Gloria Steinem

I undertook a reporting assignment armed with a large diary and this ad:

GIRLS:

Do Playboy Club Bunnies Really

Have Glamorous Jobs,

Meet Celebrities, And

Make Top Money?

Yes, it’s true! Attractive young girls can now earn $200-$300 a week at the fabulous New York Playboy Club, enjoy the glamorous and exciting aura of show business, and have the opportunity to travel to other Playboy Clubs throughout the world. Whether serving drinks, snapping pictures, or greeting guests at the door, the Playboy Club is the stage — the Bunnies are the stars.

THURSDAY, 24 JANUARY 1963

I’ve decided to call myself Marie Catherine Ochs. It is, may my ancestors forgive me, a family name. I have some claim to it, and I’m well versed in its European origins. Besides, it sounds much too square to be phony.

FRIDAY, 25TH

I’ve spent the entire afternoon making up a background for Marie. She shares my apartment, my phone and my measurements. Though younger than me by four years (I am beyond the Bunny age limit), Marie celebrates the same birthday and went to the same high school and college. But she wasn’t a slave to academics — not Marie. After one year she left me plodding along the path to a BA and boarded a tourist flight to Europe. She had no money, but short periods as a waitress in London, a hostess-dancer in Paris and a secretary in Geneva were enough to sustain her between beachcombing and other escapades. Last year, she came back to New York and worked briefly as a secretary. Three mutual friends have agreed to give her strong personal recommendations. To know her is to love her.

Tomorrow is the day. Marie makes her first trip out of this notebook and into the world. I’m off to buy her a leotard.

SATURDAY, 26TH

Today I put on the most theatrical clothes I could find, packed my leotard in a hatbox, and walked to the Playboy Club. It is impossible to miss. The discreet six-storey office building and art gallery that once stood there has been completely gutted and transformed into a shiny rectangle of plate glass. The orange-carpeted interior is clearly visible, with a modern floating stairway spiralling upwards at dead centre. The total effect is cheerful and startling.

I crossed over to the club where a middle-aged man in a private guard’s uniform grinned and beckoned: “Here Bunny, Bunny, Bunny!” He jerked his thumb towards the glass door on the left. “Interviews downstairs in the Playmate Bar.”

***********

The application form was short: address, phone, measurements, age and last three employers. I finished it and began to stall for time by looking at an accompanying brochure entitled BE A PLAYBOY CLUB BUNNY! Most of it was devoted to photographs: a group picture showing Bunnies “chosen from all over the United States” surrounding “Playboy Club President and Playboy Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner”; a close-up of a Bunny serving Tony Curtis, “a Playboy Club devotee [who] will soon star in Hugh M. Hefner’s film titled, appropriately enough, Playboy”; two Bunnies smiling with Hugh M. Hefner on “Playboy’s nationally syndicated television show”; Bunnies handing out copies of Playboy in a veterans’ hospital as “just one of the many worthwhile community projects in which Bunnies participate”; a blonde Bunny standing before a matronly woman, the “Bunny Mother,” who offered “friendly personal counselling”; and, on the last page, a bikini-clad girl crouching on a yacht flying a Bunny flag. “When you become a Bunny,” said the text, “your world will be fun-filled, pleasant, and always exciting.”

WEDNESDAY, 30TH

I arrived at the club promptly at 6:30, and business appeared to be booming. Customers were lined up in the snow to get in, and several passers-by were standing outside with their faces pressed to the glass. The elevator boy, a Valentino-handsome Puerto Rican, cheerfully jammed me in his car with two uniformed black porters, five middle-aged male customers, two costumed Bunnies and a stout matron in a mink coat. We stopped at the sixth floor. “Is this where I get out?” said the matron.

“Sure, darling,” drawled the elevator boy, “if you want to be a Bunny.” Laughter.

***********

By 7:00 I had watched three girls tease their hair into cotton-candy shapes and four more stuff their bosoms with Kleenex. By 7:15 I had talked to two other prospective Bunnies, one a dancer, the other a part-time model from Texas. At 7:30, I witnessed the major crisis of a Bunny who had sent her costume to the cleaners with her engagement ring pinned inside. At 7:40, Miss Shay came up to the office and said, “There’s no one left but Marie.” By 8:00, I was sure she was waiting for the manager of the club to come tell me that my real identity had been discovered. By 8:15, when I was finally called in, I was nervous beyond all proportion.

I waited while Sheralee looked over my application. “You don’t look twenty-four,” she said. Well, that’s that, I thought. “You look much younger.” I smiled in disbelief. She took several Polaroid pictures of me. “For the record,” she explained. I offered her the personal history I had so painstakingly fabricated and typed, but she gave it back with hardly a glance. “We don’t like our girls to have any background,” she said firmly. “We just want you to fit the Bunny image.” She directed me to the costume room.

I asked if I should put on my leotard.

“Don’t bother with that,” said Sheralee. “We just want to see that Bunny image.”

The wardrobe mistress told me to take off my clothes and began to search for an old Bunny costume in my size. A girl rushed in with her costume in her hand, calling for the wardrobe mistress as a wounded soldier might yell, “Medic!” “I’ve broken my zipper,” she wailed, “I sneezed!”

“That’s the third time this week,” said the wardrobe mistress sternly. “It’s a regular epidemic.” The girl apologised, found another costume, and left.

I asked if a sneeze could really break a costume.

“Sure,” she said. “Girls with colds usually have to be replaced.”

She gave me a bright blue satin costume. It was so tight that the zipper caught my skin as she fastened the back. She told me to inhale as she zipped again, this time without mishap, and stood back to look at me critically. The bottom was cut up so high that it left my hip bones exposed as well as a good five inches of un-tanned derriere. The boning in the waist would have made Scarlett O’Hara blanch, and the entire construction tended to push all available flesh up to the bosom. I was sure it would be perilous to bend over.

“Not too bad,” said the wardrobe mistress, and began to stuff an entire plastic dry-cleaning bag into the top of my costume. A blue satin band with matching Bunny ears attached was fitted around my head like an enlarged bicycle clip, and a grapefruit-sized hemisphere of white fluff was attached to hooks at the costume’s rear-most point. “Okay, baby,” she said, “put on your high heels and go show Sheralee.” I looked in the mirror. The Bunny image looked back.

“Oh, you look sweet,” said Sheralee. “Stand against the wall and smile pretty for the birdie.” She took several more Polaroid shots.

***********

Sheralee called me back into the office. “So you want to be a Bunny,” she said.

“Oh yes, very much,” I said.

“Well …” she paused significantly, “we want you to be!” I was startled. No more interviews? No investigation? “Come in tomorrow at three. We’ll fit your costume and have you sign everything.” I smiled and felt foolishly elated.

Down the stairs and up Fifth Avenue. Hippety-hop, I’m a Bunny!

THURSDAY, 31ST

I now have two Bunny costumes — one orange satin and one electric blue. The colour choice and the quality of satin are about the same as those in athletic supply catalogues. Costume bodies, pre-cut to body and bra-cup size, are fitted while you wait. I waited, standing on the cement floor in bare feet and bikini pants. The wardrobe mistress gave me a small bathroom rug to stand on. “Can’t have brand new Bunnies catching cold,” she said. I asked if she could follow the line of my bikini pants in fitting the bottom; the costume I had tried the day before was cut up higher than any I had seen in photographs. She chuckled. “Listen, baby, you think that was high, you should see some.” The whole costume was darted and seamed until it was two inches smaller than any of my measurements everywhere except the bust. “You got to have room in there to stuff,” she said. “Just about everybody stuffs. And you keep your tips in there. The ‘vault’ they call it.”

***********

I dressed and went to the Bunny Mother’s room. Sheralee was at the desk. With her long hair pinned back she looked about eighteen. She gave me a large, shocking pink form marked “Bunny Application” and a brown plastic briefcase with a miniature nude girl and the Playboy Club printed on it in orange. “This is your Bunny bible,” she said seriously, “and I want you to promise me you’ll study it all weekend.”

***********

Miss Shay stapled a set of Polaroid pictures to my employment form and gave me my schedule. “Tomorrow, you’ll have makeup guidance at Larry Mathews’, this weekend is Bunny-bible study, and Monday I’ve made an appointment for you to see our doctor for a physical exam.” She leaned forward confidentially. “A complete physical,” she said. “Monday afternoon is the Bunny Mother lecture and Bunny Father lecture. Tuesday you’ll have Bunny school, and Wednesday you’ll train on the floor.”