The engaging warmth of the New Orleans Playboy Club's Living Room makes it aperfect place to relax with friends and associates. Playboy, March 1962

"There were people standing in line for an hour or more," agrees Bonnie Jo Halpin, a Miss Chicago beauty contest runner-up and model for Playboy’s Bunny recruitment ads, who also worked the door that night. "It was really cold, but you know, it was happening so fast and was so exciting that we were all working on adrenaline overload."

Also at the door that night was Kelly Collins, whose likeness appeared on the cover of Playboy’s Bunny Manual for a quarter of a century. "I think I was the one who came up with the Bunny Dip [a backwards bow that was not only graceful but kept pent-up bosoms from escaping the confines of the Bunny costume]," she told author Scott. Kelly, who dated Hefner’s brother Keith for several years, helped him in developing the detailed instructions that made up the Bunny Manual.

Images of two women who actually spent little time working at Clubs are indelibly fixed in America’s memories of the Playboy Bunny. Playboy receptionist Cynthia Maddox, who became Hefner’s girlfriend and the magazine’s Assistant Cartoon Editor, modeled a prototype Bunny costume, edited for TV with a feather-trimmed neckline, on the Playboy’s Penthouse television show. And June "The Bosom" Wilkinson, who appeared in Bunny garb on Playboy’s Penthouse balancing a pair of champagne glasses on her ample chest, worked only one night.