Powderpuff tails. Bunny ears. Silhouette cufflinks. Collars, nametags, lighters, shoes. Most of the 60 ex-Playboy Bunnies at one recent Chicago reunion could tell you exactly where lies their Bunny accessories.
“In the attic,” smiles Angelyn Chester, legal assistant with a Loop law firm.
“In a drawer with my training manual,” nods Patricia Murphy, a downtown travel agent with Flying Colors.
“My ears are sitting on my dresser where my hats are,” announces Marie Mann, City of Chicago police officer assigned to Cabrini-Green. “My tail, ears, collar and everything else are in my closet. I tried to keep my uniform, but I couldn’t get it out.”
“I still wear the cufflinks,” says Jeanette O’Brien, tactical officer with the Chicago Police Department.
Apparently, the Bunny years, which lasted from 1960 to 1988, offered more than met the eye to some of the world’s 15,000 retired rabbits. After all, how many of us are preserving our fast-food uniforms, lifeguard whistles or stenographer’s pads?
Today, the women who worked the 22 Playboy Clubs worldwide — including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, London and Tokyo — are mothers and grandmothers. Once breakfast Bunnies, cigarette Bunnies, hat-check Bunnies, bumper pool Bunnies, gift shop Bunnies, and (the ultimate) showroom Bunnies, they, like the rest of us, form a patchwork of happily marrieds, divorcees, widows, singles. They’ve become social workers, attorneys, homemakers, veterinarians, radio disc jockeys, actresses. Who keep rabbit ears back home.
This preservation of memorabilia suggests that the Playboy Bunny experience for these women was (gasp!) positive and that working for Hugh Hefner left indelible, warm, fuzzy feelings. In fact, all the Bunnies spoken to at the Chicago reunion recall the experience in those glowing terms generally attached to motivational speakers.
“It made a complete difference in my life,” says Murphy. `Being a Bunny made me more self-confident. It opened doors and changed my life completely.”
`It gave me confidence,” claims Nancy Caddick, Ph.D., a clinical social worker with the AIDS-HIV hospice at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
“I learned how to stand up for myself. Plus I made excellent money — $200 to $300 per night in 1968,” says Dian Doss, a geriatric home healthcare companion. “I traveled two and a half years on the money I earned at the club.”
Wasn’t the experience demeaning?
“Demeaning? No,” replies Kathryn Leigh Scott, actress and author of the recently released “The Bunny Years” (Pomegranate Press, Ltd., $25). “Women made the club their own, safe, comfortable place to work….It was a very empowering experience.”
Say what?
Let’s get this straight. Rabbit ears were attached to your head by means of a plastic head band fitted so tightly, it caused some agonizing headaches.
You poured your body into a patented, corseted, strapless outfit purposely cut too small so that, like a tube of toothpaste, your contents were squeezed until they spilled over the top.
You stuffed your costume’s cleavage — which was available only in cup sizes 34D and 36D — with plastic dry-cleaning bags and cut-up Bunny tails.
You wore regulation height 3-inch spike heels as you carried food trays high over your head.
You tucked your tips in your cleavage.
You wore as many as three sets of false eyelashes simultaneously.
When a guest was seated, you first gracefully pivoted and “tailed” the table, then introduced yourself with the words, “I’m your Bunny, Mary,” or whatever your name was.
When setting a drink on the table, you adhered to the prescribed Bunny Dip body language, detailed in the Playboy Club Bunny Manual, a k a The Bunny Bible. (“The Bunny Dip is performed by arching the back as much as possible, then bending the knees to whatever degree is necessary. Raise the left heel as you bend your knees.”) When standing you used the Bunny Stance.
(“When in view of patrons, a Bunny should stand in a slightly exaggerated model’s stance — legs together, back arched, hips tucked well under.”) When not waiting tables, you displayed yourself in the Bunny Perch. (“To sit, or `perch,’ on the back of a chair, sofa or on a railing while waiting to be of service”).
Photos of naked women graced the walls of your work environment. You called your immediate supervisor the Bunny Mother.
You needed special permission to wear glasses.
You received demerits for no lipstick or unmatched ears. You were fired when you had circles under your eyes, developed laugh lines, or no longer projected the Bunny image.
A gynecological exam was a job requirement for years.
For heaven’s sake! Your derrieres were punctuated by white fluffy tails constructed of fire-retardant material, on account of the fact that patrons fancied putting matches to them! This gave you confidence? This was empowering? This was not demeaning? What would you women find demeaning?
Not the costume nor the experience as a whole, proclaims Chester, the legal assistant. Named the International Bunny of the Year in 1974, Chester earned a college degree thanks to Playboy’s college tuition program, all the while pocketing between $100 and $300 nightly in tips. “We made so much money!” she laughs. “It was wonderful! It was satisfying knowing that when I divorced, I could take care of myself and my son without any financial assistance from anyone.”
“It was the most secure job,” adds Chester, who has remained single.
“People always want to put it down. They can’t understand that we always had a choice.”
Like other Bunnies interviewed, Chester says the Playboy Club was an extremely safe environment for women. “We were so protected,” she says. “There was a no-touching rule. When I started working outside Playboy, I was amazed at what some women had to tolerate at offices.”
Is it possible that Playboy Bunnies weren’t victims and that some were determined women who simply enjoyed, even willingly exploited, their youth and sexuality, took advantage of Playboy’s college tuition program, worked a flexible job around college-class schedules, pocketed more money than women could make elsewhere at the time, became financially independent, found their jobs glamorous, reeled in severance packages, made some lifelong friends in the process, and now recall the experience with songs of praise?
Of course it is. It’s also possible that Gloria Steinem, who went undercover as a New York Playboy Bunny in 1963, did not make up her dirgeful conversations with Bunnies who said they were threatened with acid thrown in their faces for complaining about the sexual abuse of Bunnies or trying to unionize.
In a postscript to her famous “I was a Playboy Bunny” article, Steinem writes of the 1984 made-for-TV drama based on her expose. (She wrote the article in 1963; the postscript appears in the 1993 edition of “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” a collection of her work.)
“A former Bunny from the Chicago Playboy Mansion also volunteered to be technical director. She had seen young women destroyed by drugs, and wanted to help us show the backstage realities of these women’s lives. Though she said she received threatening phone calls, she stayed on the set; an exact replica of the New York Playboy Club constructed from the architect’s drawings. Hugh Hefner was said to have tried to use his other television properties to pressure ABC out of doing this production, but it was shown, continued to be aired for four years on ABC, and is still rerun on Lifetime.”
After all these years, getting a firm handle on the Playboy Bunny life is as easy as catching a rabbit.
The Bunny mystique lives on.
