The Bunny Years (5 page)

I walked into Betty's costume department. Tiny and fierce-looking, sitting hunched over her sewing machine, she gave me the once-over and then asked me how the hell she was supposed to tell what I looked like with my coat on. Her husky, warm voice made me laugh. She was tart and sassy with a shrewd eye, and she looked like nobody I'd ever seen before. But my fate was now in her hands, and I figured she would take care of me. In fact, Betty left the impression that she would always be on your side no matter what. I stripped down to bikini panties and was zippered into a discarded Bunny costume in my approximate size to see if I had “it.”

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OTTONTAIL

L
ook pretty.” “Wear lipstick!” “Be a lady!” “You're a star!” Words of wisdom pasted to the bathroom walls of the New York Playboy Club by the unofficial spiritual head of the Bunnies, Elizabeth Dozier Tate, the longtime seamstress and wardrobe mistress for the Club. Known to one and all as Betty, she was the cheerleader behind those paste-on smiles that Bunnies, sometimes dragging a world full of problems behind them, were forced to assume for the Keyholders.

“Be a star!” she'd exhort. “You know, honey, I was once a star myself.”

Indeed, she was. As “Chinkie” Grimes, a singer and show dancer, Betty knew and worked with all the big stars of her time: Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. She was born in Georgia, one of 12 children, and made her way to New York as a teenager. While working as a housekeeper and cook for actor Orson Welles and his family, Betty entered an amateur contest at Harlem's Apollo Theatre and sang “I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”

She won third prize and a job in the chorus. She started out as a singer and tap dancer. “My oriental cheekbones and eyes (my father had Japanese blood) attracted a lot of attention along with my dance, and I came to be known as ‘Chinkie.'” She was featured on Broadway, appeared in the movie Stormy Weather with Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and while married to Tiny Grimes, guitarist with Art Tatum for many years, she toured the country.

“All this time I was designing and making costumes for myself and others,” Betty recalls. In 1962, when the New York Club was opening, Betty's current husband, Robert Tate, was working for Playboy in key sales. “He heard they were having a hard time fitting the Bunny costumes, so I came in,” Betty says, “and ended up spending the next 26 years there.”

Rosemary Costello and Elizabeth Dozier Tate.

In fact, it lead to a guest spot on What's My Line? in 1964 (“I fit the Bunny costumes at the New York Playboy Club.”). But that was not what Betty's job ultimately meant to her: “I do much more than just make and fit Bunny costumes. The Bunnies are my girls, and I love them all. I mother them. I've taught them how to sit, how to walk and how to act like ladies.” In 1994, she was honored at the National Tap Dance Day salute sponsored by the New York State Black Film Archives.

She let me know that it was only for me that she would go to so much trouble to find a ready-made costume that would make me look like the right stuff. I slipped on a red number and looked at myself in the long mirror. I was amazed. Even in stocking feet and without the transforming collars and cuffs, I thought I could make the grade. It was nothing short of a miracle.

“You're looking good, sugar. You tell 'em I said so,” Betty growled.

I padded down to the Bunny Mother's office for an inspection. Claudia Burgess, a pretty blonde in her mid-20s and a former Bunny herself, told me to go ahead and get fitted. I would start work immediately as a Cigarette Bunny. I could take my Bunny training later.

Betty fits a Bunny's costume, 1962.

I leaned against the counter with a blonde girl named Cheryl while I waited for Lauren Hutton to be fitted in a blue costume. There were long steel poles hung with satin costumes in dry cleaning bags and stacks of new costume shells with muslin linings. As I stood there waiting, I watched the steady stream of girls hurrying in and out of the dressing room as Eva Shephard, Betty's cousin, handed out collars and cuffs and made sure the girls signed for the black mesh stockings. The $5 charge for hose would be deducted from their paychecks. The space was cramped, cluttered and intoxicating. Multicolored satin trims lay discarded on the floor. Bags of cottontails and satin ears rested in corners. High-pitched chatter, raucous laughter. It was “backstage.” I was nervous and very excited.

Betty determined what color costume you got, based on what was available in your size from the stacks of prefabs and her determination to keep a rainbow of colors fairly balanced. I was told all the night-shift Bunnies wanted black costumes, “but only Bunny China refuses to wear anything but black.” When I later met China Lee (who eventually married
political satirist Mort Sahl), I discovered that her entire wardrobe—on and off the job—consisted of black or white clothing.

A pink costume was selected for me. (I eventually was given three costumes: red, gold and pink.) The prefab corset was shiny and stiff with raw edges and no side seams. I tucked my breasts into the cups and held the top in place while Betty pinned the sides together. Then swiftly, with a pinch here and there, the costume started to take shape. Not necessarily my shape, but I wasn't going to complain. Betty identified a hipbone and then snipped and tucked her way to my crotch.

“If I left it any wider, baby, the fabric would cut into you,” she said.

“Yes, it would,” I thought, and who's complaining? Grommets would be stamped in later to string the corset laces. Now my tummy was flat, my legs were looking longer than I believed possible and, for the first time in my life, I had hips. As my mother delicately put it while fitting me for a skirt, I hadn't quite “filled out” yet. In high school, I had once worn Bermuda shorts under a straight skirt to give the appearance of a figure. In those days I was even willing to settle for looking lumpy as long as I didn't look like a stick. I was indeed a late bloomer; I was still growing and would add another inch to my height before I turned 21.

The streamlined Bunny costume was clearly an improvement. The black mesh hose and the high-heeled shoes made even mediocre legs look better. The tail and ears were just plain silly. But something about the collar and cuffs actually made me feel like I was wearing a shirt. Still, there was the top problem. But Betty was not ready to raise the white flag. She bunched together a handful of plastic dry cleaning bags and told me to stuff them under my breasts.

“But don't use those all the time, baby; it'll make you sweat and you'll lose what you got,” she added, hinting that I should look for more conventional help.

As it turned out, living up to the Kelly Collins ideal was a problem I shared with a lot of the girls, most of whom, it seemed, were content to stuff themselves with whatever came to hand, including gym socks and old Bunny tails.

While Betty finished my costume, I was sent back to the Bunny Mother for a hurried version of Bunny boot camp. As it turned out, I was to start immediately—with or without the dyed-to-match shoes. Miss Burgess was all business. She assigned me a locker and told me to leave nothing valuable in it. Girls pin their rings inside their costumes, I was told. Furthermore, she
instructed, we weren't allowed to wear any personal jewelry, not even the tiny gold posts for pierced earrings that I was wearing. Just a white linen collar with a bow tie and cuffs with Bunny cuff links.

“And remember, the Bunnies have to be kissing,” she warned. As I quickly learned, that meant that when you held your wrists together, the Bunny logos had to be facing each other—or you would be given demerits. There were also demerits for not keeping your Bunny tail white and fluffy. In fact, there were demerits for a wide variety of things. The Merit/Demerit System could have been a Parker Bros. board game. Demerits were what you got for absenteeism, tardiness, improper appearance, chewing gum or eating in front of customers. Accumulate 100 of those and you were out of a job. Merits canceled out demerits and could be earned by, among other things, working on your day off or doing unpaid promotional work for Playboy. At events where Bunnies were sent to promote Playboy, the girls wore remarkably chaste cheerleader-type outfits: black sweaters with a logo, white pleated skirts to the knee and black high-heeled shoes.

Miss Burgess informed me of the rules—and the dire consequences should they be broken—in a solemn, matter-of-fact tone. Of course, the ridiculous marine drill instructor façade was funny, even funnier delivered deadpan. But I was too afraid at the moment to laugh. I made a mental note to make sure my Bunnies would always be kissing. Miss Burgess then gave me a brown folder with a thick Bunny Manual to take home and study. I wouldn't take the Bunny training necessary to serve food and beverages for another week or more.

And so began the daily race from the Academy at 52nd Street and Broadway to the Club at 59th Street and Fifth. I flew down the stairs after class, jumped into a taxi, wriggled into the black stockings, glued on eyelashes, leapt out of the cab, ran up the stairs to the Bunny dressing room, grabbed my costume, changed clothes, hurled myself down to the gift shop to get my cigarette tray and began my parade through the Club by 1:30 p.m. As far as I was concerned, the Cigarette Bunny had the best job in the Club. Each pack of cigars and cigarettes was sold with a black-enamel lighter for $1.50. The lighter with the white Bunny logo and the cigar or cigarettes cost me 55 cents. I was allowed to keep the difference. Almost everyone bought cigarettes to get the lighter as a souvenir, and I was invariably asked to “keep the change” from $2 and, very often, from $5, $10 and $20 bills.

That first night after I returned home, my roommate, Sheila McGrath, sat with me at our kitchen table, smoothing out the crumpled dollar-bill
tips I'd stuffed into my costume. After one day on the job, I'd earned $45—more money than I made in two weeks of working at Bloomingdale's. Sheila, who eventually abandoned her theatrical aspirations for a 25-year career as executive administrator at
The New Yorker
, was amazed. That night, I peeled off my new and expensive false eyelashes and left them perched on the bathroom sink. Sheila awoke bright and early the next morning. Entering the bathroom, she mistook the eyelashes for cockroaches and slapped them down the drain. Clearly, the fast lane was going to take a little time getting used to.