Bunny Birthday

She's been called a sex symbol, a girl scout, an Occidental geisha, a "good girl dressed as a bad woman," "pure sin on sight," the embodiment of a perpetual male erotic fantasy. Her working uniform is arguably the world's most recognized. She was born 20 years ago. She's the Playboy Bunny, and ever since that memorable night in February 1960, she has been the subject of curiosity--then, and now, often manifested in goggle-eyed stares--and controversy. Back in 1960, purse-lipped Mrs. Grundys feared that the mere sight of these shapely young ladies would corrupt the morals of their sons. In 1980, militant feminists, some of them equally grim-visaged, complain that the Bunnies themselves are the victims of some sort of sexist corruption.

Still, the (text continued on page 260)Bunny Birthday(continued from page 145) Bunny has not only survived, she has multiplied. Triumphantly. Since 1960, upwards of 25,000 young women have worn the ears and tails of the Playboy Bunny, and we'd like to salute them. So happy birthday, Bunny!

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The Playboy Club's most enduring attraction--like Playboy itself, which was originally going to be called Stag Party--just missed entering the world under another name. Our first recruiting ad, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune late in 1959, seeking "the 30 most beautiful girls in Chicagoland" to staff the new Playboy key club, referred to the prospective employees as Playmates. At least the costume illustrating the ad bore some resemblance to the Bunny outfit finally adopted, though it was fur-trimmed and lacked collar and cuffs. When he was laying plans for his new club, Hugh Hefner's first notion had been to dress the girls in shortie nightgowns. The rabbit, to him, was a masculine symbol. But associates--Victor Lownes, then the magazine's promotion director, among them--persuaded Hefner to carry the Playboy Rabbit identification into the magazine's night-life extension. Lownes was dating a girl named Ilza Torins, a Latvian model who had appeared on Hef's television show Playboy's Penthouse; Ilza's mother, a seamstress, ran up a sample costume and--presto!--the Bunny was born.

To bring his club idea to fruition, Hefner enlisted not only Lownes but also experienced Chicago restaurateur Arnold Morton. Morton left Playboy in 1973 to return to the restaurant business; his establishments are among the most popular in the Chicago area. Lownes is still with the company; as President of Playboy Clubs International, he makes his home in England, where he supervises Playboy's profitable British gaming operations.

Masterminded by the triumvirate of Hefner, Lownes and Morton, the Chicago Playboy Club was a success from the moment it opened its doors at 116 East Walton Street. Within months, 50,000 keyholders had signed up and plans were under way for expansion to other cities. As columnist Art Buchwald put it a couple of years later, "Not many people are aware of it, but Chicago has become the sex-symbol capital of the United States.... Many people in Chicago think Bobby Kennedy's recent trip around the world was a secret mission for Mr. Hefner to find new locations for Playboy key clubs. The slogan of the Playboy is, of course, 'Today girls, tomorrow the world.' "

Buchwald wasn't the only observer who was bewitched by the Bunnies. Gushed a writer for Paris Match, in a story headlined "The new American Pinup has Rabbit Ears": "The 'Bunny' is the best-known animal in American mythology. In case of a flood, it will surely be the first to go up the gangway of the modern-day Noah's Ark." Tony Crawley, writing in a more restrained vein for an English newspaper syndicate, simply described the Bunny as "the most fashionable status symbol for all career girls. The newest entree to films, TV and modeling."

Norman Mailer, on a visit to the Chicago Playboy Club, was fascinated by cottontail cleavage. In his book The Presidential Papers, Mailer described the Bunny costume's superstructure-as "a phallic brassiere--each breast looked like the big bullet on the front bumper of a Cadillac." Also intrigued was John Skow (who has subsequently become a valued contributor to Playboy); writing in the March 2, 1963, Saturday Evening Post, he defined the Bunny as "half geisha and half double malted, in a satin swimsuit that shows what swimsuits usually show."

Television went equally gaga over the Bunnies. Everybody who was anybody turned up on TV in some version of a Bunny costume. Rosalind Russell did it; so did Shari Lewis, Bill ("My name José Jimenez") Dana, Mimi Hines, Marty Allen, Steve Rossi, Ruth Buzzi, Goldie Hawn, Steve Allen, Flip Wilson, Johnny Carson (on the occasion of his first anniversary with The Tonight Show) and even Charlie Weaver (on the Mike Douglas Show). In later years, the ladies of Saturday Night Live--Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman--also wore Bunny duds on the air. So did Charlie's first famous Angel, Farrah Fawcett, who, in a 1971 made-for-TV feature, The Feminist and the Fuzz, played a Bunny opposite David (Good Morning America) Hartman.

All of that, however, was far in the future in 1962, when Hefner wrote in his informal illustrated journal: "The Playboy Club's cotton-tailed cuties have become the most famous females of show business since the glamorous Ziegfeld girls of the Twenties. The Bunnies have been written about, parodied, praised, analyzed, idolized, damned, kidded and copied around the world. In the United States, they have become a TV and club comic's cliché--a sure-fire laugh producer; cartoons about our Bunnies abound in other magazines and newspapers.

As if to confirm Hefner's observation, the ABC television network in 1963 cooked up a special on The World's Girls, billed as "an hourlong survey of woman's place in the world today," and featured--along with actress Simone Signoret and authors Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir--a New York Playboy Bunny. Similarly, the Montreal Expo of 1967 included the Bunny in its exhibit on professions for females, along with those of nurse and schoolteacher.

Given all this enthusiasm, sometimes bordering on hyperbole, it's a wonder the Bunnies didn't begin to take themselves too seriously. Fortunately, the Bunny is all too human. Her feet can hurt, her orders get goofed; there can be spilled trays, garbled introductions ("Good evening, I'm your Bunny Lotila," chirruped a sweet young thing at Lake Geneva whom Playboy brass had fancied resembled Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet and christened with the Bunny name of Lolita). Our favorite story concerns the nearsighted Miami cottontail who, in her zeal to give a keyholder excellent service, whipped out her Playboy lighter and ignited the carrot stick on which he was munching.

And not all the Bunnies' press has been good. There have been those who figured Bunnies were all denizens of Hefner's own personal briar patch, over which he exerted some kind of droit du seigneur. A goggle-eyed writer identified only as "a special correspondent" for an Auckland, New Zealand, paper burbled breathlessly to his readers that Hefner "lives an indolent life of Oriental splendor. He nibbles grapes and cavorts and carouses with all the bunny girls who frolic behind the wrought-iron gates of his four-story, 48-roomed mansion in Chicago."

Hoo, boy.

Yarns like that may have titillated Auckland readers, but they didn't make life any easier for the Bunnies. In the summer of 1964, a dozen of them from the Chicago Club decided to challenge the Portage, Indiana, Jaycees to a benefit baseball game. One of the girls had read a newspaper story about Tip Brock, an 18-year-old Portage youth paralyzed from the waist down by a mysterious illness, and the Bunnies--who had already supplied diapers for infants at Cook County Hospital, uniforms for the Highland Park Little League and were sponsoring 23 European orphans under the Foster Parents Plan--decided to help out. When syndicated radio commentator (continued on page 282)Bunny Birthday(continued from page 260) Paul Harvey heard of the game plan, he huffed over the nation's airwaves that Bunnies were unfit company for such an endeavor. Retorted Gary Post-Tribune columnist Oliver Starr, Jr.: "It seems to me that a group of girls who want to give their time to help out a paraplegic boy can't be all bad (in fact, on close inspection, I can say they aren't half bad)."

Harvey's quibbles notwithstanding, the game was held and some $2000 raised to equip the Brock home so that Tip could be released from the hospital.

Some of the anti-Bunny business has, over the years, been more troublesome. New York's Playboy Club opened its doors in 1962, but not without problems. The city's license commissioner at one point refused to grant the Club a cabaret license because he objected to its "scantily clad waitresses." His decision was overruled by New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur G. Klein, who declared in a ruling remarkably free of legalese: "It is not incumbent upon the petitioner to dress its female employees in middy blouses, gymnasium bloomers, turtleneck sweaters, fisherman's hip boots or ankle-length overcoats."

When petitioning to open Playboy of Boston in 1963, Club executives took a Bunny from New York along with them to show just what Bunnies would be wearing on Beantown's Park Square. Geraldine Doherty, 19, was a local girl and a graduate of Our Lady of Presentation High School, but that cut no ice with the Boston Licensing Board. When Bunny Geraldine opened her raincoat, board member Timothy Tobin turned his face to the wall for the remainder of the proceedings. The vote went against Playboy, prompting a cartoonist for The Boston Herald to draw a waitress garbed in fur from head to toe, complete with tail larger than she, captioned: "Rumor hath it a new key club will open here with waitresses costumed in the seemly manner of Boston Common squirrels."

Some three years later, Playboy of Boston finally opened its doors. Meanwhile, there had been anti-Bunny campaigns in Detroit and San Francisco. The latter city's police chief, Thomas Cahill, told the press that he was "concerned about a club with flimsily dressed girls operating behind closed doors. The police couldn't get easy access to check the action."

Whereupon columnist Jim Elliott pointed out that police carrying proper identification would have no problem entering the Club; "so maybe Chief Cahill is not so worried about getting his officers in as he is about getting them back out again."

The best retort to all such criticism was voiced by Candy Humphries D'Amato, an ex-Bunny turned real-estate broker. Interviewed at a Bunny reunion some years later by Dick Roraback of the Los Angeles Times, she said: "I think every woman's secret desire is to try on a Bunny suit, but they're just not liberated enough. Yes, liberated. It wasn't the Bunnies who were being exploited, you know, not with our incomes. I worked as a bank teller before I became a Bunny, and I'll tell you what exploitation is. Exploitation is working for $250 a month."

Even in the early Sixties, when the average working woman was lucky to take home half that amount, a Bunny often made $250 a week. Money has always been a major factor in Bunny recruitment. So have the job's flexible hours, which facilitate scheduling college classes--many a Bunny has earned a degree by day through table-hopping at night--modeling jobs, even child care. Some of those children, incidentally, have grown up to be Bunnies themselves. Playmate/Bunny Connie Mason's daughter Elise worked in the New York Club; Great Gorge Bunny Mother Sandra Schiffer, herself an ex-Bunny, has a daughter who works as a cottontail at the resort during vacations from college. London Bunny Jade Lawrence's daughter Tracey joined her in uniform at the Park Lane hutch this year, and at the Chicago Club, both Bunnies Cynthia Goodwin and Venice Kong are the daughters of former cottontails Helen Goodwin and Barbara Anderson.

Ranking right up there with economics and convenience in attracting young women to Bunnydom is the opportunity to rub elbows with celebrities--or to become one. More than 100 Bunnies have been featured as Playboy Playmates, for starters. Actress/model Lauren Hutton was a Bunny in our New York Club; so was Blondie's Deborah Harry. Susan Sullivan, star of ABC-TV's new series It's a Living, spent three years at our Club on Manhattan's East 59th Street before landing such plum TV roles as that of Peter Strauss's lawyer girlfriend in Rich Man, Poor Man and the title role in Julie Farr, M.D. Susan, who used to surprise keyholders by quoting Shakespeare, expressed fond memories of Playboy to Bob Newhart when he interviewed her earlier this year during a stint as guest host for Johnny Carson. "They made you feel you were very, very special," she said, "trained you to think that you were a goddess."

Another Gotham Bunny, Jackie Zeman, met and wed disc jockey Murray the K Kaufman while working there--then moved to the West Coast and a role as the soap-opera siren Bobbie Spencer of General Hospital. Los Angeles Bunny Lynne Moody played Alex Haley's great-grandmother on both Roots miniseries, while on the big screen, her fellow Angeleno Maria Richwine was Buddy's wife in The Buddy Holly Story. Carol Cleveland, the blonde regular of the Monty Python troupe, was a London Bunny. New York Bunny Gloria Hendry got the chance to bed James Bond (Roger Moore) in Live and Let Die; she also appeared in Black Belt Jones, Black Caesar and Hit Man. More recently, another black Bunny from New York, Dana Valentien, was featured in Night of the Juggler with James Brolin. Among other Bunnies who have appeared in films are London's Katy Mirza and Anika Pavel, L.A.'s Joyce Williams, Anazette Williams, Wini Winston, Syleste Michaels and Chere Bryson.

Playmate-Bunnies have often star-spangled the screen. China Lee (Miss August 1964) played the title role in the Woody Allen spoof What's Up Tiger Lily? Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers, and Miss May 1966, Dolly Read, both starred in Russ Meyer's lighthearted cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sharon Clark, the 1971 Playmate of the Year, who became a Los Angeles Bunny, won plaudits for her starring role in Lifeguard a couple of years ago; another centerfold cottontail, New Orleans' Laura Misch (Miss February 1975), has been seen in Mandingo, Hard Times and French Quarter; L.A.'s Astrid Schulz, Miss September 1964, had a role in A House Is Not a Home.

Latest of the gatefold/Bunny sisterhood to gain stardom was 1980 Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten, whose career was tragically cut short last summer; she starred in Galaxina and in Peter Bogdanovich's yet-to-be-released They All Laughed, after having made her film debut, in Americathon, as a Bunny.

In the celebrity-cottontail category, feminist leader Gloria Steinem occupies a special niche. Back in 1963, on assignment for Show magazine and using the name Marie Ochs, she signed up for Bunny training in the New York Club, spent four weeks there--and wrote what was probably intended to be a lurid exposé for that magazine. A Bunny's Tale made Gloria Steinem--and, interestingly, boosted recruiting for the Clubs.

Barbara Walters also donned Bunny ears for a story, but she did it on the up and up; her report appeared on the Today show in January 1963. Noted Barbara on the air: "I felt pretty awkward, but at least I didn't spill anything on the customers.... Later, when I left the Club, the doorman asked me if I wasn't taking off early. 'Well,' I replied, rather grandly, 'after all, I'm not really a Bunny--I'm a reporter for the National Broadcasting Company.' 'Gee,' he said, 'you could have fooled me.' And you know something, Hugh [Downs], I must admit that secretly I think I was kind of pleased."

Until 1975, when they picketed for and obtained "Bunny Lib," Bunnies were not allowed to date the keyholders they met in the Club. The idea was a chivalrous, perhaps old-fashioned one: to protect the Bunnies from harassment. Despite the prohibition, though, a number of them not only dated but married celebrities. China Lee, who as training Bunny in a half-dozen Clubs put hundreds of prospective cottontails through their paces, wed comic Mort Sahl; Dolly Read, one of six girls sent over from Britain to train as the nucleus of our London cottontail corps, is now the wife of comedian Dick (Laugh-In) Martin; both are popular game-show guests. Los Angeles Bunny Maria Roach, the daughter of producer Hal, married astronaut Scott Carpenter. Christa Speck, a Chicago Bunny and September 1961 Playmate, is the wife of producer Marty Krofft, who got his start as a puppeteer and most recently brought Middle Age Crazy to the screen. Sara Lownds Dylan, Bob's ex, was a Bunny; singer Buddy Greco's wife, Jackie Sabatino, was a St. Louis Bunny of the Year. And the former bad boy of tennis, Jimmy Connors, attributes his present, more sedate lifestyle to the support of his wife (and mother of his child), St. Louis Bunny Patti Mc-Guire, our Playmate of the Year for 1977.

Bunny alumnae have moved on into successful business careers, too, often making use of the know-how they learned in the Clubs. Real-estate mogul Sue Gin, named one of Chicago's ten most eligible women by the Chicago Tribune, is a good example. Since leaving the Club in 1964, Sue has pioneered in condominium sales and loft conversions, opened a French provincial restaurant, even helped organize the city's first Do-It-Yourself Messiah.

Peg Dameron, also an early Chicago Bunny, parlayed her expertise into a successful training school for cocktail waitresses in California's Orange County. Boston's Beverly Veseleny has been a detective on that city's police force for nearly eight years; since passing the bar in 1977, she has also become assistant legal counsel to the Boston police commissioner. One of Chicago's first Bunnies, Carole Martin, now runs, with her husband, Chuck Gold, the stables at Playboy's Lake Geneva Resort and Country Club. In the nearby town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, ex-Bunny Dana Montana has executed the ultimate role reversal: She owns the Sugar Shack, a night club featuring male go-go dancers.

Male strippers are probably the one form of entertainment Playboy Clubs haven't offered over the years. The moment the Clubs began expanding beyond Chicago--first to Miami and New Orleans, later to other cities, with a current total of 19--they began to acquire a reputation as incubators of talent. As early as 1961, a Variety headline predicted Playboy was about to become the "Biggest Vaude Loop Since Rko."

First nationally known talent to get his big break at Playboy was comic Dick Gregory, whose January 1961 appearance in the Chicago hutch set him on the road to stardom. Gregory, like Slappy White, Nipsey Russell, Redd Foxx and George Kirby, who followed him to the Playboy circuit, had been limited previously to working what were then known as "Negro night clubs." Not too long before, in fact, Gregory had been earning ten dollars a night at the Club Esquire on Chicago's South Side. His Playboy debut, which started out to be a one-night fill-in, stretched to a five-week engagement and a Time story that noted that he was "just getting started on what may be one of the more significant careers in American show business."

A check back into Playboy records reveals an amazing variety of entertainers who got their start--or at least an important career boost--at Playboy. Professor Irwin Corey, the World's Foremost Authority, opened in Chicago in June 1960 and went on to play almost everywhere. Damita Jo headlined at the Los Angeles, New York, Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Cincinnati Clubs early on. Impressonist Rich Little was booked in Miami in 1964, political satirist Mark Russell in New Orleans in 1965. Singers Adam Wade, Johnny Janis, Lana Cantrell and even Billy Dee Williams (described in a January 1962 Playboy press release as a "rising young vocalist" toward the bottom of a bill headlined by Homer & Jethro) took early steps to stardom at Playboy. Everybody knows Williams in his latest incarnation as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back, sequel to Star Wars; few know that Nichelle Nichols, who plays Lieutenant Uhura in both TV and movie versions of Star Trek, was also a 1961 Playboy attraction. Oddly enough, Nichelle had played in a short-lived musical satire on Playboy, Kicks & Co.; in its first-night audience was one Hugh M. Hefner, who immediately booked Nichols into the Chicago Club.

An item in the February 6, 1961, Billboard mentions "Aretha Franklin, Columbia's recently signed 18-year-old thrush, currently having a picnic at Chicago's Playboy Club." The same column reported that the comedy team of Burns and Carlin was working the Playboy circuit; George Carlin subsequently left Jack Burns (himself later to team with Avery Schreiber) and went off on his own to new heights of comedy success.

Ronnie Milsap, now celebrated as a country-and-western star, had just gotten his first combo together when he signed to play at the Atlanta Playboy Club in 1967. "We played everything," he recalls. "Jazz, country, blues, classical, Broadway. I really enjoyed it." Milsap spent eight months with Playboy, at Atlanta and Lake Geneva, before settling into the Nashville groove.

In 1971, an unknown comedian, Gabe Kaplan, appeared as a warm-up act for singer Morgana King at the Chicago Playboy Club. Back this year for a special ten-day engagement, Kaplan observed: "It's great to be here, trying out a lot of new things. I can't really do this when I play Las Vegas; the people in the audience won't indulge the creativity."

Over the years, as tastes in entertainment have changed, doomsayers have been predicting the demise of the Clubs and, with them, the Bunny.

But in the past few years, the Clubs have started expanding again and seem on the verge of yet another boom. Bunnies now hop in Japan (Tokyo, Sapporo, Osaka, Nagoya), Manila and San José, Costa Rica, as well as in London. Portsmouth and Manchester, England. Mainland Clubs are located in Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, Dallas and St. Louis, as well as at the two resort properties. Playboy operates a casino in Nassau, and a multimillion-dollar hotel and proposed casino is due to open shortly in Atlantic City. One of the first totally new casinos on the famed Boardwalk, it's a joint project of Playboy Enterprises. Inc., and the Elsinore Corporation, an affiliate of the Hyatt hotel chain.

And the Clubs, both established and projected, are getting a new look: In the cabaret rooms, the Cabaret Bunny (herself an important part of the show) is appearing in a new, more feminine, ruffled outfit. When it was introduced at the Los Angeles Club in July of this year, the new garb, predictably, produced oceans of ink around the world. "Sexy," "more alluring," "can't stop looking," proclaimed the press. A. James Lisak of the Van Nuys, California, Valley News, wrote: "Miss Kitty might have worn it to impress Matt Dillon in a setting considerably more amorous than the Long Branch Saloon."

That doesn't mean the standard costume is being discontinued, even though Britain's Prince Charles, among others, has called it old-fashioned. Counters Victor Lownes: "Nobody ever says Mickey Mouse's costume is out of date, and our Bunny is as much our symbol as Mickey is Disney's."

Jeri Ness, a Chicago Bunny since March 1979, agrees: "I'm surprised how infatuated people still are with the Bunny image. When you go on a promotion in Bunny costume, they treat you like a little movie star."

A few women, of course, turn up feminist noses at Jeri, posing questions in the "Why are you letting them do this to you?" vein.

"I tell them I have two degrees, a bachelor's and a master's, in English lit, and I don't have to work as a Bunny, but I want to. It's a fantasy; it's fun; I meet exciting people and I make money. Ten years from now, I'll use my degrees.

"Some things never change," Jeri observes. "Men are always going to want to look at pretty girls and women are going to want to look at them, too. It's every woman's fantasy to try on the Bunny suit."

It's a chance few women are likely to get. The Bunny Costume was the first ever to be registered as a service mark with the U.S. Patent Office, and its construction details are a carefully guarded secret. Old Bunny Costumes aren't retired, they're shredded. Imitations crop up everywhere, at masquerade balls, Halloween parties and amateur theatricals. Gerald Fisher, proprietor of a thriving costume shop in rural St. Charles, Illinois, says unhesitatingly that a simulated Bunny getup is his all-time top seller.

Which may explain, in part, why 3000 young women lined up to apply for 250 positions at our Atlantic City property.

After 20 years, obviously, the Bunnies exert much of the same fascination they always have. Alert lensmen at Epsom Downs turned away from courtiers and other notables at 1978's Derby Day to snap a surprised Queen Elizabeth accepting a daisy from London Bunny Louise Palmer; early this year, other photogs rushed to photograph Bunny Louise greeting Prince Philip at a Sportsmen's Club charity event with the comment, "I'm sorry I startled your wife the last time I met her." Both photos ran all over the world, an unlikely circumstance if Miss Palmer had been anything but a Bunny. In a Bunny's life, that's not unusual. Times change; Bunnies endure.

"Norman Mailer, on a visit to the Chicago Playboy Club, was fascinated by cottontail cleavage."

"Actress/model Lauren Hutton was a Bunny in our New York Club; so was Blondie's Deborah Harry."