Drooping Cottontails

"You look old. You have lost your Bunny image," the International Bunny Mother told Patti Colombo, an eleven-year veteran cottontail at the New York Playboy Club. Another aging Bunny, Carmelita Atwell, was told: "You no longer look like the girl next door. You're going into womanhood." With those curt bits of Playboy philosophy, the Misses Colombo and Atwell and two other hutchmates, all over 28, found themselves out in the street.

Like airline stewardesses before them, the fursome foursome fought for their right to grow old in their jobs. Last week they took their case before the New York State Division of Human Rights and charged that Playboy had discriminated against them on the basis of sex and age, and that their union was in cahoots with management. One of the Bunnies, Nancy Phillips, who was a leader in a successful arbitration case against Playboy over seniority in 1971, insisted that she and her coplaintiffs had none of the Bunny image shortcomings set down in a "Checklist of No-Nos": wrinkled eyelids, sagging bosom, flabby underarms, bulging tummy, crepy neck, droopy derriere and rippling thighs.

The no-no list is a serious matter at Playboy clubs, where each Bunny's image is rated quarterly. Even so, the four complainants believe that image is not at issue. "As in 1971," Miss Phillips alleged, "seniority is the cause of the problem." They are eliminating senior girls, she said, so that the club can move the Bunnies anywhere it wants without worrying about seniority. For his part, Robert Mozer, an attorney for Local 1 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International, denied his union was in collusion with Playboy and pledged they would "fight for" the Bunnies.

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