Bunny Memories

You're . . .," said Gloria Steinem, with one of those give-me-a-second, palms-up gestures.

"Oh, you won't remember me," I said.

It had been nearly 30 years since we worked together. I hadn't even expected to see her at the party launching a publisher's fall list, which included Steinem's much-anticipated The Revolution Within. But when our eyes met I thought I could detect a flicker of recognition.

"I was Bunny Kay," I continued. "We worked together at the Playboy Club in New York."

"Oh, dear," she muttered. The sentence trailed off as she began backing away. To fill an awkward pause she added, "Are you doing anything now?"

"Yes I am," I answered. "I have my own publishing company."

As the gap between us widened, she ventured, "Oh, well, I guess there is life after Bunnydom."

"I never doubted it," I replied.

I was surprised to see how eager she was to distance herself from the slightest memory of the women she had written about in her renowned piece, "A Bunny's Tale," for Show magazine in 1963, when she had taken a job as a Playboy Bunny to write an exposé on the newly opened Club. Her characterization of Bunnies then as naive, hapless victims was not only clichéd but also predictable and insultingly inaccurate. Our chance meeting at the party got me thinking, and I wondered if I'd remembered only the good times, the quirky encounters with customers, the funny anecdotes.

My fascination with Bunnies, even 25 years later, surprised me, and I began my own Rabbit hunt, as it were, to find out what happened to all the girls who stood poised on the dawn of a new era, bedecked in satin ears and eager to explore.

Before I was finished, the list included such notables as actor and supermodel Lauren Hutton, Teddy Howard (who owns a multimillion-dollar ad agency), rock singer Deborah Harry, TV and film actor Susan Sullivan, congressional candidate Sabrina Scharf Shiller and the National Institutes of Health's distinguished immunologist Polly Matzinger, as well as the chief executive of a New York Stock Exchange company, an architect, a racehorse breeder, a real estate tycoon, lots of attorneys, a vast number of moms . . . well, you get the idea.

Here are four who shared their memories.

Lauren Hutton

"The girls who became Bunnies in the early Sixties were trailblazers. We were prefeminist, pre-hippie-era pioneers and extraordinarily brave for the time. I don't think any of us at 18 or 19 felt we needed permission to do anything, though we had grown up in an age when girls had to have permission for everything. Before there was any attention given to the idea of a woman controlling her sexuality, we had started figuring out for ourselves what real sexual freedom was about.

"Back then everything was a giant adventure. After a year at the University of South Florida, I headed for New York. I saw the ad for Bunny jobs in The New York Times and was hired in 1963, not long after the Club opened. There were three other Bunnies with my given name, Mary, so I opted for Lauren, after my father, Laurence. I was hired as a Lunch Bunny, because I was too young to work at night. Lunch Bunnies were there to be looked at--to smile, chat and, incidentally, serve drinks.

"I quickly became the Demerit Bunny. My ears were crooked, my tail wasn't on straight, whatever. Every time I had almost enough demerits to be fired, I would somehow win the bartender's Bunny of the Week contest. That would give me enough good points to lower the demerits.

"After about a year, I wanted to move on. I was working in a dark club while the sun was shining. It was depressing. Also, I was in my first relationship, a bad one, with a disc jockey I'd fallen in love with in Florida. He was older and had a lot of control over me. (text continued on page 154) Bunny Memories (continued from page 112)

One reason I never went to parties or saw the other girls outside the Club was that he wouldn't let me out of his sight. So I finally left the Playboy Club and went to the Bahamas to work in a resort casino with a lot of other former Bunnies. The Italian croupiers used to make pasta for us, and they'd fling the spaghetti against the wall to see if it was al dente. If it stuck, it was cooked enough. I thought that it was the most European thing I had ever seen. And an English croupier who had records by some group called the Beatles told us, 'They're bigger than Elvis--they're going to take over the world!' I was fired shortly before the resort's big grand opening because I wouldn't sleep with one of the owners. It was a Saturday night and all the cruise ships were coming in, but the other girls walked out in support of me. Everybody quit en masse.

"I eventually found myself back in Manhattan, standing with two suitcases in front of Tiffany's on a Sunday morning, not knowing what to do. Then I remembered a Bunny I'd worked with, and I called her. She and her boyfriend, Arnie, a great born-in-Brooklyn kind of guy, let me sleep on their couch until I could figure out what to do. I needed a job, but I couldn't be a cocktail waitress again. Arnie looked in the New York Times ads and said, 'Here. You can be a house model for Christian Dior.' You had to be 5'8" but I was 5'6-1/2", so I went in wearing high heels and got the job. Later, when I was modeling for Vogue in the Seventies, I was asked to be one of the speakers at a feminist rally held in front of the New York Public Library. Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were there, and I was proud to have been asked. I stood in the crowd listening to the angry words, and it struck me that I was hearing nothing but a tirade blaming men for everything. I couldn't relate to all that hostility. I turned around and left. My idea of being a feminist is making your own way in the world, being responsible for your decisions and taking care of yourself, not looking to a man to take care of you.

"We were young women on the move, out there exploring a new frontier. We were like sisters learning together how to take charge of our own lives. We protected one another. We were a rare bouquet."

Susan Sullivan

"It was summertime, and I was working in Manhattan as a showroom model to earn money for my junior year at Hofstra University. The fashion houses always took on extra girls to show the new fall lines, but I needed a part-time job when I went back to school too. It was then that I saw a full-page ad in The New York Times announcing Bunny jobs at the Playboy Club. The Playboy Club to me was about Playboy, which represented something illicit and erotic. I didn't read the magazine, but I found it sexy to look at when I would see it in some guy's apartment. I suppose it comes from my Irish Catholic background, but the taboo of sex was very erotic to me. The idea of working as a Bunny titillated the voyeuristic aspects of my nature. I never seriously thought I would be hired, but I decided to at least apply for the job. I wanted to see the Club, and I figured that would be the only way I ever would.

"The fact that I was a Bunny was soon known on campus, and that became a big thing. I was already well established at Hofstra as an actress because I was in all the plays. Then a big picture of me in my Bunny outfit appeared in the school newspaper. I had been dating a very popular guy and we had broken up. I remember him seeing the picture of me as a Bunny and saying, 'Oh my God, what's going on here?'

"That pleased me. I was in school, doing something significant, yet I was also capable of doing this other thing on the side. I was pretty enough to do it. It gave me a bit of an edge. I never thought of myself as terribly pretty, so getting hired to be a Bunny served as confirmation that I was a sexy woman.

"During Bunny training, it was repeatedly emphasized that we couldn't date customers or meet a man anywhere near the Club. Well, a man sat down in my station, a Texan, and I said what I always said: 'Hello, I'm Bunny Sue and I'm applying for a Fulbright. What would you like to drink?' Well, this man became fascinated with me and wanted to help me get the Fulbright. He was intent on meeting outside the Club, and, of course, I told him that wasn't possible. He followed me on the train to Long Island, and when I got off at my stop, there he was. All he wanted to do was give me a set of books, Best American Plays, which I still have.

"Many of the gals working at the Club were not necessarily beautiful. They were not the prettiest and didn't have the best bodies, but they were bright. That quality seemed to be of greater importance to the Club. Initially a lot of the women selected were college students. I remember meeting a lot of European girls there, and a good many highly motivated women.

"At the time I worked at the Club, being a Bunny was not the main thrust of what was going on in my life. But when I look back at it, I'm glad I had the experience, because it was just that--an experience. So much of your life goes by with a sameness, but the experience of being a Bunny has a sharp, electric-blue kind of color. The same color as my costume."

Polly Matzinger

"I was struck by one of the questions on the Bunny job application: 'What do you feel yourself to be an expert in?' Playboy used that information to select the most suitable Bunnies to do various promotions. I had never been asked that before, and it made me ponder what I would be most qualified to talk about. My answer was dogs. Yes, I felt I was an expert on dogs. Many of the women were going to school, an amazing group. Bunnies weren't just pieces of flesh but interesting women who were able to talk to people.

"I made the most money playing billiards as a Pool Bunny, earning 40 cents an hour and a dollar a game, with the first $17 going to the Club. If you play dozens of games a night at the same table night after night, you get pretty hard to beat. Then you make some crazy triple bank shot and everyone wants to play you because they think you couldn't possibly do it again. I was able to save a fair amount of money.

"It was actually my waitressing work that led me into a career in science. I got to listen to a lot of great conversations. Two professors would come in and talk science. One day they were talking about animal mimicry--how one butterfly will mimic another butterfly, and how a good-tasting butterfly will mimic a bad-tasting butterfly to avoid being eaten by birds. I had studied biology and asked them a question that I had wondered about for years: 'Why has no animal ever mimicked a skunk? A raccoon with a stripe down its back would have a selective advantage.' Their mouths fell open--a cocktail waitress asking this sort of question? They didn't know how to answer it.

"One of the scientists launched a personal campaign to persuade me to go to college and take up science. He convinced me it was something I could actually do. Otherwise, I could have worked as a cocktail waitress forever because it was a job that never got boring.

"In 1979, after getting my Ph.D. in biology, I went to England to do a four-year postdoctorate at Cambridge funded by a National Institutes of Health overseas fellowship, followed by a six-year fellowship at Hoffman-LaRoche in Switzerland. In 1989 I took up residence at the NIH and began to develop my theory, ultimately named the Danger Model, which London's Daily Telegraph called 'potentially the most far-reaching development in immunology this century."'

Deborah Harry

"I came from the sticks and wasn't at all sophisticated. I was born in Florida, but grew up in New Jersey. The Bunny job had an aura of glamour. I thought I'd give it a try, figuring it might be interesting and fun, certainly lucrative. I was quiet. I did my job and I kept my eyes wide open to everything.

"Being a Bunny involved a rare combination for a woman in the workplace. It was an unusual perception of women as beautiful, feminine and very sexy, and at the same time ambitious and intelligent. At Playboy we women had a place where we could use those attributes to make money--and also be valued as employees. Bunnies were the Playboy Club."

"We were young women on the move, out there exploring a new frontier. We were like sisters."