The lobby of the famous St. Louis Playboy Club, circa 1962...
Hugh Hefner opened the first of his series of private key clubs in Chicago in early-1960. Two years later, on October 16, 1962, he opened the St. Louis Playboy Club at 3914 Lindell Boulevard.
The St. Louis Playboy Club was the only one that was built from the ground up, and it was owned and built in a partnership with wealthy St. Louis real estate investor and insurance man, Max Lubin.
I was working at a Clayton bank in at the time, and frequently played the piano in the evenings, primarily at St. Louis hotels and restaurants for extra money.
The city was a very social one in those days; perhaps it still is. After work, people frequently went out for drinks and dinner, and those people were always looking for the latest nightclub de jour...a new place to go...a new place to talk about at the office the next day.
So naturally, the St. Louis Playboy Club opened with great anticipation.
The first night I walked into the club, the very elaborate hi-fi system was playing Jobim’s new hit, “The Girl from Ipanema.”
Several times over the next year, I was called to substitute for one of the regular pianist. During the breaks, it seemed to me that inevitably one of the first tunes to play was that Jobim hit.
So that tune for me became the club’s signature.
Summer came. I left St. Louis for good, and stopped over in New Orleans for a brief vacation. That first afternoon, I walked from the Royal Orleans Hotel to the New Orleans’ version of the Playboy Club.
It was in what had been a carriage house between two famous restaurants – Felix’s Oyster Bar and Diamond Jim Moran’s Restaurant on Rue Iberville between Bourbon and Royal Streets.
As I walked through the front door – an elaborate cut glass one --- the hi-fi was playing “The Girl from Ipanema.”
Interestingly, the bunny intuitively knew I would sit on the couch in the club’s living room and enjoy a cold Tangueray and tonic. The last time I had seen her was in St. Louis.
