The Bunny Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

into Betty’s costume department. Tiny and fierce-looking, sitting hunched over her sewing machine, she gave me the once-over and then asked me how the hell she was supposed to tell what I looked like with my coat on. Her husky, warm voice made me laugh. She was tart and sassy with a shrewd eye, and she looked like nobody I’d ever seen before. But my fate was now in her hands, and I figured she would take care of me. In fact, Betty left the impression that she would always be on your side no matter what. I stripped down to bikini panties and was zippered into a discarded Bunny costume in my approximate size to see if I had “it.”

    T HE W OMAN B EHIND THE C OTTONTAIL

    L ook pretty.” “Wear lipstick!” “Be a lady!” “You’re a star!” Words of wisdom pasted to the bathroom walls of the New York Playboy Club by the unofficial spiritual head of the Bunnies, Elizabeth Dozier Tate, the longtime seamstress and wardrobe mistress for the Club. Known to one and all as Betty, she was the cheerleader behind those paste-on smiles that Bunnies, sometimes dragging a world full of problems behind them, were forced to assume for the Keyholders.
    â€œBe a star!” she’d exhort. “You know, honey, I was once a star myself.”
    Indeed, she was. As “Chinkie” Grimes, a singer and show dancer, Betty knew and worked with all the big stars of her time: Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. She was born in Georgia, one of 12 children, and made her way to New York as a teenager. While working as a housekeeper and cook for actor Orson Welles and his family, Betty entered an amateur contest at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre and sang “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”
    She won third prize and a job in the chorus. She started out as a singer and tap dancer. “My oriental cheekbones and eyes (my father had Japanese blood) attracted a lot of attention along with my dance, and I came to be known as ‘Chinkie.’” She was featured on Broadway, appeared in the movie Stormy Weather with Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and while married to Tiny Grimes, guitarist with Art Tatum for many years, she toured the country.
    â€œAll this time I was designing and making costumes for myself and others,” Betty recalls. In 1962, when the New York Club was opening, Betty’s current husband, Robert Tate, was working for Playboy in key sales. “He heard they were having a hard time fitting the Bunny costumes, so I came in,” Betty says, “and ended up spending the next 26 years there.”

    Rosemary Costello and Elizabeth Dozier Tate.
    In fact, it lead to a guest spot on What’s My Line? in 1964 (“I fit the Bunny costumes at the New York Playboy Club.”). But that was not what Betty’s job ultimately meant to her: “I do much more than just make and fit Bunny costumes. The Bunnies are my girls, and I love them all. I mother them. I’ve taught them how to sit, how to walk and how to act like ladies.” In 1994, she was honored at the National Tap Dance Day salute sponsored by the New York State Black Film Archives.
    She let me know that it was only for me that she would go to so much trouble to find a ready-made costume that would make me look like the right stuff. I slipped on a red number and looked at myself in the long mirror. I was amazed. Even in stocking feet and without the transforming collars and cuffs, I thought I could make the grade. It was nothing short of a miracle.
    â€œYou’re looking good, sugar. You tell ’em I said so,” Betty growled.
    I padded down to the Bunny Mother’s office for an inspection. Claudia Burgess, a pretty blonde in her mid-20s and a former Bunny herself, told me to go ahead and get fitted. I would start work immediately as a Cigarette Bunny. I could take my Bunny training