Playboy Clubs, Bunnies Go From Risque to Passe

The clocks were tolling midnight, and an American Cinderella fantasy, the Playboy Bunny, was turning back into a real woman.

As the Los Angeles Playboy Club in Century City closed its doors Monday night, hours after the New York and flagship Chicago clubs had done the same, there was time for a last toast, perhaps a last leer, to the memory of the Bunny, that patented hourglass shape that helped to mold the sexual attitudes of a generation.

Inside the club, where balloons bobbed toward ceilings draped with pastel crepe paper, there had gathered alumna bunnies, a few celebrities such as Tony Curtis, loyal key holders, and Hugh M. Hefner, the man who began it all and who was there to preside over its demise.

“We really felt the time had come to put it behind us,” Hefner had told a reunion of bunnies. “ . . . Why be locked forever in that kind of time trap?”

A line of key holders stretched outside the building for one of the 50 cardholder spots inside. Ex-Marine Rich Harms of South Gate had been first in line since 4 p.m.

“It’s like losing a friend,” he said, leaning on a walker he has needed since surgery. Instead of his weekly visits, “I guess I’ll watch TV until I get over the shock.”

Inside, the bunnies met for one last time, took a few souvenir snapshots of their own, and even jokingly suggested a last-night rebellion.

“Hey, let’s all put on our gym shoes!” yelled one. “Yeah!” a couple yelled.

But all of them were braced for nostalgia.

“This is the final page in my scrapbook you’re writing,” said “hutch of 1961” veteran Martha Harwood, a Bunny for seven years and a wife for 20 years. The “Bunny Hunt” ad she saw in 1961 in New Orleans had demanded “good moral character,” and she considered taking along a letter from her priest. “We were risque, but now it’s passe. . . . People run around naked nowadays.”

25,000 Bunnies

Since the first Playboy Club opened in 1960, 25,000 women, “girls” in club parlance, had fastened on the three-hook bunny tail--as big as a plush white cantaloupe--and stepped into the cantilevered costume so engineered that it could practically stand alone. But the Bunny had become an endangered species over the years.

What was naughty in 1965, when the Los Angeles club first opened on the Sunset Strip, had become demurely dated; there are beachside restaurants where waitresses wear skimpier ensembles than bunnies.

“The Bunny was the ‘60s version of the Ziegfeld Girl,” ex-Bunny Hope Parker (hutch of 1964) said. And just as the Ziegfeld Girl was outmoded by the Flapper, the Bunny fantasy has been overtaken by the reality of the woman--and the man--of the ‘80s.

It is telling that Bunny Sonia Winter, 30, on maternity leave for her second child in her five Bunny years, calls it “the perfect job if you’re going to have children. I came to work at night, it got me out of the house, I got all this glamour. . . . It just had its day.”

Clubs Held Promise

When the Playboy Clubs began, in an age when television assigned married couples to twin beds, the clubs held the promise of a titillating evening on the town, of turning a man into a rakish bon vivant for the evening.

Now, in a nation glutted with X-rated cable movies and explicit sex magazines--the bunny symbol has become parodied, outmoded and, by comparison, even respectable in some quarters.

The bunny ears are as recognizable as Mickey Mouse’s, and just about as middle-of-the-road. The price of a club key, with its aura of racy sophistication, had risen only from $25 to an unexclusive $40 over the years.

There are Playboy franchise clubs still thriving, “where some of that magic of bunnydom still exists,” Hefner said Monday, in Japan and in such Midwest cities as Lansing, Omaha and Des Moines. But in the big cities there are more nighttime diversions, and in Los Angeles, the real avant-garde seek out private pleasures, and the real celebrities would frequent the Playboy Mansion, not the Playboy Club.

On Monday night, there was a late supper, a buffet, of course, tying no one down to just one entree--a touch of the Playboy philosophy.

And all around were what two decades of customers came to see: the bunnies, some working their last night, others recalling their glory days.

Whatever their age, there is a Scout-troop camaraderie among them, born of nights when their three-inch spike heels felt like six, of evading an occasional pinch or pat, of the constant vigilance of coiffed hair and perfect makeup, at the risk of demerits, at a dollar per. And the pinch of the skin-tight costume--a Bunny was adapted to fit “the shape”; the shape didn’t change to fit the woman--which outraged feminists said epitomized Playboy’s attitude toward all women.

“The shape of ‘80s women is different from ‘60s women--it was rounded; they had more flesh on their bones, more hip, more bosom,” ex-Bunny Parker said. “They taught us how to stuff, to make the cleavage. . . . That’s how you got that superstructure look.”

Mother-Daughter Pair

The bra cups were also where they stashed tips, and some Bunnies left the job with enough money for their own businesses or college tuition.

A mother-daughter pair of bunnies were among those saying farewell to the club Monday night: Venice Kong, a Bunny and September, 1985, Playmate, and her mother, Jamaican-born Barbara Walker, who often took little Venice to the club during the day.

“This is a start for a young girl. It’s like a college,” Walker said. “It teaches you growing, how to get along with people. I always tell my daughter, it’s the best college I’ve ever been to.”

Added Parker: “They used to say Bunnies were being exploited, but fresh out of college I earned the best money I could have, being paid for a professional job.”

Cherished Friendships

As the former bunnies reminisced, it was clear that they cherish their friendships--when they say “girls,” they say it with affection.

The club’s closing means that manager Joe Dorffeld will have to find a replacement for a job that was “the envy of every guy I know,” although “after a while you don’t notice--no, that’s not really true. It’s just not foremost in your mind,” he said, grinning.

It also means no more bathrooms coyly labeled “Playmates” and “Playboys,” no more dinners and shows in the cabaret dining room, no more game corner, with its old-fashioned pinball machine, no more gauzy-focused wall photos of Playmates. Across the way, Hefner’s own photo, his shirt undone a couple of buttons, hung above the cigarette machine--another American indulgence that has lost ground of late.

The Bunny Dip

It is also the end of the Bunny Dip, the drop-and-swivel method of serving drinks without spilling either alcohol or cleavage. It is also the last of the “bunny clutch,” a midriff hitch-and-hike employed on occasions when the stiffened uniform slips a bit, but the wearer doesn’t.

Now, club member Art Chatelaine said, he will spend his free evenings at the Sports Connection, where women and men both exercise in more revealing outfits than one finds at the Playboy Club. “I’ll be healthier,” he said, smiling.

The Granada Hills man, a youthful-looking 60--Hefner’s age--has belonged to the Playboy Club since 1968, and has every issue of Playboy magazine, back to the first.

“When (the club) was on Sunset, I probably owned the place,” stopping there several times a week, bringing in friends “tables at a time,” he said.

Chatelaine pulled something from his wallet. From behind his gold key-holder card, he slipped a small note. It had been folded into quarters, and the edges of the folds were sharp from wear.

It was, he said, a note from Hefner’s own former girlfriend, from the years when she worked in the Sunset club and he came in often, sometimes sitting at one of her tables.

Scrawled on it was, “Art, sorry I missed you--Barbi Benton.”

He smiled at it for a moment, folded it carefully and put it away.