Bunny & The Bombshells

By Lucie M. Winborne

ReMIND Magazine

“I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests. I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl, or two of them together.”
Bunny Yeager most certainly accomplished that —with plenty of titillation thrown in.
As buxom and beautiful as the women she captured on film, Linnea Eleanor Yeager, born in 1929 in Wilkinsburg, Pa., was a self-described shy youngster who aspired to be a pinup model herself. At 17, following her family’s move to Miami, she embarked on a reinvention of sorts, taking the professional name Bunny (inspired by Lana Turner’s character in Week-End at the Waldorf) and entering the Coronet Modeling School and Agency. “I can just act like the person I want to be,” she later recalled thinking during this period. A winner of several beauty pageants, Yeager soon became a highly popular glamour model with numerous appearances in swimsuit magazines, posing in bikinis of her own creation even as “all the other models were wearing one-piece Jantzen and Catalina suits.”
Yet while in her own mind she was “modeling my own designs” and considering herself a high-fashion model, Yeager also eventually recognized that she was “kind of deceiving myself,” and in the early ’50s moved behind the camera. Her timing was fortuitous given the emergence of men’s magazines such as Playboy, but Yeager’s typical model embodied both naughty and nice — “the girl next door,” as she put it. The photographer built a following among her subjects by treating them with respect, noting that “they knew I wouldn’t take advantage of them.”
The most famous of these subjects was Bettie Page, known primarily for her underground S&M shots before meeting Bunny. Yeager’s pose of Page in nothing but a Santa cap became the centerfold in Playboy’s January 1955 special holiday issue and helped launch the raven-haired beauty to iconic status. Yeager also went back in front of the camera herself occasionally, most notably as Swedish masseuse Bunny Fjord in the Frank Sinatra detective flick Lady in Cement, and published more than two dozen books on photography, including How I Photograph Myself, a volume on self-portraiture, and Bunny Yeager’s Bouffant Beauties.
In her later years, contemporary artists and photographers would cite Yeager as an important influence on their own work, while other admirers have lauded her as both a “feminist hero” and a role model for women wanting to make it in a man’s world. Whether or not the twice-widowed Miami housewife, mother of two and Girl Scout leader for disabled kids (one of her daughters is deaf) would have agreed with those assessments, perhaps she best summed up her career when she remarked, “I’m better at taking these pictures than men. I know how to photograph a woman’s body and make it look so much more beautiful.”
Yeager died from congestive heart failure in May 2014, at age 85.

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