Authors: Kathryn Leigh Scott
The Bunny Years (2 page)
In a world where you can get just about any sort of thrill you want, whether in real life or online, it becomes ever more clear that a Bunny is more than just a desirable girl in a flattering outfit. Playboy has always stood for the very best, whether in food, fashion or music. Every man lucky enough to be a Playboy Club Keyholder knew that behind those doors was a world others only hoped to enter. Even today, the timeless glamour of the Playboy Club still sets the standards for sophisticated entertainment.
I hope you'll consider
The Bunny Years
your personal VIP invitation to sit back, enjoy a cocktail, and experience its irresistible allure for yourself.
I
NTRODUCTION
:
The Steinem Connection
C
HICAGO
: Three Men and a Bunny
N
EW
O
RLEANS
: Bunnies in the Vieux Carré
N
EW
Y
ORK
: The Bunny Bites the Big Apple
L
OS
A
NGELES
: Bunnies on the Sunset Strip
W
ILL THE
L
AST
B
UNNY
O
UT THE
D
OOR
, P
LEASE
T
URN
O
UT THE
L
IGHTS?
E
PILOGUE
:
Yes, Gloria, There is Life After Bunnydom
The Bunnies and the Clubs Multiply
THE STEINEM CONNECTION
“Bunny Marie,” 1963.
Y
ou'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 well-populated party launching a publisher's Fall List, which included Steinem's much-anticipated book,
The Revolution Within
. But as I threaded my way through the crowded room, Steinem had emerged from a group of booksellers right in front of me. When our eyes met, I thought I caught a vague 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 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.
She was quickly inundated by a throng of admirers who had come to see America's foremost feminist. I turned away, astonished by the feelings the encounter provoked in me. Part of me wanted to reach out, catch her arm and say, “Wait a minute! Did you really think that the rest of us would stay on to work as Bunnies all our lives?” On the other hand, why hadn't I just congratulated her on the book and told her I couldn't wait to read it?
I was surprised to see how anxious she was to distance herself from even the slightest memory of the women like myself she had written about in her now-fabled piece, “A Bunny's Tale,” for
Show
magazine in 1963 when she had secretly taken a job as a Playboy Bunny in order to do an exposé on the newly opened Club. Could it be a vestigial pang of guilt even now for deceiving her coworkers? Probably not. But I was just as surprised by my own reaction: As one of the Bunnies she had portrayed in the article, I still harbored after all these years a mild residue of resentment over what had seemed at the time a kind of betrayal.
Gloria Steinem and I had become Bunnies for very different reasons. Many of the girls, teenagers like myself, were aspiring actresses or models and college students. Some were single mothers. Most of us who stood in line and waited to fill out job applications wanted the job because of the convenient hours, the flexible schedules and the money, which was unheard-of at the time for women. The 1960s brought with them a dawn of change in Americaâeconomically, technologically, socially. It was the time of Camelot in the White House, of the optimism of youth, of a country and a culture emerging from a period when families concentrated primarily on just getting ahead, when hard work and education were the best means of forgetting the dark, stultifying cloud left in the wake of the Cold War and The Bomb. The country now boasted the Peace Corps, the Space Race, Hula Hoopsâand The Pill. But the social revolution that engulfed the 1960s had yet to trickle down to women. For the first time, daughters were graduating in almost equal numbers from college with sons. But what was waiting in the real world was in reality not terribly different from what
their mothers had faced. There was no clear-cut path from a four-year university to Wall Street or corporate America. Talk of the so-called glass ceiling was still a few years away. In 1962, there was just a ceiling, period.
Now, suddenly, there was this opportunity for many of us to earn more money than our fathers, in what was essentially an interim job, while exploring a range of options that would otherwise have been beyond our financial means. Here was an opportunity for a young woman to pay for a college education independently or stockpile funds to start a business, invest in real estate, travel the world or realize any number of other dreams. There were also those attracted by the showbizzy glamour of working in the daring new Club where men could experience firsthand the good life advertised and promulgated in the pages of Hugh Hefner's infamous men's magazine (which everyone, of course, claimed to read strictly for the articles and cartoons). Beautiful, scantily clad young women dressed up as Bunnies who personally served martinis and Manhattans in the dark, cushy confines of a sophisticated men's-only sanctuary was as close as many a man or woman would ever get to the fantasy world epitomized by the magazine. Talk about your New Frontier. Even President Kennedy was a
Playboy
fan.
But the odd Bunny out was undercover reporter Bunny Marie. That was the pseudonym Steinem, a 28-year-old fledgling journalist, used when she applied for her job as a Playboy Club Bunny at the just-opened and highly anticipated New York sister Club to the famous Chicago Club. Steinem knew a good story when she saw one. Other young female reporters had been unsuccessful in their attempts to get hired as Bunnies, but Steinem, attractive, leggy and exceedingly smart, succeeded. So “Marie Ochs” was fitted for a costume in January 1963, about six weeks after the New York Club opened. She began as a Door Bunny, greeting Key-holders in the entrance lobby of the seven-story Club. In quick succession, she graduated to Hatcheck Bunny and then to Table Bunny, serving cocktails and food.
None of us, her coworkers, ever singled “Bunny Marie” out as particularly unusual; there was a vast range of different types among the 150 or so women working as Bunnies at the time Gloria was hired. By law, only those women over the age of 21 could work at night, and among the older Bunnies there were many with college degrees and work experience that went beyond cocktail waitressing. Certainly no one I knew suspected that she was keeping a daily diary of the presumably hellish days and nights she worked at the Club with the intent of publishing these notes.
She struck me, personally, as someone I'd like to know better. We had met in Bunny training class and then worked together a few times. I was flattered when Bunny Marie sat down beside me at dinner one evening in the employees' lounge. She was older, more elegant and sophisticated. She told me she was a college graduate and had traveled in Europe. In fact, she was pretty much what I had wanted to be. When she asked me about myself, I eagerly told her that I'd come from Minnesota a few months earlier to study acting in New York and that I was a full-time scholarship student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. But Bunny Marie was gone before I ever had a chance to know her.