Business Notes LEISURE

The framed Playboy magazine covers will come down, the mauve walls will surely be repainted, and the scanty outfits and cottontails donned by twelve Bunnies will be packed away for good. On July 31 the last Playboy Club in the U.S. will close its doors. Officials at the Hilton Inn in Lansing, Mich., which houses the hutch, have announced they will dismantle the operation that once employed 45 Bunnies and on one Valentine's Day attracted a crowd of 200 to watch a performance by another anachronism, Tiny Tim. It was the last of five franchises that sprang up in Midwestern cities in the 1980s, when Playboy Enterprises President Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter, attempted to revive the company's club division.

Hefner had hoped to adapt the clubs, established in the 1960s as havens for male entertainment and dining, to an altered business world in which sexism had become unfashionable. But not even toned-down decor, less nudity and the hiring of male Bunnies could bring back Playboy's heydays of the 1970s, when 22 clubs flourished around the country. Hefner presided over the closing of three company-operated clubs in 1986. Two of the last three franchises, in Des Moines and Omaha, were closed in May. There are no plans, however, to shut down five clubs in Asia, where business is still hopping.