Before the Playboy Club was a TV series, it was a Kansas City hot spot

• NBC
• Playboy bunnies sing on the TV show, but Kansas City’s Playboy Club brought in big nightclub acts, including Marilyn Maye.

The success of the AMC period drama Mad Men certainly inspired the NBC network to hop around for its own series based in the same time period — the early 1960s — that had the same nostalgic components: drinking, smoking, sex, heavily lacquered hairstyles. Last Monday night, NBC trotted out its own 1960s period piece, The Playboy Club, based on the first nightclub, located in Chicago, inspired by Hugh Hefner’s sexy magazine. The series continues tonight on KSHB Channel 41.

Not many people remember that Kansas City had its own Playboy Club (why would they? It closed decades ago) at the height of Hugh Hefner’s fame. The club was a corporate-owned venue — unlike the St. Louis operation, which was a franchise — and featured a full-service restaurant that served lunch and dinner, two show rooms that offered both local entertainers and nationally known headliners, and a banquet room. The Playboy Club Kansas City opened on June 13, 1964, in the top-floor ballroom of the former Continental Hotel at the corner of 11th Street and Baltimore. It’s now known as the Mark Twain Tower.

Kansas City residents who were around during the years the club operated, from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, have different memories of the club. A prim female professor at Rockhurst University was taken to lunch to the Playboy Club by her father, a noted local lawyer, in the 1960s and remembers it as “tacky and unimpressive.”