Ex-Playmate has fond memories of Playboy Club days
From 1960 to 1988, approximately 15,000 young women donned the ears; tight, skimpy, one-piece suits; tuxedo collars and logo cufflinks that identified them as Playboy bunnies. They worked at Playboy Clubs in cities from Miami to Tokyo, 23 clubs worldwide. Victims of changing tastes and the magazine's belt-tightening, the clubs shut down. The last to close was in Lansing, Mich.
In their heyday, Playboy Clubs projected an aura of sophisticated sexuality. They were accessible only to key holders, many of them businessmen who saw the value in entertaining clients (mostly male then) with drinks delivered by bunnies doing the famed backward-bending "bunny dip" and with shows far more hip than anything on TV or in most venues outside Las Vegas.
For most bunnies, however, the view from inside the clubs was less about glamour and more about hard work and making ends meet.
From 1965 to 1968, now-socialite Beverly Crown was Indiana housewife Bunny Beverly — 5 feet 8, 118 pounds and a modeling-school grad — at the Chicago club on East Walton Street.
"I started at 26," she said from her Jupiter Island home on Florida's West Coast. "I was an old hare."
Now 63, she vividly remembers the rigors the job — "basically a glorified waitress" — required.
"You had to know that Cutty was scotch and Meyers was rum and so forth so you could set up the appropriate glassware, a long-stem glass for a grasshopper, for instance. You put the correct fruit in — olives for martinis, cherries for manhattans, etc. Every once in a while, the bunny mother (the bunnies' teacher, disciplinarian, mentor and protector) would test you outside of work hours."
No dating key holders
Clubs also tested bunnies on the policy of not dating key holders. "They'd send in guys to ask you out, a set-up," she said. "If you so much as had coffee together, they'd put your picture up on the bulletin board and fine you."
While working, bunnies weren't allowed to sit, although they could lean on the back of a chair in the careful stance called "the bunny perch."
"When you weren't serving, all you could do was hold a tray and look happy and beautiful," Crown said.
Though all were beautiful, not all bunnies were happy. Crown knew some who completely bought into what she called Playboy's "fairy-tale world" that promised a good deal more than it delivered. Perhaps the most negative portrait of the clubs came from Gloria Steinem, who became a bunny to research a 1963 article on the objectification and mistreatment of the women there.
Most former bunnies, however, seem to remember the experience as positive. Making as much as $300 a night in tips, they paid their bills, financed college educations, learned lessons about life.
"The Playboy Club changed my life," Crown said. She recalled that, at the Sunday ladies brunches for the wives of preferred key holders, she would observe these wealthy women and wonder what they had that she didn't. "The answer was nothing," she said. "They just used it better."
Two lives, two worlds
Bunny Beverly lived two concurrent and wildly different lives. She was married to a schoolteacher in Indiana. They had three children. She drove 100 miles a day to and from a job that got her invited to glittering parties at Hugh Hefner's mansion, although she seldom saw the host. "That was," she said, "his reclusive phase."
In the cold months, she had two bunny costumes, one black and one red. In the summer, there was a turquoise one and an orange one.
"Before they'd let you wear the summer colors, you had to be tan," she said. "The bunnies who lived in the hutch (a dorm within the mansion) would lie naked on tanning beds. I would set up the ironing board outside at home and iron in a swimsuit."
At the club, she met Barry Crown of the wealthy Crown family. Both were married. Although the club punished girls who dated customers, that restriction didn't apply to No. 1 key holders, big spenders. She and Crown got together, eventually divorced their spouses, and have been married for 32 years. They have traveled extensively on adventurous treks, (including a climb on Mount Everest), and she has become a successful competitive bodybuilder.
"The club did well for me," she said. "The Palm Beach Post was just here to take my picture. I think it was for a story on jewelry."