Night Life: London

Brave New Underworld

By KENNETH ALLSOP rTHERE are probably three hundred strip clubs 1 prospering in Britain, two hundred of them in London alone, though an accurate figure is elusive because they flit as elusively as the bulbs on a pin-table. But enough of them have opened in the past three years to have caused the Public Morality Council to brand London `the Mecca of the strip-tease industry,' and to have induced vague whinnies of disapproval from bishops and members of the House of Lords. Still, many of us are unwilling to accept unquestioningly the stric- tures of bishops and watch committees.

It occurred to me that no one, not even their opponents, had plainly said—perhaps they do not even know—what does go on inside a strip club. On the testimony of the proprietors and em- ployees, printed in newspaper interviews, I had received the impression that they are unsullied in atmosphere as the YWCA, as jolly as the Gang Show. One establishment, I had read, is run by a devout Catholic, another has its resident padre. The girls—de-feathered and en- skirted—regularly help at church bazaars. The productions, it is emphasised, are artistic.' The premises are 'tasteful.' Mothers come along proudly to watch their daughters' accomplish- ments. Businessmen can relax while topping up their esthetic batteries. The strip-queens are lofty in ethics and impregnable in virtue— indeed, a regiment of them recently staged a Soho protest march bearing banners with the stirring device: WE ARE NICE GIRLS. A nineteen- year-old blonde said passionately (but with only spiritual passion): 'We arc more moral than ordinary working girls like secretaries and such. And what's more, we work harder.'

It seemed timely to do some research; for if, after all, this was simply a matter of a girl grace- fully disrobing to music in innocent pantomime —a sort of Mother Goosepimple—the Public Morality Council was being needlessly fussed. As it turns out, I have news for the Public Morality Council. I confess that it surprises me finding myself supplying evidence for this body which, while doubtless worthy in intention, has never excited my support. Yet, after spending several boring, seedy and soiling evenings trudging with my eyes over acres of twitching bare flesh, I think the facts might usefully be niorc widely known.

Soho was the field of investigation. Here, the strip clubs have burgeoned so thickly that between the restaurants, pubs. coffee bars and delicatessens is an intermittent frieze of photo- graphic studies of bulging girls: it is like trying to shoulder your way through a marrow-patch. Around the alleyway doorways and the Aladdin's cave lobbies the neon flickers, the lamps flare in haloes around the curves and contortions, and the superlatives contest shrilly: 'SEXIEST,' 'SAUCIEST,' 'NAUGHTIEST,' 'MOST EXCITING,' .`MOST GLAMOROUS,' 'MOST IWIMATE.' In fact, there" proves to be what is, I suppose, an unavoidable sameness about the actual fare.

A brunette is revealed upon a spotlit divan. A spider appears to have spun a few wisps of black gossamer here and there across her pallid beefiness: black quasi bra, perfunctory black panties, black fishnet stockings, black thread of suspender belt. She is unfolding a letter—pre- sumably from her lover, as it instantly spurs her into a randy thresh. She bites her lower lip. Her eyes gyrate. She thrusts her hands inside her panties; then kneads her breasts; with the dogged deliberation of a pre-breakfast physical-jerker she writhes out of the gossamer in a solitary sexual charade of half a dozen postures and speeds. She is doing this for the benefit of what is apparently a board meeting of company direc- tors. In the theatre's faint heliotrope radiance the tiered rows of lounge chairs are solid with solid citizens. Cigar smoke coils. Through the strains of 'Blues in the Night' comes the clunk of ice in gins-and-tonic, and the grunt of expert com- ments and comparisons.

One of the dependable routines, I found, is the flagellation act—a nude girl whimpering pleasurably as she cowers in the glare while being stock-whipped by a man in Russian boots. After a demonstration of sado-masochistic torture, this usually ends in a, climax of the girl turning the whip upon the man in a transport of ruttish revenge. Apart from this standard attrac- tion, each club has its own frequently changed lip-wetting novelty numbers that cater for all tastes. You can see a naked girl strangled with a stocking. You can see girls seduced by a gorilla and a demon (The Devil and the Virgin'). married to Frankenstein's rhonster, or making love to a life-size male statue. You can see girls pretending to conceal themselves with fans, veils and plumes, but also girls bare to their pudenda, for the convention of G-string or diamante star are old hat in this brave new underworld.

You can watch girls in endless permutations of that divan fantasy—alone in a bedroom, or on a raft, or up a hay-loft, in narcissistic sexual athletics. You can see girls drawing phallic in- ferences from objects in a dozen different ways just short of hanging a label on them. You can see harem orgies and slave-ship spectacles, with an elaborate choreography of flogging and brutality. You can see, in a science-fiction dance, a man arrayed as a gigantic electric plug flashing coloured lights as he connects with a girl arrayed as a gigantic electric point.

You can, in Britain's new good-time bazaar, see pretty well anything, and anything neither pretty nor well, if you have thd subscription fee —and it is all legal.

For this is a cosily private activity. These are membership clubs, beyond the restraining hand of censor or watch committee. Most are cramped, dingy cellar drinking clubs—'flea-pits' in the industry's phrase—whose cabarets, con- trary to the general contention, are, because of lack of space, costumes and facilities, generally 'less luxuriously twisted than those 'staged at the grander theatre clubs. There is also, here, an internal racket. At minimum outlay, a base- ment room opens, whisks in a quick crop of members for an 'annual' fee of £1 a head, closes a month later, and reopens elsewhere under another name to continue the shake-down. Apart from this sub-sub-contingent, however, there are about twenty relatively permanent clubs operat- ing in London, most of these concentrated in the Soho-Leicester Square purlieus, and a dozen of these are above the clip-joint level, have a be- dizened air of elegance, and, within their own terms, are well conducted.

The development of the vogue may be traced back to the now venerable Windmill Theatre, which for an age held a surprising monopoly on nudity—but in Van Damm's famous hall the tinselled torsos stood frozenly still (in case the Lord Chamberlain spotted them batting a false eyelash) or were gently twirled on tableaux like a wedding cake in a window. There was an attempt by ambitious impresarios to give the movement more mobility by sending out touring tease- shows with titles like Abreast of the News and Paris Sexations, and Phyllis Dixey had her phase as a stock-still poser and pin-up. It was Mr. D. P. Chaudhuri, Persian owner of the Irving Theatre, who did a little research and found that the Windmill could be checkmated and the `don't-move-I've-got-you-uncovered' rule by-

passed by forming a members-only club. He did, and he speedily had 61,000 registered clients. That was in 1956. His success did not go un- noticed, and imitators began to spangle the West End pastures like weeds in high summer.

Every night now about 1,000 girls are simultaneously peeling off in Central London. Many of these work several clubs on a circuit, having barely time to drag on their sweaters and scurry round the corner before ripping them off again. On this strip-treadmill they pick up about LIO a go; but this is basic pay, the navvy class of the craft. Fifty pounds a week is commonplace, £300 and £750 a week not uncommon. A certain TernPest Storm, who is, said to still even the slot machines of Las Vegas, is being brought over for the publicised sum of £1,000 a week.

Such fees can be afforded with ease. The Membership of London's top twelve clubs is estimated at 250.000, who, in subscription dues varying between ten shillings and a guinea, in additional entrance fees of about £1, and ;n drinks, are spending £2,000,000 a year, which may make clear why there is a keen wish to keep the business thriving by stimulating jading palates with ever-weirder flavours.

The dimensions of the boom in the mime of slap-and-tickle may be measured by the case of Paul Raymond, a thirty-two-year-old Glossop- born striver who, from being a £4 10s.-a-week potman in an Essex pub, now has a personal in- come of £2,000 a week, a maroon Bentley Con- tinental, and a £20,000 home at Wimbledon. The source of these splendours is the Raymond Revuebar in Brewer Street, which Mr. Leslie Perrin, Mr. Raymond's press agent, describes as `the Atheneum of the strip clubs.' Indeed, it seems possible that you might find yourself among the same company in either place. The names of Raymond Revuebar members are con- fidential, but I can tell you that among the 70,000 are ten MPs, eight millionaires, more than sixty knights, thirty-five peers and enough businessmen and captains of industry to drain dry the Stock Exchange and the Savoy Grill When a new whipping act is being staged.

Mr. Raymond makes it plain that he is a churchgoer, a happily married family man with two children, and relentless in his concern for the spiritual welfare of his staff. 1 had just been watching that brunette wriggling out of her Panties and reaching for a candle to the sus- tained applause of the executives breaking their journeys home to the suburbs, when I sought more information about Mr. Raymond's attitude to his chosen task in life. He flinches from such words as 'sordid' and 'salacious.' He explains that, in his view, there is nothing immoral or ugly about the female body—any evil is right there in the eye of the observer. 'Let's not be childish about this,' he says practically. `Stripping is an art, and it is art that sig.ituates :t

from pornography.' He has invested .000 in his theatre--to ensure that there is nothing squalid in the atmosphere. He will not permit nude photographs to be exhibited outside, for fear that they should offend a passing young woman or someone of fragile susceptibilities.

While the 'fountain purled in the Raymond Revuebar's foyer and upstairs the bald heads glistened sweatily in the pastel lighting of the ritual chamber, trade was as brisk at the taber-

nacle of another, and younger, titillation tycoon, Eric Lindsay, who, at twenty-five, is managing director of the Casino de Paris in Denman Street, behind Piccadilly Circus. Here the ninth edition of Paris Sensations is now panting through its daily continuous performance from early afternoon until late night. He appeared unworried about the outcrop of competition in the neighbourhood, and he takes pride in the 'niceness' of his club. 'Customers are discriminat- ing,' he explained. 'They can pick between 'the. clubs that are nice and those that aren't nice: What about the whipping act I had seen? I inquired. Plaintively, Mr. Lindsay retorted : 'You can see things far more vicious than that in a variety theatre. After all, what is one going to do? Unless you introduce new stuff, every thing's going to get rather monotonous. Isn't it'?'

The customers fleeing monotony appear to come in all ages and social types, although prosperity is the distinguishing patina—at the prices charged by the glossier establishments, it is bound to be. There are youths trying to find out what it is all about, old men who can only just remember and want to be reminded, pro- vincial spree-merchants determined to beat up some London whoopee, Rugger club stag- parties, solitaries in raincoats and spectacles seeking nourishment for their sad and obscure preoccupations. three-telephone chairmen with brandy-tans courting thrombosis.

Will the strip club be a permanent part of the new social landscape? Tony Irving, a thirty-

three-year-old theatrical agent who has seventy strip-tease showgirls on his books (and collects 10 per cent. of their average £40-a-week takings), thinks that the boom may continue for only another year. Ahead are signs that the easy- money days may be numbered. Last month Mr. R. A. Butler, the Home Secretary, was asked in the House of Commons if the new Licensing Bill would include provision 'for the control of nightclubs to prevent nude shows and other un- desirable performances?' In his reply Mr. Butler said : 'In so far as they are not genuine members' clubs. they would, under my proposals, require a justices' licence for the supply of intoxicating liquor, and would thus become subject to an effective measure of control.' Which means that magistrates would have the same right to refuse licences to undesirable applicants as they already have with applicants to keep public houses. For, 4s the law now works, a club does not need a Fcence. It is registered with the clerk of the local justices, who cannot refuse registration, and al- though intoxicating liquor may be sold there the Police have no right of entry as they have into pubs. And, although a club can be struck off the register, it can pop up again under a changed name and be re-registered even while staying on the same premises. The Licensing Bill may clip the wings of the fly-by-night clubs; :t seems improbable that it will intrude upon the executive-level sex-shows. The brunette with the candle is a status-symbol which will be hard to put out.