Read Online The Bunny Years by Kathryn Leigh Scott - Free Book Online Page B

passant
conversations in the kitchen, but also provided me with a treasured insight to a world of art and literature I would never otherwise have known. (As of this writing, incidentally, Paul is in his 22nd year as a manager of Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel, where he still oversees talent such as Bobby Short and Barbara Carroll.)
    Another contributor to my
ad hoc
“finishing school” was Al Mandaro, a former Maitre d’ at the El Morocco, who became the Party Room director at the Playboy Club after the celebrated nightclub went out of business. There isn’t much that escapes the attention of a good Maitre d’ and Al had wonderful vintage café society stories about everyone from boxers to debutantes, dowagers to movie stars and heiresses to gangsters. Eventually, Al asked me to join him for his customary Monday lunches when he checked out the new places and kept tabs on veteran establishments. I ate well and listened avidly, enthralled by his who-begat-who Genesis of New York society. “A society girl’s breath is always sweet,” he told me one day, “and they pay particular attention to their footwear.” I also learned the proper way to order from a menu and eat things I’d never heard of before meeting Al Mandaro.
    When the Academy term ended in the spring and I could sleep late, I was in for another education. I started to join the other Bunnies and some of the musicians at the after-hours jazz joints in mid-Manhattan, Greenwich Village and the lower East Side. I was a sponge. I absorbed it all: the music, the atmosphere, the language and lungs full of cigarette smoke. For a while, I would only smoke
Gauloise
.

    During my senior year at the Academy, the registrar, Bryn Morgan, called me out of class one Friday morning to offer me a job posing for fashion photographs that would appear in a
Time
magazine story. Bryn told me he often got calls asking for students to “model,” but he’d vetted this job carefully and it was legitimate. If I was free to do the job after I got out of classes that day, I’d be paid $50. A fortune! I accepted immediately.
    I arrived at the photographic studio bright-eyed and breathless with excitement. A skinny, tough-talking woman introduced herself as a fashionstylist and handed me a tiny package containing the outfit I was supposed to model. In the privacy of the dressing room, I pulled the garment out of its plastic wrapping and stared at the minuscule mound of black nylon in my hand. I learned later that it was the first stretch-lace body stocking in history (this was, after all, for a
Time
magazine
news
story), but I already knew I was in trouble. The good news was that I luckily had worn a black bra and black panties that day. Gamely, I stripped off my clothes and pulled on the body stocking, then stared at myself in the mirror. I looked like I’d been tattooed from neck to toes in black lace, not necessarily a pretty sight. At that moment, the stylist hollered at me to come out and get to work.
    Ben Martin, the
Time
magazine photographer, had just arrived: 6 feet tall, suntanned and wearing a trench coat. A suntan in November! He took one look at me and said, “How come you’re wearing your underwear?”
    As I fled toward the dressing room I heard him say, “Wait a minute. Don’t you have that thing on backward?”
    I stayed in the dressing room a very long time, all the while overhearing the photographer talk about his flight back from Venezuela. From South American politics to pop fashion in 24 hours, and now he’s stuck with some dumb kid who has never modeled before. For my part it seemed inconceivable that
Time
magazine would publish a photograph of a naked girl unless she was a member of a remote African tribe. I was sure, once they saw me naked under the black lace, they’d all come to their senses and send me home, maybe with $50 in my pocket for my time and trouble. No such luck. The