Bunny Birthday - Part 4 of 9

To celebrate the Chicago Club's second birthday, a key-shaped cake for a Michigan Avenue cop, delivered by Bunny Pat Higgenbotham.

Harvey's quibbles notwithstanding, the game was held and some $2000 raised to equip the Brock home so that Tip could be released from the hospital.

Some of the anti-Bunny business has, over the years, been more troublesome. New York's Playboy Club opened its doors in 1962, but not without problems. The city's license commissioner at one point refused to grant the Club a cabaret license because he objected to its "scantily clad waitresses." His decision was overruled by New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur G. Klein, who declared in a ruling remarkably free of legalese: "It is not incumbent upon the petitioner to dress its female employees in middy blouses, gymnasium bloomers, turtleneck sweaters, fisherman's hip boots or ankle-length overcoats."

When petitioning to open Playboy of Boston in 1963, Club executives took a Bunny from New York along with them to show just what Bunnies would be wearing on Beantown's Park Square. Geraldine Doherty, 19, was a local girl and a graduate of Our Lady of Presentation High School, but that cut no ice with the Boston Licensing Board. When Bunny Geraldine opened her raincoat, board member Timothy Tobin turned his face to the wall for the remainder of the proceedings. The vote went against Playboy, prompting a cartoonist for "The Boston Herald" to draw a waitress garbed in fur from head to toe, complete with tail larger than she, captioned: "Rumor hath it a new key club will open here with waitresses costumed in the seemly manner of Boston Common squirrels."

Some three years later, Playboy of Boston finally opened its doors. Meanwhile, there had been anti-Bunny campaigns in Detroit and San Francisco. The latter city's police chief, Thomas Cahill, told the press that he was "concerned about a club with flimsily dressed girls operating behind closed doors. The police couldn't get easy access to check the action."

June 1963 Playmate Connie Mason, who was a Bunny in Miami and Chicago, and whose daughter Elise later became a Bunny in our New York Club.

Whereupon columnist Jim Elliott pointed out that police carrying proper identification would have no problem entering the Club: "so maybe Chief Cahill is not so worried about getting his officers in as he is about getting them back out again."

The best retort to all such criticism was voiced by Candy Humphries D'Amato, an ex-Bunny turned real-estate broker. Interviewed at a Bunny reunion some years later by Dick Roraback of the "Los Angeles Times," she said: "I think every woman's secret desire is to try on a Bunny suit, but they're just not liberated enough. Yes, liberated. It wasn't the Bunnies who were being exploited, you know, not with our incomes. I worked as a bank teller before I became a Bunny, and I'll tell you what exploitation is. Exploitation is working for $250 a month."

Even in the early Sixties, when the average working woman was lucky to take home half that amount, a Bunny often made $250 a week. Money has always been a major factor in Bunny recruitment. So have the job's flexible hours, which facilitate scheduling college classes -- many a Bunny has earned a degree by day through table-hopping at night -- modeling jobs, even child care. Some of those children, incidentally, have grown up to be Bunnies themselves. Playmate/Bunny Connie Mason's daughter Elise worked in the New York Club; Great Gorge Bunny Mother Sandra Schiffer, herself an ex-Bunny, has a daughter who works as a cottontail at the resort during vacations from college. London Bunny Jade Lawrence's daughter Tracey joined her in uniform at the Park Lane hutch this year, and at the Chicago Club, both Bunnies Cynthia Goodwin and Venice Kong are the daughters of former cottontails Helen Goodwin and Barbara Anderson.

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