The Bunny Years: The Surprising Inside Story of the Playboy Clubs: The Women Who Worked as Bunnies, and Where They Are Now by Kathryn Leigh Scott

Author:Kathryn Leigh Scott [Scott, Kathryn Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2011-09-26T22:00:00+00:00

BARBARA BOSSON

I arrived in New York at 18, almost the second I graduated from high school in St. Petersburg, Florida. I studied acting with Herbert Berghoff and Milton Katselas while working in a succession of bread-and-butter jobs to save enough money to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) School of Drama full-time.

“I was good at shorthand and typing, thanks to a high school class I took in order to earn money for college. I got a job as an executive secretary, which paid $75 a week.

This job included, before any such practices were questioned, personal shopping for the boss, after-hours work, charming clients at lunch and whatever other chores needed to be done. I hated feeling like I was owned, so I started taking temporary office jobs.

“Then in 1962, one of my roommates was working as a secretary for a lawyer representing the Playboy corporation. She told me about the Bunny jobs. To me, that executive secretary job was far less honest than being a Bunny—and I earned a hell of a lot less money. I figured I had to wear high heels and look good as an executive secretary, so what was the difference? I went to one of the early huge cattle calls, although I had never thought of myself as glamorous or particularly pretty. I probably wouldn’t have gotten the job if the lawyer hadn’t put in a good word for me.

“At the time, my roommates and I were all poverty-stricken. At the end of the week, literally starving, we’d go out for dinner with guys we would never have dated if we weren’t so hungry. When I began work at the Playboy Club, I wasn’t used to the amount of money that we were making in tips—in cash. We were living in this crummy place on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village and when I came home from work, I would throw the tip money into a dresser drawer in my room. One day, one of my roommates came in to borrow something. She opened my drawer and gasped, ‘Oh, my God, where did this come from?’ The drawer was full of cash, hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

“The whole time I worked at the Playboy Club, I felt like a fish out of water. There was a track for those girls who you knew were going to be asked to pose for the centerfold, and then there were the shleppers like me—you know, just hop into the Bunny suit and go wait on tables. I was a 32D, so I was well enough endowed without padding. But a lot of girls weren’t so they would stuff plastic cleaning bags into their costumes and then wonder, after a busy night running around waiting on tables, what had happened to their breasts. One girl said to me, ‘What’s with this? My breasts are getting even smaller!’

“I never went to the parties or dated customers. But a couple of girls I worked with intimated there was more going on than I knew about.

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