"I am today announcing my candidacy for the Presidency of the United States." "The year was 1960." "America was locked in a cold war." "In North Carolina, four African-American students staged a sit-in at a "whites only" lunch counter." "And the FDA had just approved a new form of birth control  that would soon be known simply as "the pill."" "It seemed like the dawn of a new era." "And for me, life was definitely changing." "I was newly divorced... with a brand-new mansion in Chicago." "And for the first time," "I was publicly embracing the Playboy lifestyle." "With all the distraction at my new home," "I was starting to fall behind on my work." "So I brought on a personal assistant." "Her name was Bobbie Arnstein." "Rise and shine." "I let you sleep till 3:00." "You need a taxi, honey?" "I'll call you one." "Come on." "You got an editorial meeting in an hour." "Spec and Russell are waiting." "Wake me in 45." "Bobbie Arnstein started as a secretary for the company right out of high school." "She was incredibly bright." "She had a marvelous sense of humor." "Hefner looked to her for personal advice and even business advice at some time." "And she did not hesitate to give it." "Do yourself a favor and take a shower." "You need one." "She had a sensitivity and a humor and an intellect that I have never found probably in any other woman in my life." "She was a pal." "She was a confidant." "And she was, yeah, my right hand... arm." "Bobbie was an instant fit in the Playboy family, handling my life and responsibilities within the magazine with ease." "People were not used to really bright women." "It was okay for a woman to try to succeed." "It wasn't okay for a woman to be faster than you are, smarter than you are, and Bobbie was." "With Bobbie managing my life," "I rarely had to leave the mansion." "I brought the staff in for meetings, and the line between work and play began to blur." " Ray." " Hef." "Good to see you, my friend." "How are you?" "Very well." "The parties were growing." "And between the dance floor  the pool, the cocktails, and the women, the mansion quickly became the place to be." "On any given night, the guest list included stars like Tony Curtis," "Frank Sinatra," "Woody Allen," "Joe DiMaggio," "Phyllis Diller, and Sammy Davis Jr." "Everything I had heard about the place was true, it was exotic." "Many young women excite anyone's amorous propensities." "People were lining up outside the mansion just hoping to get a glimpse inside." "With everyone wanting in," "I realized there might be a way to let the public experience my world." "And in that moment, I came up with what would become our most ambitious undertaking yet." "In the spring of 1960," "I started dating a girl named Cynthia Maddox." "Hi, I'm Cynthia Maddox and I work for the magazine." "Cynthia and I met at the Playboy offices." "She'd recently been promoted to assistant cartoon editor after working her way up from receptionist." "Hi, Cynthia." "Cynthia was brought in by Bobbie Arnstein." "They were friends in high school." "She was bright and charming and beautiful and demonstrated editorial intelligence." " It's ready." " Oh, excellent." " And this is ready, too." " Yes." "With her new position," "Cynthia and I began spending more time together." "Cynthia Maddox was a great girl." "You know, very outgoing." "And she became Hef's girlfriend, uh, live-in girlfriend." "And she traveled a lot with him." "She would be seen in public with Hef at all major events." "It was my first real relationship since my divorce." "But as happy as I was with Cynthia," "I wasn't quite ready to give up the bachelor lifestyle." "I vowed after my divorce... never to marry again." "Hef was always very upfront with his girlfriends that he was not interested in a monogamous relationship at all, even though they were living together." "No matter how involved I became in a primary romantic relationship, there were still other secondary affairs." "I guess I wanted, as a young man to have somehow the best of both worlds." "We're probably gonna have a couple of hundred people here, uh, throughout the night." "It's, uh, a party of this kind usually begins for us around 1:00 and, uh, and goes till dawn." "The truth was, I was having the time of my life." "Our mansion parties had become legendary." "Now, I wanted to give my readers a chance to experience them firsthand." "And I'd finally come up with a way to do it." "The inspiration came from a feature we'd run years earlier." "A November 1956 article profiling a new, private nightspot in Chicago, the Gaslight Club." "Modeled after a turn-of-the-century speakeasy, with its exclusive membership policy and scantily clad waitresses, it quickly caught the attention of our readers." "It was a private club, and the girls were uniformed in a sort of 18th-century outfit." "And we had over 1,200 letters from readers asking how they could join the Gaslight Club." "I knew we could do the concept of the Gaslight Club, but make it bigger, better, and more accessible." "And that's when I decided to open the Playboy Club." "The pages of the magazine come to life." "Victor Lownes and I immediately got to work, formulating a plan." "The Bunny logo... right there." "Connecting to Playboy, coming to a Playboy party was the ultimate goal of so many people." "And the clubs were meant to bring to life the lifestyle of the magazine." "There's a market for this." "The vision that my dad had for the clubs were to act as a sort of opportunity for readers of the magazine or watchers of the show to be able to go and live out whatever they were reading or watching." "If we were going to do this right, we knew we needed a partner." "How are you?" "Back then, our favorite club in Chicago was the Walton Walk, owned by Arnold Morton." "Arnie!" "Good to see you." " Victor, always a pleasure." " Arnie..." "I had a friend, Arnie Morton." "And we knew that he knew something about the business end of it, 'cause we knew nothing about running a restaurant or nightclub." "Can I get you guys a round of drinks?" "Arnie Morton was well-known as a restaurateur even in those days." "Of course, he became gigantic as the years went on with his own Morton's operations in half the cities in America." "Hope to see you again." "Good to see you, John." "I knew the only way to bring our vision to life was to make Arnie part of the team." "Well, first of all, we need a location." "We teamed up, we each took a piece of it." "Hefner had a piece, the magazine had a piece." "Arnie had a piece and I had a piece." "There were four owners." "I know of a premises that isn't being used down there at the moment and I think I can make a couple of calls." "Our first order of business was to secure the perfect location." "Gentlemen..." "To the Playboy Club." "The Playboy Club." "And Arnie said there was only one place our club could be." "Chicago's Gold Coast district." "Once known for its mob-controlled speakeasies and casinos, it was now home to the hottest clubs and restaurants Chicago had to offer." "Nightclubs were a new, a new glamour, uh, for manhood." "Everybody had their nightclub." "There were local nightclubs." "There were black nightclubs." "There were Jewish nightclubs," "Italian night... in the neighborhood." "But the big hit was to come downtown." "And Arnie knew of a place that was available... 116 East Walton." "The former home of the Cameo Club." "Five stories high and right in the heart of the action." "We planned to transform the Cameo Club into a fantasy bachelor pad with rooms designed to look like a living room and a library, as well as a disco and a theater." "With construction under way, we began focusing on the club's most important feature." "So, Hef, we need to deal with the issue of the waitresses." "Right, right, the, uh, the Playmates." "What's your preference?" "Hefner wanted to call the waitresses Playmates." "And he wanted to dress them in shorty nightgowns." "And somehow that was gonna be very sexy." "But, uh, we kept seeing that there were gonna be a lot of problems in overexposure, et cetera, if we dress the girls in nightgowns." "I would like to suggest going in a different direction." "Rather than the Playmate, what do you think about Bunnies?" " Bunnies?" " Mmm." "We tried to persuade him to use the Playboy rabbit, which was always a male rabbit in a little dinner jacket." "But we tried to persuade him that this could be applied to the girls, and he was sold." "Victor spent weeks working on the costume." "And after many iterations, he finally revealed the prototype on our television show Playboy's Penthouse using the perfect model, my girlfriend, Cynthia Maddox." "Hey, Hef..." "Hef, uh, I hate to interrupt you with business at this time of night." "But I've got something I want you to see." "The, uh, little Bunny outfit for the girls at the Playboy Club." " This is the outfit." " Yeah." "That's what we cooked up." "Well, I like that very much, uh..." "Including the, the outfit, too." "Oh, yeah, it'll work out." "Uh..." "Do you think our members will like that?" "I think the members will like that." "Maybe I ought to explain that, uh, Playboy is, is, uh, going in the Key Club business." "Starting as of the 1st of the year, there will be keys very much like this in the hands of members throughout the country." "Our viewers gave the costume rave reviews." "But I still felt something was missing." "The Bunny costume wasn't quite the way Hefner envisioned it." "So he added some important elements to the costume." "We don't want this to be too drastic." "If we cut this collar, just a clean cut." "And the cuffs as well." "Hefner can be difficult because he's a perfectionist." "Whether it's on the page or whether it is a costume." "I'd like to introduce you to Cynthia Maddox, your first Playboy Bunny." "Hefner was really instrumental in the changes in the Bunny costume." "I just raised the cut to accentuate her legs." "Lowered it a little on the bust." "He was the one who insisted on the cuffs with the Playboy cufflink and the bow tie." "Would you mind doing a spin for us, Cynthia?" "I think the costumes are adorable." "Fixed the tail." "Sits nicely there." "There's just something, the dichotomy of an innocent Bunny, and then it's, you know, sexy, but it's still, again, I think very classy." "Hefner has a tremendous visual eye." "And as a result of that, our costume is in the Smithsonian Institute and is the first costume that ever received a copyright." "Perfect." "Now came the hard part." "Finding 30 girls who could fill that costume like Cynthia." "So we put ads about our upcoming auditions in newspapers around the country." "I was in college, part-time job." "Worked at a pharmacy." "And the pharmacist got something in the mail that said that they were having a Bunny hunt." "It said you'd make a good salary and you'd have fun." "And you got to wear this Bunny outfit." "And it was the 1960s where it was perfectly acceptable to tell these girls to bring a bathing suit to audition in." "Nowadays, they'd be up on all kinds of charges." "But back then, it was perfectly acceptable." "Maybe I could go and be a receptionist or work in a department store and move my way up." "But this was an opportunity for me to make a very good living." "So I went." "The day of the first Bunny auditions was one of the coldest days I can remember." "We weren't even sure if anyone was going to show up." "So, do we know what kind of questions we're gonna be asking these girls?" "Well, I think, uh, keep it simple, um..." "Arnie's started on a few here." "I put Bobbie in charge of running the auditions." "Finally." "You try wrangling 400 girls without running behind." "400?" "You ready?" "Absolutely." "Quite ready." " Hello." " Hello." "Uh, please take your mark." "Thanks, Hayley, and where are you from?" "Kalamazoo, Michigan." "Hello." "Women came from all across the country..." " Where are you from?" " Seattle, Washington." " Massachusetts." " Milwaukee." "... and from every walk of life..." "I'm a teller at First Chicago." "I'm a nurse." "Real estate agent." "I'm a sophomore from DePaul." "Great school." "... looking for excitement, adventure, and a taste of the Playboy lifestyle." "It was about youth." "The advert said, "Be a Playboy Bunny."" "And you had to be between 18 and 22 years of age." "And so, naturally, it was about young people, the spirit and whatever went with that." "All right, thank you very much." "All right, good-bye." "Okay, so... that's it, that's the last one." " That's it?" " Yeah." "What do you do?" "I'm an assistant to you assholes." "Uh, uh, ma'am, uh, where's your swimsuit?" "Go fuck yourselves, okay?" "You're hired!" "Ahh..." " Carol." " No." "No, not Carol." "Carol's in my top five." "We spent hours deliberating over the candidates." "Of course, the Bunnies had to be skilled waitresses, but they also had to be much more." "They were performers, bringing to life the pages of the magazine." "How's it going?" " Hm..." " Not well." "We only have 17." "How about using some Playmates?" "No." "Why not?" "They're not gonna wanna serve drinks for eight hours." "I was just talking to Joyce, and she said she thought about auditioning" " but she was sick." " Joyce Nizzari?" "Joyce would look amazing in one of those outfits." "Uh-huh." "Do you think any of the other girls might consider it?" "I'll make some calls." "Okay." "Thanks, Bobbie." "Anytime!" "Bobbie was able to get five of our Playmates to sign on, including Joyce Nizzari," "December 1958's Playmate of the Month." "To our loyal readers, our Playmates were as famous as any celebrity." "And the chance to meet them would be a dream come true." "When the club opened in Chicago, it was a knockout." "We opened the door, and the door Bunny was one of the original Playmates." "That's the stuff of a fantasy land." "Finally, we had our Bunnies." "Let's give it a try, go along this way, okay?" "Way we go, low, carry at the moment, low carry." "But if these Bunnies were going to represent our clubs, we needed to make sure nothing was left to chance." "So I asked my brother Keith to join the team." "Faster, faster, faster, high carry." "Reverse!" "Keith had studied at the Lee Strasberg studio, trying to make it as an actor." "But when his career failed to take off, he jumped at the opportunity to help." "I'd had a background in teaching." "I had a background in show business, and I tried to bring both of those things to bear in the clubs." "So the first people that I trained were the Bunnies." "Good evening, I'm your Bunny, Izzy." "You notice that she smiles, gives eye contact with all four of us." "We imagine that there's another gentleman sitting there." "Along with Victor Lownes," "Keith created what would come to be known as the Bunny Manual." "This is a Bunny Manual that we give to all the girls when they start working." "That gives you all the rules and regulations that pertain to being a Bunny in the Playboy Club." "You will find that we are very, very strict." "In order to maintain the right image for the club, we needed our Bunnies to follow very specific rules." "We wanted them to be glamorous, but also highly professional." "Bunnies were only allowed to use their first names." "They could not be seen drinking any beverage or wearing any jewelry during their shift." "And each Bunny had to make sure her grooming was impeccable." "They knew the ingredients of 125 different drinks and always had their service trays arranged in a precise order." "Our Bunnies went through rigorous training, led by the Bunny Mothers who made sure each Bunny met the manual's requirements." "Honey, why do you have this costume on today, dear?" "My other costume's in the cleaners." "Mm-hmm, you'll have to go downstairs and find something else." "Your shoes are soiled, too." "I'd like to have you change clothes." "Your ears are always bent a little too much, Terri, why?" "I didn't know any particular way to fix them." "We had training about four hours a day for six weeks." "You started off with the tray." "You spread your fingertips and therefore you have full balance." "Okay, now who's gonna try a real high carry, okay?" "Whoop, there we go, no!" "It was intense." "Do you notice that she is doing what we call a Bunny dip?" "To enforce the polished image of our Bunnies, there were specific movements each girl had to execute with the utmost precision while serving our patrons." "There was the Bunny stance, how a Bunny should stand." "Look, leg should be against that table." "Straight, all right?" "The Bunny perch, how a Bunny should sit." "Now dip." "And most famously, the Bunny dip." "There you notice that she's bending at the waist." "That's incorrect." "Another way that it could be incorrect is if she were to go down in a sitting position." "Look, when you're doing your dip, bend." "This side should never be broken." "Let's see the Bunny dip done just so." "That's absolutely correct." "With the Bunnies in training, the rest of the staff was working overtime to get the club open by the end of February." "While Arnie was supervising renovations..." "Victor was working hard to sell memberships to the most affluent and most important men around the country." "The buzz around the club had been building for months, but for all the people excited about our opening there were just as many who hoped we would fail." "Everything about the extravagant Playboy empire accents youth, glamour, money, and pleasure." "Is Hugh Hefner's empire a 20th-century Garden of Eden, or it is a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah?" "Many still saw Playboy as just another smutty magazine, and our famous parties as just another example of the kind of debauchery people could expect at our clubs." "Hef always had the eyes of the Catholic Church and the city government looking for any excuse to close them down." "Because every city thought it would destroy the neighborhood." "But I was determined to prove them wrong." "When opening night finally arrived, all of our hard work was put to the test." "The club looked great." "The Bunnies looked even better." "And we were ready to share our vision with the world." "All right, ladies, let's hit the floor." "Open the doors." "The opening of the Chicago club was something truly exceptional." "There was a line around the block." "You had to be a key holder in order to get into the club." "As you entered the club, there was a board with the name plates of all the club members so that when they checked in, their name went up." "And you could see who was in the club that night." "Every detail of the club had been carefully thought out with something exciting and new in every room." "Across from the lobby was our full-service bar and pool room where you could go one-on-one with our Bumper Pool Bunny." "The bar was called the Playmate Bar." "And we had transparencies of all the Playmates on display." "Upstairs in the "living room" was the piano bar where we served up our world-class buffet, all set to live music." "And on the top floor, we called that "the library,"" "our marquee performance venue." "Now you can walk into this experience." "And for most people, it was a fantasy." "You know, you weren't gonna get this at your neighborhood diner." "You weren't gonna get that anyplace but at the Playboy Club." "But the stars of the evening were the Bunnies." "We had desk Bunnies to greet guests at the door as well as coat check Bunnies... cigarette Bunnies... roaming camera Bunnies to capture every special evening... gift shop Bunnies selling Playboy merchandise... and our floor Bunnies serving up drinks" "from the Playmate Bar." " Victor." " Hef." "Good to see you." "Welcome to the Playboy Club." "Look around." "Hello, gentlemen." "When Cynthia and I showed up, the party was in full swing." "With every detail in place and the Bunnies looking fantastic  all that was left to do was enjoy the show." "Just seven years after launching Playboy from my kitchen table, there I was, hosting what felt like the biggest party on the planet." "The opening in Chicago was one of the best moments of my life." "Thank you, thank you, thank you much." "The American male has found a new place of relaxation." "It's the Key Club." "The most famous example of such a type club is The Playboy." "Over the next few weeks, the crowds only grew." "And the Bunnies weren't the only attraction." "Uh, ladies and gentlemen," "I'm really pleased to introduce our next act." "So, please give a warm Playboy Club welcome to an incredible talent from just up the road in Detroit, Michigan, Miss Aretha Franklin." "You'll do great." "With our TV show, we'd fought against segregation inviting the best American entertainers regardless of race." "It was a formula I wanted to replicate in our clubs." "Hef decides Aretha Franklin is talented when no one knew who Aretha Franklin was." "Today, she'll say that the first time she performed for a white audience and didn't have to enter through the kitchen was a Playboy Club." "And that was just how Hef thought." "I don't care what the rest of the world thinks." "I think this is good and therefore it's worthy of exploring and exposing our audience to, that was it." "Along with Aretha Franklin, our club featured many musicians on the rise, like Ray Charles..." "Sam Cooke... and Bette Midler." "The best of entertainment, black and white, went to the Playboy Club." "And it really became a social landmark." "It was a place to be seen." "Our Penthouse stage featured top comedians like Milton Berle, edgy up-and-comers like Steve Martin," "George Carlin, and an unknown young comedian named Dick Gregory, who we discovered at one of the city's black nightclubs." "'Cause everybody I meet in the nightclub after they get drunk, they all tell me the same thing." "Greg, some of my best friends are colored." "And Mike, you know and I know there's not that many of us to go around." "At that time, black comics had not been permitted to stand flat-footed in a white nightclub and talk." "Hefner brought me in from there to Time magazine, to the Jack Paar Show." "When you look and see the role that black comics played and the influence that the Richard Pryors have had on white comics, all that started because of Hefner." "Thirty years from this year, a Negro can become president." "So treat me right, I'll get in there and raise taxes on you." "With the entertainment," "Bunnies and ambiance, we were finally giving our readers the full Playboy experience." "The food was good and the drink was stiff." "And the entertainment was nice." "That's what made people keep coming back." "And the Bunnies were part of the show." "The Bunnies were an undeniable hit." "And though we knew they would earn big money in tips, our customers' generosity exceeded our wildest expectations." "Many of the customers are aware that the girls are oft times making more money than they are." "That's interesting, more money than the fellas who can afford the $50 for the key?" "Oh, yes." "Even Mike Wallace had to admit that the opportunity we were giving our Bunnies was something special." "What we did was we stuffed our costumes, and at the end of the night when you unzipped it and you dropped it to the floor, all the money was there so you wouldn't lose it or forget it." "Do, uh, the girls date club members?" "Definitely not, you cannot date members of the club." "Our Bunnies were our most valued employees, and we made protecting them a top priority." "From the beginning, the personnel head of every Playboy Club was a woman." "That was the Bunny Mother." "And there was a very, very strong and strict culture around protecting and respecting the women." "So, at a time in which it was very common for women to get hit on because they were waitresses or working in a bar or for that matter working in an office, let's think of Mad Men," "this was an environment in which women felt safe." "Any hint of impropriety between members and Bunnies would give ammunition to our critics." "So I made sure that the no-dating rule was strictly enforced." "At least, for most of my guests." "We did make exceptions for a select group, a few friends and trusted VIPs." "Well, what can I say?" "Sometimes being the owner has its perks." "Can you shut the door, Vic?" "By the end of the club's first year, we had over 100,000 key holders." "And we were pulling in the modern equivalent of $33 million, doing higher volume in food and drink than any other night spot in the city." "And there was something about a Playboy Club that put it in a class by itself." "The Bunnies were the stars of the club." "And we treated them that way." "And they loved it." "And many of them were Bunnies for many, many years." "It was just a special place." "The instant success of our club made our next move obvious." "We needed to go national." "And there was no better place to start  than New York."