The Bunny Years (3 page)

In fact, Steinem's career at the Club was virtually nonexistent. After about a week, she took a leave of absence on a trumped-up story of illness in the family. Less than a week later, she was back to clean out her locker and resign formally. Because the Club was short of Bunnies, she was persuaded to work the Playmate Bar for two more nights. Her agreement wasn't entirely altruistic. “Might I learn something new?” she wrote hopefully in her diary. For the truth was, as appealing as the job was made to sound, the reality was that it was like any job: hard work, long hours. In her diary she griped, Where was the “glamour” the recruitment ads had promised? The celebrities? The top money?

But for Steinem, nothing had changed. Same old grind. Bumptious customers. Crass jokes. Sore feet. Dumb Bunnies. One wonders what she had expected. Erudite discussions in the dressing room? New York's intelligentsia convening in the Playmate Bar?

After working a total of 11 days, she concluded there was nothing more to learn. She went off to fine-hone her article, which appeared as a two-parter in the May and June 1963 issues of
Show
magazine published by Huntington Hartford—perhaps not coincidentally, the liveliest rival of another Hefner venture,
Show Business Illustrated
.

The reaction of Steinem's coworkers at the Club to her exaggerated “insider” exposé was more or less “Good for her.” After all, we couldn't quibble with her portrayal of the work as strenuous, the hours long and the costumes tight. But on a personal level, there was a feeling of betrayal, even hurt. How could Steinem, posing as a Bunny, talk to us, work among us, observe us and then profile us in such a condescending manner? A good many of her coworkers were every bit as ambitious as she was to get on with their careers. None of the women I knew anticipated collecting her first Social Security check upon mothballing her Bunny costume.

The characterization of Bunnies as naive, hapless victims who spent all their time complaining was not only clichéd and predictable, but also insultingly inaccurate. (In the course of time, Bunnies did, after all, negotiate benefits and effect a good many changes in working conditions.) I know that I, personally, felt ambivalent about the article. Working at the Club had been a job, both good and bad, like all jobs. Looking back on it, there was, if anything, the nostalgia of having been a part of an icon of the '60s. It had hardly been the kind of exploitative experience Steinem had managed to transform into a cornerstone of feminist folklore.

Our chance meeting at the publisher's party reminded me of the bad feelings I'd had at the time reading her article and the even more negative feelings I had in 1984 when “A Bunny's Tale” was made into a TV movie-of-the-week starring Kirstie Alley. Steinem was one of the producers of the movie, which was made a good
21 years
after she wrote the piece. Bunnies seemed to be stuck in some kind of Steinem time warp.

I began to wonder if maybe I had remembered only the good times at the Playboy Club, the quirky encounters with customers, the funny anecdotes? I rummaged through the cache of old diaries and scrapbooks I had stored away to see if memory had betrayed me. At the bottom of a hatbox, I discovered the long-forgotten pair of pink satin Bunny ears I had packed away. I slipped them over my head, to see if they still fit. I rifled through the weathered memorabilia and came across a snapshot of myself as a Bunny, taken in the service area of the Living Room soon after I had completed my Bunny training. I was wearing a beehive hairdo, of course.

Tucked in the back of a scrapbook was my Bunny Manual, still in the brown plastic folder, and stuck between its pages was the examination paper and my answers to the 61 questions. Sitting in my office 28 years later wearing my pink satin Bunny ears, I also found copies of
Show
with “A Bunny's Tale” by Steinem. I reread the article and yes, there I was, “the pretty brunette who never took off her coat.” Steinem's description of me during the first afternoon of our Bunny training together reminded me that underneath my yellow polo coat, I was wearing decidedly unglamorous Academy school clothes. I was a student, after all, working to earn money for room and board.

And I remembered again our dinner together in the employees' lounge that night when she had confided her fear that friends or acquaintances might come to the Club and recognize her.

“What would they think of me?” she asked, almost terrified.

Her anxiety baffled me. An actor friend had just visited the Club to see me, bringing with him one of my acting teachers at the Academy. As it turned out, the two men were, if anything, in awe of the “bacchanalian” surroundings. I realized with some amusement that they looked upon me as a sort of demi-celebrity. It was a heady new feeling for me, a shy and, I thought, gawky kid from the Midwest. Even more, I realized with hindsight, it was deliciously empowering. Over time, other Bunnies proudly introduced me to boyfriends, parents and acquaintances who made their way into the Club. It never struck any of us as something to be ashamed of. If anything, though we were perhaps only vaguely aware of it on a conscious level, we were part of the novelty and publicity of a revolutionary sexual change in post-World War II society. But far more important than any such highfalutin concepts was the almost giddy realization that we had scored an unparalleled opportunity to earn great sums of money for what amounted to very basic waitressing work.

I had friends at the Academy working part-time as salesgirls, temporary secretaries, file clerks and waitresses who made only a fifth of what I was making. As easy as it is to exploit youth and inexperience, I was aware even then that I was better protected by a rigidly enforced code of behavior in my exotic waitress job than were many of my friends in their more traditional jobs that earned them only a minimum wage.

The fact was, Gloria Steinem couldn't identify with the rest of us and didn't care to. At that point in her life, she would never have considered working as a waitress, let alone a waitress with Bunny ears, except as research for an article. Her viewpoint was that of a journalist—or more to the point, a privileged professional.

Ironically, in some sense, she may have been the least liberated of all of us. Among the many young women there looking to become something different from Donna Reed—or even Madame Curie—Gloria was the least open to change, to experiencing the crazy, giddy, exhilarating age of experimentation when a woman, quite possibly, could do anything she damn well pleased. We flouted our beehive hairdos, padded our bosoms, wore false eyelashes, and defied convention in our daring satin outfits.

I remember something secretly divine about shedding the polo coat and loafers in the dressing room and stepping into the sexy satin Bunny costume and high-heeled shoes. In fact, a good number of us remember fellow Bunny-turned-actress Lauren Hutton, bawdy and always fun, arriving for work stark naked under her trench coat and wisecracking to us in the
dressing room that it hardly made sense to put clothes on to come to the Club only to have to take them off again. It was the ultimate rush to leave the schoolgirl behind in the locker and strut around in a revealing costume for a few hours to the sounds of cool jazz and easy banter. For me, it was pure escape—as much from the altogether new pressures of adjusting to the big city as from my Midwestern background—and a brazen way of thumbing my nose at the establishment.

As for the men: Well, this
was
the early '60s. They wore suits, and most were businessmen who indulged in the then-proverbial three-martini lunch. We had our regular customers who confided in us, treated us like pals, teased us, yearned after us and talked with us. They were, on the whole, very pleasant. I blossomed from the attention. I gained confidence and authority. I learned how to handle myself in an adult world of easy intimacy and establish my own boundaries. I developed skills for deflecting unwanted attention, rather than becoming the victim of harassment. It was all part of the job. Part of the job that all the Bunnies accepted.

In a 1984
New York Times
profile, Steinem referred to her brief stint at the Club. “It was a turning point,” she said, “but not
the
turning point.” Yet, for many of the young women at the Club, their brief stints as Bunnies did represent a real turning point in their lives. We were very much in the vanguard of the sexual revolution that presaged the women's lib era.

After rereading Steinem's
Show
magazine piece, I did the unthinkable. I called home and asked my mother if she really had saved all those letters I had written to her. “Yes,” she said, “but you don't really want to read them, do you?” Memories had been stirred and I was unstoppable. “Send them,” I said.

One of my brothers called to warn me: “Brace yourself. It can make your skin crawl to think you once wrote that stuff.”

When I began to read the letters, I knew what he meant. The dreams. The idealism. The naive, unbridled curiosity . . . the convoluted syntax. How often I talked about “The World.” I arrived in New York shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy was assassinated a little over a year later. A boy I went to school with and who played Billy in the senior class production of
Carousel
was killed in Vietnam. I was devastated to read in the newspaper that a girl from my hometown, someone I'd hero-worshiped in high school, had died of a drug overdose in New York just as her acting career was taking off. It was all in those letters.

I was a virgin. And then I wasn't. That was
not
in those letters.

I realized that the dates of my letters corresponded to the dates in Gloria Steinem's diary. We indeed had observed things from two radically different perspectives. My outlook reflected the bright-eyed, carefree teenager that I was then. To the general public, Gloria's bleaker viewpoint had become the Gospel of the Way Things Were.

On numerous occasions over the years, I had come across other women I had once worked with at the Playboy Club. No one ever bolted in embarrassment. I remembered, for example, seeing the reflection of a tall, striking brunette in the mirror during a strenuous jazz class in a Hollywood dance studio several years ago. After class, she tapped me on the shoulder. “Hi, Bunny Kay. Remember me?” “Oh, God! Jorjana! What're you doing out here?” I asked, thrilled to see her again. “I'm a film editor.” Her hair was salt-and-pepper. She looked radiant. It had been 20 years since we'd worked at the New York Club together.

A year or so later my theatrical agent sent me to meet the producers of a television pilot. The casting director brought me into an office where several men and a woman were seated. I had barely settled into a chair facing them before the woman, who was vaguely familiar to me, grinned and said, “Hi, Bunny Kay.” The co-creator and executive producer of the television pilot was Judith Allison, a stunning, 6-foot-tall former Bunny I'd worked with in the early days of the New York Club. My surprised reaction at seeing Judith after so many years was completely eclipsed by the stir she had caused among the men in the room, who were astonished by her revelation.

The fascination with Bunnies, even 25 years later, surprised me. Even more so because of that unmistakable flicker of surprise whenever a coworker, a friend, a fellow member of the PTA would learn you had been a Playboy Bunny. There seemed to be that unspoken assumption even among the well-meaning that somehow Bunnies would just be Bunnies forever. So I began my own rabbit hunt, as it were, to find out just exactly what did happen to all those girls, poised on the dawn of an unexplored New Era, bedecked in satin ears and eager to explore.

What I found surprised even me. I began with the names and telephone numbers of two old friends from my Bunny years, who each passed along the names of other former Bunnies. Soon, I was calling complete strangers, but, happily, there was invariably an immediate bond, an assumption of shared sensibilities, when I introduced myself as a former Bunny.

Before I was finished, the list included such former Bunnies as actress,
supermodel Lauren Hutton, who also designs her own line of eyeglasses; Teddy Howard, now Elaine Trebek Kares, an author, talk-show hostess and owner of a multimillion-dollar advertising agency specializing in fragrances; Jill Graves, now Linda Durham, owner of the Durham Art Gallery in Galisteo, New Mexico; rock singer and actress Deborah Harry; TV and film actress Susan Sullivan (
Dharma & Greg, My Best Friend's Wedding
); actress-producer Barbara Bosson (
Hill Street Blues, Murder One
); entrepreneur Monica Schaller Evans; former actress, congressional candidate and attorney Sabrina Scharf Schiller; and the National Institutes of Health's distinguished immunologist Dr. Polly Matzinger. In addition, there is a CEO of a New York Stock Exchange company, an architect, an opera singer, several attorneys, a book publisher, a restaurateur, a television director, a stock broker, a racehorse breeder, a real-estate tycoon, three psychologists, an award-winning hat designer, a nurse, several schoolteachers and a vast number of moms. I came across casualties, too, among our mutual friends—alcohol and drug problems, disastrous marriages, career meltdowns, ill health. This book in no way chronicles anyone's entire life story, my own included, but instead focuses on the lives of the women interviewed in terms of their experiences as Bunnies. Not surprisingly (at least to me), their stories mirror the struggle and enterprise of women throughout this tumultuous era.

Each had her own unique tale to tell, a piece of that long-ago forgotten Magic Time of the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy was in the White House, the Moon was just a rocket shot away, and every woman had her dream that someday she could attain more than her mom, or even her dad, and still be sexy. Dumb Bunnies? Hardly. They were women with dreams, ideals and goals to achieve. Just like Gloria Steinem.