DETROIT — At the end of a good night working
Detroit’s old Playboy Club, the former Union Lake, Mich., schoolgirl
known as Bunny Jill would unzip her corseted costume and clouds of money
would fall from the satiny bosom.
“We used to put
all of our tips in the top of the costume and we’d unzip our costume
and there’d be money everywhere,” recalls Joy Percival, aka Bunny Jill.
“We’d all sit there and count our money and have a cup of coffee. It was
a wild kind of padding.”
Percival, who now lives
in North Carolina, was hired when she was 18. She worked at the Detroit
club from 1963 to 1971, eventually becoming a “Bunny Mother” who trained
others in bunny protocol, and earned enough money to buy her own
lakeside house in 1970. Her first car was a Corvette.
Nearly
five decades after their heyday, the atmosphere and allure of the
1960s-era hot spots are being resurrected in “The Playboy Club,” a show
set to debut this month on NBC. And the Playboy bunny — whether you
consider her the seductive clarion of the sexual liberation era or a
scorned symbol of women as sex objects — will get mainstream attention,
both good and bad.
“This NBC show seems to signal
that we’re reverting to a vision of women that works against all the
gains of the last half-century or so,” says Meenakshi Gigi Durham, the
author of the “The Lolita Effect” (Overlook Press, $24.95) and professor
of media and gender studies at the University of Iowa.
“The
show, and its celebration of the Playboy bunny, falls in line with
every other objectified, one-dimensional, ludicrously hypersexual
representation of women out there,” Durham says. “It certainly sends a
powerful message to young girls: that parading around in stupid costumes
to turn men on is a worthwhile occupation; that being viewed as a
subservient sex object is the route to success; that ‘hotness,’ as
defined by the media, matters more than anything.”
But the women who worked at Detroit’s two Playboy Clubs say they were empowered by their jobs, not exploited.
The Detroit Playboy Bunny of 1970 still calls it a highlight of her 62 years.
No amount of feminist reasoning or argument will convince Renee Burton that she was exploited or objectified.
She
was 19, just a year removed from graduating third in her class of 680
at Detroit’s Cody High, when she was hired at the Detroit Playboy Club
in 1968.
“It was fabulous. It was a great
experience for a young person. It was very glamorous. We were the stars.
We were the attractions,” says Burton, who now owns a cleaning service.
“It was like we were on stage. Everybody looked up to us. It was our 15
minutes of fame.”
The stage was the
restaurant/bar. The women performed in 3-inch heels and a corseted
costume, a ladylike tease, former bunnies say. There were strict rules
against fraternizing with the customers, although the uniform
accentuated every body curve and amplified the sexual tension. Bunnies
couldn’t divulge their last names and customers couldn’t touch them. “I
saw a girl give her number out, and she was fired immediately,” Burton
recalls.
Burton worked at the downtown club from
1968 to 1972 and she said she was treated “like royalty” — albeit one
who had to know how to mix more than 100 drinks, work for tips and serve
boozy men. Burton does not think she was a victim of sexism. But
age-ism, she says, was another story.
“They liked
(women) 18 to 22. It wasn’t a published thing. But I trained them. I
knew the hiring practices,” says Burton, who also worked for a time at a
Playboy Club in Jamaica. “I was 24 when the club was almost closing
down. And they were telling me I was getting old.”
The
NBC show, set in a Chicago Playboy Club, is already being decried by
feminist Gloria Steinem, who famously wrote a 1963 magazine article
about her undercover stint as a Playboy bunny. Groups such as Morality
in Media and the Parents’ Television Council also stepped in to say that
the show will further glorify Hugh Hefner’s creation of male sexual
fantasies.
Ingrid
Rigney donned the bunny ears to put her husband through the University
of Michigan- Dearborn where he was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in
electrical engineering. She shaved a couple years off her age, thinking
it would help her get the job. She was 26, but said she was 24. She said
she had just emigrated from Germany and was working as a dental
assistant.
“I was not able to meet the bills, so I
saw an ad in the paper,” says Rigney, who applied without telling her
husband. Unlike other bunnies who remember making big money, Rigney
remembers the many hours she had to put in to win large tips.
“It
was not an easy job if you wanted to make money,” she says. She took
two or three buses from Dearborn to get to the club. She’d work lunch
and dinner, from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., in the show room to up her take. She
remembers that diners could eat steak and salad for $1.50 and add
another buck-and-a-half for a drink — not a big base from which to glean
a tip.
But she says she enjoyed every minute. She didn’t feel like a sex object, more like a “glorified waitress.”
“I was never ashamed of telling people that I was a Playboy bunny,” she says. “Hefner did a great job of creating an image.”
Four years into the job, she was fired.
“I
was a Playboy bunny until I got too old. They found out I was almost 30
and terminated me,” says Rigney, 73. “When they hire 18- year- olds and
you’re almost 30, you do feel old.”
There
were some 30 Playboy Clubs around the U.S. from the 1960s through the
‘80s, with the clientele paying a membership fee for a symbolic bunny
key and entry. Now, only three clubs remain in the world. The Playboy
brand still includes the flagship magazine, pornographic movies and a
cable-TV reality show — “The Girls Next Door” — that features
octogenarian Hefner cavorting with live-in bleached blond girlfriends.
While
the new show will juice up the drama by featuring a bunny’s high heel
as a weapon used to deter a sexual predator, the real life of the
bunnies was a bit more structured.
The work of a
Playboy bunny was grueling. Bunnies got one week of vacation after one
year of employment. They got free copies of Playboy magazines —
available in the Bunny Mother’s office two weeks before general
availability. There were Bunny Finder Fees for girls who hired talent.
Bunnies
were not permitted to chew gum or eat while on duty, or drink alcoholic
beverages. They could partake of lemonade and soda pop, but not in the
view of guests.
They could earn extra cash by
earning merit points for daily good service, or selling the most Playboy
mugs to customers. They could earn demerit points — and possible
dismissal — for unpolished fingernails, improperly centered bunny ears
or an “unkept tail,” as misspelled in a 1960s-era “Bunny Manual.”
A
room in Mandy Callahan’s Livonia, Mich., home pays tribute to her years
as Bunny Mandy. There’s a photo of her, with Hefner, just a few years
out of high school. Her given name was Deborah, but she liked her bunny
moniker so much that she had her name legally changed to Amanda. Her b
unny tail is framed, and her bunny cuffs and collar are on display.
“It
was all in a box, and then when I went through a divorce, part of my
re-creation was pulling all of this out and celebrating it,” says
Callahan, who works as a Realtor and manages an investment sales office.
She remembers competing with hundreds of other young women for the job.
“I knew it was about being the girl next door,” she says. She wore a high-necked jumpsuit to her audition.
Callahan
worked at the downtown Detroit club, and then helped open the northwest
Detroit club, then left after she was married and three months
pregnant. She says she took the job, in part, because she hoped it would
be a stepping stone to an acting career in New York or Los Angeles.
“I
went to Playboy for the theater of it,” Callahan says. “It would just
feel like it was showtime. We walked into that room and we owned it.”
Those who criticize the job, and the bunnies, are missing the point of it all, Callahan says.
“It implies that we’re dumb and we were taken advantage of,” Callahan says. “No one was conscripted into that job.
“We
had power. Gloria Steinem was so wrong. We all had lots of fun. We
worked real hard — and we smiled and looked good doing it.”
———
©2011 the Detroit Free Press
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