From bunny to politics: a woman's survival tale

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 20, 2001

There was once a Southern governor who shocked the nation by admitting he was a married man of ordinary character.

Jimmy Carter 'fessed up that despite his most honorable Georgia Baptist roots, he suffered pangs of lust for women other than his wife.

Even more shocking, he told this to Playboy while he was running for president.

This happened in 1976.

In the 25 years since, we have moved so far down the slippery slope of prurient interest in politicians' private lives that Jimmy Carter's candor has the dusty feel of an analysis of the Ming dynasty.

Playboy, though, has now-and-forever icon status.

Cynthia Henderson, Gov. Jeb Bush's secretary of the Department of Management Services and his falsely rumored playmate, wore one of those wired-up-so-her-breasts-would-half-pop-out costumes, with ears, while working at St. Petersburg's Playboy Club in the early 1980s. She was in law school at the time.

It was funny on its face that a city reputed to be God's Waiting Room would ever have had a Playboy Club. But that has completely escaped the members of the national press corps, who have either been predicting Gov. Bush's political demise or beating up on one another for chasing this baseless story.

St. Petersburg's Playboy Club lasted a little more than two years and closed in May 1983. (I can verify this because in December 1982, on my first night in town, a Sunday, before my first interview with my current employer, I was put up at the hotel that housed the club, and the club was the only place downtown open for dinner. I was the sole patron. I have no way of knowing if the bunny who served me was Cynthia Henderson. What I remember is I felt sorry for the bunny, in that wired-up bra and little fuzzy tail, forced to serve, dear God, a woman. I thought some male boss had gotten mad and sent her to Playboy's equivalent of Siberia.)

You will find Cynthia Henderson's picture now, all bunnied up, on Internet sites that appear to be run by Democrats. The photo jazzes up the story of the illicit romance that is not.

Overlooked is the story of Henderson's ability to survive in public office.

She was a development lawyer in Tampa before Bush named her secretary of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation in 1999. She lasted at the department about as long as St. Pete's Playboy Club.

The FBI stepped in to take a look after Henderson allowed Malio's, Tampa's entry in any People magazine celeb hangout contest, a tax break so generous it turned into a tax credit.

Henderson got box seats at the Kentucky Derby and wined and dined routinely with lobbyists for industries she regulated. Horse racing, like restaurants, was among them.

Henderson said she always paid her part of the tab. But she was as blind to the appearance of conflict as Secretary of State Katherine Harris was to the way her false eyelashes looked on camera during the greatest crisis of the modern republic.

Now Bush has Henderson in a job at a smaller agency, where it only appears she can do less damage, overseeing state purchasing and state employees.

The Big Boys on the Press Bus explain Henderson's survivability by concluding that she must be sleeping with the boss. They seem to need no other proof of the unprovable romance.

They forget that boobs of the two-legged male sort have always survived in government without enduring accusations that they slept with the boss. Instead, it is assumed that said boobs have some dirt on the boss and he knows it so he lets them keep bumbling away. Better the boobs should take the public rather than the boss to the cleaners.

So maybe Henderson has the goods on the governor.

That at least would be politics, crass the way they used to be crass, back when the fantasies of a Baptist churchgoing husband were considered shocking.

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