The Playboy Bunny with all the brass and the balls

‘Ma-HUMMM!” Francesca Emerson’s son Geoffrey Charles was on the phone. He was editing her autobiography The Chocolate Bunny and he kept calling her. 

“I mean every chapter he read it was, ‘Mom … Ma-HUMMM!’

“He was sort of shocked because even he didn’t know these things,” she tells me with a most mischievous sparkle in her eyes and the sweetest smile on her face. 

Emerson is a vivacious and totally charming 83 going on 60 — we’re chatting about her tell-all tale at a friend’s Johannesburg house during her recent visit to South Africa.

Sub-titled The Life and Loves of Francesca Emerson, it is her fascinating story as one of the very first black Playboy Bunnies, from poverty in the Harlem ghetto to glamour in Hollywood. 

Her son’s response is no surprise, because if you want to know the size and shape of Leonard Cohen’s willy, it is there on page 190. 

“There was always a parade of women traipsing through his house,” she adds about their brief but passionate interlude back in the promiscuous late 1960s, when Cohen’s debut single Suzanne had just been released.

There must have been another “Ma-HUMMM!” after reading pages 52 to 54 where she tells how she put celluloid beau and womaniser of note Warren Beatty in his place. 

The gorgeous Emerson had walked past his booth at the Playboy Club in LA in her Bunny uniform and he remarked to his mates, “Shit guys, with an ass like that, she must have a truly ugly face.”

At a restaurant after her shift, the feisty Emerson again encountered the “pure Hollywood, plastic hero”, who was known for dating Bunnies. 

The shameless Beatty joined her and her colleagues’ table uninvited and slid in next to her, his hand all over her thighs.

She writes: “So, I reached under the table, and my hand grabbed him by the balls. The look of sudden shock on his face was utterly priceless; but it was nothing compared to the look when I whispered into his ear, ‘You’ve fucked one of my friends, who told me that you can’t last more than 60 seconds. Sorry, Warren, but even a minute is more valuable to me than wasting that minute on you.’”

There must have been many other “Ma-HUMMMs!” from Geoffrey Charles because The Chocolate Bunny spills the beans (and more) on Emerson being the lover and confidante of some of the most handsome and talented actors, directors and writers in the world, including Omar Sharif, Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Michael Douglas — as well as the unwilling moll of a New York mobster.

When I ask her what the men she wrote about thought about her book she gets that naughty smile again: “Well, I have no idea, as no one has talked to me about it, and most of them are dead. Not to be disrespectful, but that helps …”

Her son must also have been shocked by the goings-on at the Playboy Club. Emerson became a Bunny in 1963, first in New York and later in LA. She writes that customers who entered hoping that it was like an upmarket brothel, where a Bunny would do sexual favours, would be disappointed.

“Except,” she writes, “of course, when it came to [founder Hugh] Hefner himself, his brother Keith, and most of the senior corporate managers. We were fair game to most of them and a tap on the shoulder from somebody within the organisation at that elevated corporate level meant advancement, gifts, sexual favours and more money than we could possibly have earned. 

“Not as prostitutes, of course … girls who slept with senior managers were never viewed in this way, but it was an organisation bursting with money and top managers spent lavishly on their pleasures.”

Geoffrey Charles would also have been amused — his mom doesn’t take herself or anyone else too seriously. 

“As you read my book,” she writes early on, “you’ll get to know me as one of the first black Playboy Bunnies; a woman who had as her friends and intimates some of the world’s most famous actors, musicians, artists, television stars and creative virtuosos who were the imaginative geniuses of the Golden Era of Hollywood. 

“A woman who has had sex with some of the world’s most famous men, gorgeous men, movie idols; but most of them uninspiring and forgettable lovers. All brass, no balls.”

Her son would also have been sad for her. She lost her mom at the age of five and had a tough upbringing. 

She married a psychotic soldier while still a schoolgirl, narrowly escaping death at his hands. 

She was married three times: “Born Francine Irene Barker, née Hudson, née Epstein, née Folley.” She later changed her first name to the more modelling and showbiz-friendly Francesca.

But he would also have been proud of her — she was many black firsts in addition to being a Chocolate Bunny: film editor; estate broker in Selma, Alabama, and when she went to Australia where she lives half of the year, the first black woman in her welding class, and many more.

In June 1948, when she was seven, something changed her life. Francesca and her brother Teddy were living in a one-bedroom flat with their grandmother Margaret in the brownstone New York ghetto suburb of Harlem. Their room faced a noisy and fume-filled street.

Her grandma worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy Jewish family, the Bennetts, who had a home in the Catskill Mountains where they went for their summer holidays. 

The three of them joined the Bennetts there for a weekend because their other house staff could only be there on the Monday.

On Saturday morning, the  young Francesca wandered around the plush house.

“This was the life I wanted,” she writes. “A life of luxury and ease; a life of new clothes instead of hand-me-downs, of deep-cushioned 

furniture which wasn’t broken or threadbare and on which I could sit without fear of injury, of views of the seas and the mountains, the rivers and the valleys that I’d only read about.”

She realised there was also intellect in that house as she stumbled upon the massive library. The kind owner of the house offered her some of his grandchildren’s books. 

She writes that it made her “determined from that day onwards that I would steep myself in intellect, and into a landscape which wasn’t hemmed in by the Harlem River, the East River and the Hudson River, his was the world I wanted to inhabit”.

She mentions this encounter a number of times in The Chocolate Bunny. Emerson tells me, “That day in that library really changed my life and opened up a whole new world for me that I didn’t know existed.”

She became an avid reader after the visit — it was a way to escape her terrible life, because when she was a teenager, they went to live with her father and a wicked stepmother. 

“I was very lonely and very isolated,”  she tells me.

She went to school, “and developed brains and a bust”, she writes. “I knew I was a pretty girl, because as I walked down the street, boys would swivel their heads just to look at me.”

She got married to one of those boys — a handsome young man who had just returned from the Korean War. They had two girls together but the PTSD from the conflict turned him psychotic. 

He tried to kill her but, fortunately, she managed to escape. He was institutionalised and Francesca got divorced from him.

A friend suggested she go for an interview at New York’s recently opened Playboy Club, across town from Bloomingdale’s, where she worked as a salesperson.

“Playboy? What’s Playboy?” she asked.

Well, Playboy, the men’s magazine, was founded in 1953 by Hefner — described as America’s “titillator-in-chief” in one obituary when he died aged 91 in 2017 — and became notorious, and massively successful, for its centrefolds.

The first Playboy Club was opened in Chicago in 1960, growing into a chain of nightclubs. Members of the clubs and their guests were served by Playboy Bunnies.

Emerson thought, “Why not apply?” and, on appointment, she was shown into Keith Hefner’s office. He was a bit surprised because all the other girls applying were white, tall and mostly blonde. She gave him her most devastating smile and said: “Hi, Mr Hefner, I’m Francine and I’m your Chocolate Bunny.”

He burst out laughing and got her to repeat that.

“Chocolate Bunny. Oh, that’s good Francine,” he said. “Very good. Keep up that attitude and we’ll both make money. Okay, you’re hired. Come back tomorrow for a costume fitting, and you can start the Bunny training classes immediately.”

Dressed in bunny ears, sheer black stockings, cuffs, a bow tie, a revealing strapless corset, a fluffy tail and high heels — not the most comfortable work clothes — Emerson started as a “Cigarette Bunny”. 

She roamed all three floors and the showrooms of the club, with a tray full of Playboy lighters, cigarettes and cigars. It was strapped to her body by black bands that criss-crossed her front and back. 

A while later, she was promoted to a “Showroom Bunny”. 

“Waiting on tables was hard, the hours were long and exhausting, it was physically demanding to carry heavy trays with drinks and food, negotiating the crowded room in three-inch heels, wearing a tight bunny costume which made breathing hard because it fitted like a glove,” she writes. 

“But what was harder for me were the customers who were drunk and thought just because we were Bunnies, we were fair game; and worse were the stars who assumed that if they just clicked their fingers, we’d go with them.”

Most of the time in the club it wasn’t the men, but the women, she had the issues with. 

“One woman took a cigarette and burnt a hole into my stocking. The women were always the ones that wanted to pull on your tail.”

But, for a black, unmarried mother living in New York, such as Emerson, “Playboy gave me confidence, independence, financial security, fun, adventure and opportunities which would never have come to me had I still been working the counters in Bloomingdale’s …”

It was also one of the few corporations at that time in the 1960s that was hiring minorities. 

She got an opportunity to branch out into advertising in 1965. There was the major tyre ad with her wearing boots and stepping inside those tyres, with Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ as the soundtrack. It was unusual for a black woman to feature in such a prominent ad, she tells me. 

“At that time, there was still a lot of prejudice.”

I ask Emerson whether she, as a woman, was in control.

“No, I think women in general were never in control. We had our place — we were gonna be mothers, when I was growing up. 

“When I was married, I couldn’t even have my own credit card — the credit card had to be in my husband’s name. So, no, we were never in control.”

Playboy changed that for her, she says: “It was control in one way that I was making my own money. 

“So, I had my own money, I had my own bank account that gave me that control and power that I had never had before.

“But I think women still today are not in control — you know a lot of us are still under some man’s foot or they’re doing what their parents want them to do.”

Feminist journalist Gloria Steinem went undercover for a few weeks as a Playboy Bunny just before Emerson joined the club. She exposed the sexism and exploitation many suspected existed under Hefner’s reign.

I ask Emerson whether she would call herself a feminist after her experiences, especially being disempowered and exploited by creepy men over her nearly 10 years as a Bunny. 

“I call myself a woman of the world, but a feminist, no. I never ever got into that whole feminist movement — I didn’t have time as I was too busy working and taking care of kids. I admired them; I admired what they were doing but it was not something that I had an interest in.”

Emerson acknowledges that the waves of feminism have brought women so much more self-determination today. 

“But, back in the Sixties, women in the main were still tethered to the kitchen and the bedroom and utterly dependent on our parents or husbands for our security, and if accentuating our tits and ass could cut the strings which tethered us to the sink and the bedpost, then so be it.”

In 1991, the Playboy Club chain shut down. By that time, Emerson was long gone and working as a successful editor in movies.

I wondered if something like Playboy Clubs could exist today.

“No,” she answers firmly. “I think it was useful but its time has gone. It had a purpose at the time — a good purpose — but it’s no longer viable now.”

In The Chocolate Bunny, she writes that those times “have to be judged with the eyes of somebody who lived in the 60s and 70s, and not somebody living today in a world of 24/7 information, of social media, and where #MeToo has become a baton-wielding powerful force for equity, with which to be reckoned.

“You have to remember that this was the era before Harvey Weinstein and all the other sleazebags who thought they were King Shit, before being brought down to size by truly brave women.”

Emerson is now retired and lives between Sydney, Australia, and Selma, Alabama. She is writing a second instalment of her colourful life story. As with The Chocolate Bunny, it is written mainly to leave a legacy for her children and grandchildren. 

“Something to look back at — that they had a really flamboyant, crazy grandma or great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother, eventually!”

By the sounds of it, Emerson will have to find space in it for another chapter in her colourful love life.

“I’m now dating a 45-year-old guy,” she tells me. 

“We just met about five months ago. He walked into my ceramic class and he said: ‘Boy, you are fine-looking, woman,’ and I said: ‘Thank you, sir.’

“And then we got chit-chatting. I said: ‘Oh, are you married?’ and he said: ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well then, you can have my number.’”

Emerson says he’s cute. 

“He’s a contractor — he buys houses — and he lives in Montgomery. I live in Selma, so that’s, like, a 45-minute trip.”

She has a good relationship with her children. 

“There’s nothing that we can’t talk about … nothing except for my son who said that I can’t date any man younger than him. 

“So, now I had to tell him I have crossed the line,” she says with that same mischievous sparkle in her eyes and the sweetest smile on her face.

The new beau is of Turkish descent, she says. 

I forgot to ask her what the new book would be called but I wouldn’t be surprised if the sweet theme will continue with some witty play on Turkish delight.