The Bunny years

FIFTY YEARS AGO HUGH HEFNER

CREATED A BRICK-AND-MORTAR

VERSION OF HIS MAGAZINE. IN SO

DOING, HE CHANGED THE WORLD

BEGINNING

XVT

^L W / hen the first Playboy ^/m/ Club opened on Febru-V T ary 29, 1960 on Chi­cago's Walton Street, there was an almost immediate sense that some­thing momentous was happening, some kind of cultural milestone.

As humorist Art Buchwald put it, "Not many people are aware of it, but Chi­cago has become the sex symbol capital of the United States." Crowds swarmed— nearly 17,000 guests

came in the first month alone. In the last three months of 1961 the club welcomed more than 132,000 visitors, making it the busiest nightspot in the world and the flagship of what would become a new and transformative enterprise that would soon have outposts across the country and in places as far-flung as Manila, Jamaica, London and Japan. The Playboy Club would also create a new

\merican ideal: tlie Bunny.

Hugh Hef­ner had already revolutionized I text continued on page 108)

See more cotton­tails at playboy .com/bunny50.

THE FIRST PLAYBOY CLUB OPENED IN CHICAGO AT 116 EAST WALTON STREET. THE DOORS SWUNG OPEN FOR THE FIRST TIME ON THE COLD NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 29, 1960.

A State of Mind

The clubs were manifestations of the playboy lifestyle, yet they were more

than mere pleasure domes. In a period of racial turmoil the clubs were inte­

grated and featured black entertainers. Note Hef (below left) with a bevy of

Bunnies before cuffs and collars became part of the uniform. ^^^m

Bunnies in Hig-h Places1

The Bunnies were associated with the allure of air travel. Big Bunny (left) had its own crew of Jet Bunnies. At right, a Bunny serves bubbly on a 1961 charter flight to the Miami Playboy Club opening. .

GOING GLOBAL

A National Groove

The club concept spread across the U.S., from New York to San Francisco. That's Raymate Joyce Nizzari (above left) opening the doors to the New Orleans club.

STAR BUNNIES

It came as no surprise that Bunnies became stars. Deborah Harry, Gloria Steinem and Lauren Hutton (below, from top) all did the Bunny dip at the New York club.

COOL BRITANNIA

The London Playboy Club (below) swung with its fabled casino, while the Manchester Casino Club (above) staked its reputation on hot dice and beautiful women.

Bunny Fete

Bunnies were entertainers, too. The 1976 Bunny of the Year Pageant was broadcast as an ABC-TV special

International

Playboy Clubs were popular across the globe. Above, Yurika Aoki wel­comes members to the Tokyo hutch.

V

Winter Wonderland

offered a variety of winter pursuits.

Los Angeles

The City of Angels was a natural location for Playboy, which had suc­cessful clubs there for 20 years. Hef lived above the first L.A. Playboy Club, on Sunset Strip.

BIHNTNY BAY, JAMAICA

The Jamaica resort was the first club operation outside the U.S. It offered everything from water sports to limbo dancing, with no shortage of pulchritude among the staff.

BUNNY

(continued from page 69) American culture with his magazine by making America safe for sex. The clubs were a brick-and-mortar tribute to this revolution—a way, said Hefner, "to give the world of Playboy a street address," as Disneyland had given a street address to Walt Disney's imagination. In fact, some observers, including the magazine itself, promptly dubbed the Playboy Club "Disney­land for Adults," a funny and perhaps obvi­ous analogy but one that contained a more profound analysis of the cultural veins the clubs would tap than they might have real­ized. So to understand the Playboy Club phenomenon it helps to start with Disney, as strange as that may sound.

On the face of it there may not have been two more dissimilar American icons than con­servative Walt Disney and lilx-rated Hugh Hefner, yet that was only on the face of it. Like Disney's parents, Hefner's were solid Midwesterners—Disney's from Kansas, Hefner's from Nebraska—who migrated to Chicago, where both Disney and Hefner were born. Both grew up in religious, repressive, emotionally frigid households. Both were childhood dreamers who sought solace and escape in drawing cartoons. Both had active fantasy lives, and both, of course, parlayed their fantasies into empires by understanding the American desire for wish fulfillment.

Disney's animations and Hefner's mag­azine eventually led to monuments where others could act out the fantasy. Disney­land was a way to make tangible what was on-screen, the Playboy Clubs a way to make tangible what was on the page. That meant the Playboy Clubs were not simply updated, upscale nightspots for drink, dining and entertainment. They were total environments and full experiences—a place to "enter" the magazine as fully as Disneyland allowed one to "enter" the animations. As piayboy itself put it in its first examination of the Chicago club, it was devised for "sophisticated plea­sure" and "dedicated to projecting the richly romantic mood, the fun and joie de vivre that are so much a part of the publication."

In large measure this was dependent on a sense of discontinuity between what was outside the club and what was inside. As Disneyland had a berm surrounding it to demarcate its fantasy from the dull reality beyond its gates, the Chicago Playboy Club had a Mondrian-inspired canopy above the door that suggested cool modern elegance. But the clubs also had a berm of sorts, a berm of privilege: private membership. The Playboy Club was the sanctum sancto­rum provided exclusively for "keyholders," who paid a fee, and their guests. This was a select group, even if it was self-selected. These denizens were, according to piayboy, the "most important, most aware, most afflu­ent men of the community."

What they found when they crossed the threshold were lands of silky sophistication. One entered a long dimly lit barroom that was understated and buzzy rather than noisy— the ultimate axktail lounge—decorated by transparencies of Playmates on the walls. Then one could ascend a stairway carpeted

in burnt orange to the Living Room, a (lin­ing and mixing area witli a fireplace that the magazine described as having the "comfort­able decor of the plushest urban pad." One floor up was the library—what nightclub had a library?—an intimate, candlelit ja/z club as sedate as its name. And then up another flight was the Penthouse, a larger club fea­turing big-name headliners. It was all the epitome of cool.

That might have been the most funda­mental similarity between the Playboy Club and Disneyland, and the deepest source of their appeal. Where most amusement parks were bastions of abandon, Disneyland was precisely the opposite. It was predicated on control, on the reassurance of the expected. Oddly, given the conservative caricature of playboy as debauched and hedonistic, the Playboy Clubs were also examples of con­trol. They were elegant rather than opulent, soft rather than loud, muted rather than brassy, decorous rather than licentious, and extremely tasteful in eveiy respect—the per­fect lair for the idealized playboy reader, who was himself all these things.

In truth it was the interface of sexuality with composed self-possession rather than the sexuality itself that made the clubs cul­tural trailblazers. Hefner is often credited with being the man who ripped through the veil of 1950s complacency and prud­ery. In fact he did something much more complex, subtle and significant. He didn't really make America safe for sex; with his clubs he made sex safe for America. Before Hefner the idea of "sophisticated pleasure" was oxymoronic. Far from sophisticated, American male sexuality was generally and crudely hypermasculine—a function of mus­cle, aggression and force asswiated with such things as manly labor, the outdoors, athlet­icism, ruggedness and risk. Its archetypes were slabs like John Wayne or Brando's Stan­ley Kowalski, both of whom had an almost bovine stolidity. Indeed, with the sole excep­tion of Gary Grant, even the smarter, more self-reflective postwar male sex symbols—-Bogart, Mitchum, Lancaster, Douglas—were required to display masculine brio.

Ihe young Hugh Hefner was the antithesis of this sort of obvious sexuality. He was thin, almost wiry. Norman Mailer described him

as looking like a "lean, rather iiKxlest cowboy of middle size" who "was not the kind of man one would have expected to see as the pub­lisher of his magazine, nor the owner of the Playboy Club." lie was a bookish intellectual, a pipe smoker. He wore pajamas rather than flannel sliirts or ripped tees. He preferred cocktails to wliiskey or beer, Franz Kline to Thomas Hail Bent on, foreign sports cars to Cadillacs and the indoors to the outdoors. He loved jazz, cutting-edge comics like Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory, minimalist archi­tecture in the Mies van der Rohe and Frank IJoyd Wright style, and iiKxlern furniture. Forswearing macho, he was the epicure who always knew what was cool.

Though Hefner would claim his chief adversary was American conformity, his real adversary may have been the conventional idea of male masculinity, and his real achieve­ment may have been reinventing the whole idea of male sexuality in his own image. By the time Hefner was done, male sexuality wouldn't only be about brawn, wealth, power or even size—the first three difficult to acquire and the last impossible—it would Ix1 about style, which was available to any man with the good sense to develop it. It was I Iefner as much as anyone who made sex a function of style. Hefner removed the vulgarity from sex and put the seduction into American coitus.

There was no better expression of this sea change in sexuality than the Playboy (Hubs. They weren't just oases for tired businessmen to wind down, entertain clients or ogle beau­tiful women; the Playboy Clubs were places where a new kind of man could indulge a particular style of urbanity. In them he could act cool, feel cool, be cl. Cool was in the air. That meant the Playboy Clubs were an ethos, not simply a location or, like Disney­land, an escape. At the clubs you could sip the cocktails the magazine extolled, listen to the jazz the magazine promoted, hear the comics the magazine featured and see the girls the magazine touted. The clubs even captured the cool political winds of the l'JtiOs. They were fully integrated—guests, entertainers, Bunnies—at a time when the civil rights movement was lighting, often bloodily, for equality elsewhere.

And because playboy was a state of mind, it wasn't just in the hipster precincts that the

Playboy Clubs thrived. It was appropriate the first dub opened in Chicago, not only Hefner's hometown and home to the maga­zine's headquarters but also Carl Sandburg's "city of the big shoulders," a masculine, deeply ethnic city one would not necessar­ily have thought of as a mecca of cool any more than one might have thought of the professorial Hefner as America's foremost sexual provocateur. Although Playboy Clubs soon opened in Miami, where more than 2,000 people jammed the streets the first night; New York, where a stream of lumi­naries including Joan Collins, Tony Bennett and Kd Sullivan braved freezing temper­atures to attend the debut; New Orleans; and Atlanta, they also appeared in such incongruous locales as Baltimore, St. Louis, Kansas City and Cincinnati, where students from nearby Xavier University protested by carrying placards proclaiming playboy phi­losophy VS. CHRISTIAN MORALITY, SIIOl'LD WE SACRIFICK MORALS FOR BfSINESS?

But if the raison d'etre of the Playboy Clubs was to provide a pocket of cool ambi­ence amid the vast American uncool, their primary appeal was indisputably the women: the Bunnies. As the story goes, Hefner and his associates were trying to come up with the right garb and the right image for the dubs' female attendants, dismissing linge­rie because one couldn't really serve in such a costume, when someone suggested tiiey deploy the magazine's logo—the bunny. Thus the waitresses tx-came Bunnies, in colorful satin-rayon bodices with matching ears and three-inch pumps, white cuffs, a collar with a bow tie, black fishnet stockings (originally), a name tag rosette on the hip and, of course, the yarn (later faux fur) cottontail. It was Hef­ner who recommended cinching the costume to accentuate a narrow waist and a large bust, and cutting the sides higher to reveal more leg. So was born one of the most widely rec­ognized images in the world.

Hefner said he had gotten the idea of the Playboy Club from a Chicago institution, the Gaslight Club, whose waitresses dressed as flappers, and the idea of roaming Ix-auties from watching The (Weal Ziegjeld—the biopic of showman Florenz Ziegfeld—in his youth. The Bunnies would, in Hefner's words, be "waitresses elevated to the level of a Ziegfeld

Follies Girl." But Ziegfeld's girls were ethe­real—distant, inaccessible goddesses who represented an idealization of American female sexuality as distinct from the avail­able strumpets at the other end of the sexual spectrum. Whatever his initial intentions, Hefner didn't wind up repositioning the Follies showgirl into 1960s America. Rather, he did exactly what he had done with male sexuality. lie redefined it by creating the sort of woman the Playboy man would desire—in effect, reconceptualizing womanhood itself.

The Playboy man—and the Playboy Club devotee—clearly liked women and enjoyed sex, but in this as in everything else he was a connoisseur. As a sophisticate, what he didn't like were obvious women, cheap women, lascivious women who were gd only for a bang. That's why, for his Playmates, Hef­ner had chosen women who were not only beautiful and well-endowed but also worth a man's attention. No trollops were allowed. The Bunnies may have taken that idea even further, if only because they were actually present. As Hefner's brother, Keith, who would help manage the clubs, described a Bunny, "She may be sexy, but it's a fresh, healthy sex—not cheap or lewd." One arti­cle called her "the all-girl girl."

Just as the Playboy man became a m<xlel for a new, cool sophistication, the Playboy Bunny became a model for a new, mod­ern kind of woman—one who was sexy and desirable but also independent, ambitious, accomplished and comfortable in her own skin. In the many pictorials that featured the "Bunnies of..." their pulchritude was never emphasized. It was their intelligence and their achievements. The Bunnies were art­ists, dancers and ballerinas, musicians, opera singers, actresses, former stewardesses, pilots, athletes, chess players, karate masters and poets. One was fluent in four languages. One intended to start a finishing school. Another was a social worker. One had attended the Sorbonne and another had a Ph.D. Many were students working their way through school, piayboy went to great lengths to show the whole woman was definitely more than the sum of her measurements.

The point—an important one in Ameri­can sexuality—was that for all the depictions of Hefner as a heedless libertine, his Bun­nies represented, and the clubs promoted, a much deeper and more traditional form of romance, albeit one with a sexual com­ponent. The Bunnies were women with whom one could share emotional and intel­lectual bonds, not just sexual pleasure. Or to put it another way, the sexual pleasure was informed by a much larger range of feelings and affinities, one reason no one would ever mistake the Playboy (Hubs for Plato's Retreat, the New York carnal den of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Playboy Clubs actually encouraged the idea of sex as a part of human expression—sex as an attitude as well as an act.

Of course not everyone shared this view. When feminist Gloria Steinem went under­cover as a Bunny at the New York club and wrote her famous expose in the May and June 1963 issues of Show, she was attempting to strike a blow for women's liberation and against what she perceived to be the sei~vi-tude of these poor young girls. She described

leaving the club one evening, walking home, spotting a high-priced call girl in a car and admitting she felt like one herself. But thou­sands of women, including supermodel Lauren Iluttonand Blondie vocalist Debo­rah Harry, aspired to be Bunnies—and not because they were self-loathing or masoch­istic or enthralled by male supremacy. One assumes it was because they liked the image of sexy liberation and because they realized that while they might be glorified waitresses, the operative word was glarified. Although they were not the distant, aloof goddesses of Ziegfeld, they were literally untouchable (anyone laying a hand on them would have been tossed out), and to make sure no one got the wrong idea, they were prohibited from dating customers—a rule Hefner later rescinded when the Bunnies demanded it. They may have seized, but they knew they were the main attraction. They didn't have to impress the guests, the guests tried to impress them.

All of which may have contributed to the clubs' demise. They nourished throughout the 19fi()s and into the 1970s, during the long transition from Eisenhower's buttoned-down America to Kennedy's unbuttoned one—they even helped facilitate that transition. By the time the clubs celebrated their 10th anniver­sary, in 1970, there had been 22.5 million keyholders and 4,000 Bunnies. The num­ber of dubs would eventually reach 24 in the United States and 10 internationally, including posh high-rise Playboy Hotels in Chicago and Miami. The empire would also include Hefner's own black DC-9 Hying club and eight Playboy resorts, beginning with one in Jamaica and later, in 1968 and 1971 respectively, massive lodges at Lake Geneva in Wisconsin and Great Gorge in New Jer­sey, testifying to how much the Playboy idea had leached into the larger culture. It was no longer a constellation of small, intime clubs for sophisticates. The Playboy Club had grown into a giant family-oriented enterprise that was not only like Disneyland, it was Disney­land. Lake Geneva even had supervised activities for children. Imagine!

By the mid-1970s, however, the clubs had begun to wobble, and by the late 1970s many were closing. Those that remained were kept afloat largely through the gambling profits of the London club, but it eventually lost its gambling license in a dispute with the British government. The dominoes fell. Great Ciorge would expire in 1982, Lake Geneva the same year—a year in which the clubs reported a $51 million loss. The last American club, in the bustling metropolis of Lansing, Michigan, closed its doors in 1988. Three years later the last international dub shuttered in Manila.

The conventional analysis for the clubs' death was to blame the recrudescence of con­servatism in Reagan America that attempted to restigmatize sex and punish the libido. In this view the Playboy enterprise had become an anachronism of a livelier, better, more honest time but a time rapidly receding into history along with other trappings of Amer­ican axil. The truth may Ix1 more bizarre: The Playboy Clubs vanished not because Rea­gan's version of America had triumphed but because Hefner's had. By revamping Ameri­can machismo and making sexuality cool, by emphasizing the intellectual blandishments

that underlay the sexual ones, by seeing sex not just as a primal activity but as pail of a larger attitude toward life and happiness— and by seeing women not as toys but as equal members of the sexual community who had the same needs and rights as men—Hefner helped integrate sexuality into American lilt-so that many of the things that had seemed secretive and scandalous when the clubs opened were now commonplace for most Americans. Sex was everywhere.

It was that integration, that success in mainstreaming sexuality, that may have finally destroyed the clubs. The clubs were designed to be segregated from conformist America—separate from the square, conven­tional, anhedonistic America outside their doors. The place was special, a repository of cool. The people who visited were special, the acolytes of cool. When America took a more liberalized view of sex and the clubs' sense of specialness disappeared, so neces­sarily did the clubs themselves.

As for the Bunnies, they had Ix-en under assault throughout the 1970s not only from the prudes on the right but, as noted, from feminists like Stcincni on the left who saw them as victims. But just as the right didn't destroy the Playboy Club, feminism didn't destroy the Bunny. On the contrary, the Bunny iron­ically may have been an early manifestation of

feminism, making Steinem correct when she said, "All women are Bunnies, but it doesn't have to be that way," just not how she thought she was right. The Bunny pointed the way to sexual liberation, and wliile it didn't have to Ix1 tiiat way, most women, younger ones especially, were glad it was. The problem for the Playboy Clubs was when all women were Bunnies, there was no longer any reason to maintain a special hutch.

The clubs and Bunnies have recently enjoyed a revival, after 20 years of dormancy, with the 2006 opening of the Playboy Club at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas and the prom­ise of more to come, but this is not an attempt to recapture the past so much as it is a differ­ent incarnation of American sophistication: grandiosity. While the original clubs were small and sleek, the new club is sophistica­tion on steroids, which may be the only way to compete in a country where cool has become a comiiKxlity. If so, the Playboy Clubs had a lot to do with that commodilication—a lot to do with blowing cool sexuality across Amer­ica until almost the entire nation was chilled. Hefner created the clubs to give piayboy a street address. Kventually, tiie address became America itself. Iliat is the Playboy Club legacy, and 50 years on it is still a big one.