization may soon need a resident nurse at one of the resort complexes," she predicts. "I'll be first in line to apply."

Dana Hunter, the daughter of a Mississippi plantation owner, received a bachelor of arts degree in French with honors from Tulane University before heading north several years ago. "I had theatrical aspirations, but I gladly gave them up," she says. Before becoming a Bunny, Dana worked at the Pentagon as a typist for the Air Force; she joined the New York coterie in 1965, then went to Montreal in 1967 to help open the Club there. This spring, she's registering for graduate school at Hunter, where she'll decide whether to major in sociology, psychology or history. A degree in education from New York University enables Bunny Pixie Engel to moonlight--or daylight--as a substitute teacher in junior high and high schools. Pixie lives in Greenwich Village, where she attends night classes in French at the New School. Her unusual avocation: finding homes for stray cats. By advertising in The Village Voice, Pixie has, by her own estimate, placed close to 40 homeless felines.

A career in teaching is also anticipated by Joyce Goldman, holder of a B.S. in education from Finch College--where one of her classmates was Tricia Nixon. "I definitely plan to go into teaching someday, but first I want to get my master's degree," says Joyce. "I'd like to study more history, too; sometimes I wish I could go back in time and find myself in Victorian England. I'd rather enjoy its pomp and splendor than today's extreme informality, which, personally, I think has gone too far." VIP Room Bunny Meja Yoon, who got her start in Chicago's hutch in 1966, moved to New York to take classes at the Art Students' League, following up on two and a half years of art studies at the University of Hawaii in her home town of Honolulu. Another Bunny who intends to re-enter school this fall, with Playboy's financial aid, is doe-eyed Tanya Mohammed, whose parents came to this country from Calcutta. Tanya will study education and child psychology--also at Hunter. She's already a member of the Foster Parents Plan and her goal--"if only I could get my hands on a million dollars or so"--is to open a home for deprived children.

The Montclair State College campus in New Jersey is off-duty headquarters for Bunny Waren Smith, Who's taking math and English there--and applying for Playboy scholarship assistance to take journalism courses this summer and prepare for a career in public relations. From 1959 to 1962--while her father was Far Eastern representative for U. S. Plywood--Waren's family lived in Japan, where she learned Japanese and became an accomplished Oriental dancer. Returning to the U. S. with her parents and six brothers and sisters, she taught herself computer programming (with a big assist from an uncle, who was in charge of data processing for a large aerospace firm) and landed a job as a systems engineer for IBM in Westchester, California, at the advanced age of 17. "I became a Bunny on a dare," Waren reports. "I had driven my psychedelic old 1962 Volkswagen bus--we call it Wheels of Fire--into New York from our present family home in Montclair. I was taking Mother to the Plaza Hotel to play duplicate bridge and my 13-year-old brother and 15-year-old sister were along for the ride. My brother joked when we passed the Playboy Club: 'Why don't you apply for a job?' So I parked the bus, left them sitting there and walked in. I had these visions of some dirty old man saying, 'Hey, girlie, take it off,' but Bunny Mother Jadee reassured me and, when I came back out to rejoin the kids, I'd been signed up as a Bunny." Waren's 20-year-old sister, Erin, also worked as a New York cottontail last year; now attending Southern Oregon College in Ashland, she's due back to reclaim her Bunny ears in June.

Six of Manhattan's cottontails--Jeri Haywood, Tiki Owens, Linda Kish, Vikki Gatling, Kay Daugherty and Mary Avram--are former airline stewardesses who gave up the high-flying life for the higher earning potential of Bunnydom. "To make ends meet as a stewordess, you have to have five girls sharing a one-bedroom apartment," says Jeri. "I earn three times as much as a Bunny than I did flying. Besides, I got tired of living out of a suitcase." Cooking--"soul food's my thing"--is Jeri's favorite offduty pastime. Tiki digs it, too; her specialty is home-baked bread. Like sister New York Bunny Gina Byrams, Tiki started out cottontailing at the Baltimore Club, returning there briefly last summer for the gala reopening following the fire that razed the hutch in 1969. Gina, who carried the Baltimore banner to victory in Playboy's first annual Bunny Beauty Contest, recently transferred to the New York Club.

Bunny Kay, who frequently presides at the turntables in the Club's psychedelic Living Room discothèque, decided to give up the stewardess life while she was ahead. "Things just kept happening on my flights," Kay explains. "I worked only for about 18 months, and I went through two emergency landings. You haven't lived until you've tried to talk people into taking out their dentures, as you're supposed to do in emergencies." Like Bunny Judy Juterbock, Kay is a minister's daughter; both girls report paternal approval of their cottontail careers. (Bunny Cheryl Glickman enjoys even more active parental support; her mother, a former Rockette, brought her into the Club at 16 to enroll her for Bunny training. But Cheryl had to wait two years to reach the minimum legal age for cottontails in New York.) Mary Avram had no unusual experiences during her year and a half as a Pan American stewardess, during which she flew to Europe and the Caribbean; but weird things started happening to her when she returned Stateside and rented a house in Maple Glen, Pennsylvania--which, she says, was haunted by seven ghosts from the Civil War period. "Two of them were friendly, and we got quite well acquainted, except that they never spoke," she reports. A fervent believer in psychic phenomena, Mary has studied both witchcraft and magic--black and white. "I'm not saying I'd practice it myself, but I believe that it is practiced, world-wide."

Peripatetic Playboy keyholders from other cities who visit the New York Club can often find a face that's familiar from their home Club. Nancy Phillips started out in Detroit, went on to Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco before settling in New York four years ago. "There's a lot more happening here," she explains. "New York is really the 'in' city." Sandi Meehan donned Bunny ears in Chicago in 1961, when she became one of Playboy's first Training Bunnies: she helped open the St. Louis, Phoenix, Boston and Montreal hutches before coming to New York.

By far the biggest lures of New York--to local girl and out-of-towner alike--seem to be the theater, both on and off Broadway, and the city's abundance of vocal, dancing and drama coaches and schools. Sue Doody ("I always tell people Howdy is my uncle") studies dramatics at the Neighborhood Playhouse School on East 54th Street. Vikki Gatling works nights at the Club, leaving her days free for acting, singing, piano and modeling classes, as well as agency visits and the-atrical auditions. Most of the latter end in disappointment, but one recent day Vikki hit the jackpot. On returning home from the Club, she found three messages from her answering service. One was for a modeling assignment and two were requests to read for low-budget films; she got a part in one of them.

Karen Ferber, a 1969 graduate in art from Queens College, is studying acting at the Herbert Berghof Studios. Being a Bunny is her first full-time job; "I just walked in on a whim and applied," she says. Inga Whealton came to New York from Tampa, Florida, to try for a modeling career, in which she's finding increasing success. "If you can make it in New York, you can make it anyplace," she says. "I was really lost here at first, and pretty broke. I had an apartment in which the only furniture was a foam-rubber mattress. Then, one night in April 1969, a date took me to the Playboy Club and asked the Room Director if I could get a job as a Bunny. He referred me to Jadee and I've been here ever since." Inga appeared as the girl in the midi on this year's Noel Harrison TV special, Mini, Midi, Maxi. Televiewers may catch Bunny Janice Shilinsky as a car-repairing cottontail in a Ford Maverick commercial, and on a forth-coming Joe Namath special, currently scheduled for September airing, on which she is to read an original poem. Masculinity. At the Club since only last October, Janice has won the title of Miss Connecticut in five different pageants: Miss American Teenager, Miss High School of Connecticut. Miss Star of the World, Miss World-U. S. A. and Miss U. S. A.-Universe.

Petite Beth Fortenberry, a native of Gainesville, Texas, completed three years in drama at Oklahoma University before coming to New York to pursue her the-atrical ambitions. "Being a Bunny has paid for all may lessons," Beth reports. "I'm studying acting with Betty Cash-man, dancing at the American Ballet Theater and Phil Black's studio, and singing with Betty Crawford. In my spare time, I go to the theater." That spare time is unusually limited at the moment; in the Performing Arts Repertory Theater presentation of Young Tom Edison, she's playing the role of Tom's girlfriend.

A veteran of show business is statuesque redhead Fonda St. Paul, who's been dancing professionally since she was three and singing since she was 13. Fonda danced in Myra Breckinridge and The Owl and the Pussycat and was an extra in The Landlord; she has sung on the Johnny Carson show, appeared in Maybelline cosmetics and Burlington hose commercials, and has a walk-on role in 20th Century-Fox's forthcoming The French Connection. It was the flexible hours that made a Bunny career appealing to Fonda: "I spend my mornings at practice--singing, dancing and acting--my afternoons calling on agencies and going to rehearsals, and my evenings in the VIP Room."

Showbiz ambitions also lured Tammy Hunt to New York. A soft-spoken cottontail of Irish-Indian extraction whose parents live on an out-of-the-way farm in Louisiana, she recalls: "We grew all our own food, shopped from a converted school bus called 'the rolling store,' lived on corn pone, pinto beans and rice most of the time. Sometimes I get a little homesick, but I don't think I could go back to chopping cotton every day, with our only entertainment going to church all day on Sunday and attending revival meetings every couple of weeks." Tammy left home to attend high school in Biloxi, Mississippi, then entered a television-commercial contest and went on tour promoting Pepsi-Cola and Mountain Dew. She ended up in New York, principally because of its fine schools. "I'm trying to get up my nerve now to get a really good singing coach." she says.

Before becoming a New York Bunny last October, Candice Bajada--a comely blend of Maltese, English and Swedish descent--traveled cross-country with two friends in a camper. While in California, she appeared in a short experimental film: "There I was, in a red-velvet dress in the middle of a field, fighting off a bunch of imaginary assailants to the tune of Scarborough Fair. People passing by must have thought I was nuts." The experience, however, whetted Candice's appetite for showbiz--at least the cinematic end of it. "I'm afraid the stage would be too demanding for me," she says. Carolyn Dark got her break via television; she landed roles in five episodes of the Hawaii Five-O series while it was filming on location in Honolulu, where she lived for four years. Carolyn once owned her own boutique, The London Express, in Honolulu; when she sold it, she used the proceeds to buy and old car. After ripping out the back seat and replacing it with a mattress, Carolyn and a Spanish-speaking girlfriend set off on a three-month exploration of the remote areas of Peru. Carolyn is also something of a baseball fan--not surprisingly, since her cousin is Cleveland Indians manager Alvin Dark.

Another celebrity relative is boasted by pint-sized Maria Young, great-great-niece of Isadora Duncan. Maria grew up in Massachusetts, where she won an all-state drama award for her portrayal of a leading role in Sutton Vane's hardy perennial Outward Bound. Then she came to New York as governess for the children of a prominent attorney and his wife--and to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse School. Now enrolled in an acting workshop, Maria hopes to open a school of interpretive dancing for children on Cape Cod this summer. "We have some backers lined up already, so I'm very optimistic," she says. "New York's a great town, but people here don't take time to realize they're alive. It was getting to me and I don't want to become a cold, hard bitch. So I took this chance to be a Bunny last September. It's not just a job to me; I accept it as a challenge to do my best to get every single person I serve to smile." This 97-pound dynamo, who once hitchhiked through Holland, England and France, is currently immersed in redecorating a loft apartment in Lower Manhattan's newly popular So Ho district artists' colony.

As might be expected of any group of 90 girls, New York's Bunnies are devoted to wide-ranging hobbies. Emma Patterson is a spirited equestrienne: "I live way at the end of the Bronx, only five minutes from a stable, so I can ride twice a week, except when it's freezing outside." Cheri Wright and Terre Marotta are among the ski buffs; Pam Powers digs yoga and sky diving; Michele McCarthy, ice skating. Carmel Atwell paints, plays Softball and football; Camera Bunny Rita Kustera plays the guitar; Lisa Aromi and Tia Mazza are inveterate junk shoppers. Gail McMahon boasts six or seven trophies and an estimated 50 medals for baton twirling. Since the age of 13, however, modeling has been her major goal and she's now signed up with a prestigious modeling agency. "I'm ambitious," says Gail. "I want to become another Lauren Hutton, or die trying." Gail may well be on the right track; Miss Hutton, one of the nation's hottest models and the female lead in the recent film Little Fauss and Big Halsy, was herself a New York Bunny in 1963.

Whether as actresses, models or career girls, the Bunnies of New York are living the good life. They take in stride such annoyances as power shortages, strikes of everything from cops to taxi drivers and even invasions by militant women's libbers. Dimpled Gina Loren, a budding singer, dancer and doting owner of a champagne-sipping black rabbit named Little One, was on duty in the Playmate Bar the day the liberation ladies stormed the New York Club. "You don't have to work here!" one of the demonstrators admonished Gina. Drawing herself up to her full five feet, three inches, Gina coolly replied: "Yes, but I choose to." The message was clear: Don't feel sorry for the Bunnies, ladies. They're there because they like it.