Bunny Birthday - Part 3 of 9

Television went equally gaga over the Bunnies. Everybody who was anybody turned up on TV in some version of a Bunny costume. Rosalind Russell did it; so did Shari Lewis, Bill ("My name Jose Jimenez") Dana, Mimi Hines, Marty Allen, Steve Rossi, Ruth Buzzi, Goldie Hawn, Steve Allen, Flip Wilson, Johnny Carson (on the occasion of his first anniversary with "The Tonight Show") and even Charlie Weaver (on "the Mike Douglas Show"). View the list of famous women who have worked as Bunnies and the celebrities who have worn (at least part of) the Bunny costume at our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Keyholder Johnny Carson and Manhattan cottontails in one of TV's first Bunny-spoof sketches, telecast in April 1963. It's a genre that remains popular to this day.

Steve Allen receiving televised instruction in the Bunny Dip from Playmate/Bunny Sheralee Conners of the New York hutch.


In later years, the ladies of "Saturday Night Live" -- Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman -- also wore Bunny duds on the air. So did Charlie's first famous Angel, Farrah Fawcett, who, in a 1971 made-for-TV feature, "The Feminist and the Fuzz," played a Bunny opposite David ("Good Morning America") Hartman.

All of that, however, was far in the future in 1962, when Hefner wrote in his informal illustrated journal: "The Playboy Club's cotton-tailed cuties have become the most famous females of show business since the glamorous Ziegfeld girls of the Twenties. The Bunnies have been written about, parodied, praised, analyzed, idolized, damned, kidded and copied around the world. In the United States, they have become a TV and club comic's cliché -- a sure-fire laugh producer; cartoons about our Bunnies abound in other magazines and newspapers."


Cartoonists throughout the world have enjoyed a 20-year romance with the Bunny as subject; a 1964 example appears above.


As if to confirm Hefner's observation, the ABC television network in 1963 cooked up a special on "The World's Girls," billed as "an hour-long survey of woman's place in the world today," and featured -- along with actress Simone Signoret and authors Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir -- a New York Playboy Bunny. Similarly, the Montreal Expo of 1967 included the Bunny in its exhibit on professions for females, along with those of nurse and schoolteacher.


Note the collarless, cuffless Bunny costume modeled by Cynthia Maddox during the infancy of the Chicago Club. Cynthia was the magazine's Assistant Cartoon Editor in the early Sixties.

Given all this enthusiasm, sometimes bordering on hyperbole, it's a wonder the Bunnies didn't begin to take themselves too seriously. Fortunately, the Bunny is all too human. Her feet can hurt, her orders get goofed; there can be spilled trays, garbled introductions ("Good evening, I'm your Bunny Lotila," chirruped a sweet young thing at Lake Geneva whom Playboy brass had fancied resembled Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet and christened with the Bunny name of Lolita). Our favorite story concerns the nearsighted Miami cottontail who, in her zeal to give a keyholder excellent service, whipped out her Playboy lighter and ignited the carrot stick on which he was munching.

And not all the Bunnies' press has been good. There have been those who figured Bunnies were all denizens of Hefner's own personal briar patch, over which he exerted some kind of droit du seigneur. A goggle-eyed writer identified only as "a special correspondent" for an Auckland, New Zealand, paper burbled breathlessly to his readers that Hefner "lives an indolent life of Oriental splendor. He nibbles grapes and cavorts and carouses with all the Bunny girls who frolic behind the wrought-iron gates of his four-story, 48-roomed mansion in Chicago."

Hoo, boy.

Yarns like that may have titillated Auckland readers, but they didn't make life any easier for the Bunnies. In the summer of 1964, a dozen of them from the Chicago Club decided to challenge the Portage, Indiana, Jaycees to a benefit baseball game. One of the girls had read a newspaper story about Tip Brock, an 18-year-old Portage youth paralyzed from the waist down by a mysterious illness, and the Bunnies -- who had already supplied diapers for infants at Cook County Hospital and uniforms for the Highland Park Little League, and were sponsoring 23 European orphans under the Foster Parents plan -- decided to help out. When syndicated radio commentator Paul Harvey heard of the game plan, he huffed over the nation's airwaves that Bunnies were unfit company for such an endeavor. Retorted "Gary Post-Tribune" columnist Oliver Starr Jr.: "It seems to me that a group of girls who want to give their time to help out a paraplegic boy can't be all bad (in fact, on close inspection, I can say they aren't half bad)."

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