Gloria Steinem and I briefly crossed paths 60 years ago—and I’m finally coming to terms with it. I was Gloria’s training Bunny at the New York Playboy Club in 1963. In her two-part Show magazine article, “A Bunny’s Tale,” she referred to me as the “Chinese Bunny who stuffed her costume with gym socks.”
Gulp, that was me—a 19-year-old, third-year math major at Hunter College, teaching 28-year-old Gloria Steinem, a Smith College graduate, how to do the Bunny dip while serving a gin rickey.
At the time, Gloria was also employed as a journalist assigned to write an exposé on the newly-opened Manhattan Playboy Club. I didn’t know that at the time. No one did.
I’d enrolled at Hunter College at age 16, immediately after graduating from high school. I was carrying a heavy class load and needed a break when I saw an ad in The New York Times: Girls, Be a Star! Step Into the Spotlight and Be a Playboy Bunny! With literally thousands of young women auditioning, getting hired as one of the first of the 110 Bunnies employed at the club really did make me feel like a star.
Besides, the ad promised earnings of $200 a week, the equivalent of $2,000 today. Compliance with New York State law meant that Bunnies under 21 couldn’t work in the Club after 7 p.m. The real money was to be made by the older Bunnies working the showrooms that featured great jazz and entertainers such as Peter Allen, Dick Gregory, Lainie Kazan, Lily Tomlin, and George Carlin.
The New York Playboy Club did not open as a members-only key club, so we were jam-packed with cash-paying customers. Working the lunch and cocktail shift five days a week, my average income in cash tips was $300-$500. Allowing for inflation at 9.86 percent (1963-2022), that’s the equivalent of $4,000 for a 15-hour work week—the buying power of almost $200,000 per year today: Not bad for a 19-year-old college student! Bunnies working nights—generally a four-day work week—reportedly made $1,000. That’s more…
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