Subsections below:
Playboy was about image, for
better or worse
A few initial extra points, including reference to famous writers
A quick stop to consider a Playboy-exploiting scene from a 1979 movie
Women working as Playboy Bunnies showed professionalism
The lessons for today posed by Playboy Bunnies
A nice theme ahead
Today, young people—not least,
women—get a few laughs talking about Hugh Hefner as “the loin in winter,”
around 90 and still putting on the old silk pajamas for some “men’s
entertainment” with his latest wife, who is about one-quarter his age. Go
ahead, have fun; I think he’s pretty ridiculous nowadays, too. But I have a few
reasons for talking about my years working at a Playboy Hotel and Country Club,
which was located in McAfee,
New Jersey (the building is still
there—long story what has become of it). I am proud of having worked there [see Part 2 for a qualification of this],
particularly as I did simple busboy work; that was a good place for such work,
for the tips you made on top of the below-minimum-wage pay, and when you were a
student anticipating college and had to earn some money to pay for college, you
were a fool to turn that kind of opportunity down.
Playboy was about image, for
better or worse
Playboy—its day is past, of
course—was also largely about image. One could probably do a pretty fancy essay
on it here. Not only do I have a few points to make, drawing inferences
(applicable to phenomena of today) from my own homely experience working there
30+ years ago, but there are a few points to make of a more general nature.
When I was still living in the Washington,
D.C., area (I forget whether it was in 1984 or 1985), I stopped by the office
of Phi Beta Kappa, which was several blocks from GWU, looking into possibly
getting a job there. One of those wildly speculative tries, you know; the kind
that would become the stock in trade of a freelancer I would be by the 1990s,
where you are sending out resumes all the time, like routinely cast-out fishing
nets that only rarely haul in a catch. Anyway, a rather elderly secretary
looked at my resume, and made some snooty remark about my having worked at
Playboy. I have always remembered this.
Among my possible retorts (which
I saw fit not to make, then), see the first paragraph of this entry, concerning
being practical about work when you were
a student. Moreover, I would have added to her, Playboy was largely about
image, and you seem to have been fooled by the image—thinking it is nothing but
a seedy, disreputable place: a bordello, making exploitative fodder of women,
about hedonism, not worth a true Cultural Pillar’s time. It was a business and,
in my town at the time, a good place to work for a student.
A few initial extra points, including reference to famous writers
* You may have heard the remark
made, “But Playboy magazine has good
articles, too!” And of course, this wasn’t just a joke; it was a prime conduit
for up-and-coming high-culture writers. Guess what two writers, greatly
esteemed today, had some early items published in Playboy, in the late 1960s and early 1970s? (There may have been plenty of
others.) Joyce Carol Oates and Garry Wills (a Playboy reference is not
made with the Wikipedia bios for either of these writers). [For Web items showing instances of these writers' past work in Playboy magazine, see here for Oates and here for Wills (beware that some magazine cover[s] depicted may seem a bit salacious).]
* The people I worked with at
Playboy—whether fellow busboys, managers, Bunnies, or regular-style
waitresses—were all there to do a job. They ran the gamut in personality,
professionalism, fun stories to tell, all else—just as at any other big
employer. More to say on aspects of this, shortly.
A quick stop to consider a Playboy-exploiting scene from a 1979 movie
I hope to get to a review of the
film Apocalypse Now Redux (2001;
original film was 1979) before long. Among the many other things about that
film that people can raise issue with, or appreciate (despite flaws), or both,
is its portrayal of Playboy Bunnies. Now obviously Francis Ford Coppola in
producer mode—or another producer on that film—arranged some deal with the
Playboy corporation to use its logo and some company-specific ideas (like the
Bunnies), with some money paid to the film, in return for giving the company
some publicity, while also playing around with the company’s trademarks. So the
Bunnies are shown—not just in what was probably Coppola’s sincere thematic attempt
to catalog the way women are degraded by war enterprises, a cause for
storytelling as old as “camp followers”—but in a way of making them seem
bimbo-ish.
Of course, in the initial Hau
Phat USO scene, rather spectacular at night, with the stage, band playing, and
Bunnies dancing enticingly in “Americana”-type costumes (Indian, cowboy, etc.),
they are there as temptations to the sex-starved soldiers in the audience. A
riot of sorts ensues. “Yet another Vietnam-type mess,” the film seems to
depict; let’s leave further discussion of that aside for now.
In the 2001 version of the film,
the men on the PBR—Captain Willard, Chef, Clean, Lance, and the Chief—catch up
with the Bunnies again (in daytime) when they come upon a military camp damaged
by a typhoon, and two of the Bunnies are sheltered for the time being, one in a
helicopter and the other in a dilapidated building—while the big Playboy
helicopter stands idle within the camp. We are then treated to Chef initiating
a good time with one Bunny, who used to work at Busch Gardens (note the many
juvenile double entendres in this extended scene, with both Chef and Lance).
Meanwhile, in another locale, Lance takes up with another Bunny, who seems in
full dopey bimbo mode as she talks rather thirstingly about wanting to be
recognized for her talent, and how she was exploited in some weird shenanigans
where she had to hold some medals between her knees, etc. The scenes are well
designed and photo’d—Coppola could always manage a visual treat—but the writing
is a bit weak. But anyway, more than we saw at the nighttime stage scene, the
Bunnies seem like Bimbo
City. This even while
Coppola also wanted to score one for lamenting the degradation of women by the
War Machine.
I always have felt this rather
slandered the idea of Playboy Bunnies. Maybe the Playboy corporation didn’t
mind this at the time—filming was in 1976—because that played into the
company’s wanting their hotels, where the Bunnies were commonly to be found, to
seem like a Stately Pleasure Dome of Earthly Delights, including the idea of sex
with a nubile young woman with bunny ears on her head (though such a thing
would never come to pass).
Women working as Playboy Bunnies showed professionalism
A couple initial notes about
what my work at Playboy was like, which would serve both this entry and a
possible Part 2: First, the Playboy in McAfee, N.J., contained (along with its
hundreds of hotel rooms) a number of different kinds of restaurants and/or bars,
along with a clothing store, a sort of drugstore/variety concession, a swimming
pool, tennis courts, and of course a golf course with the typical amenity of
the “Pro Shop” (where the pros could raise a few cold ones). When I worked at
the club, my “tenures” there, and locations, were as follows:
* from September 1979 to August
1980, *extending about a year's period that ended right before college* (Sept.-Dec. 1979, at the “Cabaret,” a sort of
Catskills-like dinner club, where people ate a choice from a sort of limited, preordained
menu of dinners, then saw live entertainment; Bunnies worked here; then,
Jan.-Aug. 1980, the “Living Room,” an Italian-buffet restaurant of a stodgier
kind, with standard waitresses and no Bunnies);
* a bit in December 1980 (at the
Living Room);
* and again in May-August 1981
(this time at the Sidewalk Café, a place with hamburgers and such, and
alcoholic drinks from a bar; Bunnies worked here, and this provided my richest
experience of working with Bunnies).
Another preliminary note is
that, as far as I recall and from a wide range of people, men and women alike,
while there may have been occasional relatively juvenile talk about the Bunnies,
by and large, people who worked there didn’t necessarily subscribe to the idea
that women should have been “derogated” or what have you by the Playboy “Men’s
Entertainment” ethos or the employment of the “Bunny” image in particular.
Women who worked there, in particular, may not all have entirely liked it, but
they went along with the business conceit, whether they were non-Bunny
waitresses at the locations using such, or Bunnies themselves. And after all,
the Playboy company was selling a sort of “fantasy world” not unlike today’s Atlantic
City or Las Vegas casinos, whether with scantily-clad waitresses or not.
In truth, the women who worked
as Playboy Bunnies—as far as I could witness while a young worker there—were
professionals doing a job, like anyone else. They ranged all over the map:
* a smart young woman who was
the daughter of some corporate big wheel, who could engage customers in smart
conversation, and hence got big tips;
* women more like Average Joes,
maybe a stoner variety, or something else, who could do the Bunny thing well
enough (and sometimes be bigger tippers to us busboys—we busboys did well when
the Bunnies did well); and
* one woman (an anomaly) whose
Bunny name was Daisy, who was very comely in bodily shape and not very bright
(my high school friend Joe Coles said—and he was not far from the truth in this,
and I’m not being mean to say this—that she “had three brain cells, and they
were all disconnected from each other”; for me, it is not an easy “caricature”
to say she was a somewhat cartoonish “dumb blonde”—I mean, she was nice enough,
and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone like her since; and I don’t think her
style was an act; and meanwhile, she was a very atypical example of who worked
as a Bunny there). Daisy usually got big tips, probably because the salivating
male customers were taken by her appearance and simple camaraderie.
But all these Bunnies were
waitresses—of cocktails or otherwise. They took and filled orders, and handled
payment with the cashier. They accepted tips. And as a regular practice, they
gave us busboys who worked under them a percentage of their tips. Different
women were differently generous, but by and large, when the Bunnies did well on
a given day, we busboys did well.
There were strict rules at the club that no one was allowed to touch or
otherwise deal with the Bunnies in any salacious manner—i.e., in a way that
today would make an office-working woman want to cry “sexual harassment!” The
Bunnies were all about corporate image, just as if you went to a McDonald’s and
saw some shmoe there dressed up like Ronald McDonald. Men, of course (and
whatever women who might be inclined), could ogle the Bunnies (just as they
might at a waitress at today’s Hooters or the casinos that have waitresses
dressed in a comely fashion). But clearly if some dork had a few too many
highballs and groped a Bunny, he would be shown the door in no time.
The Bunnies wore costumes—of
course, along with “ears” that were held up as a headdress of sorts—that looked
from a distance like one-piece bathing suits, but they were actually on the
bulky side, and had pockets for carrying things. I think they wore high-heel
shoes—part of the image—but again, this was part of a costume.
There was also a “Bunny
Mother”—a supervisor who worked with the Bunnies, while the latter all got dressed
in their Bunny outfits in their special locker room. The “Bunny Mother”
certainly didn’t wear a Bunny costume. The Bunny Mother—to the extent I
understood what she did (other busboys there knew more about her, I think) had
some supervisory function related to scheduling (and maybe did some level of
coaching), and possibly addressed more normal workplace issues, etc. And the
Bunny Mother, as I recall the one I knew about, did not look like a Bunny; she
had more in common with Rosie the Riveter—and I recall she was
hefty, too.
The lessons for today posed by Playboy Bunnies
I have thought numerous times over recent years that one difference
between the women who worked as Playboy Bunnies in the late 1970s and some of
today’s young female Turks in media companies is that the Bunnies knew they
were doing a job. Today’s young Turks—I don’t know; I think they think they’re fighting the Good
Fight for Women’s Rights, along with carting that mundane paperwork around. But
if they remembered we are all in the
office to, Number One, do a job, then
they’d share something in common with the old Playboy Bunnies, which is that
they are doing a job in line with the expectations of the company they work
for. If a woman in 1979 was willing to portray a Bunny, to the (discreetly)
horny looks of an occasional male customer, she would do this, with bemusement
and a sense of safety. She knew the company rules would protect her. And she
had income to earn, not some vapid ideal to raise a stink about, not quite
appropriately within the context of normal company business.
You didn’t have women working then
(at least as far as I saw) in an office setting as you might have today, a
setting that has little in common with the old high-class Playboy country-club
environs, and which may seem at first to have nothing to do with sex; and
then—what do you know!—she’s being used to have her pretty face grease the rails
in some greasier sales transaction.
As in, shall we say?, the
seamier parts of today’s medical marketing, where, strangely, sex is used
because, for an example, sometimes, the admin manning the computer “cockpit” at
the conference table with the (my term) ad-agency pitch clique in a meeting where each side of the agency/client
divide could see the other—well, that admin looks a bit like Bo Derek, and the
dazzled (male) Big Pharma potential client says, “Sure, I’ll sign on the dotted
line. You can have our business for our Baby Poison Sugar-Free Throat
Lozenges.” (Fair balance: The paragraph contains a certain amount of satire.)
A nice theme ahead
