a roaring retrospective of photos by, and of, playboy's pinup queen: bunny yeager
There's a Photograph from the late Forties of a woman getting an award for being selected as Queen of the Sports Carnival. She's wearing a one-piece black bathing suit, standing near the pool of the Monte Carlo Hotel in Miami Beach. A tall, instantly recognizable man is handing her a trophy. The woman has extremely long legs and she is approximately the same height as the man. She looks happy, as if she expected to win. The man looks slightly, well, intimidated. His name is Joe DiMaggio. Her name is Bunny Yeager.
Bunny is one of Miami's most enduring attractions, up there with Morris Lapidus' world-famous architecture, Joe's Stone Crab restaurant, the House of Serpents and all those fabulous mansions built for deadbeat Arab princes, religious con artists and semiretired gangsters. She earned her landmark status in the mid-Fifties. Having won the beauty contests and posed for the best-known photographers, Bunny decided she could do it better herself. And she did. Over the next several decades, she beat the boys at their own game, shooting glamour-and-cheesecake photographs and selling them to the best-known publications in the world. She was called "the world's prettiest photographer." She seemed to have a special gift for putting her subjects at ease, for making unnatural poses--of semiclad and unclad women bending, stretching, jumping in the air and running in the surf--seem natural. The photographs are uninhibited without being sleazy or cheap. The models look as if they trusted her. As if they were having a good time. And they probably were.
Bunny didn't like the bathing suits being sold back then, so she designed and manufactured her own line. She wrote and published almost a score of books--of her own photographs and on how to take photographs, including the best-selling Photographing the Female Figure, one of the most popular guides for students of photography and, as I fondly recall, a perennial favorite of high school boys everywhere.
Over the years, Bunny turned out many Playboy pictorials, including the now famous Christmas centerfold of Betty Page in her Santa hat. The Yeager--Page relationship occupies a special niche in the history of cheesecake. Bunny's pictures of Betty on the beach and Betty in the "jungle" cavorting with various dangerous beasts are among the most cherished in the world of girlie pix. Bunny was one of the last photographers to shoot Betty Page before the legendary dark queen of pinups vanished in the Sixties. And when Betty surfaced a year ago, living quietly somewhere in California and seemingly unaware of the efforts of her fans to unlock the secret of her mysterious disappearance, it was Bunny who talked with her for Interview magazine.
Today, Bunny continues to take photographs in her Miami studio. She has been in a number of films and on television shows. She is the editor and publisher of Florida Stage and Screen News, a trade newspaper. She has been assembling retrospectives of her photos for publication. And she still has those great long legs.
