The Bunny Years (38 page)

Ava Faulkner dancing on the piano in the Living Room of the New York Club, 1970.

The American geisha, wearing Bunny ears and a cottontail, smiled, served drinks and cast her winsome presence over every sort of occasion from business lunches to first dates and anniversaries. But more than a metaphor, a Bunny was the flesh-and-blood embodiment of a male fantasy fulfilled. Frequently, the Keyholder who brought his business associates to the Club for weekday lunches returned with his wife in the evening so she could meet “his Bunny.” A Bunny, with no last name or address, served as an amiable stand-in for any number of roles: a disarming young woman who listened, remembered you, reminded you of your college sweetheart, made you feel young again—or grown up—and made you want to come back another day in the hope that maybe, just maybe, she, in turn, secretly harbored lustful feelings for you. Yet Bunnies were skilled in putting wives, girlfriends and other women accompanying the Keyholder at ease. They quickly established a sympathetic, nonthreatening air of collusion with women guests, a kind of unspoken acknowledgment that they were co-conspirators in satisfying male fantasy needs.

But less obviously, Bunnies also embodied the fantasies of other young women—here was a fun job with good pay that required minimal training, but no career commitment. As with airline stewardesses of their day, the job was also perceived as having the caché of glamour and sex appeal. It was
cool to be a Bunny. Women visiting the Club and coming upon a Bunny invariably asked privately, “So, c'mon, what's it really like?” And, in some cases, “Do you think they'd hire me? How do I get a Bunny job?”

The Playboy Bunny as glorified waitress and unattainable, nonthreatening sex object had entered the pop lexicon. Bunnies were popping up everywhere, as familiar an icon as the Hula Hoop and the Corvette Stingray, and serving as almost accidental poster girl for the blastoff into the '60s Sexual Revolution. The Bunny-as-Girl-Next-Door made her way into the newspapers and onto local television programs, as Bunnies appeared at community, charity and sporting events. There was the Bunny softball team, which had started as a charity event against the local Chicago Jaycees to raise money for a handicapped high school youth. In Bunny Baseball, an antic version of the sport that would have confounded Abner Doubleday, the game's originator, “stealing a base” meant actually stealing a base—but always for a charitable cause.

The idea spread throughout all the Clubs and though the point was fun and philanthropy, the girls showed a competitive edge sharp enough to get the New York Club Bunnies into the prestigious Broadway Show League in Manhattan, which played every Thursday at noon in Central Park. In 1963, the New York Club's Dream Team, sporting black tights and orange sweatshirts with the Bunny logo, vaulted to supertar status in a showdown against the WNEW Good Guys that drew a crowd of 5,000 spectators. The Bunny 9, boasting a 9-0 record behind the pitching of China Lee, won the League Championship with a 7-6 victory. “We were very strong from carrying the heavy trays,” China recalls, “and everyone loved watching the Bunnies play ball.”

China Lee and Teddy Howard play the WNEW Good Guys, 1963.

“The game had to be stopped in the third inning because the crowds were so enormous,” recalled Teddy Howard, who played second base. “The mounted police tried to control the crowd, but they were afraid we were going to get hurt in the crush. In order to get us out of there, the cops lifted each one of us onto the back of a horse and rode us out of the park. We were literally saved by the cavalry.”

By 1965, Bunnies and various Bunny teams were regular fixtures in charity events around the country. Bunny basketball originated with a team of Chicago Bunnies playing a team of high school coaches from Gary, Indiana, to help pay the hospital and educational expenses of a young boy who had been shot while trying to prevent an armed robbery. There were Bunny touch football and broom-ball hockey teams, scooter races, snowball fights, horseshoe matches, bicycle relays and bowling competitions that raised money for, among others, the March of Dimes, Muscular Dystrophy Association and American Cancer Society. Bunnies volunteered at local hospitals and community events while wearing white skirts and black sweaters with the Playboy logo.

A chorus of Bunnies danced at the Carnegie Hall Celebrity Tribute to Sammy Davis Jr. for the Leukemia Foundation. “I'd taken dance classes, but I certainly wasn't a professional dancer—none of us was,” recalled Marcia Donen Roma, the Bunny who eventually married the New York Club's manager, Tony Roma. “The Bunnies just volunteered and then rehearsed like crazy.” Eva Nichols, a former teenage Freedom Fighter and refugee from the 1956 Hungarian uprising, remembers, “We opened the show with a song and dance number from
Hello, Dolly!
and everything went perfectly. The applause was thunderous!”

The charity events, aided by the show-business patina of the Clubs, dramatically elevated the image of the Playboy Bunnies; it also had the effect of forging strong bonds among the women themselves, who began to feel more protective of their role in the Clubs—and of their own welfare.

At the top of that list of concerns was the increasingly unacceptable “Saturday Night” massacres in which Bunnies would show up to work only to find that they had been fired without warning or redress.

EL
AINE
F
REEMAN

I
was 20 when I graduated from college. That made me only a few years older than the students I would be teaching at New York City's Junior High School 71. Although I had always been a good student myself, I was totally awful at teaching and entirely too young for the responsibilities. I had to find another line of work. In the teacher's cafeteria one day, I was discussing the job market with several friends when one of them said, ‘Well, you can always be a Playboy Bunny.'

China Lee.