The Bunny Years (18 page)

Barbara Grant DeNoux owns six clothing boutiques in Palm Desert, California.

J
UDY
V
ANDER
H
EYDEN
D
ESERIO

H
ugh Hefner and Victor Lownes used to come into The Cloisters, where I was working as a cocktail hostess, and tell me I ought to be a Bunny. I told them they were crazy. I was too skinny and the costume was too risqué. My roommate, Barbara Grant, kept urging me to ‘just come in and try on a costume.' One day I did, and the costume looked fine on me. It pushed everything in the right places.

“The girls in those costumes were what set Playboy apart. People came because they thought they would see the Playmates from the magazine—very often they would—and what they did see never disappointed them.

“Eyeglasses were forbidden, but I couldn't get used to contact lenses. I had a pair of glasses on my tray that I used only to check a member's key and take the drink orders. In 1962, an item appeared in a newspaper column: ‘Cute Bunny Judy, wearing tortoise-shell-frame glasses, looks very unique . . .' After that, I became the first Bunny officially allowed to wear eyeglasses.

“The vocabulary in the Bunny Room was tough, rude and ballsy. We cut loose in the dressing
room: full of ourselves, tired and letting off steam. When some girls unzipped their costumes, their backs were bloody from the stays. Some Bunnies tried to line the inside of the costume with tissue paper or napkins to keep the boning from pressing into their skin. The fishnet stockings that we wore in the early days bit into your feet and caused them to bleed. You'd go home feeling pretty tired and miserable, but with a lot of money in your pocket.

“One night, Lenny Bruce, who played at The Cloisters and was often a guest at the Playboy Mansion, showed up very late outside my apartment throwing pebbles at my window. He wanted me to make him breakfast. He was carrying a big bag of groceries—everything I needed to make breakfast—and a bottle of perfume for me.

Judy at Chicago's Trattoria Roma, which she co-owns with her daughter and son-in-law.

“None of us wanted to work on weekends. On Friday and Saturday nights we, too, wanted to be out having a good time, going to clubs like Chez Paree and The Cloisters. If you needed a replacement, you could always count on Sue Gin, a Bunny who worked one shift after another. She lived on Rush Street, very near the Club, and sometimes wore her costume home to take a nap between lunch and dinner. She always invested her money.

“Barbara and I still kid each other, saying that between us we should own about five or six brownstones each.

“After I married and left Playboy to have a baby, a friend persuaded me to work a few days a week at The Cloisters. Victor Lownes came in and asked, ‘What are you doing here? Aren't you coming back to Playboy?' They made it so easy for me, offering to let me choose shifts that would work around my husband's schedule. Frankly, I felt spoiled.

“Eventually I was fired because of Bunny Image. I looked too old. I wasn't told in so many words, but that was generally the reason you were let go. However, that wasn't the end of my career at Playboy. After I took training in cosmetology, Tony Roma hired me as a makeup consultant to the Bunnies, and I assisted the Bunny Mother with the ‘Bunny Hunts' for new recruits.”

S
UE
L
ING
G
IN

I
went to Chicago when I was 17 to attend DePaul University. I stayed three semesters, then ran out of money and figured it might be better just to work really hard and save some money. I'd started buying real estate when I was 17, living in Aurora, Illinois. (I still have the property.) When I began making money as a Bunny in 1960, I looked around and saw all these properties available—and they were really cheap. I bought my first property with Bunny earnings in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago. It was a 27-unit building, three stories. I had two other partners, and I think my total mortgage was $175 a month. Today the building is worth a million dollars. I still have that, too.

“I lived just off Rush Street and worked at the Club as many hours as I could. After the lunch shift, I would train Bunnies for a couple of hours in the afternoon and then work the night shift. It was like found money. As I recall, according to a national survey done at the time, Bunnies' earnings were in the top 2 percent to 5 percent of the female population in our age group. I used to get very large paychecks. In fact, Arnie Morton once said to me, ‘Your paycheck is larger than mine!'

“Adrienne Foote, one of the Bunny Mothers, became a friend, and a kind of mentor as well as a boss. The girls that worked there had a great deal in common—and we had a lot of fun together. I think that we were, as a group, typical of our age. I started a Bunny sorority, Pi Beta Sigma, and we did charity events. We raised money for the needy, visited the county jail and hospitals, supported causes—it was our community outreach effort. The Bunnies were very popular, so we raised a fair amount in donations.

“We decided to do a promotion with the Chicago Bears, but none of us knew how to play football. We managed to get Dave Condon, the No. 1 sports writer at the time, to serve as our coach. It wasn't easy for him—none of us weighed more than 110 pounds, and we all wore long fingernails and eyelashes—and the game is rough even if you play it nicely. Dave decided we should play the Bears pound for pound; three Bunnies against one 300-pound Bear.

Chicago Bunnies Marge, Judy and Dana, members of Bunny sorority Pi Beta Sigma, visit with two youngsters in the Cook County Hospital. Proceeds from their cookie sale bought thousands of diapers for the hospital's charity children.

“There was a social revolution going on throughout the nation in the early ‘60s, and the whole concept of Playboy was very timely. I don't necessarily think that that operation would work today, but when you look at where we came from in the ‘50s, it was an edgy, progressive concept for its time.