The Bunny Years (33 page)

Bunny Mother Joan Howard teaches novice Bunny stylized service.

“There were a lot of misconceptions about Bunnies—one being the assumption that we all lived together in one big dorm on the top floor of each Club. Another that persists to this day is equating Bunnies with Playmates. I take great pains to explain that I wasn't a centerfold. My son remembers that when he was a toddler, he heard someone mention that I was a Bunny, and his image was that his mother actually turned into a little furry animal.

“But some of the wild stories were true. A good friend, a German Bunny who worked in the VIP Room, once called me at home to ask if my husband and I would like to come to a party that Victor Lownes was throwing in his hotel suite. She said that there would be some other nice couples there and that Victor would send his car for us. Well, we accepted, thinking it would be great to go to a swanky party hosted by one of the Playboy executives. We got all dressed up. My husband put on a suit and I wore a cocktail dress with a mink stole, and soon a limo arrived to take us to the hotel. We knocked on the door of the suite and waited a long time for anyone to answer. Finally Victor, looking very disheveled, opened the door and said, ‘Have a seat here and we'll be right with you.' It was obvious what was going on. We could hear people in the various bedrooms, and there was a stack of Polaroids on the coffee table, pictures of Bunnies I knew, without their clothes on. It was clear that we were expected to join in and switch partners. That kind of party life was always available if that's what you wanted. We didn't and we left.

“Like a lot of Bunnies, I was making more money at age 20 than my father made when he was raising a family. I had fun, and I learned a lot of valuable lessons as well. Years later when I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I realized that the city had only a souvenir art
market. I had lived in Greenwich Village during my years as a Bunny and made friends with the art crowd. So I decided to open the Durham Gallery to show the works of fine, contemporary artists.

“I also created a workshop called Creative Business and the Artist to give artists a better sense of how to operate in the crazy contemporary art world. Oddly enough, schools of business and management—not art departments—recruit me for lectures in which I point to my Playboy Club days as my own personal business school. So much depends upon having a strong sense of yourself and confidence in your ability to accomplish something. When I was setting up my own business, it helped to keep in mind the relationships I had with some of my customers who were executives of big corporations. I talked to them as equals, and they treated me with respect. If you feel intimidated, it will communicate itself; that in itself is an important lesson.

Linda Durham at her Contemporary Art Gallery in Galisteo, New Mexico.

“On my last day as a Bunny, I went into the wardrobe room to say good-bye to Betty, the seamstress, and told her I couldn't bear to turn in my costume. I managed to keep the whole outfit, including the ears, collar, cuffs, cuff links and bow tie. Around the time I turned 40 and was feeling lonely, I came across my old Bunny costume in a trunk where it had been for years. I thought, ‘I'm going to try it on, and if it doesn't fit I'm going to be really depressed.' But it did fit.

“I wouldn't want too many people to see me in it, but I'd like everyone to know that I can still get into it.”

H
ELEN
H
ITE

N
ovice to Bunny? People who hear that I went from life in a convent to being a Bunny in the Playboy Club ask me how I could have managed such a transition. Actually, it wasn't as traumatic as it sounds. In terms of discipline, the Bunny Mother functioned much like a Mother Superior.

“As a teenager in South Carolina, I had won eight beauty pageants in a row. But when my mother died, I became very involved in the church. After seeing the movie,
The Nun's Story
, I decided I should give up everything and devote myself to God. I lived in a convent for a year before realizing it was not the life for me. I was pretty much on my own by then because my father had also died. “When I saw the ad: ‘Girls! Be a Bunny!' I sent a letter with a few beauty-pageant photographs to Playboy. I got a letter back telling me I was hired, and in March 1964 I started at the New York Club.

“I remember sitting in front of the makeup mirror in the Bunny dressing room, carefully gluing on three pairs of false eyelashes, and laughing so much. Everything about being a Bunny was a hoot! Madeleine Tarr and I were invited to be mascots for the Philadelphia 76ers. Wearing our Playboy promotions outfit (white skirts, black sweaters and black satin ears), we sat on the bench with the players at every game throughout that basketball season.

“Madeleine and I were saving our money for a trip to Europe, but friends suggested we should become stewardesses and travel free.”

After two years as a Bunny, Helen quit Playboy to become a Pan Am flight attendant. “One difference from the Club was that in the sky I didn't have a room director I could go to and say, ‘Table 32—out!' At 35,000 feet, you can't do that to the obnoxious passenger in seat 32.”

During the three years she flew for Pan Am, Helen married and had her first baby. “I was then fired because, at the time, airline regulations wouldn't permit a woman to work as a flight attendant if she had children. By that time, I had become interested in natural childbirth and trained to be a midwife. I've now delivered more than 500 babies.”

“In 1974, I received a letter informing me that I had been wrongfully fired and was offered the opportunity to return to work as a flight attendant. My daughter Nimi was then a year old. I've now been flying with the airlines for more 30 years, first with Pan Am and now with United.

Helen Hite at home in her kitchen sewing the hats she's designed for Denver Broncos fans.

“I've been married and divorced twice and I have three children, my youngest daughter born when I was 40. I'm single again and haven't had a date in five years. I think I've gone back to being a nun!”

L
AUREN
H
UTTON

T
he girls who became Bunnies in the early ‘60s were pioneers. We were pre-feminist, prehippy era explorers and extraordinarily brave for the time. I don't think any of us at 18 or 19 felt we needed permission to do anything, yet we had grown up in an age when girls absolutely had to have permission for everything. Before there was any press attention given to the idea of a woman owning her own sexuality, we had already started figuring out for ourselves what real sexual freedom was about. Entering a milieu that was then misconstrued to be in the ‘B-Girl hooker' category—fearlessly—we were basically all learning together what was good and bad.