On the topmost floor of the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, Hugh Hefner keeps leather-bound scrapbooks on rows of glassed-in bookshelves that not only fill his attic-like archive room but also run up and down the narrow surrounding hallways. He has been filling these scrapbooks since he was in high school, and they now run to nearly 2,500 volumes, or roughly 2,489 more volumes than Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization. Hefner is currently compiling new ones—with the aid of an archivist, but he does much of the work himself—at the rate of up to 11 a month. Like many people’s scrapbooks, Hefner’s contain photos, newspaper and magazine clippings, and other two-dimensional memorabilia. Unlike many people’s, they also contain captions written in the third person, by Hefner, often in a grand but stilted tone that seems drawn from vintage newsreels.

Volume 115, from November of 1965, covers the launch of the San Francisco Playboy Club. On one page is a photo of Hefner on opening night—he was 39 years old—looking gaunt and tense with a furrowed brow, drumming his fingers on a table while sitting on a big banquette that looks as if it could hold eight or nine people. But Hefner is alone. Behind him, decorating the walls, are illuminated photos of half-naked centerfolds. The caption reads: “A contemplative moment for Hefner at the end of the evening—seated alone in Playmate bar—considering the phenomenon he has wrought.” Perhaps it was the burden of creation that left him looking so morose and spent. Maybe Zeus looked glum after pulling Athena from his head.

In truth, Hefner could claim to have wrought many phenomena: Playboy magazine, which he founded in 1953 and, at 85, still serves as editor in chief; Playmate calendars; rabbit-logo air fresheners for cars; even the cable porn that now provides the magazine’s parent company with its greatest source of revenue. (Though perhaps not enough: Playboy Enterprises, Inc., has lost money in five of the last six years. With the company’s stock price languishing for most of the past decade, Hefner, the controlling shareholder, recently took it private, paying $6.15 a share for outstanding stock that had been trading for around $4 last summer, when he made his first offer.) Despite all that, Hefner’s singular melding of worldview and lifestyle may have found its most spectacular expression in the Playboy Clubs. In a realm of enterprise where life spans are usually measured in a handful of years, if not months, the Playboy Clubs managed to endure for more than a quarter-century in America, from the early 1960s to the mid-80s, and a bit longer overseas—an impressive if not always graceful feat. (Studio 54, to cite another headline-making nightspot, hung on for only a dozen years.) The clubs’ central attractions were the famous Playboy Bunnies, the glorified waitresses who braved skimpy, pinching, corset-like costumes to serve and titillate patrons of Playboy Clubs throughout the world, and who, in their idealized form, rank among the most iconic of 20th-century American sex objects, eclipsed only by Marilyn Monroe. En masse, they helped shape the fantasies of several generations of adolescent and post-adolescent men, when they weren’t clearing tables or trying to remember the proper garnish for a Cuba Libre.

In much the same way that Walt Disney conceived of Disneyland as an extension of his films, Hefner designed the Playboy Clubs to embody the lifestyle portrayed in his magazine. An informational packet sent to members of the New York club during its 1960s heyday spelled out the fantasy in explicit terms: “Step into the Playroom”—one of the multi-leveled club’s different areas—“and the wonderful world of Playboy is yours! Against a background of brilliant, illuminated covers from Playboy, the joie de vivre depicted within the world-famous magazine’s pages comes to life.” And on some nights this was even true. The crowd that helped open the London Playboy Club, in 1966, was as glittering, attractive, and eclectic as a publicist could hope for: Julie Christie, Ursula Andress, Roman Polanski, Michelangelo Antonioni, Sidney Poitier, Laurence Harvey, Peter Sellers, David Frost, Peter Cook, Kenneth Tynan, Rudolf Nureyev, Woody Allen, Lee Radziwill. This may have been Playboy’s apotheosis of cool. But even on normal nights, celebrities were not immune to being seen in the clubs. Bunnies who worked in New York and London remember serving various Beatles. Tony Bennett was a regular in New York, as was Johnny Carson, who then became a “rabitué” of the Los Angeles club, as Playboy would style it, after The Tonight Show moved west in 1972. If club members in outposts such as Denver or Phoenix or St. Louis or Baltimore were less assured of rubbing elbows with pop stars and television hosts, they could always count on being served a drink by a pretty girl with long legs, bare shoulders, and a cantilevered bosom.

The clubs were as carefully planned, as routinized, as rigidly controlled as anything Disney ever built. Over the years Playboy opened a total of 33, including 4 in Japan and one in Manila (there were also a handful of Playboy resorts). They were incorporated as key clubs, meaning potential revelers had to buy memberships, proof of which was an individually numbered key that served as both entrée and in some cases club credit card. For Bunnies, behavior was codified by a series of Bunny Manuals that read like Federal Trade Commission rulings and dictated how Bunnies could smoke (one small puff at a time, the cigarette then resting in the ashtray, not the hand), how they could sit (on the back of a chair or resting a hip on a banister; this was known as the Bunny Perch), how they could stand (the Bunny Stance: one foot behind the other, hips squared), and how they could address members (“Smile and introduce yourself with the standard Bunny Introduction: ‘Good evening, I am your Bunny _________ (name). May I see the Playboy key, please?’ … Never express your request for a keyholder’s order in a crude and trite phrase such as ‘What’ll you have?’”)

Even in 1960, when the first club opened in Chicago during the last year of Eisenhower’s presidency and three years before the publication of The Feminine Mystique, there must have been something faintly ridiculous (or creepy and fetishistic) about the sight of a grown woman, even a barely legal one, dressed in a Bunny outfit with satin ears and a cottontail the size of a two-year-old’s head planted on her bottom like a fluffy target. She was an un-ironic version of a Pop Art dolly, a Tom Wesselmann nude dressed in a Roy Lichtenstein outfit and then sold to the hoi polloi. Where you located her on the silly-to-sexy spectrum was a matter of taste, but the reality of the Bunny was always something less than her come-on, and the literature of Playboy Club criticism, such as it is, is a literature of debunkery. As Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, wrote following the opening of that city’s club, in 1965: “When I left, my libido still registering zero, I noticed a carful of cops parked across the street, keeping a watchful eye on the club. They’d have been better off casing someplace really racy, like the YMCA.”

The most famous Playboy Club exposé is Gloria Steinem’s two-part undercover report from 1963, “A Bunny’s Tale,” published in Show magazine and made into a TV movie two decades later with Kirstie Alley. Steinem had spent a couple of weeks working as “Bunny Marie”—Bunnies on duty had no last names—and portrayed the life as a low-paying slog through long nights of heavy drink trays, sore feet, too-tight costumes, and boorish customers. The writing was funny, but the piece and its revelations were no more shocking, really, than were the Bunnies themselves, though Steinem probably deflated a few fantasies by publishing this “unofficial list of Bunny Bosom Stuffers” (the costumes came in only two, mostly prescriptive bust sizes, 34D and 36D):

 1) Kleenex

 2) plastic dry cleaner’s bags

 3) absorbent cotton

 4) cut-up Bunny tails

 5) foam rubber

 6) lamb’s wool

 7) Kotex halves

 8) silk scarves

 9) gym socks

Nearly every former Bunny seems to have a story about some unlucky colleague taking a tumble and sending a roll of toilet paper or half a box of Kleenex flying across the room. And yet, like young visitors to Disneyland who don’t seem to mind that there are teenagers inside Tigger and Winnie the Pooh, Playboy’s keyholders were for the most part willing to suspend disbelief. As Hefner himself told me during an interview at the Playboy Mansion (it must be noted that he smells like baby oil): “My concern with the clubs was, since we were dealing with dreams and fantasies, how could you re-create that in a club atmosphere? And whatever we did, would the keyholders be disappointed? What we discovered was exactly the opposite. Because it was Playboy, they brought the fantasy with them. We also put together a very good club.”

Back in 1953, Hefner was a restless Chicago striver who had kicked around in the magazine industry for a few years, including a low-level stint at Esquire, and then launched his own men’s magazine with a $10,000 investment. (Hefner contributed initial funds by hocking his furniture.) For content, he drew on his ideas about the good life and spiced it up with old calendar nudes of Marilyn Monroe. His first printing was 70,000 copies. By 1958, despite vocal opposition from churchmen and anti-smut campaigners, his circulation was nearing one million and the magazine was making $4.2 million a year. “Hefner’s genius is that he has linked sex with upward mobility,” Paul Gebhard, executive director of Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research, told Time for a subsequent cover story. But more than that, Hefner had made the magazine, as he himself said, “a projection of the wonderful world I dig.” He and his lifestyle—he would soon buy his first Playboy Mansion and was already the country’s most notorious and dedicated bachelor—embodied the meaning of his magazine to an extent that would be unmatched until the advent of Martha Stewart Living and O. “It’s difficult to bring into perspective and fully appreciate,” he wrote in another scrapbook caption, “but we are truly becoming, in our own time, a legend. And what does it feel like, being a living legend? Well, it feels just great!” (An excellent account of Hefner’s life and empire, which I’ve drawn on here, is Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy,by Russell Miller.)

Victor Lownes III was Playboy’s promotion manager, having joined the company in 1955. He was also Hefner’s close friend, sharing his tastes for nightlife, hobnobbing with celebrities, and obsessive-compulsive swordsmanship. (Both men had first wives on their résumés.) From a moneyed background, whereas Hefner’s was solidly middle-class, Lownes also served as a de facto style guru to the young editor, who, before meeting the smartly suited Lownes, had affected a more collegiate look. For his part, Lownes was awed by Hef’s “mind-blowing belief in his personal destiny, and in his magazine.”

The spark that led to the Playboy Clubs was a 1959 article the magazine published about Chicago nightlife that highlighted the Gaslight Club, a Gay 90s–themed key club—Hefner was a member—that featured “buxom waitresses, lightly clad, and lots of singing round the piano.”

VICTOR LOWNES: The article drew over 3,000 responses from people who wanted to know how to become members of the Gaslight Club, and I went to Hef and pointed out, “We’ve got an audience that is very interested in this kind of operation. We should have our own club.”

HUGH HEFNER: We didn’t know what it was going to turn out to be. The notion originally was just to open a club where we could hang out. There wasn’t really a notion that it would become something beyond Chicago at the time. There was even a point when I went to a casual acquaintance who ran a place called the Black Orchid. They had a junior room, and I actually suggested that they might turn the theme of the junior room into a Playboy Club, and the director at the time said, “Well, how much would you give me for that notion?” Of course, my notion was exactly the opposite.

I think part of the inspiration also was—*Casablanca’*s my favorite film. Everybody wanted to be Rick. In other words, to have your own bar. There was a romantic connection to it, I think, particularly in those days.

It was a business too—one Hefner and Lownes knew nothing about. They turned to the restaurateur Arnold Morton, who would later found the Morton’s steakhouse chain.

NOEL STEIN (longtime operations director for the Playboy Clubs): Arnold had a place called the Walton Walk, and that’s where Hef and Vic used to go every night looking for dates—girls, you know. They needed a food-and-beverage man, that’s how they got Arnold.

VICTOR LOWNES: We had a meeting and we agreed that we would each take a share of the business, Hef, Arnie, and me. And then Hefner as an afterthought says, “And the company.” So there were four of us. And Hefner was the company.

The trio incorporated Playboy Clubs International as a separate entity from HMH Publishing, which owned the magazine. Ads touted the pending opening of the Playboy Club and offered memberships. The initial fee was $25; more than 50,000 keys were sold in the first year.

Obviously a Playboy Club would have waitresses, and obviously they would be attractive. The big question was: What, and how little, would they wear?

VICTOR LOWNES: Arnie Morton and I thought that the Playboy Rabbit [the magazine’s logo], which was simply a male figure as far as Hef was concerned, was a good concept for a costume. Hef had been thinking in terms of a shortie nightgown or something. And we couldn’t quite see how that would work.

Lownes’s girlfriend at the time, a Latvian refugee named Ilse Taurins, sat in on some of the formative meetings. She also thought the nightie idea none too “serviceable,” given the physical demands of waitressing. She offered to have her mother, a seamstress, put together a prototype bunny costume, which proved to be a bathing suit or corset—memories differ—with tail attached and a headband with ears. Taurins wore the costume at a meeting with Hefner, Lownes, and Morton. Le Neiman, the painter, Playboy contributor, and friend of Hefner’s, was also present. Lownes, for one, thought the costume was a letdown: not surprisingly, it looked like a bathing suit with ears. He expected Hefner to chuck the idea, but Hef saw possibilities.

Le NEIMAN: Hef had the girl standing there [in the costume] and the seamstress. She had pins in her mouth, and Hef would say, “Bring up the bust a little bit,” and she’d stuff something in there. Then he’d say, “Pull it up here a little bit more. I want to have it way up on the side.”

By all accounts it was Hefner’s insistence on pulling the costume up over Taurins’s hips that made all the difference: the higher cut lengthened a Bunny’s leg line, quite theatrically, and turned the costume’s crotch into an exaggerated vee, as dramatic as a Cadillac’s tail fin. An admiring Lownes later wrote, “Once again, Hef had seen in a matter of seconds what others might never have seen.” (Hef would refine the costume further shortly after the Chicago club opened, adding the white cuffs, collar, and black bow tie that lent a formal, oddly masculine air while also making their wearers look, paradoxically, even more naked.)

Soon, the following ad ran in the Chicago Tribune:

great opportunity for the 30 most beautiful girls in chicagoland

Playboy is opening a new key club … catering to Chicago’s most prominent executives and sportsmen. To serve our exclusive clientele and decorate the club, we are looking for thirty single girls between 18 and 23. Experience is not necessary. Just be beautiful, charming and refined.

The hope was to find women who would match the sexy but wholesome, girl-next-door appeal of the magazine’s centerfolds—in contrast to the more jaded allure of the so-called B-girls who flourished in the seedier, more nakedly transactional precincts of Chicago nightlife. As a Bunny-recruiting leaflet later explained: “A Bunny is not a broad or a ‘hippy.’ She may be sexy, but it’s a fresh healthy sex—not cheap or lewd.” There was also the bottom-line requirement, as Lownes says, of being able to “fit into the costume.”

More than 400 young women showed up for an audition at Playboy’s offices on a January Saturday. They all brought bathing suits to model in and, in Lownes’s words, “Most of them were awful.”

VICTOR LOWNES: It was a difficult situation. You had to find pretty girls who were not used to just having everything handed to them and didn’t mind working because it is hard work. Pretty girls are not used to working. It was a problem.

Somehow, the company managed to find 30 who would do. (According to one source, Playboy hired the entire chorus line of another Chicago club featuring scantily clad women, the Chez Paree, which soon went out of business.) These 30 were charter members of a sisterhood that would eventually grow to more than 25,000, overseen by a smaller army of “Bunny Mothers,” who managed the young women and saw to their intimate needs.

MARILYN COLE LOWNES (former London Bunny; 1973 Playmate of the Year; the current Mrs. Victor Lownes): Women today say to me, “Oh, I could never have been a Bunny, because I don’t have large enough breasts,” or “I’m not tall enough.” But it was never based on that. It was based on a pretty smile, and that was the charm and mystery, because they were all different types of girls, different colors, different weights, different sizes. Surely that was a big part of the charm because men are attracted to all different sorts of women.

TRISH MURPHY (former London Bunny; later assistant Bunny “Mum”): There’s a common misconception: “Oh, you worked at the Playboy Club. I bet all the girls there were bitches.” And they weren’t. There was great camaraderie between us. I think it’s because we were all supposedly pretty. The one pretty girl in an office, you get: “Oh, she thinks she’s so posh.” But because we were all supposed to be pretty, we were all ordinary.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT (former New York Bunny; author of The Bunny Years, the definitive book on the subject): These were college girls and girls trying to launch careers and work their way through school. It could be your daughter, it could be your sister. I think that made the Bunny threatening [to some members of the public], because there was a joy, there was an innocence to it. These girls loved what they were doing and that came across. They weren’t bad girls. They were having a walk on the wild side in a very safe environment.

MARILYN COLE LOWNES: You had to be a bit of a show-off to put on ears and a tail. It was the perfect place for a girl who was maybe not good-looking enough to be a fashion model, did not have aspirations to act But, you know, underlying it all, I think any girl who got into that costume had certain hopes and dreams that they might not even have admitted to at the time, of being discovered in some way. Why would you put on a costume? Liberating—it was liberating.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: You could re-invent yourself completely You went from the schoolgirl to this glam person, and you could be anything. You could put on a French accent and call yourself Fifi It was a way of discovering yourself and playing around—a great experience when you’re 18, 19 years old and exploring your sexuality. Am I pretty enough? Am I sexy enough? And here’s a whole room full of people letting you know you are.

HELENA ANTONACCIO (former New York Bunny; Miss June 1969): Your feet would hurt. The costume would pinch, especially if it was “that time of the month.” But it was a lot of fun. The kind of person I am, I loved being looked at by men.

MICHELE DAWN (former Los Angeles Bunny): I didn’t have a huge ego. I had medium to low self-esteem. Working at the club gave me the self-confidence to venture into new and different things. It made me feel really good about myself, [though ultimately] I preferred resolving problems using my head more than my looks. I got tired of people looking at my chest when I was having a conversation.

PAT LACEY (former Los Angeles Bunny; later Bunny Mother): I was a young black girl coming from South Central L.A. So the difference between a New York steak and a filet mignon, or what chicken Kiev was, I didn’t know. What were they talking about? The six weeks of training, all the brand names, what [mixer] goes with what. I’d never heard anyone have a gin-and-tonic with lime. [Where I grew up] it was just having some gin with your barbecue, that kind of thing. So the club was very much an eye-opening experience for me.

It was certainly hard work. And I realized I had to walk a little faster, talk a little faster, work a little harder to be able to be recognized because, quote, “the image” was the blonde-blue-eyed whatever, the girl with the big bazooms. It was a little easier for them. But yes, I loved it.

Bunnies were only the most prominent design element. The décor of the Chicago club would serve as a prototype for those that followed.

Le NEIMAN: All that Hef wanted was, he wanted orange rugs. Orange was his color. He wore an orange sweater all the time. He just loved orange. And he had to have a chandelier. I got involved with Muhammad Ali when he became champion. He got his first house, got a chandelier right away. I always pick on these guys: you make it, you got to have a chandelier.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: [The décor] was very masculine and there was teak, chrome, lots of orange and avocado green, that sort of Danish-modern look that was very big at the time, that kind of living-roomy feeling.

PHYLLIS DILLER (comedienne; occasional Playboy Club-goer; later played Playboy resorts): It was the first time I ever saw rugs used as wallpaper. I’m sure Hugh Hefner came up with that idea.

HUGH HEFNER: It was the combination of a club concept and an apartment. We had done in the magazine some very popular [design] features, the first of which was called the Playboy Penthouse. A bachelor pad was the whole concept of it. The club was an extension of that.

The Chicago club was built on multiple levels, like a stacked theme park, the hope being that a keyholder and his date would while away an entire evening—drinks, dinner, and a show—under Playboy’s wing. The first floor featured the Playmate Bar, with illuminated centerfolds and “a stereo high fidelity system to top all hi-fi systems” playing music “especially selected by Playboy’s editors.” The Living Room, with its piano bar and buffet, took up the second floor. The third and fourth floors had showrooms: the Library and the Penthouse.

The Chicago club opened on February 29, 1960—leap day!—to long lines despite bitter cold. Hefner and Lownes finally rolled in around midnight to savor their success. (With Hefner now preferring to party at his new mansion, and Lownes being something of a snob and not wanting to rub shoulders with conventioneers and middle managers, neither man would spend much time in the Chicago or any other Playboy club.) Within a year, the club was said to be doing a higher volume in food and drink sales than any other restaurant or nightspot in town. Franchises in Miami and New Orleans were quickly brokered. After the $4 million New York club opened in December 1962, to equally long lines in almost as bitter cold, Hefner’s scrapbook noted modestly:

the skeptics came to scoff and left singing the praises of the most singularly successful night club operation of our time.

Not surprisingly, the clubs’ success attracted the interest of outside investors.

HUGH HEFNER: One night—and by that time we already had two or three clubs open—I was at a party [in Chicago] on Rush Street. A couple of guys were there that I recognized as Mob guys. One of them was Marshall Caifano, whose cover name was John Marshall. [Caifano was then the Chicago Mob’s enforcer in Las Vegas.] They wanted to know whether or not they could invest in Playboy Clubs International. I got embarrassed and tried to avoid the conversation. I said, “I don’t like to talk about business.” … He pressed me further, and he even brought over a guy, got a guy out of bed, one of his money people, whose name I think was English, and brought him over. He was really getting in my face, jabbing me with his finger, and I just tried to back away politely. But he kept touching me and made an appointment to see me the next afternoon.

I sat down with my guys the next day and said, “What the fuck am I going to say to Marshall?” He came in. I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. I said, “John, I don’t know what your business is.” And he got a little embarrassed and flustered. He said, “Oh, gambling.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got enemies and you do, too. And I really don’t think that it’s a good idea to have our enemies and your enemies combined against us.”

He accepted that and went away, and I heard the following day that that night in the club he collared one of my guys, who was our old-time P.R. man, and said, “What did you say to Hefner about me?” But that was the end of it.

A big part of the club’s success was due to the fact that Morton had instituted an unusual pricing system: virtually everything—food, drinks, a pack of cigarettes (coupled with a Playboy Club lighter)—sold for $1.50.

NOEL STEIN: The food at the Playboy Clubs was a great value. In one room, there was a buffet. It had filet mignon on a skewer, tenderloin tips, fried chicken, barbecued ribs, rice. It had a relish tray. You could eat as much as you wanted for a buck and a half. Another room would have six-and-a-half-ounce filet mignon with Duchess potatoes, which was out of a pastry bag—a buck and a half.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: They made their money on the drinks. A buck-fifty was nothing for a filet mignon dinner. A buck-fifty was a lot for a drink.

NOEL STEIN: How much would each drink cost you? Eleven cents? Twelve cents?

Not only that: selling cigarettes for $1.50, even coupled with a cheap lighter, yielded a profit of almost 70 cents.

NOEL STEIN: Then there was the Camera Bunny. She’d go around taking pictures. She’d say, “Only a nickel.” But if someone only gave five cents they would lose face. The Bunny would say, “It’s only five cents, but I’m kidding, you know. It’s whatever you want to give me.” The guy would leave 10 bucks, sometimes a hundred bucks. He figures he’s going to date her. That was Victor’s idea. Victor, I tell you, he never came to the club once or to the office without an idea. Every day. If he came with 800 ideas a year, 796 might have sucked, but those 4 that hit were terrific.

The Bunnies also did well for themselves financially.

HELENA ANTONACCIO: The tips were wonderful. There were a lot of Mafia guys. They tipped very well. My mother once said, “You make more money than your father does with his paycheck.”

MARILYN MILLER (former Chicago Bunny; later New York and Los Angeles): The regular Bunnies made close to $1,000 a week [in 1961]. We made so much in cash, Hef finally called me in and said, “You’re not cashing your paychecks.” And I said, “No, I don’t need them.” And he said, “Well, please do, because you’re throwing off my accountant.” That’s how much we used to make.

TRISH MURPHY: The feminists used to say to us, “You’re selling out. You’re being exploited.” But we never felt that. We felt that we were the first women we knew that bought their own [apartments] as single women. To me, it was emancipation. It was empowering.

BARBARA COPESTAKE (former London Bunny): I bought a little cottage in the country when I was 23. Without the Club, I never would have been able to do that.

When it came to tips, the tease of availability clearly worked to the Bunnies’—and the clubs’—advantage.

PAT LACEY: Putting a girl in a costume and first name only, no last names, no jewelry—because jewelry tells stories—all of these things left a mystique. A guy could look at a girl and he could think whatever he wanted to think.

HELENA ANTONACCIO: They would tell you, “Never say you have a boyfriend, because men want to fantasize they can get you.”

And yet the clubs had strict rules in this regard: That Bunnies could not date customers was a central tenet of the business. Nor, according to section 520.2.7 of the Bunny Manual, could there be “mingling, fraternizing, socializing, any physical contact, dancing or any other form of mingling by any female employee with any patron or guest,” under penalty of dismissal. (Exceptions were made, in writing, for non-touch dances such as the Twist and the Watusi.) The reason, in large part, was to protect the company from being accused of running a veiled prostitution racket. Avoiding even a hint of scandal was key for a high-profile business that depended on state approval for its liquor and cabaret licenses. A leaflet distributed to Bunnies explained the policy this way:

You—the stars—are what bring the people into the Club. You are what gives the Club its glamour and, therefore, we want to make sure that it stays legitimate glamour. We stress that Bunnies should not get too familiar with customers for just that reason. Men are very excited about being in the company of Elizabeth Taylor, but they know they can’t paw or proposition her. The moment that they felt they could become familiar with her, she would not have the aura of glamour that now surrounds her. The same must be true of our Bunnies.

From the Bunnies’ point of view, there were obvious benefits.

MARILYN COLE LOWNES: Imagine you go to work at the Playboy Club. Now, odds are you’re not really going to be attracted to many of the members, in general. So isn’t it just perfect that you’re not allowed to go out with them? Isn’t it perfect that you can appear as appealing and nice and charming and sexy as you feel like being, and be protected? It’s perfect.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: That was part of the fun, the college guys coming in on Saturday night from Yale or wherever and asking you out. But you weren’t allowed—unless you thought he was cute, maybe you’d make some other arrangements. But the ball was in your court. You could say, “I’m sorry, sir. Bunnies are not allowed to date the customer.” “Sorry sir, you’re not allowed to touch the Bunny.” So it created a situation where the women were in power and where we were very well protected—certainly more so than some girl going out on a Kelly Girl job as a temp secretary.

So assiduously did the clubs guard the Bunnies’ honor that a detective agency, Willmark Service System, was hired to send undercover agents to test their resolve. Hefner included the following instructions in a memo to Willmark:

Use your most attractive and personable male representatives to proposition the Bunnies and even offer as high as $200 “right now” for a promise of meeting you outside the Club later. Ask a barman or any other male employee if any of the girls are available, on a cash basis for a “friendly evening.”

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: You could always tell the Willmark guys because they never ordered more than one drink. They wore thick-soled shoes, usually in a brown suit. If you were new and young, there was always some other Bunny who had spotted them: “Careful, it’s a Willmark guy.” They did do tricks. You know those twofer tickets for shows, two for the price of one? The Willmark guy would pass the ticket out and say, “Why don’t you and your girlfriend meet me at the theater?” “Oh, a Broadway show!” Well, if you showed up—and this did happen once—you got fired.

MICHELE DAWN: I remember one time a man offered to write me a check for a thousand dollars if I gave him my last name. You know what? My job was more important than that. Of course, I was a coward back then—I probably would have taken it today!

There was, however, one important exception to the non-fraternization rule. As Lownes put it: “We certainly didn’t want them to feel that they couldn’t go out with us!” Meaning himself, Hefner, other Playboy executives, and various V.I.P.’s the organization wanted to impress. A system was set up whereby “C1” keyholders were granted Bunny dating privileges.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: First of all, you’re talking about 18- and 19-year-old girls. And then there were these men in their early 30s [managers]. I’m sure there were people who took advantage … Victor. Yes, Victor, of course. All of them. They set the clubs up for themselves Obviously, boys will be boys, and good heavens, for them this was a candy store.

MARCIA DONEN ROMA (former New York Bunny; later Los Angeles and San Francisco): They did it in a nice way. They didn’t take advantage of anyone who didn’t want to be taken advantage of.

EMMA PATTERSON (former Chicago Bunny; later New York and London): There were so many women that were willing to go out with them there was a line.

Bonnie Lomann (former Los Angeles Bunny): Every night there was a party upstairs in the Penthouse. Hef’s girlfriend would be there, Barbi Benton. She’d go home, and then the next day we’d come to work and find out which Bunny stayed late with Hef. They didn’t want to admit it, but they did. The bartenders would tell us.

Brenda Cassen (former London Bunny): I found Victor very nice. He used to warn me about this and that one, the punters.

ELAINE MURRAY (former London Bunny): But he wouldn’t warn you about himself! He wouldn’t say, “Don’t come to one of my parties!”

Keyholders’ attitudes toward the Bunnies veered from gentlemanly to less so. On the one hand, as the manager of the London Playboy Club confessed to Time in 1967, “The basic conventioneer doesn’t want to go to bed. He just wants to gawk.” On the other hand, as a spurned keyholder once hissed to Gloria Steinem, “What do you think I come here for, roast beef?”

RICHARD ROSENZWEIG (longtime Playboy executive, currently executive vice president): Keyholders would pick at the Bunnies’ tails and so on. That probably wouldn’t be the worst violation. But they’d be warned, and if they got obnoxious or had a little bit too much to drink or something and they got too rambunctious, they were out of there. And if it was a really bad scene, their key would be confiscated, which would be like capital punishment.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: The first thing you’d say is “I’m sorry, Mr. Brown, you’re not allowed to touch the Bunny.” And that would do it. But if it got really out of line you’d say, “Sir, I’m going to have to call over the room director, and if I do so, you’re going to lose your key.” The room director was effectively the bouncer. They were your line of defense if something did get out of hand.

MARILYN MILLER: One time I was working in one of the showrooms and a man pulled my tail when I went by with a tray full of drinks. “Please don’t touch the Bunnies, sir.” This happened about four times and at this point I emptied my tray and I hit him over the head with it. Victor Lownes came, and he took that guy out of there fast.

PAT LACEY: The type of gentlemen who purchased keys were professional businessmen. They had intelligence and control of themselves. There could be a table where someone would say something that was off-color a little bit, and you could see the other keyholders looking at him, like, You better straighten your act up.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: A lot of [keyholders] had their own particular Bunny. During the weekday you’d serve them lunch and they loved it because you’d say, “Mr. Brown, the usual?” It would be a business lunch and he felt important. Then on Saturday night, of course, he’d bring in his wife from Connecticut or New Jersey or whatever to meet his Bunny. Then you’d give a handful of swizzle sticks to the wife to take home to the kids. Because you never, ever wanted to look like you were in competition with the wife. There was always a kind of collusion there: make a wife feel important. It was a flirtatious kind of thing: how we are treating the men in our life. You know, I’m his Bunny, you’re his wife You never wanted to get into competition with the wife, because it would affect your tip. That’s mercenary. But it was also an understanding that, on their evening out, you had to be sensitive to the fact that you’re standing there in a provocative costume and she’s all dressed up in a cocktail dress. She’s going home with the guy.

MICHELE DAWN: I think there was a lot of insecurity on the women’s parts. “Oh, honey, do you think she’s really prettier than I am?” That sort of thing.

Among the performers who played various Playboy Club showrooms—at one point there was a Playboy Club circuit—were Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Bette Midler, and Peter Allen. Their Playboy appearances would mostly come during the pre-fame portions of their careers, because wages were low on the Playboy circuit. But, as Phyllis Diller observed of those coming up in the circuit, “It was a good jumping-off point for a lot of people.” Lownes was initially in charge of booking the entertainers.

NOEL STEIN: Victor, without seeing an act sometimes, would book them. He would go to Variety and look at the reviews and if it said “socko,” he’d book them at $300 a week. If it was “wowsy” or something, $500 a week.

VICTOR LOWNES: We had three acts for three shows a night, four on Friday and Saturday. We wouldn’t let a singer sing more than two songs. She could sing one more if she got big applause. And then we had comics who had to do 10 minutes, no more. Tight rules, so the show moved fast One of the first acts we had was Aretha Franklin, playing piano and singing. For $250 a week. This was her first professional engagement.

Actually it was her second—she says she had first played at another nightclub on a bill with Buddy Hackett—but she was indeed a youthful performer when she made her Chicago Playboy Club debut.

ARETHA FRANKLIN: I was 17 or 18. I was just out of church, and the manager at rehearsal was saying get some makeup on that girl. I had a chaperone, so my dad was not concerned about it being the Playboy Club. I just came through the stage door right up to my stage and then right back to my dressing room. I don’t know what went on in those other rooms.

VICTOR LOWNES: I signed Barbra Streisand before anyone knew who she was. But she never played the club. [Between signing and her performance date] she became Miss Marmelstein in some musical comedy [I Can Get It for You Wholesale], and she soared to the top immediately, and A.G.V.A.—the American Guild of Variety Artists—had a thing in its contract where you pay to play. You have to either play or pay, which means that [if you don’t play], you pay the venue whatever it was they were going to pay you But we waived that for her. We said, “No, you don’t need to. Forget about it.”

The Chicago club broke an important racial barrier when it booked Dick Gregory in 1961.

DICK GREGORY (comedian, activist): Never before, until Hefner brought me in, had a black comedian been committed to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk. So when Hefner brought me in, that broke the whole barrier. The most comical thing about it was that right down the street from Playboy was the Chez Paree, owned by the Mob. Here was a humble dude, Hefner, who took a chance on bringing a black person in when the big bad Mob boys, the baddest dudes on the planet, wouldn’t take that chance.

Like club executives, entertainers were effectively exempt from the rules about dating Bunnies.

NOEL STEIN: One guy, he worked there two weeks and 13 [out of 14 girls] had a dose. So what happened to the 14th girl? He says, “I liked her. I dated her twice.”

As a business, Playboy Clubs International grew throughout the 1960s. In 1965, a total of 13 clubs grossed $19.7 million. The following year, 15 clubs grossed $24.9 million. The big new addition was the London outpost, which was opened by Lownes, who had returned to the company to run its British operations after a brief estrangement. (He’d been feuding with Hefner’s brother, Keith, who was in charge of Bunny training and recruitment and whose obit will no doubt note that he invented the Bunny Dip.) The London club, on Park Lane, was seven stories high and trumped its American counterparts by featuring gambling, with Bunny croupiers, though British gaming authorities eventually insisted they wear bibs of a sort so as not to unfairly entice or distract the clientele, which in the 70s came increasingly from the Middle East.

EMMA PATTERSON: What was different about the London club was they really loved blondes, because they had all the Arabs coming in, and they were the ones who spent all the money, because they were the big gamblers, and they loved blondes. Victor couldn’t believe that brunettes [including Patterson] were transferred from the States. He said to me, “You’re dark. How could you be transferred?” Because the blondes were the ones who got all the Arabs coming through the door. You had to be a blonde.

Indeed, by today’s legal standards, Playboy’s employment rules were, to put it gently, antiquated.

PAT LACEY: You had to stay within five pounds of your hiring weight. [If you went over] you would be asked to lose whatever the amount was—and it would be documented. Everything was. But you were always given time to correct the situation.

BRENDA CASSEN: [Wearing the uniform] what you saw was what you got. If you put on a pound it showed.

HELENA ANTONACCIO: If you didn’t wear the right color lipstick, you’d get demerits. I was a blonde then, but I turned my hair darker, and they didn’t like that. They said, “We hired you as a blonde.”

MARILYN COLE LOWNES: In our day, you could be dismissed for being too fat, too thin, too old.

Or, as a Bunny Mother once told one of her charges—in this case a 28-year-old—“When you start looking wilted, you’re through as far as Hef is concerned.”

KEITH HEFNER: There wasn’t a specific age requirement. It’s just at a certain point, they no longer fit the Bunny Image. We told them that going in, that it’s a glamour job, like a model or an ingénue of the theater. It’s going to last for a certain amount of time, but at some point everybody is going to be no longer the Bunny Image. We tried to do it nicely.

LISA AROMI (former New York Bunny): There was kind of a discreet way it was done. If they felt like you didn’t have the look they wanted anymore, or something was amiss about your personality, the schedule would come out and you’d see on the schedule that you no longer worked there.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: Saturday night was the night it was posted because they needed you Saturday night. They knew you would be there. And if you weren’t on the schedule [for the upcoming week], there would be tears, so much crying in the dressing room. But management knew they had Sunday and Monday [to re-staff].

British gambling revenue became more and more important, because by the mid-70s it was propping up the clubs and hotel division of Playboy Enterprises. (HMH Publishing and Playboy Clubs International had merged by 1971, when Hefner took his businesses public.) The American clubs, which by 1975 had begun losing money, were suffering from a number of problems: inner-city locations that had grown blighted, the rise of feminism, competition from more explicit entertainments.

HUGH HEFNER: The first club opened in February of 1960. But the 1960s, the early 1960s, were really still very much like the 1950s. The sexual revolution really did not arrive full-blown until the middle 60s. And then, of course, we were dealing in some places—typically San Francisco—with topless clubs et cetera.

PAT LACEY: I don’t want to sound sexually gross or whatever, but when I started for Playboy, the photos in the magazine were usually only topless. Then here comes Penthouse and Hustler. In our magazine we weren’t showing—excuse me—the pink, you know? But Hustler and Penthouse were. Then there was topless dancing, and now full-nudity dancing. And so now, a girl in a Bunny costume doesn’t look like she’s showing as much as you could see down the street. The girl next door with lots of sex appeal and whatever had to take a backseat to what else was happening in the world.

NOEL STEIN: The first time I saw a problem is when we opened in San Francisco in ’65. When the club opened, it wasn’t as busy [as other clubs]. And what’s happening up on Broadway [three blocks away] is there was a place called Big Al’s. The owner was a guy looked like Al Capone, he had a scar on his face and wore a fedora. He said to me, “Noel, come on in”—we’re open a week—“I have something starting tonight.” I said, “What have you got?” He said, “I’ve got a man and woman performing sexual intercourse onstage.” And then you got a topless shoeshine right across the street. Normal shoeshine in 1965 was just a quarter. She was charging five bucks.

Rather than retrench, Playboy began opening clubs in places where the Bunny might have still passed for somewhat risqué: Buffalo; Omaha; Lansing, Michigan; Columbus, Ohio.

HUGH HEFNER: I think if I’d been smarter I would have recognized that [we were diluting the clubs’ glamour]. I think that in some ways we became the victims of our own success.

VICTOR LOWNES: We were too successful.

PAT LACEY: Another thing, too, someone had the big idea: let’s lower the membership fee. The young professional attorney who brought his clients, now all of a sudden, is sitting next to Joe Blow and whoever comes out one night a week—nothing wrong with that, or that person. But in [the professional’s] mind, it wasn’t the caliber that he wanted anymore.

KATHRYN LEIGH SCOTT: I’ll tell you a story that a Chicago Bunny told me. She saw these guys on a garbage truck one morning and as she passed them, one of the guys yelled out, “Bunny Quinn!” She turned around, wondering how this guy knew she was a Bunny, and he said, “I saw you at the club Saturday night.” It suddenly dawned on her: of course, anybody can be a keyholder. Nothing wrong with that, but it was an indication of how things had changed from the early 60s. And then with all the kinds of [non-discrimination] legislation, the day was coming when you couldn’t fire a girl because she no longer fit the Bunny Image. But a 40-year-old woman in a Bunny costume—it’s not meant to be.

BILL FARLEY (former Playboy publicist): I wonder if the entertainment model hadn’t changed a little because—taking Studio 54 as an example—people had moved on to loud dance clubs, a lot of coke was going around, and that kind of stuff wasn’t happening at the Playboy Clubs. Dancing was part of what you could do there, but they weren’t dance clubs primarily.

What had been designed to appeal to a New Frontiersman made less sense in the post-Watergate era. Hefner says he was never so desperate that he considered having Bunnies go topless. The company did at one point order its executives to do all their entertaining in Playboy Clubs, but as one employee said: “The attitude was that any Playboy executive who spent time in a Playboy Club not in the line of duty was too dumb to be a Playboy executive.” A 1975 “Bunny Lib” publicity stunt arranged by Lownes, which saw Bunnies demonstrating for the right to date customers, generated only a brief uptick in business. But despite fears of keyholder lawsuits, clubs in Kansas City, Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, San Francisco, and Montreal were soon shuttered.

By 1980, nearly every Playboy division—the company had gotten into music, film, book publishing, limousines, a modeling agency—was losing money aside from the magazine (though it was suffering from the same kind of competition the clubs were) and the English casinos (Playboy had bought four more aside from its flagship London club). But the company endured major setbacks in the early 80s when, after a series of mostly self-inflicted mistakes, it lost its British gambling licenses and failed to win a gambling license for a hotel-casino that it had already built, along with a partner, in Atlantic City.

CHRISTIE HEFNER (Hef’s daughter; former C.E.O. of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.): I took over as president of Playboy in 1982. And the company was in that classic position of having over-diversified. So obviously part of what we were trying to do was figure out what was the right mix of businesses to go back to—sort of what, if you go to business school, they call rationalizing the lines of business. I call this dumping the losers.

One of the businesses she proposed shutting down was the clubs, which lost $3 million in 1984. But Hef resisted.

CHRISTIE HEFNER: My father’s argument was that we have half a million people who are paying cardholders, we haven’t tried to update the clubs for years—how do we know we can’t make it work if we don’t sort of give it the old college try? And that was an impossible argument to refute. So we agreed that we would do a new club.

The original New York club, on East 59th Street just off Fifth Avenue, had been shuttered in 1982, but plans were set in motion to open a new and supposedly improved club on less tony Lexington Avenue.

HUGH HEFNER: The writing was really on the wall for me when I had a stroke in ’85 [at the age of 59]. While I was recovering, they were planning the relaunch of the New York club. It was very badly handled What happened is, it was turned over to a guy, Rich Melman [who had started the Ed Debevic’s restaurant chain and founded a company called Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises]. He was a friend of Christie’s—I was off the scene and she picked him. And they were having so many mixed feelings [about the very concept of a Playboy Club] that they wanted to call the club something else. They were lost.

Not only was the new club “rebranded” as the Empire Club, and not only had the old Playboy standbys filet mignon and prime roast beef given way to sushi and frozen Snickers bars, but the decision was made to add male servers to the Bunny mix in an effort to attract more female customers. The so-called Rabbits wore an array of costumes that included sleeveless tuxedo shirts, some form of wrestling unitard, and—most inexplicably of all—the sort of yachting cap that at that time was most closely associated with Daryl Dragon of Captain & Tennille. The Rabbits did not wear ears or tails.

The Empire Club was not a success. Christie Hefner maintains that the redesign’s problems had less to do with “the product per se” than with the inherent vagaries of the nightclub business. Be that as it may, and despite what she says was her father’s sentimental attachment to the club business, the time had come. Hefner survived his stroke; the clubs didn’t.

CHRISTIE HEFNER: He didn’t drag his heels. I mean, we sat down and sort of looked at it [from a business point of view]. He said, “O.K.,” and we wound it down one by one. And I think nobody had probably more fun that he did with all the bye-bye parties.

HUGH HEFNER: I think it simply became clear that the clubs themselves were no longer working. And we were suffering quite frankly in the 80s from a very unfriendly political climate for the magazine. And the clubs by that point were connected to the past in what at the moment in time didn’t help. It just made the magazine seem old-fashioned.

VICTOR LOWNES: It wore out. Clubs do, after a while.

The three remaining company-owned clubs, in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, were closed in the summer of 1986. (As a parting gift, the clubs had contributed significantly to the company’s $3.5 million operating losses in the first three months of 1986.) Franchised clubs in Omaha, Des Moines, and Lansing lingered on until 1988; the clubs in Manila and Japan closed in the early 90s.

Epilogue

HUGH HEFNER: But if you live long enough...

And he certainly has. Long enough to see the dawn not just of Viagra and reality television, both of which have added some luster to the old brand, but also of a new Playboy Club, which opened in 2006 in Las Vegas at the Palms Casino Resort. Though it owes its existence to retro-chic allure, no one would confuse the new club with one of the originals: its vibe is more Entourage than Mad Men, its gilt-y pleasure décor less Danish-modern-bachelor-pad than Elvis Presley Cadillac, or maybe Tony Soprano vomitorium. In that vein, the Bunnies have been dressed in Roberto Cavalli bling-accented updates on the classic costumes. Cavalli told me in heavily accented English that he had tread relatively lightly lest he “spoil all the charming atmosphere that in 50 years was creating around this place.” But restraint isn’t this designer’s strong suit—not that it’s really Playboy’s, either.

Fans of the original clubs can content themselves with watching DVDs of Mad Men’s fourth season, which includes two scenes set in a loving re-creation of the New York club’s Playmate Bar. (Don Draper’s English partner, Lane Pryce, briefly dates a “Chocolate Bunny,” as African-American Bunnies were unfortunately known in the 1960s.) Purists can also look forward to the opening of another new Playboy Club, in London, later this spring. It will be located in Mayfair, occupying an appropriately midcentury-modern building (a former airline office) a mere hundred yards or so from the original London club. As in Las Vegas, the London nightspot will operate under a licensing deal, meaning Hefner and Playboy have “input” but the club will be owned and run by others, in this case the U.K. subsidiary of Caesars Entertainment, the American casino and resort company that also owns Harrah’s and Bally’s and a ton of other establishments in which you can lose money.

The people in charge of the London Playboy Club say all the right things, that it will be “a pre-eminent property,” that it will be “exclusive but inclusive” and “female friendly,” and that it will “respect the heritage” of Playboy. The designs I was shown reference motifs from the old clubs and the magazine while giving them a kind of sleek, contemporary, fiber-optic-y update; the overall effect promises to land just this side of gimmicky.

The cleverest design element is a section of the club’s exterior that resembles a meshrebeeyeh, the traditional Arabic latticework window, though here the pattern is formed by cut-out rabbit-head logos rather than geometric forms. Presumably this wink will help club members from Arab countries feel at home, just as they did when they kept the original London club afloat. Reminiscing about that era over tea with some ex-colleagues, one woman, a former croupier Bunny, told me with a laugh that she had been watching a TV report about the recent unrest in the Middle East and had recognized “half the old Playboy customers” among various royal families. If Hefner and Caesars are lucky, “that lot” may have even more time to spend at the new Playboy Club than any business plan originally envisioned.